Did Hell just freeze over, or did the President take responsibility for failing in Iraq?

I'm literally speechless. Good thing this is a written forum.

I hope you all saw the President's speech last week, because otherwise you might be lost. Georgie-Boy actually stated that the mistakes made in Iraq were his. My jaw literally dropped, and I believe I uttered a Stacy London style "SHUT UP", but I can't be too sure- the whole thing is a bit of a blur. However, the familar old George we all know and despise was back at it a little later on in the speech, committing 20,000 more American service men and women to this modern day Vietnam. Apparently taking responsibility for previous mistakes gives you carte blanche to continue making even bigger mistakes, with even more human lives. Was he possessed by the ghost of LBJ, the other Texas War President? I mean, this is getting ridiculous. When a man who lived through the Vietnam war can stand in front of the global community and state that we must remember the lesson of Vietnam, and that the lesson is that we will lose if we leave, then you really need to start looking for supernatural reasons for this kind of negligent evil.

I'm of two minds about the so called "surge". Part of me agrees with Colin Powell's Pottery Barn doctrine of "you break it, you buy it", meaning that we took the lid off this can of worms, and we need to figure out how to get it back on. The other part of me believes that while this mess is our fault, there really isn't a damn thing we can do about it, and we need to let them fight their civil war and then come back when the dust has settled to actually provide aid and infrastructure. Neither one of the courses of action is particularly responsible. The question is, whose lives do we value more, those of Americans or those of Iraqis? Can we live with the blood on our hands if we pull out now (much like the evacuation from Saigon...maybe years from now there will be a musical called Miss Tikrit)? Can we live with the blood on our hands if we commit more troops? I don't know. I saw an Army recruiting ad today that made me cry, not with sadness, but with anger and frustration, that we have created a society where we use our poor as cannon fodder, stringing them along with the promise of money for college if they survive the war. It's disgusting. Where does Bush think he's going to get these 92,000 more troops that he wants for the military in general? There is no way we're going to have that many recruits without the draft, and as a woman in her early twenties, that concept literally scares the shit out of me.

So I don't know how to feel. I don't know what the answer is, but at this point I think it would have to involve a time machine or Barbara Bush believing in birth control.