Quote of the day from the Last Roman Senator, Robert Byrd: “Meanwhile, in this summer of great peril, the president is back at the ranch in Texas, meeting sporadically with his advisers and launching his re-election campaign. One wonders who’s minding the White House. A rare combination of volatile and dangerous international developments is gathering in the far corners of the world. In large part, it is a storm of this administration’s own making, fueled by the fear, confusion and instability caused by the ill-advised and dangerous doctrine of pre-emption.” (For the rest of this speech, see below)
Newsweek just released its latest poll on the war in Iraq and the presidency under the striking (online) title “When is Enough Enough?” The San Francisco Chronicle, in its own piece on the poll, sums up the headline material this way (Poll shows most Americans feel U.S. will be bogged down in Iraq for years):
“With public confidence declining in President Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq, nearly 70 percent of Americans feel the United States will be bogged down in the country for years without achieving its goals, a poll finds. Americans had mixed feelings over how to proceed. About 48 percent said the United States should withdraw military personnel because of the attacks, while 47 percent said the soldiers should stay.”
That is certainly striking. Support for the war has been on a slow but steady decline since not so long after that “Mission Accomplished” banner flew over the USS Abe Lincoln, but a closer look at the poll actually offers far more interesting news — not highlighted in the media as far as I’ve seen, in part perhaps because the President’s current “approval” rating remains above 50%. (Newsweek puts it at 53%; an ABC news poll on his handling of the war puts it at 56%.) What startled me were the figures on the President’s potential reelection where, for perhaps the first time, the 50% boundary of a Florida-divided nation seems to have been broken. I expected this, but possibly months and months from now. (Admittedly, it was broken with the President running against a phantom being, not a specific Democrat, but the drop-off in figures is significant enough, I suspect, to leave Karl Rove up nights.) Here’s how Newsweek puts things:
“Against this backdrop, President George W. Bush’s approval ratings continue to decline. His current approval rating of 53 percent is down 18 percent from April. And for the first time since the question was initially asked last fall, more registered voters say they would not like to see him re-elected to another term as president (49 percent) than re-elected. Forty-four percent would favor giving Bush a second term; in April, 52 percent backed Bush for a second term and 38 percent did not.The biggest shift in opinion, however, comes in Bush’s handling of non-terror issues. A plurality of voters now think the Democratic leaders in Congress have a better approach to dealing with the economy, tax cuts, healthcare, education, social security, the environment and energy policy. In January 2002, more thought Bush had the best approach to handling all the issues above, except the environment.” (When is Enough Enough?)
I mean, five months back did you imagine you’d run across a paragraph like this in the news pages of the Washington Post?
“Both Republican and Democratic strategists have begun adjusting their plans for what they once viewed as unthinkable: that Bush’s handling of national security in general, and the war in Iraq in particular, could become a vulnerability rather than an asset in his reelection race.”
That is certainly striking. Support for the war has been on a slow but steady decline since not so long after that “Mission Accomplished” banner flew over the USS Abe Lincoln, but a closer look at the poll actually offers far more interesting news — not highlighted in the media as far as I’ve seen, in part perhaps because the President’s current “approval” rating remains above 50%. (Newsweek puts it at 53%; an ABC news poll on his handling of the war puts it at 56%.) What startled me were the figures on the President’s potential reelection where, for perhaps the first time, the 50% boundary of a Florida-divided nation seems to have been broken. I expected this, but possibly months and months from now. (Admittedly, it was broken with the President running against a phantom being, not a specific Democrat, but the drop-off in figures is significant enough, I suspect, to leave Karl Rove up nights.) Here’s how Newsweek puts things:
“Against this backdrop, President George W. Bush’s approval ratings continue to decline. His current approval rating of 53 percent is down 18 percent from April. And for the first time since the question was initially asked last fall, more registered voters say they would not like to see him re-elected to another term as president (49 percent) than re-elected. Forty-four percent would favor giving Bush a second term; in April, 52 percent backed Bush for a second term and 38 percent did not.The biggest shift in opinion, however, comes in Bush’s handling of non-terror issues. A plurality of voters now think the Democratic leaders in Congress have a better approach to dealing with the economy, tax cuts, healthcare, education, social security, the environment and energy policy. In January 2002, more thought Bush had the best approach to handling all the issues above, except the environment.” (When is Enough Enough?)
I mean, five months back did you imagine you’d run across a paragraph like this in the news pages of the Washington Post?
“Both Republican and Democratic strategists have begun adjusting their plans for what they once viewed as unthinkable: that Bush’s handling of national security in general, and the war in Iraq in particular, could become a vulnerability rather than an asset in his reelection race.”
