President Without a Game Plan (washingtonpost.com)

Christ, I rebel by going to the desert and doing some radical self-expression. W. rebels by going to the desert and, well, read this passage from W's Dad's Autobiography:

"Someone has dug out and put on the Internet a fascinating passage from the first President Bush's memoir, "A World Transformed." The senior Bush is explaining why he didn't pursue and kill Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf War (the elisions are for space only and in no way change the meaning of the passage):

"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream . . . and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. . . . We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect rule Iraq. . . . There was no viable 'exit strategy' we could see. . . . Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome." "