I have hit on this point before but feel compelled to return to it today, especially in light of the flurry of news stories about calling the Iraq crisis a "civil war."  It seems that various media outlets are finally getting out from under the hapless White House spin and naming Iraq for what it is: a brutal and growing civil war.  I guess we have to count this as progress of a sort.

    The President himself is still unable to face the horrible reality; his spokesmen resist the obvious description.  Incredible.  Things get worse and worse and Bush can only bicker over what to call it.  He has no plan, he has no idea of what to do. He has created something well beyond his capacity to control but he continues to hide behind flimsy rhetorical constructs and fiddles while Baghdad burns.
 
    Maybe Josh Marshal is right: Bush has just checked out on the war.  I was struck by this passage:

Back when he was riding high President Bush used to say that he ‘didn’t
do nuance’ — a point on which he was unquestionably right. And that
being the case, there’s just nothing left for him to say. No more
chest-thumping or rah-rah or daring his opponents to say he’s wrong. So
he’s just gone silent. Like it’s not his problem any more.

    He can’t do anything because he does not have the words to capture the complexity of the situation.  To be sure, "civil war" is only an approximation of a multidimensional conflict.  But "civil war" is a starting point.  Without that concept, there is really no way to dig into the dirty details and find a way out.  And that is what reminds me of Confucius:

Naming enables the noble-minded to speak,and speech enables the noble-minded to act.  Therefore, the noble-minded are anything but careless in speech.
Analects, 13.3

     Bush, of course, is famously careless in speech.  And his willful denial of the name "civil war" makes it impossible for him to act.

     Let’s remember the most important point in all of this: Bush lost Iraq.  There will be plenty of complaints from neo-cons and their fellow-travelers about how the media lost Iraq or the Democrats lost Iraq or Iran lost Iraq or….[fill in the blank with demon of the week].  But the clear reality is that Bush lost Iraq.  It was his war going in, and it is his insoluble mess now.  He is responsible.   And close to three thousand Americans – and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis – have died due to his irresponsibility.