Bush's message 'a pig wearing makeup'

Phillip Carter, who knows a thing or two about the English language and about the situation in Iraq, calls the substance of President Bush's national address last night "a pig wearing makeup."

We are basically sowing the seeds of civil war with this strategy, and doing little to mitigate the risk.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where we stand today. When President Bush announced the surge in early 2007, it had a simple idea at its core: to secure the population in Baghdad and Anbar in order to facilitate political progress at the national level. Security was always a supporting task in this strategy; the main goal was political. Unfortunately, the political strategy has failed, due to the inability or unwillingness of the Iraqis to resolve fundamental questions at the heart of their society. That's not a ding on them; these are hard questions that any society would be taxed to solve. Now, we're stuck. The White House is trying to do damage control by taking credit for other successes which sprang from the surge, but the overall situation speaks for itself.