If I didn’t know he doesn’t read, I would almost swear that President Bush has been reading popular books on business leadership. That could explain where he’s picked up the mantra “Do More With Less.” But in the absence of innovative ideas for specific ways to get more results from limited resources, the mantra is really just a nice item to add to a magical wish list.
Jonathan Chait considers why Bush won’t send more troops:
Virtually every independent analyst who does not want to withdraw from Iraq thinks we need more troops in order to win. Republicans at the Weekly Standard have said this. Democrats such as Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware have said this. The troops themselves say this, incessantly. A dearth of boots on the ground results in such predicaments as an inability to patrol the border where enemy fighters are swarming in, or the need to repeatedly fight for the same towns, which we lack the forces to occupy continuously.
But President Bush doesn’t think we need more soldiers. Comically, he also insists that in not sending more troops he is merely obeying the wishes of the “commanders on the ground.”
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Given that the president obviously wants to win the war, what is his motivation for shortchanging the number of troops? It appears to be a combination of partisanship and genuine ideological fanaticism.
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Bush’s continued stubbornness probably derives from a refusal to admit a mistake. If we need more troops now, that implies we needed more troops all along, which means that if the war ends badly, Bush must have made a colossal mistake. It’s characteristic of this administration that it would rather reduce the chances of being blamed for a national catastrophe than reduce the chances of the catastrophe happening in the first place.
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