Three years and five months ago, February 2003, the president delivered a speech to the American Enterprise Institute (transcript here), explaining how the war in Iraq was going to "begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace" by "bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions." So how's that going? (He also said that Saddam Hussein was "building and hiding weapons that could enable him to dominate the Middle East and intimidate the civilized world," but let that pass - he needed people to feel this was important, and that would do the trick.)

But what he said about how shaking things up dramatically with a war to overthrow a nasty government would result in - when what was shaken and turned inside out and utterly rearranged in the Middle East fell back to earth - a new and better and amazingly good thing, and a far better world, seems to have been a gamble that didn't exactly pan out. The whole idea seemed to be that stability - achieved over the long years by lots of talk and compromise and ignoring some awful stuff for some practical convenience and grudging peace (traditional diplomacy) - was just crap. You needed to do something startling and spectacular to make real progress in this sorry world, to really change things.

That's an interesting theory of what this country should really be doing - change the world and eliminate evil everywhere and spread our way of doing things ("best practices" and all that) around the globe and so on. Yeah, no one asked us to do any of that, but you have to assume, for some reason that's rather obscure, that's what we're supposed to be doing, and anyway, all of that will keep us safe and is in our national interest. That was the idea. So the goal seemed to be to save the world, to transform it, because after we broke all the old patterns and ways of thinking, the new patterns and ways of thinking would be good for us, and good for everyone.

Well, Iraq was shattered and now it's so bad there, and not falling into a new pattern, that bright shiny new secular democracy, you get this - Gil Gutknecht, a Republican congressman from Minnesota, who last month was admonishing the House to "give victory a chance" in Iraq and not "go wobbly," took a field trip to Baghdad. He says it was "worse than I expected" and it's time to bring the troops home. "We learned it's not safe to go anywhere outside of the Green Zone any part of the day."

No kidding. Well, he hadn't trusted the press, just the administration. He says he seems to have been receiving faulty "spin" - claims that the violence in Iraq was being caused by just a few hundred insurgents. "All of the information we receive sometimes from the Pentagon and the State Department isn't always true."

Oh. Really?  It's almost comic. The idea that congress checks up on the executive branch to see how they're doing in faithfully executing the laws passed and wisely using the funds allocated hadn't occurred to him. He's learning on the job. We'll see how saying he was keeping himself uninformed, was a gullible follower, and actually not really doing his job, plays out in his reelection bid.  Too bad about all the dead people - ours, theirs, and the civilians in the middle.

And since the congressmen had his epiphany, it just gets more dismal, as on Thursday, July 20, there was more.

There was this -

Bombings and shootings soared by 40 percent in the Baghdad area in the past week, the U.S. military said Thursday. An American general said extremists were preparing "an all-out assault" on the capital in a decisive battle for the future of Iraq
... U.S. military spokesman Maj. Gen. William Caldwell said there had been an average of 34 attacks a day involving U.S. and Iraqi forces in and around the capital since Friday - up sharply from the daily average of 24 registered between June 14 and July 13.

"We have not witnessed the reduction in violence one would have hoped for in a perfect world," Caldwell told reporters. "The only way we're going to be successful in Baghdad is to get the weapons off the streets."

Caldwell said insurgents were streaming into the capital for "an all-out assault against the Baghdad area."

Say, how often does one get what one would have hoped for in a perfect world? Just a thought... Think what Samuel Johnson said about the triumph of hope over experience - he mocked it.

And there was this - "Tens of thousands more Iraqis have fled their homes as sectarian violence looks ever more like civil war two months after a U.S.-backed national unity government was formed, official data showed on Thursday." The data showed a hundred Iraqis die each day, and six thousand in the last two months. Anyone would get out fast. The relatives get the kids someplace safe when mom, a translator for the Americans, gets grabbed off the streets, raped, has holes drilled in her head, then is shot, and her body is dumped in the street (see this on July 18). No point in hanging around.

And Israel, Hezbollah and Hamas are at war and have been for a week - and now Israel hints at full-scale Lebanon attack - and, yes, they rolled in once before and stayed eighteen years. That didn't work out well, so this may be a bit more temporary. But Beirut is under siege. And we're blocking all attempts at any cease fire.

