Centerblue.org

Last night President Bush, with what looked like fear on his face, gave a speech to a skeptical public and a defiant Congress–trying to convince them that applying a little band-aid of 20,000+ troops to Iraq is actually going to make a difference. He failed. Instead, he ended up looking like an ignoramus by standing in the presidential library in an attempt to invoke images of FDR’s fireside chats, where one couldn’t help wondering if Dubya had ever read a single book on the shelves behind him.

His proposal is too little, too late…and appears to be the last gasp out of a president who is tired and out of ideas on how to fix the monumental disaster he created. Twenty thousand troops may impose martial law and quell some violence in Baghdad, yes. But Iraq is a big country. The western Anbar province is overrun by Al-Qaida, who aims to make that a base for its vision of a new Islamic Caliphate, and despite Bush’s optimistic rhetoric about that province it has already been declared lost by military analysts. No military band-aid is going to fix that fact, and that is a tremendous problem that goes far beyond the violence in the neighborhoods of Baghdad.

Nor did Bush say what would happen if his new “strategy” doesn’t work, just like none of his previous strategies have worked. What do we do if the violence isn’t quelled? How do we prevent the violence from coming back the minute we re-deploy troops to Anbar or withdraw them altogether? The problem is far more intractable than Bush would have us believe–but maybe he’s just not capable of thinking that far ahead.

He also blundered by continuing his saber-rattling against neighboring countries at a time when they hold all the cards (especially Iran) and we hold precious few of them. A poker face can be a good thing, but not when everyone knows that every card in your hand is a dud. Like it or not we need Iran’s, Syria’s and the others’ cooperation to help stabilize the situation, and they all benefit from a stable Iraq. Rather than appealing to their sensibilities and realizing that nothing is lost simply by talking with them, he instead prefers to hiss and threaten them instead like a cornered pussycat. Pathetic.

Bush did get a couple of things right in his speech. He put Iraqis on notice that our patience has run out and that they need to step up to the plate right now to secure their own country–essentially telling them to grow up and stop acting like a bunch of street thugs. Their insistence on killing each other over an obscure split in Islam about who should have been the first caliph is ridiculous on its face and an affront to civilized society everywhere.

He also got right the best line in his speech: that mistakes were made in Iraq, and that he bears responsibility for them. Yes he does, and he should therefore resign for his extreme incompetence. Sun Tzu once said words to the effect that you should never launch a war unless you are assured of a crushing victory through overwhelming force. Bush ignored that wisdom, and as a result we will never have anything that looks like a victory in Iraq. It will either devolve into civil war, or our soldiers will continue to die. In either case our energy markets will be in constant jeopardy, and Iraq will be used as a springboard for terrorists–both of which we will be powerless to prevent. By refusing to resign and continuing on his ineffectual plodding course, he is simply reinforcing his own legacy as quite possibly the worst president in US history.

Let’s hope that whoever is elected in 2008 has the wisdom and grace necessary to fix this bloody mess.

The ink is barely dry on the Iraq Study Group’s report and Bush is already pooh-poohing parts of the report he doesn’t like while cherry-picking the parts that he does. He prefers instead to stick with his grandiose vision of spreading democracy in the Middle East, a desire called unrealistic and naive by the report itself.
One of Bush’s biggest concerns is engaging Iraq’s neighbors in dialogue as to how to resolve the situation. That’s not surprising–Bush doesn’t like to eat crow, and he’ll have to eat a lot of it before he could reach out to “axis of evil” member Iran. As for Syria, he prefers to make demands that Syria back off meddling in Lebanon before talking. In typical Bush mode of having his head stuck in the sand, he appears not to realize that he’s really not in a position to be demanding anything at this juncture…and that he’ll be lucky to get any cooperation at all out of countries that he has previously sought to have cast out into the international wilderness.

As study group author and Democrat Lee Hamilton observed in the Washington Post article, “How do you solve problems without talking to people?” Indeed. Bush may not like it, but the entire region’s interests are intertwined in finding a final solution for Iraq that satisfies everyone–or that is the least odious among a menu of odious choices.

