Yesterday amounted to one of the deadliest days in Iraq since the war
started. Sadly 11 soldiers are included in the deaths which plagued the country.
What is even more troubling is the fact that these soldiers didn’t die in a
single attack but rather in spread out attacks throughout the country.

• 2 Killed by a suicide bomber in Ramadi during an attack on police
  recruits
• 2 Killed in Baghdad from a car bomb
• 2 killed in separate small arms attacks in Fallujah
• 5 killed by a roadside bomb in Karbala

Every soldier lost is tragic but what makes these worse is the fact they they
all died in separate and spread out incidents. The last day we had this deadly
on US forces was on December 1, 2005 when 11 soldiers were killed. Ten of those
were killed in the same attack in Fallujah and the eleventh killed in an attack
in Ramadi.

Information like this makes it look like the insurgency is getting more
spread out and mobile. It also is an indicator that the insurgency is still
going strong, contradicting reports of it “fizzling out”.

Yesterday morning as headlines were pouring in of how Bush was reaching
outside his “inner circle” to get opinions on Iraq these attacks were happening.
I even blogged about Bush including former administration officials in talks as
it seemed to be a shocking turn of events for the President but also one I
feared was purely political. Sadly I was right.

His predecessor, Madeleine K. Albright, a bit stirred up after hearing an
exceedingly upbeat 40-minute briefing to 13 former secretaries of state and
defense about how well things are going in Iraq, asked President Bush
whether, with the war “taking up all the energy” of his foreign policy team,
he had let the nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea spin out of control
and allowed Latin America and China policy suffer by neglect.

“I can’t let this comment stand,” Mr. Bush shot back, telling Ms.
Albright and the rare assembly of her colleagues, who reached back to the
Kennedy White House, that his administration “can do more than one thing at
a time.” The Bush administration, he insisted, had “the best relations of
any country with Japan, China and Korea,” and had active programs to make
alliances around the world.

That was, it appears, one of the few heated moments during an unusual
White House effort to bring some of its critics into the fold and provide a
patina of bipartisan common ground to the strategy Mr. Bush has laid out in
recent weeks for Iraq.

But if it was a bipartisan consultation, as advertised by the White
House, it was a brief one. Mr. Bush allowed 5 to 10 minutes for interchange
with the group – which included three veterans of the Vietnam era: Robert S.
McNamara, Melvin R. Laird and James R. Schlesinger – before herding the
whole group into the Oval Office for what he called a “family picture.”

Article continues

here.

So 5 to 10 minutes was all the Bush gave to these people to hear their
concerns and ideas of the war. What in the world could of come out of 10 minutes
of brainstorming. Wellllllll

There you have it. Another photo op. Bush had no intention of getting input
on what to do with Iraq. Instead he was trying to make some quick headlines,
which worked. Now his headlines have fizzled out and been exposed as another
cheap photo op at the expense of the country, much like all those photo-ops
during Katrina.

Instead of trying to fix a deteriorating situation in Iraq it seems the
President is trying to achieve his legacy through photograph. Could we have a
more incompetent leader? I highly doubt it.