Coalition of the Not as Willing as They Used To Be *

From the Daily Mail:

Blair refuses to match US troop 'surge' in Iraq
Last updated at 16:53pm on 8th January 2007

Tony Blair will make clear this week that Britain is not going to send more troops to Iraq even if the US pushes ahead with a "surge" of 20,000 extra soldiers.

The Prime Minister will insist that the UK will stick to its own strategy of gradually handing over to the Iraqi army, as it has been doing with success in Basra and the south.

Escalation repackaged as "Surge" was supposed to be a political boost for George W. Bush. According to a Gallup Poll conducted over the weekend, the American public is about as enthusiastic as Tony Blair is:

For all of the talk about the Bush Administration 'creating its own reality' I'm beginning to wonder if they truly believe that they can. While I'm proud to contrast myself with the Bush Administration by being a self-identified member of the Reality-Based Community, I understood that the original statement, that Neocons could 'create their own reality' wasn't as rediculous as it sounded. The unnamed aide that forever put the Bush Administration outside of "what we call the reality-based community" didn't mean that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney stood around telling everybody that Unicorns and Dragons would be the next additions to the Washington Zoo. In my understanding, what the aide meant was that Bush, Cheney, et. al. believed that they could create any reality that they wanted. The aide believed that Democrats (and those like us) were in the 'Reality-Based Community' because we "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." This was in contrast to BushCo, which didn't think it was important to bother with all that 'judicious study' - you just do it.

Want to remake the Middle East into a region full of Democratic, Pro-American governments? Pick a country with an easily defeatable military, an unterly disgusting leader, enough dirty laundry to justify an invasion and go in and start the place over! (Settling old scores and/or securing vast oil reserves is just a nice side benefit.) America is unrivaled as the most powerful nation that the world has ever seen. To not use that power to find weapons of mass destruction, spread freedom and democracy would be a sin!

It's not a good, it's not right, and it's not effective, but it isn't an utter rejection of reality - it's just a rejection of the idea that anything could go wrong when you try to change it.

Well, at least that's what I thought then.

It seems that now it really is about Unicorns and the Toothe Fairy...

Tony Blair War in Iraq Surge Coalition of the Willing

* 'Coalition of the Not as Willing as They Used to Be' now Includes the American Public.