Four years ago today, you landed a jet on the USS Abraham Lincoln, stood under a banner that read 'Mission Accomplished,' and said, "In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." It turns out that prevailing takes a really long time.Team Bush quickly realized that this whole photo op was a tremendous mistake and did what you always do when confronted with your own incompetence -- you blamed someone else. In this case, it was the crew of the ship. They put up the banner. Except, of course, that was one helluva weak argument and quickly fell apart:
CNN:
White House spokesman Scott McClellan told CNN that in preparing for the speech, Navy officials on the carrier told Bush aides they wanted a "Mission Accomplished" banner, and the White House agreed to create it.
"We took care of the production of it," McClellan said. "We have people to do those things. But the Navy actually put it up."
In other words, you accidentally made the banner. There's a reason why Scott McClellan's no longer the Press Secretary. The Bush administration really requires a better class of liar.
But what's weird about this whole 'Mission Accomplished' thing is that it's kinda-sorta true. At that point, major combat operations had ended. There was a zero percent chance that Saddam Hussein would ever be back in power, so the mission was accomplished. The problem was that the idiot visionaries who make up the cult of the neocons were now faced with a reality you were totally unprepared for. It turned out that iraqis didn't so much like being invaded, that removing Saddam Hussein created a power vacuum that armed militias rushed in to fill, and that the arab world sympathized with the iraqis who fought on. Reality has a way of bitch-slapping you visionaries, doesn't it?...
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