And the same time our troops are under attack from Taliban forces in southern Afghanistan (here) - but didn't we wipe them out? And the president keeps warning that Syria is trying to reassert control over Lebanon and Iran is hoping that the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel will mean everyone forgets about its nuclear plans. And now Turkey is sending signals that it's ready to send troops into Iraq to fight Turkish Kurdish guerrillas there (see this).

Bill Montgomery links to even more such stories and see it all like this -

Let's see. We've got: Israeli Jews fighting Lebanese Shi'a and Palestinian Sunnis; Palestinian Fatah militants who've stopped fighting Hamas militants, but only because they're both fighting the Israelis; Saudi Sunni fundamentalists issuing fatwas against Hezbollah Shi'a fundamentalists; Egyptian Sunni fundamentalists backing those same Hezbollah Shi'a fundamentalists; Iraqi Sunnis killing Iraqi Shi'a and vice versa; Iraqi Shi'a (the Mahdi Army) jousting with Iraqi Shi'a (the Badr Brigade); Iraqi Kurds trying to push Sunni Arabs and both Sunni and Shi'a Turkomen out of Kirkuk; Turks threatening to invade Kurdistan; Iranians allegedly shelling Kurdistan, Syrian Kurds rebelling against Syrian Allawites who are despised by Syria's Sunni majority but allied with the Lebanese Shi'a who are hated and feared by the House of Saud and its Sunni fundamentalist minions. Oh, and American and Israeli neocons threatening to bomb both Syria and Iran.

That's about it. So begins begin a new stage for Middle Eastern peace. Maybe the "shake everything up and see what happens" approach was a bad idea. But it all could have worked out. It just didn't. Bummer.

Ah well, live and learn.

And the curious thing is that the White House has a "Director of Lessons Learned." Really, they do. Mid-month they released a list of White House employees and their salaries, and pay increases - required by law as congress is supposed to know how the money appropriated is being spent.

That led to this speech by congressman Rahm Emanuel on the House floor -

Mr. Speaker, yesterday the President said we continue to be wise about how we spend the people's money.

Then why are we paying over $100,000 for a "White House Director of Lessons Learned?"

Maybe I can save the taxpayers $100,000 by running through a few of the lessons this White House should have learned by now.

Lesson 1: When the Army Chief of Staff and the Secretary of State say you are going to war without enough troops, you're going to war without enough troops.

Lesson 2: When 8.8 billion dollars of reconstruction funding disappears from Iraq, and 2 billion dollars disappears from Katrina relief, it's time to demand a little accountability.

Lesson 3: When you've "turned the corner" in Iraq more times than Danica Patrick at the Indy 500, it means you are going in circles.

Lesson 4: When the national weather service tells you a category 5 hurricane is heading for New Orleans, a category 5 hurricane is heading to New Orleans.

I would also ask the President why we're paying for two "Ethics Advisors" and a "Director of Fact Checking."

They must be the only people in Washington who get more vacation time than the President.

Maybe the White House could consolidate these positions into a Director of Irony.

No, that wouldn't work. The president doesn't understand irony. It puzzles him, or makes him angry.

Meanwhile, back at the American Enterprise Institute, it seems the neoconservative who have shaped everything we've done don't do irony either, as the Washington Post here, quoting Danielle Pletka, their "Vice President For Foreign And Defense Policy Studies" - she doesn't know anyone who is "not beside themselves with fury at the administration" given the way things are going. They have issues - "Conservatives complain that the United States is hunkered down in Iraq without enough troops or a strategy to crush the insurgency. They see autocrats in Egypt and Russia cracking down on dissenters with scant comment from Washington, North Korea firing missiles without consequence, and Iran playing for time to develop nuclear weapons while the Bush administration engages in fruitless diplomacy with European allies. They believe that a perception that the administration is weak and without options is emboldening Syria and Iran and the Hezbollah radicals they help sponsor in Lebanon."

We need to be strong and kick ass - if all who oppose us are defeated and humiliated and seething with resentment but unable to do anything, and we keep reminding them of that, then we'll be safe. No, that can't be right. But that is the thinking. They have no Director of Lessons Learned, or so it seems.

Tim Grieve here -

Why are Iran and North Korea able to do what they want with little fear of serious repercussions? Why might Syria and Iran and Hezbollah think the administration is weak and without options for stopping them? It gets back to the beginning of all of that, the part about those U.S. troops "hunkered down" in Iraq. They're there, of course, because Bush sent them there - and because people at places like the American Enterprise Institute applauded so enthusiastically when he told them what they'd been telling him: Invade Iraq, and we'll transform the Middle East. Invade Iraq, and we'll make the world a safer place.

