There's No Satisfying Bush on Iraq

The Bush administration has been putting pressure on Syria and Iran for a long time now to do something about what's going on in Iraq. Yet, when the leaders of those 2 countries and the president of Iraq announce that they'll be meeting to discuss their options, they're smacked down by the White House, cutting their efforts off at the knees before the get together has even happens.

Meanwhile:

One military official close to the [Iraq study] group's discussions said that one option could combine encouraging talks with Iran and Syria with shifting the U.S. military focus away from combat and toward training the Iraqi forces.

But members of the commission have expressed concern that working with Iran and Syria could require America "to enter into a de facto partnership with them," with possible trade-offs, said the official, who requested anonymity because the group's discussions have not been made public.

Like no US government has ever made trade-offs with rogue regimes before?

Bush and his neocon warmongers have backed themselves into a corner with no easy way out and if the leaders of Syria and Iran are offering to help, Bush needs to stop playing out his Freudian psychogical melodrama of clashing with his father (and his representatives like Baker) at every opportunity and actually listen, for once, to alternative methods for ending the Iraq war. He can spend all the years in therapy he needs to once he's out of office to explore his defiance against his father and his pandering to his surrogate daddy, Dick Cheney. In the meantime, hundreds of people are dying every week.

Update: The Iraq government has announced that it will restore full diplomatic ties with Syria. It looks like Syria's president has now refused the invitation by Iran's Ahmadinejad to attend a trilateral summit. The dynamics are changing quickly in the region.