Bush Needs a Twelve-Step Program
William D. Hartung
May 27, 2004
Containing no substantial
new policy, Monday's speech laying out the administration's plans for the
handover in Iraq reaffirms the Bush team's arms-length relationship with
reality. In this commentary, Bill Hartung focuses on the president's credibility--or
lack of it--and calls for an end to the fatally flawed Bush Doctrine.
William D. Hartung is
a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York and the author
of How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy? - A Quick and Dirty Guide
to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration (Nation Books/Avalon Group,
2004).
President Bush's
May 24th speech on his administration's five-step plan for a transition
to sovereignty and democracy in Iraq was highly persuasive, if you happened
to have spent the past year in a sound-proof room, sealed off from even
the faintest whiff of reality. The speech was the first of six he will
give on this subject between now and the June 30th date for the handover
of power to an Iraqi caretaker government of uncertain composition and
capabilities. For those of us who have been paying even intermittent attention
to the growing fiasco in Iraq, President Bush's latest rhetorical offensive
is far too little, far too late.
The central issue at hand is the
president's credibility. After two years of spin, dissembling and outright
lies about Iraq's great and gathering arsenal of nuclear, chemical and
biological weapons and Saddam Hussein's ties to Al Qaeda, the Bush crowd
abruptly changed their rationale for going to war there. No longer had
we risked lives and treasure to displace an imminent threat to national
security. Instead, it ends up, we had cast Saddam Hussein into the dustbin
of history in service of a breathtaking mission to spread democracy in
the Middle East and beyond. This was supposed to have collateral security
benefits, as the flowering of democracy eventually undermined support for
Al Qaeda and other global terror groups, at some indeterminate date in
the future.
The photos of torture at Abu Ghraib
prison--and it was torture, no matter what verbal gymnastics Donald Rumsfeld
chooses to perform have cast serious doubt on the latest rationale for
the war. In Iraq throughout the Arab world, and even among America's closest
allies elsewhere, the torture photos send a message of disrespect for Iraqi
life that seems incompatible with treating Iraqis as democratic citizens
worthy of the fundamental rights and responsibilities of self-governance.
Recent polls indicate that 90 percent of Iraqis view American troops as
occupiers, not liberators, while a majority of Americans are finally starting
to wonder what on earth the Bush administration thinks it is doing there.
As we now know, the cavalier disregard
for international law and basic human decency suggested by the torture
photos starts at the top, with President Bush, his top legal advisors and
Donald Rumsfeld and his merry band of yes-men at the Pentagon. If this
scandal is a about a "few bad apples," as the Bush PR machine would have
us believe, those apples are at the top of the tree--not the bottom--and
their names are Bush, Cheney, Gonzalez, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz,
Feith and Cambone.
The Abu Ghraib scandal draws together
all that is wrong with the Bush Doctrine in one deadly but concise package:
1) arrogance bordering on
megalomania
2) failure to take into account
the history, culture, or dynamics of the
society
being acted upon
3) poor coordination and confused
lines of authority
4) a congenital inability to acknowledge
or learn from past mistakes.
This was the context for the president's
speech, whose only genuine applause line was a promise to build a new prison
and tear down Abu Ghraib, if the new Iraqi government was amenable to the
plan. Talk about diminished expectations -- "Operation Iraqi Freedom:
Better Prisons Thanks To American Intervention!" It's not exactly a slogan
designed to launch armies, or stanch the president's sliding approval ratings.
It will take a lot more than five
steps and six speeches to restore George W. Bush's credibility on Iraq
in particular, or foreign policy in general. What he really needs is a
12-step program to roll back his administration's parallel addictions to
aggressive unilateralism and excessive secrecy. Firing Donald Rumsfeld
at this late date is probably beside the point, but heads should roll among
the neocon implementers of Rumsfeld's Iraq policy, including Paul Wolfowitz,
his chief deputy, who was apparently so busy thinking big thoughts that
he couldn't even tell a Congressional committee how many U.S. military
personnel had lost their lives in the Iraq war he helped to start; Douglas
Feith, the raving ideologue who has been the Pentagon's point man for overseeing
the unbelievably inept Iraq rebuilding process; and Stephen Cambone, who
may well have "set the conditions" for orders to be sent down the chain
that led to the Abu Ghraib abuses.
The State Department should be given
a much more robust role in running U.S. policy towards the rebuilding of
Iraq, in conjunction with the United Nations and key U.S. allies. The Bush
administration should invite United Nations inspectors back into Iraq to
find out what they can about the state of Iraq's weapons programs. They
should also press for an international tribunal to deal with war crimes
committed by Saddam Hussein's regime rather than the current partisan body
run by Ahmed Chalabi's nephew, Salem Chalabi. The administration should
openly renounce any designs on long-term U.S. bases in Iraq, and announce
a date certain for a U.S. troop pullout. That date should be measured
in months and years, not years and decades. The absurd investment law
that was rammed through by Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority,
which allows 100 percent of any Iraqi industry other than oil to be owned
by foreign interests, should be repealed to make room for arrangements
that will allow room for the flowering of indigenous Iraqi businesses.
Future rebuilding contracts should be open to genuine competition, with
preferences for Iraqi-owned concerns. The administration should rethink
its plan to embed U.S. advisors in each and every ministry of the transitional
Iraqi government with veto power over major decisions. In short, instead
of the narrow, aggressive, "with us or against us" approach that got us
into Iraq, the United States should pursue a genuine change of course that
suggests that "we're all in this together." That would mean giving up
its role as "occupier-in-chief" in Iraq and sharing political, economic
and military power with allies, the United Nations and indigenous Iraqis
who suffered under Saddam Hussein's rule.
Obviously, this kind of about-face
in U.S. policy would be more likely to occur if there were to be a regime
change in Washington in November 2004 that sent the neocons and their imperial
dreams packing. There would still be plenty of work to do to get John
"Stay the course" Kerry to disengage from Iraq rather than burrowing in
deeper, but at least advocates of Iraqi independence from U.S. occupation
wouldn't have to contend with the Cheney/Feith/Wolfowitz "axis of arrogance."
Would it be too much to ask Bush
and Cheney to make one of the six speeches on Iraq a joint appearance,
at which they take a page from Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam-era address and
announce that "we shall not seek, nor will we accept, the nominations of
our party to be the president and vice-president of the United States of
America?"
Just wishful thinking--but no more
wishful than Bush's claim that he has a workable five-step plan for bringing
sovereignty, security and democracy to Iraq.
first published by Tom Paine.com
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