1. Bush Has Created a Comprehensive Catastrophe Across the Middle East
In every vital area, from Afghanistan to Egypt, his policies have made the situation worse than it was before.
By Timothy Garton Ash/The Guardian UK
What an amazing bloody catastrophe. The Bush administration’s policy towards the Middle East over the five years since 9/11 is culminating in a multiple train crash. Never in the field of human conflict was so little achieved by so great a country at such vast expense. In every vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five years has taken a bad situation and made it worse.
If the consequences were not so serious, one would have to laugh at a failure of such heroic proportions - rather in the spirit of Zorba the Greek who, contemplating the splintered ruins of his great project, memorably exclaimed: “Did you ever see a more splendiferous crash?” But the reckless incompetence of Zorba the Bush has resulted in the death, maiming, uprooting or impoverishment of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children - mainly Muslim Arabs but also Christian Lebanese, Israelis and American and British soldiers. By contributing to a broader alienation of Muslims it has also helped to make a world in which, as we walk the streets of London, Madrid, Jerusalem, New York or Sydney, we are all, each and every one of us, less safe. Laugh if you dare.
In the beginning, there were the 9/11 attacks. It’s important to stress that no one can fairly blame George Bush for them. The invasion of Afghanistan was a justified response to those attacks, which were initiated by al-Qaida from its bases in a rogue state under the tyranny of the Taliban. But if Afghanistan had to be done, it had to be done properly. It wasn’t. Creating a half-way civilised order in one of the most rugged, inhospitable and tribally recalcitrant places on the planet was always going to be a huge challenge. If the available resources of the world’s democracies, including those of a new, enlarged Nato, had been dedicated to that task over the last five years, we might at least have one partial success to report today.
Instead Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld drove us on to Iraq, aided and abetted by Tony Blair, leaving the job in Afghanistan less than half-done. Today Osama bin Laden and his henchmen are probably still holed up in the mountains of Waziristan, just across the Afghan frontier in northern Pakistan, while the Taliban is back in force and the whole country is a bloody mess. Instead of one partial success, following a legitimate intervention, we have two burgeoning disasters, in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
The United States and Britain invaded Iraq under false pretences, without proper legal authority or international legitimacy. If Saddam Hussein, a dangerous tyrant and certified international aggressor, had in fact possessed secret stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the intervention might have been justified; as he didn’t, it wasn’t. Then, through the breathtaking incompetence of the civilian armchair warriors in the Pentagon and the White House, we transformed a totalitarian state into a state of anarchy. Claiming to move Iraq forward towards Lockean liberty, we hurled it back to a Hobbesian state of nature. Iraqis - those who have not been killed - increasingly say things are worse than they were before. Who are we to tell them they are wrong?
Now we are preparing to get out. After working through Basra in Operation Sinbad, a reduced number of British troops will draw back to their base at Basra airfield. We will sit in a desert and call it peace. If the White House follows the Baker-Hamilton commission’s advice, US troops will do something similar, leaving embedded advisers with Iraqi forces. Three decades ago, American retreat was cloaked by “Vietnamisation”; now it will be cloaked by Iraqisation. Meanwhile, Iraqis can go on killing each other all around, until perhaps, in the end, they cut some rough-and-ready political deals between themselves - or not, as the case may be.
The theocratic dictatorship of Iran is the great winner. Five years ago, the Islamic republic had a reformist president, a substantial democratic opposition, and straitened finances because of low oil prices. The mullahs were running scared. Now the prospects of democratisation are dwindling, the regime is riding high on oil at more than $60 a barrel, and it has huge influence through its Shia brethren in Iraq and Lebanon. The likelihood of it developing nuclear weapons is correspondingly greater. We toppled the Iraqi dictator, who did not have weapons of mass destruction, and thereby increased the chances of Iran’s dictators acquiring weapons of mass destruction. And this week Iran’s President Ahmadinejad once again called for the destruction of the state of Israel. Those American neocons who set out to make the Middle East safe for Israel have ended up making it more dangerous for Israel.
We did not need an Iraq Study Group to tell us that resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict through a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine is crucial. In its last months the Clinton administration came close to clinching the deal. Under Bush, things have gone backwards. Even the Bush-backed Ariel Sharon scenario of separation through faits accomplis has receded, with the summer war in Lebanon, Hamas ascendancy in Palestine (itself partly a by-product of the Bush-led rush to elections), and a growing disillusionment of the Israeli public.
Having scored an apparent success with the “cedar revolution” in Lebanon and the withdrawal of Syrian troops, the Bush administration, by its tacit support of sustained yet ineffective Israeli military action this summer, undermined the very Lebanese government it was claiming to support. Now Hizbullah is challenging the country’s western-backed velvet revolutionaries at their own game: after the cedar revolution, welcome to the cedar counter-revolution. In Egypt, supposedly a showcase for the United States’ support for peaceful democratisation in the Bush second term, electoral success for Islamists (as in Palestine and Lebanon) seems to have frightened Washington away from its fresh-minted policy before the ink was even dry. On the credit side, all we have to show is Libya’s renunciation of weapons of mass destruction, and a few tentative reforms in some smaller Arab states.
