Dream Girl

Peter Baker has a revealing piece in today's Washington Post on the exit over recent months of so many high-level aides from the Bush White House. The whole thing's worth a look, but one story jumped out at me.

Baker opens his story with a passage on Bush's designated micromanager in Iraq, deputy national security adviser for Iraq and Afghanistan Meghan O'Sullivan, who came to be known in the Green Zone as Bush's "7,000-mile screwdriver":

It had been four days since Meghan O'Sullivan left her job at the White House. Just four days since she gave up her Secret Service pass, her classified hard drive and her entree to the president. Four days since she gave up any day-to-day responsibility for Iraq.

Too soon, evidently, for the dreams to end. "In fact, I was dreaming about Iraq last night," she said. "And I woke up and thought, 'When do you think this will stop?' "

She's speaking of her dreams of Iraq -- when will they end -- rather than of the Iraq war itself. Of course. This is, after all, a person hand-selected for the job by Bush. So what sort of maturity and wisdom about the war have "the dreams" brought to bright, ambitious, thirty-something O'Sullivan?

"No one who works on a war should be free from thinking of the sacrifices that come with it. You're always thinking: Is this worth it? Is this going to be worth it? What justifies the level of sacrifices on both the U.S. and Iraqi side? I believe as long as the possibility of being successful's there, you can justify continuing the effort."

In other words, you do whatever you need to do to keep the dream alive.