Panic on the Hill
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5032508/site/newsweek/
Republicans are reassessing Bush’s leadership skills—and confronting the idea that he could lose the November election
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Eleanor Clift -- NewsweekMay 21 - Like the movie, "No Way Out," Iraq can only get worse; it can't get better. Gen. John Abizaid, head of U.S. Central Command, said as much when he testified this week before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the violence would increase after the June 30 handover and that the Iraqis won't be ready to assume responsibility for security until April 2005.
Who is President Bush kidding when he talks of turning over sovereignty to the Iraqis? No one yet has been identified to give power to, and the Pentagon's love affair with Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi is over. American troops stormed Chalabi's residence and offices in Baghdad, a remarkable reversal of fortune for a man who was on the U.S. payroll until this month, and who provided most of the phony intelligence that formed the Bush administration's basis for war.
The Bush juggernaut looks like the Keystone Cops. What's going on would be pure farce, except it's tragedy because so many people are dying. Missiles slam into what Iraqis said was a wedding ceremony, leaving women and children among the dead. Israel is going crazy in the Gaza Strip, bulldozing Palestinian homes and shooting into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators. At home, gas prices are rising to an all-time high and in Canton, Ohio, a steel plant that Bush touted as a model last year announced it was closing, costing another 1,300 jobs in a state that has already lost 170,000 in the manufacturing sector.
Surveying the wreckage, an aide to a prominent Senate Republican termed it a "perfect storm of bad events."