Bush Apparently Wants To Share The Blame

Our president had this to say about Iraq yesterday:

President Bush suggested yesterday that US troops might stay in Iraq beyond his presidency, which ends in 2009, saying at a press conference that the issue of removing troops from the country ''will be decided by future presidents and future governments of Iraq."

The president, responding to aggressive questioning at the hastily arranged morning session, declined to give a timetable for pulling US soldiers out of the increasingly unpopular war. But he warned several times about the danger of a ''premature" withdrawal.

Bush is clearly thinking about his legacy right now. The last thing Bush wants is for the Iraq Debacle to be a one-president catastrophe. Even though Johnson took the most heat for Viet Nam, that war did span the terms of at least three administrations.

I remember thinking last year that had Kerry won the election, then Iraq would have become his problem, meaning that Bush could later write in his memoirs that everything was going great in Iraq until Kerry took over the White House. But a Bush victory in 2004 meant that Iraq would forever be regarded as Bush's debacle and would help to permanently brand him as the worst president ever. This is something that Bush wants to avoid, apparently.

But there is, of course, more going on here than Bush worrying about his legacy. This country has spent a ton of money building "super-bases" in Iraq, no doubt to advance the PNAC plan to establish a permanent U.S. military presence in the heart of the Middle East. If the United States were to totally withdraw from Iraq, the Pentagon would have a hard time justifying the cost that went into constructing these bases.