While President Bush has enjoyed relative success on Iraq after months of frustration, he has suffered defeat after defeat on the home front. The relatively peaceful elections in Iraq with significant participation of Sunnis has now given some credence to President Bush's insistent claim that eventually democracy will triumph in Iraq.

President Bush has succeeded in reversing the public opinion on Iraq. After nearly six months once again American support for continued US presence in Iraq � albeit under revised circumstances � has risen over 50%. Today Americans recognize the spurious justification for the war but support the goal to establish democracy in Iraq and hence support troops in Iraq.

Only time will tell what impact the current elections will have on the Iraqi insurgency. Sunni participation in politics must bear fruit for the support for insurgency to diminish. Sunni politicians campaigned on the triple negative agenda � anti-US, anti-Shii and anti-Constitution. It is difficult to expect them to either win an early US withdrawal, or reduce the growing political power of the Shii or even have a systematic rewriting of the constitution. Unless the Sunni politicians transform their political goals, they will see little political success and that could sustain and even energize the insurgency.

But that is the end of good news for the Bush administration.

A week before Christmas, he has suffered two significant defeats on the home front of the so-called war on terror. First he was forced to surrender to his old nemesis, Senator John McCain, and drop his opposition to the proposed senate ban on torture. President Bush and his Vice President Dick Cheney had tried hard to prevent the US senate from banning torture completely. They were seeking exemption for the CIA and the President had even threatened to veto the bill.

But he was forced to capitulate on torture and this failure to preserve the option to torture must come as a major moral defeat for President Bush. By the way, the strong opposition of the Bush administration to the ban on torture makes one wonder if the shame of Abu Ghraib was not authorized at the highest levels after all.

The second major defeat for the Bush administration came through the rejection by a bipartisan Senate to reauthorize the Patriot Act, the infamous law that has subverted habeas corpus and undermines other constitutional protections such as privacy and the right to a fair trial.

The senate took this remarkable step after revelations that President Bush had ordered the surveillance of thousands of American citizens without the necessary approval of a court order. Many senators correctly recognized this abuse of power and refused to reauthorize the Patriot Act that essentially demands that citizens and Congress implicitly trust the executive branch to conduct itself in accordance with the constitution free of oversight

The pre-holiday season has been remarkable. The President has made two confessions, which are egregiously inconsistent with his now well-established style of leadership. The Bush administration's signature style has been its supreme self-confidence marked by a hubristic refusal to acknowledge any mistakes ever. A comical and even astonishing manifestation of this characteristic had been Dick Cheney's insistence well into 2005, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

But in recent days President Bush has made two acknowledgements, one with humility and another with bravado.

First, he finally acknowledged that the intelligence on Iraq was grossly incorrect but also defended that his decision to wage war in Iraq was valid. I found this confession rather amusing. He finally came out and accepted that there is no correlation between intelligence and policy under his watch. When the intelligence about Iraq was assumed to be right the decision to go to war was deemed right. Now that we know that the intelligence was dead wrong, the decision based on that dead wrong data apparently is still right. Conclusion: intelligence does not determine or shape policy.

His second confession was surprising. He confessed that he authorized the violation of US laws repeatedly by ordering the intelligence community to spy on US citizens without court permission. He is claiming that his responsibility to protect Americans gives him the prerogative to authorize such actions.

This confession must have come as a relief to the torture experts in the CIA who must have been looking for new jobs after the Senate ban on torture.

There was one more thing... Harriet Myers, social security reform, public diplomacy, Iran... never mind, I forgot.

Why, oh why, can we not have Clinton back? Corrupt and intelligent, I can handle.

Corrupt and Stupid.....Arrragh!...oh, and there's Cheney - corrupt, evil, and intelligent...sigh...

Did anyone read the article in The Onion last week about Bush, Cheney and the intercom? It could so very easily be true...

I had previously given the Administration a small benefitof the doubt in foreign policy issues. However, Bush's public statement that domestic spying will continue is draining whatever patience I had with him. As one Senator said, "He's the President, not a King"!! Ah, political suicide in front of our very eyes...

The "defeats and failures" bit seems premature. Accepting MSM criticism of Bush's "domestic spying" is to accept being ill-informed (see The New Sisyphus).

The upshot is that there should be no need to for Bush to acknowledge as his "mistakes" when what is really happening is ignorance propagandized through the mainstream media.

To accept domestic spying...this is what Hitler demanded of the Germans to combat Communism and what Stalin demanded of the Russians to combat counter-revolutionaries. domestic spying has not been proven to increase our intelligence on the jihadis; the Patriot Act has not been proven to have stopped terrorist attacks which regular law enforcement within the US wouldn't have done anyway. Never, ever trust the government with your constitutional freedoms. The founding fathers made the constitution in just this way to prevent the executive from slowing acquiring the powers of a king.

>>eally happening is ignorance propagandized through the mainstream media.

Well, I was in the millitary intellegence field for many years and we were annually required to sign numerous documents that we would not collect on US Persons or Persons residing within the US. It was expressly forbidden. It is just as expressly illegal to spy on people within the US without warrants from a judge, which provides vital judicial oversight. Fighting the jihadis should never mean we have to annul parts of the Constitution in practice.

Canada just keeps looking better and better...

OmarG, I think a lot of the collection rules changed after 9-11, but I don't know the substance of it.

Also, I am very suspicious of people who live in the world of "should" rather than the world of "is". I do not consider arguments containing the word "should" to be valid unless they also examine the "or else" case and other logical alternatives. (Therefore, I never read the editorials of the New York Times.)

I dont understand why people are surprised at this. Many of these alphabet agencies operate outside the law and do as they please.
When you have such groups running around, in addition to an ignorant populace, democracy becomes fairly non-existent.

>>OmarG, I think a lot of the collection rules changed after 9-11

If they were, such changes were not disseminated widely, apparently, because even as of this year, the Executive Order on Intelligence Oversight still had my annual signature on it for FY 2005... Also, I'm referring mostly to the "smaller" story that the Pentagon kept dossiers on protesters which is patently illegal in every way, shape or form. Nevertheless, even with a Presidential waiver to the NSA, it would more properly be the FBI's job.

"should"... huh? You know, I bet people in Italy said the same thing about Mussolini: "Spying? At-a least-a he makes-a the trains run on time, capiche!" We're doing just fine on the military front without abridging the constitution. Please back away from the armchair before even more of your freedoms which me and my Marines were fighting for are slowly encroached upon...