From The Guardian UK
By Simon Tisdall

There is something too easy, and rather ill-judged, about the rush to write off George Bush in the wake of his unpopular Iraq troop surge decision and his feeble State of the Union speech. Suddenly, it is open season on the President among those who were once counted loyal supporters and others who ingloriously hedged their bets on the war. As the late Vince Foster, former White House legal counsel and confidant of Hillary Clinton, once said, “In Washington, politics is a blood sport”.

There is no cause to feel sympathy for Bush. If he had listened to wiser and more experienced people during his presidency’s crucial period, between September 2001 and March 2003, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved and the Middle East would not be quite so chronically and dangerously unstable as it is now. His warnings last night of a regional conflagration and a “nightmare scenario” as the Iraqi government is overrun by extremists on all sides now agree almost exactly with the pre-invasion analysis of those in the US and Britain who opposed his irresponsible adventure in the first place.

But Bush, weakened and ridiculous though he is in some ways, still wields enormous power as commander-in-chief and as the nation’s leader. Obvious constitutional and congressional constraints notwithstanding, he can still use this power any time. And it is still two years before he leaves the Oval office in January 2009. An awful lot can happen between now and then.

In the first instance, his Iraq surge strategy might actually work, at least for long enough to enable the Administration to claim some success and create leeway for a more orderly handover and withdrawal. The new Iraq commander, General David Petraeus, is a canny strategist and military thinker who is intimately acquainted with what has gone wrong so far - and well-placed, therefore, to avoid repeating those mistakes. Securing Baghdad should not be beyond his proven capabilities.

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