Are they chastened by the experience? Wiser for the knowledge that the deaths of 2,544 Americans and more than 50,000 Iraqis have bought? It doesn't look that way. This morning on Fox News, neocon pundit Bill Kristol said that the United States has to be ready to use military force against Iran. "Think what this crisis would be like given what we now know about the Islamic Republic of Iran, its regime, its recklessness, its close, close ties to terrorist groups," Kristol said. "Think what the world would be like with an Iran with nuclear weapons."

It sounded like satire, only Kristol was dead serious - even as he delivered the greeted-as-liberators punch line: The Iranian people "dislike their regime," he said, and they might just welcome "the right use of targeted military force."

He wasn't laughed off the set. It was Fox News. He's a brilliant man, and a fine writer. He's a slow learner. Those of us who have done project management and remember all that stuff about "lessons learned" and "best practices" may wonder if the Project for the New American Century could use a real project manager, with the PMI certificate and all. The idea is to learn from experience.

Maybe the refusal to learn from experience isn't a lack project management skills, but just a psychological limitation, as in this -

The current squawking also strikes me as a useful reminder of how very, very important war is in the neoconservative vision. It is as central to that vision as peace is to the classical liberal vision ... Who we're fighting is secondary. That we're fighting is the main thing. To be a neoconservative is to thrill to the sound of gunfire.

Well, they do love war, and shaking everything up, scorning stability and working things out. It must be the thrill of gunfire - makes you think big things are happening. And they are. They're just not good things.

So you set aside what happened, and shrug at the idea of learning from experience. That only takes the thrill away, and messes up the theory of how things should be.

Of course that's kind of the opposite of how science works, but that too is overrated, as the president made clear when, as promised, he vetoed legislation that would have expanded federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. It was very the first veto of his presidency, but there was no ceremony, and press photographers were barred from the event (noted here). Seventy-two percent of the population favors this research, and the Democrats would love to have photos of the president vetoing thing for their campaign ads this fall. But the White House Press Secretary, Tony Snow, late of Fox News, said that wasn't it at all. Photographers weren't allowed in because the president "doesn't feel it's appropriate," Snow said. "He's signing a veto."

So this puts him at odds with almost all scientists and most Americans, including some in his own Republican Party, but "It crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect so I vetoed it." And there aren't enough votes to override the veto.

Anger from the left, Oliver Willis here -

The pathetic excuse for a president uses his constitutional powers to do the bidding of the extremist "religious" right and issues a veto of the stem cell bill, consigning many Americans to pain and death. But hey, the conservative mullahs wanted it done, so whaddya gonna do?

There are two uses for these cells:

1. Throw them away down the drain

2. Use them to save possibly hundreds of thousands of human lives

The president and the con movement has chosen the latter, simply to boost their own inflated egos.

No, not at all, as Andrew Sullivan, notes here -

I feel obliged to come to the president's defense on his embryonic stem cell research veto. I find the absolutism of those who view a blastocyst as a human person to be morally unpersuasive, but I cannot see how it can be seen as anything other than human life. I know also that many of these superfluous blastocysts and embryos will be discarded anyway and so not using them for research does not protect them from extinction. Nevertheless, it is hard not to be troubled by the line this crosses. Human life is created and then experimented on to save other human lives. I think the argument for the benefits of such research is compelling; there's little doubt that this avenue could be extremely fruitful. I live with one of the diseases, HIV, it might help cure or treat. For those reasons, I don't believe such research should be banned - or even that individual states shouldn't, if their citizens support it, directly finance such research from the public purse. I'm a federalist. But when a very significant number of Americans feel deeply that this really is morally unconscionable, and when the research is taking place anyway under other auspices, I see no reason why the feds should actively finance this research as well. I don't think that Bush's compromise is so unreasonable, in other words. This isn't a ban on such research; it's a decision not to throw the weight of federal financing behind it. I respect the case of those who favor it; but, when push comes to shove, I'm with Bush on this. It took political courage to take this stand. And the morality it reflects - a refusal to treat human life as a means rather than as an end - deserves respect even from its opponents.

Of course you could argue, and may have, that the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and those to come in Syria and Iran, are treating human life as a means rather than as an end, a geopolitical and political end, writ large.

