Little wonder the Shrub doesn't want to bother with having news conferences where he might have to answer a few uncomfortable questions like "So, Dub, how goes things?

Alas, the evidence for George's self-deception is stronger still, because this is without even a blush of apology, or acknowledgement of error, from the same Bush who has been insisting for months that Al-Qaeda is on the run, finished, kaput, dead in the water. Turns out that in deserts, water is often a mirage; who knew?

~snip~

Meanwhile, all that any Arab or Muslim needs do to reach a very unflattering conclusion about America's foreign policy intent is look at the last two beneficiaries of American "liberation": Afghans, now trapped in a war zone ruled mostly by brutal, warring Northern Alliance warlords with a long and despised history of mass theft, rape, torture, mutilations, and murder, all of it still suffused with Taliban-style religious intolerance but now coated with a thin veneer of oil-soaked, American-approved puppets in Kabul; and Iraq, where after only six weeks ordinary Iraqis' life savings have evaporated with the abrupt currency transition from the dinar to the U.S. dollar; the U.S. has done virtually nothing to curb weeks of widespread looting by people alternately looking to enrich and/or feed themselves, or to arm themselves to protect what assets they have left; Iraqis are now approaching 100% unemployment, with few stores open -- they don't have any currency to buy inventory, and nobody else has the money to buy it from them, and nobody dares to leave their homes for something as trivial as shopping anyway; the Americans have shown no interest in either establishing democratic institutions or infrastructure, collecting evidence of the crimes of Saddam's regime, finding the large number of remaining high officials, including Saddam himself, or finding those still-mythic illegal weapons of mass destruction (hint: look in this year's federal budget); disease is spreading, hospitals are nearly useless, food and water are in sporadic supply, and a severe health crisis looms; American censorship is alive and well; various Iraqi factions are turning on one another, just like in Afghanistan; and the Americans have made it abundantly clear that they will impose their own puppets rather than allow ordinary Iraqis any voice at all in either public policies or who enacts them.