So here’s the scoresheet for Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt: worse, worse, worse, worse, worse, worse and worse. With James Baker, the United States may revert from the sins of the son to the sins of the father. After all, it was Baker and George Bush Sr who left those they had encouraged to rise up against Saddam to be killed in Iraq at the end of the first Gulf war - not to mention enthusiastically continuing Washington’s long-running Faustian pact with petro-autocracies such as Saudi Arabia. I’m told that Condoleezza Rice, no less, has wryly observed that the word democracy hardly features in the Baker-Hamilton report.
Many a time, in these pages and elsewhere, I have warned against reflex Bush-bashing and kneejerk anti-Americanism. The United States is by no means the only culprit. Changing the Middle East for the better is one of the most difficult challenges in world politics. The people of the region bear much responsibility for their own plight. So do we Europeans, for past sins of commission and current sins of omission. But Bush must take the lion’s share of the blame. There are few examples in recent history of such a comprehensive failure. Congratulations, Mr President; you have made one hell of a disaster.
2. Bush’s ‘new way forward’ is into quicksand — by JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY/McClatchy Newspapers
The power brokers in Washington spent the week carefully arranging fig leaves and tasteful screens to cover the emperor’s nakedness while he was busy pretending to listen hard to everyone with an opinion about Iraq while hearing nothing.
Sometime early in the New Year, President Bush will go on national television to tell a disgruntled American public what he’s decided should be done to salvage “victory” from the jaws of certain defeat in the war he started.
The word on the street, or in the Pentagon rings, is that he’ll choose to beef up American forces on the ground in Iraq by 20,000 to 30,000 troops by various sleight-of-hand maneuvers - extending the combat tours of soldiers and Marines who are nearing an end to their second or third year in Hell and accelerating the shipment of others into that Hell - and send them into the bloody streets of Baghdad.
These additional troops are expected to restore order and calm the bombers and murderers when 9,000 Americans already in the sprawling capital couldn’t. They’re expected to do this even when Bush’s favorite (for now) Iraqi politician, Prime Minister Nouri Kamel al Maliki, refuses to allow them to act against his primary benefactor, the anti-American cleric Moqtada al Sadr and his Shiite Muslim Mahdi Army militiamen who kill both Americans and Sunni Arabs.
This hardly amounts to a “new way forward” unless that definition includes a new path deeper into the quicksand of a tribal and religious civil war where whatever President Bush eventually decides is already inadequate and immaterial.
The military commanders on the ground, from Gen. John Abizaid, the head of the U.S. Central Command, to his generals in Iraq, have said flatly that more American troops aren’t the answer and aren’t wanted. For them, it’s obvious that only a political decision - an Iraqi political decision - has even the possibility of producing an acceptable outcome.
The White House hopes that its much-trumpeted reshuffling of a failed strategy and flawed tactics will buy time for their bad luck to change miraculously. That this time will be bought and paid for with the lives and futures of our soldiers and Marines - and their families - apparently means little to these wise men who’ve never heard a shot fired in anger.
This president has made it painfully obvious that he has no intention of listening to anyone who doesn’t believe that he’s going to win in Iraq. He’ll march stubbornly onward without any real change of course until high noon on January 20, 2009, when his successor will inherit both the hard decision to pull out of Iraq and the back bills for his reckless, feckless misadventure.
The midterm election that handed control of Congress to the Democrats can be ignored. His own approval rating in the polls, now at an all-time low of 27 percent - likewise means little or nothing.
Only President Bush’s definition of reality carries any weight with him and therein lies the tragedy - both his and ours.
James Baker was sent to Washington by the original George Bush, No. 41, to salvage something out of the mess that his son, Bush No. 43, has made of his presidency and the world. The Baker Commission labored mightily and produced, if little else, some truth: That the situation in Iraq is dire and rapidly growing worse.
It’s also clear, however, that Bush the son is paying no more than lip service to the Baker report. He doesn’t want Dad’s help, and the idea that he once again needs to be rescued from the consequences of his mistakes - as he had to be so often back in Texas - can only have hardened his resolve to stay the course.
This is akin to a drowning man who pushes away a life preserver just before he sinks for the last time. Can nothing save this man from himself - from the voices that only he hears telling him that he, like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman, will have his reputation and his place in American history restored and burnished long after his death?
What will happen to that impossible dream in the coming year if the congressional Democrats begin to do their job, issuing subpoenas and holding oversight hearings into the looting of billions from the national treasury by defense contractors and other fat-cat donors to the Republican Party?
What will happen if everything that George Bush does to string things along in Iraq fails, as has everything else he’s done there so far, and the Iraqis ask, order or drive us out of their country?
Did you notice that at every stop on the President’s information-gathering tour this week, there was a very familiar face looming over his shoulder? There was Vice President Dick Cheney, looking as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
Should the president suddenly have an original thought or seem to be going wobbly, Cheney will be right there to squelch it or to set him straight.
It can be argued that George W. Bush understood little about war and peace and diplomacy and honesty in government. Cheney understood all of it, and he bears much of the responsibility for what’s gone on in Washington, D.C. and in Iraq for the last six years. Keep a sharp eye on him. Desperate men do desperate things.
