Tuesday, January 16, 2007

The Broken Egg Problem

Today, Jim Lehrer interviewed President Bush about Iraq policy, and the transcript is well worth reading. Unfortunately, it only underscores the fact that Bush's Iraq policy makes absolutely no sense. Consider this exchange:

MR. LEHRER: Is there a little bit of a broken egg problem here, Mr. President, that there is instability and there is violence in Iraq - sectarian violence, Iraqis killing other Iraqis, and now the United States helped create the broken egg and now says, okay, Iraqis, it's your problem. You put the egg back together, and if you don't do it quickly and you don't do it well, then we'll get the hell out.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yeah, you know, that's an interesting question. I don't quite view it as the broken egg; I view it as the cracked egg --

MR. LEHRER: Cracked egg?

PRESIDENT BUSH: -- that - where we still have a chance to move beyond the broken egg. And I thought long and hard about the decision, Jim. Obviously it's a big decision for this theater in the war on terror, and you know, if I didn't believe we could keep the egg from fully cracking, I wouldn't ask 21,000 kids - additional kids to go into Iraq to reinforce those troops that are there.




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2 comments:

Tina said...

By extending the metaphor Bush was definitely left with egg on his face. I guess it's a lot easier to talk about "eggs" than multiple amputees and funerals. At this point one could branch out into Humpty Dumpty jokes if the situation weren't so very very serious. Some observers think that Bush & Co are playing for time so they can turn the whole narrative into one in which they would have won if the Dems had not been clueless wimps. It's more about the 2008 elections than either our country's moral stature or the lives of young men and women.

Amy Morton said...

Is he clueless, or is this something much more insidious? I seriously struggle with that. If you read the whole transcript, he talks about protection of the oil and whose hands it may fall into. This response and other nonsensical things this President has done remind me of when my teenagers were lying to me. If they were not telling the truth, the details just didn't make sense.