God help us

[khaosworks]

President Keeps the Battlefield Close at Hand
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON, March 29 - George W. Bush was standing three feet from his television screen in his cabin at Camp David last weekend, absorbed in every detail of the news from Iraq, when a correspondent came on to report that the president of the United States, according to White House officials, was not glued to the TV.

Mr. Bush started laughing, said his close friend Roland Betts, who was with the president at the time.

"He is just totally immersed," Mr. Betts said in an interview. Mr. Betts said that he and Mr. Bush talked of little else but the war over two days at Camp David last weekend, and that the president regularly turned in to the cable channels for updates on Iraq. When Mr. Bush saw something that concerned him, Mr. Betts said, he picked up the phone to tell Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser who was at nearby cabin, to look into it.

A week and a half into the invasion of Iraq, friends and administration officials say the president has emerged as an engrossed commander in chief, who is far more gripped by daily battlefield developments than his father was in the first Persian Gulf war.

Although the White House is quick to portray Mr. Bush as a confident executive who is leaving the management of the war to his generals, the fact is that a president not known for his love of detail is wholly absorbed, an administration official said, in such specifics as the exact positions of the 101st Airborne and the Third Infantry Divisions and where they are headed.

Mr. Bush has also made at least two major military decisions within the last 10 days with what his aides say is almost no equivocation: the long-expected decision to go to war, and the last-minute decision to try to kill Saddam Hussein and his sons in a single strike.

Is it just me, or is the New York Times really ass-kissing the Bush administration? I haven't been reading it that often, so I haven't noticed until now...

In any case, the idea of Bush - a man with no military experience, a draft dodger who spent the Vietnam War mostly AWOL, a former alcoholic and drug user - making military decisions scares the shit out of me. The image below is frighteningly apt.