Bush “Has Given the Promotion of Democracy a Bad Name”

Reactions to the ISG report are still coming in:

If the report of the Iraq Study Group is nothing else, it is a devastating declaration that the administration’s approach is an abject failure and that the United States needs to scale back its goals. Grand dreams of Iraqi democracy and a transformed Middle East are out. The best we can hope for now is an Iraq that can "govern itself, sustain itself, and defend itself."

Cleverly, the report cited those words because they were spoken by Bush himself in one of his least expansive descriptions of the mission. The president is now stuck with a minimalist definition of what can be accomplished in Iraq, because everything he has done since 2003 has made broader achievement impossible.

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The administration fought this war in a way guaranteed to make the road to democracy even more difficult.

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The report is seen as the triumph of "realism" in the foreign policy debate, and it is that. After years of unrealistic administration claims that all was going well in Iraq, it is truly refreshing to read a report by a group of establishmentarians stating plainly and realistically what is actually going on.

Democrats have mostly welcomed the report, and for good reason: It makes clear that whatever happens in Iraq, the mess was created by Bush administration policies. It will be hard to blame the new Democratic Congress after the fact.

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And with some of the nation’s leading Republican foreign policy specialists pronouncing Bush’s policies a failure, other Republicans will have a hard time accusing Democrats of stabbing our military in the back with their own calls for withdrawal. The commission states clearly that what has happened up to this point has left our nation with only bad choices.