"FULL SPEED AHEAD"

This is what Bush's dirty little war has gotten us. After nearly 3,000 coalition fatalities and nearly 45,000 wounded, more than $400 billion (some analysts say the real economic impact could be as high as $2 trillion), and a severely damaged military, we're left with an Iraqi prime minister who caters more to Shiite leaders and militias than to U.S. wishes for a unity government. At this point we have more in common with Saddam Hussein's Sunni insurgents than with the "elected" Iraqi government. And there's little we can do about it.

Yet Darth Cheney says "full speed ahead" with the Bush administration's course in Iraq -- something like the captain of the Titanic was claimed to have said (he reportedly wanted to break an ocean-crossing record). Cheney says it doesn't matter if the American people oppose the Iraq war, or if the Congress does. He and Dubya think it's right, and they know better than anyone else.

Cheney said, the administration is not considering a fundamentally different course.

"I think it'll have some effect perhaps in the Congress," he said of the election's outcome, "but the president's made clear what his objective is. It's victory in Iraq. And it's full speed ahead on that basis. And that's exactly what we're going to do."

Or maybe the situation is more akin to a shipwreck something like the Hesperus, led as we are by a captain who laughs at the cautions and warnings he receives from his more experienced crew:

Then up and spake an old Sailòr,
Had sailed to the Spanish Main,
‘I pray thee, put into yonder port,
For I fear a hurricane.

‘Last night, the moon had a golden ring,
And to-night no moon we see!’
The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.
...
Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman’s Woe!

Tags: full speed ahead, Dick Cheney, Iraq