From The Independent UK
By Rupert Cornwell

These days, George Bush is so unpopular that even the Republican candidates seeking to succeed him dare not speak his name. But the great lesson imparted by current US politics is that, however enfeebled, a President with a veto is more than a constitutional match for his foes.

For proof, look at the Iraq war. Public disenchantment with that disastrous venture was the reason the Democrats recaptured Congress last November. Ten months on, Mr Bush’s approval ratings have sunk even lower. But what have Democrats managed to achieve with all their huffing and puffing? Zero. They haven’t been able to put the slightest brake on the US war machine.

This impotence has many reasons. The mess that Mr Bush has created is such that there are no simple answers any more. Democrats dread opening themselves up to charges that they are letting down the troops. Most important, however, they don’t have the votes – not the 60 needed in the Senate to break a filibuster, still less the two-thirds majority of 67 to override a presidential veto. The long-term results of the “surge” in Iraq are debatable. At home, however, it’s worked wonders as a short-term political weapon by persuading enough Republicans to stick with their President – at least until a bemedalled General David Petraeus returns to Capitol Hill in March to deliver his next progress report.

So the waste continues. “A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money,” the Texas Democrat Lloyd Bentsen once said, apropos the Reagan deficits of the Eighties. In the case of Mr Bush and Iraq, read not billions, but hundreds of billions.

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