And even then, Sullivan may be wrong, as one of his readers from San Francisco points out here -

What you don't understand is that when a researcher conducts research, he is often involved with many projects. Therefore it is likely that one who would engage in embryonic stem cell research, funded by a state or private organization, will also be participating in research funded by federal agencies such as the NIH. The problem with this ban means that none of the researchers implements funded with federal money can ever be involved/associated with research funded by other means. This includes the lab space, every beaker, piece of paper, pencil, etc.! This is not practical in the slightest. That means that a researcher, say here at UCSF, who wants to tap into the money allocated by the state of California for stem cell research, would have to have a completely different facility whereby NOTHING funded with federal dollars can enter, and that likely includes the researcher himself. In academic medicine this is impossible.

Too bad. It's done. The living will die so the blastocysts might live, or remain frozen, or be thrown out in the medical waste. The theory wins, or the principle. It's just that the principle here looks more like a political calculation. The man isn't big on science (see global warming), and he has always been more than willing, from his days as governor of Texas to these wars now, to makes sure others die. He just doesn't seem like a "life is sacred" kind of guy. Maybe he's just sentimental.

Not to say he doesn't learn. After five years of icy separation, he finally addressed the NAACP [the writer is a member so this may be biased]. This is a first for him. And he was showing he may have learned something after all, as in this -

"I understand that racism still lingers in America," Bush told the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "It's a lot easier to change a law than to change a human heart. And I understand that many African-Americans distrust my political party."

That line generated boisterous applause and cheers from the thousands in the audience, which generally gave the president a polite, reserved reception.

No kidding. The Republican Southern Strategy since Nixon has been to get the white vote in the south LBJ threw away by backing all that civil rights stuff in the sixties. The party made its bones on the race issue.

But he was slick, as John Dickerson explains here -

Condi Rice hasn't left for the Middle East yet, perhaps because the president wanted to send her into combat here at home. Today the secretary of state joined George Bush for his first presidential visit to the NAACP. Rice received no special announcement when she arrived, and she didn't have to say a word, but when she preceded Bush into the vast ballroom, she got a standing ovation. "I knew he was bringing her," said one woman as she applauded. "That's his confidence blanket."

Bush was braced for a tough reception from the audience of a thousand or so at the Washington Convention Center. In 2004, the president described his relationship with the nearly 100-year-old civil rights organization as "non-existent." Openly hostile would have been a more accurate characterization. During the 2000 presidential race, the organization ran a television ad against Bush featuring the daughter of James Byrd, a black man dragged to death by three white men in a pickup, blaming Bush for refusing her pleas for a hate-crime law when he was governor. Julian Bond, the NAACP chairman who sat behind Bush on the stage, once accused him of appeasing the "wretched appetites of the extreme right wing" and picking "Cabinet officials whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection." Before he stepped to the podium, Bush took the kind of consuming deep breath David Blaine does before an underwater stunt.

White men generally behave in one of two ways when they are anxious to connect with African Americans: They're excessively solicitous or self-consciously chummy. The first produces an unending smile. The second produces expressions like: How is it hanging, my African brother? When Bush shook Bond's hand with the sweeping theatricality of friends meeting to play a pickup game of basketball, I thought we were in for an uncomfortable morning, but Bush put away the awkwardness. Instead he was relaxed, and immediately addressed the tension in the room. Speaking about NAACP President Bruce S. Gordon's introduction, Bush said: "I thought he was going to say, 'It's about time you showed up.' "

Bush kept at it, describing the country's history for the audience in a way that would drive conservative talk-radio hosts to their prescription medications if a Democrat did it. Slavery placed a "stain on America's founding, a stain that we have not yet wiped clean," said Bush, before going on to compare African slaves to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. "Too often [people] ignore another group of founders - men and women and children who did not come to America of their free will, but in chains. These founders literally helped build our country."

Yipes! What's going on here?

What's going on is the Republicans need votes. It looks bad this year. He's learning. And later in the day the Senate confirmed what the House had done the week before, and voted to renew the 1965 Voting Rights Act, unchanged, the same legislation that drove half the south into the Republican Party back then. Various southern senators had put up a fuss, saying things were better now and they were still being punished, and the "damned dirty Mexicans everywhere" senators had wanted mandatory English-only ballots put in, but votes are votes. The right will forgive the president's NAACP comments, and congress renews the voting rights act. Votes are votes. You learn.

Sometimes, not always, experience is a good teacher.