Three articles to prepare for the new year

Richard Lionheart vs. Salah al-Din Yusuf (Saladin)

The coming year could turn out to be more decisive than most of us expect. It's very unlikely to be the "tipping point" on winning the war in whatever sense the Cheney-Bush administration is currently defining it. Steve Gilliard, ridiculing the recent proclamation of the Cheney-Bush outlook on the Iraq War and expanding it to Iran by Sen. Joe "HoJo" Lieberman warns, "But in the end, this [2007] is our last year in Iraq."

Here are three articles, all of which I've blogged about before, that give a good background on the castles-in-the-air approach of this administration to policy, both domestic and especially foreign policy:

Retreat from Empiricism: On Ron Suskind's Scoop by Jay Rosen, PressThink blog 12/18/06

Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush by Ron Suskind New York Times Magazine 10/17/06

"Iraq: War of imagination" (Part 1 11/24/06 and Part 2 11/25/06) by Mark Danner Salon. At this writing, the full article is still available (not behind subscription) at the New York Review of Books, Iraq: The War of the Imagination 12/21/06 issue.