Who better to extricate us from this mess than the man who led us into it?
To motivate voters and Congress to extricate us from these presidential wars, we need the Pentagon Papers of the Middle East wars right now.
What they should do is use the coming report from the commission headed by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and Lee Hamilton, the former Democratic House member, to force a genuinely bipartisan approach to extricate us from Iraq at the lowest cost possible.
The road back from war is very narrow indeed, and President Bush obviously has no strategy whatsoever to extricate us from Iraq and will leave others to clean up his mess.
The only "victory" will be when the administration stops misinforming the public and comes clean about how it plans to extricate us from this war it wanted so badly.
"A huge thanks to the Australian, Chinese and French teams that helped extricate us from the ice field," said Chris Turney, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales and the leader of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition aboard the Shokalskiy.
We will never know what might have been — there is evidence that he might have extricated us from Vietnam, for example — but especially in an age of extreme cynicism about the role of government, to this member of the 1960s generation, at least, his vision of global improvement through service and shared commitment does indeed continue to resonate and to inspire.
What all this means is that the next president, even as he or she tries to extricate us from Iraq — and prevent the country's breakup from turning into a regional war — will have to deal with constant sniping from the people who lied us into an unnecessary war, then lost the war they started, but will never, ever, take responsibility for their failures.
If Obama couldn't entirely extricate us from the wars he inherited, he has refrained from entangling us in new wars, despite being constantly urged to do so by congressmen and senators who otherwise refuse to spend tax dollars – on, say, education, or roads, or environmental safeguards.
George McGovern lost the 1972 election in a landslide, but he turned out to be right: President Richard M. Nixon finally extricated us from Vietnam, at a huge cost in dollars, domestic turbulence and lost lives; and the regime in Vietnam collapsed anyway, as it was always going to do.