The other sticking point is the report’s recommendation to withdraw troops from Iraq by early 2008. The report sees what Bush does not: that keeping troops in the country that are not able to control the situation is only worsening the problem and putting them in harm’s way. Troop involvement should be re-defined to a supportive role that assists in educating the Iraqis to police themselves.

Withdrawing troops would, of course, be the final nail in Bush’s legacy as a failure in his Iraq adventure and will therefore resist it. This is where the Democratic Congress can exert its pressure with full knowledge that it has the backing of a solid majority of the American people, and it is Bush himself who can be portrayed as outside the mainstream, out of touch, and more concerned with a failed legacy than anything else.

It’s way past time to face the realities of Iraq, acknowledge it for the huge mistake it was, do the best we can among a suite of bad choices, swallow bitter medicine, and do what it takes to get our troops home…..because frankly the lives of our troops are way more precious and valuable than Bush’s pathetic legacy.

Bush’s refusal to pressure Israel to stop its war campaign is a carefully calibrated “strategy” that will in his mind bring long term peace to the Middle East, according to this analysis.

He believes the current aggression is a golden opportunity to permanently eliminate a major de-stabilizing force of Hezbollah “terrorists” (or “freedom fighters”, depending on who you ask). This is the type of rationale that guides his actions in Iraq as well. He would thus rather address the consequences of the war as a “manageable crisis” instead of continuing to serve as an “honest broker” in any Middle East peace process.

The fallacy of this line of thinking is that if you kill enough people then the conflict will go away. This completely ignores the root of the conflict, an ideology arising from hatred bred rightly or wrongly from actual or perceived wrongs against a group of people. If you fail to address the causes of the ideology then killing people will not resolve the problem, because new people will simply step into the shoes of others killed. The rampant unemployment among youth in the Middle East and even what they learn in school about the West provide almost unlimited numbers of willing suicide bombers to unleash against Israel or the US and to strengthen the ranks of groups like Hezbollah.

The foolishness of Bush’s reasoning is amply evident in the disastrous mess represented by Iraq. Instead of promoting stability and eliminating a big threat to the region in Iraq, the US is instead fomenting all sorts of unrest that it is completely incapable of quelling. That weakness is emboldening countries like Iran and Syria to behave in ways they would not were the US truly a check on their power. Israel would do well to learn from the American mistake in Iraq, especially because it was its own behavior in Lebanon in years past that gave rise to Hezbollah in the first place.

Rather than weakening the anti-West ideology, Israel and the US are strengthening it by their warmongering in Lebanon and Iraq. It is providing the validation the Arab world needs to prove that their cause against the West is a just one. They need only see the senseless bombings of cities and the slaughtering of innocent children and civilians to fuel their hatred.

I categorically condemn groups like Hamas and Hezbollah detonating suicide bombers among groups of innocent Israelis in cafes and restaurants–such behavior undermines whatever legitimacy their causes may have. Even if suicide bombers are the only weapon you have against an opponent vastly superior militarily to you, you focus on military targets in wartime and not civilians. On the other hand, how is this behavior qualitatively different from Israel bulldozing Palestinian houses and people or indiscriminately shelling Beirut? Innocent people are just as dead regardless of the method used.

The rest of the world sees what Bush and Israel do not: that the neocon ideology of shooting first and managing the damage later solves nothing and only creates far larger problems than the ones solved. As usual, the US chooses to behave like a rogue nation while paying token lip service in admonishing Israel to minimize the killing of civilians.

It is time to address the ideology behind the Middle East hostility rather than just shooting guns at the problem. Pulverizing Lebanon accomplishes nothing. The biggest obstacle is the Palestinian statehood issue. Until Israel gets serious about the subject of providing a viable permanent home for these displaced people it will continue to be perceived as an oppressor by the Arab world and will continue to be in a state of perpetual war–if not by Hezbollah then inevitably by some other group or nation that takes its place.