It’s taken from an interesting piece of reportage and analysis by Dana Milbank and Mike Allen, a piece tellingly entitled, Security May Not Be Safe Issue for Bush in ’04. That article, by the way, was published before the Newsweek poll was released. Newsweek‘s figures on the public’s tilt to the Democrats on domestic issues (seconding the Pew poll of last month) are not good news for this administration. George may actually need that financial “war chest” of his.
The Post piece includes the following quote from candidate Richard Gephardt speaking “from the campaign trail in Las Vegas [said] that at event after event, voters who are supportive of the military ask him when the troops will be coming home from Iraq. ‘The president seems oblivious to the fact that we’re over there almost alone,’ Gephardt said. ‘We’re not getting less violence, we’re not getting the country put back together, people are getting killed, and the forces are stretched thin.'”
I mean we’re not talking Dennis Kucinich here. We’re talking a change in the direction of the prevailing winds. It’s generally considered a rule of thumb in our country that elections aren’t determined, no less won on “foreign policy.” But in this case, I suspect, we all need to think again. Remember, the dreamers and planners of this administration spent years imagining how to nail the rest of the globe to the wall like a pelt – a planet whose oil lands would be girded by bases, whose territories would be monitored and threatened by future space-based weapons systems and by a military so high-tech its soldiers would practically be capable of morphing like so many terminators, and in which all possible centers of competition would be reduced to military and possibly economic states of dependency. They came to believe that the critical place to get this process rolling was Iraq from which a threatening Middle East could be reorganized, pressured and controlled and from which the world’s oil supplies could also be regulated. There, given the exhaustion of a whole society and the tyranny with which it had been ruled, we would be greeted as liberators and would be able to experiment as we pleased. Well, so much for dreams. For them, Iraq was the fulcrum on which but we all know there are no fulcrums for dreams and it turns out Iraq wasn’t much of a place for those dreams either.
Still, hand it to them, the Bush Bunch (like the Wild Bunch of Peckinpah fame) had the guts of its convictions. They were the greatest global gamblers in American history. Once 9/11 happened they didn’t hesitate for a second to roll the dice. The results – well, we’ve started to see the results and they aren’t pretty, of course. But no less important, by that dice roll, the President and his presidency were wedded to Iraq. We’re talking, I think, in till-death-do-us-part language here. I mean, as good global fundamentalists of various stripes, they never imagined a divorce, hence no exit strategy, nor do they now.
So the only question is: Where’s the Ted Koppel of this moment? Because, if I were to chose among the welter of historical analogies being thrown around right now, I might pick – despite the many obvious political differences – the Carter presidency or more specifically, the moment when Nightline began, when Ted Koppel started appearing on late night ABC with a tagline that went something like “America Held Hostage, Day X.” Unfortunately, the Bush administration doesn’t yet have its Nightline, but in an understated way the effect is similar. The President is now held hostage by Iraq, the days are starting to click away, and (my belief at least) it can only get worse.
You can feel the rats (and nonrats) heading off the sinking ship. Here’s Justin Huggler of the British Independent on the fin-de-siecle feeling in Baghdad (Hunt for Saddam turns into a nightmare):
“[M]ore than just the Canal Hotel [headquarters of the UN Mission] is in ruins. Among the rubble lay the last illusions that the American occupation of Iraq might be working That the news of [the] capture [of Saddam’s vice president and “Chemical Ali”] was overshadowed by the week’s other events shows how successfully those responsible for the bombing of the UN headquarters have been able to change the agenda in Iraq. The story is no longer about the hunt for Hussein and his henchmen – it is about an occupation in danger of turning into a nightmare
“Fear has taken hold of Baghdad. Westerners are leaving town. The humanitarian organisations are following the UN’s lead and considering cutting their staff. The international Red Cross has put oil drums filled with sand outside its Baghdad headquarters in the hope of slowing the approach of another suicide bomb truck. The evacuation of the British embassy signalled that the only safe place for a Westerner was behind the massive fortifications the Americans have built around military bases.”
In Iraq right now, everyone but us is standing down: The World Bank, the IMF, the Red Cross, foreign investors, and the UN itself (not unsurprisingly) Troop commitments already in the “bank” or promised seem to be drying up too. Other countries can see the handwriting on the wall, even if we refuse to. Thailand and Japan are backing off offers to send troops; Poland is trying to shuffle the responsibility for more dangerous areas of Iraq our way; and even the Howard government in Australia, staunch supporters of this war every inch of the way, has reportedly refused informal requests for more troops (Canberra defies troop call).
Moreover, the administration can prattle on about bitter-enders or dead-enders or al Qaeda clones running the show in Iraq for as long as they want. It’s not going to change a thing. Brian Knowlton in the New York Times today even reports (Senators Say Iraq Needs More U.S. Troops and Money) that “L. Paul Bremer III said on the Fox News program that scores of foreign terrorists were pouring into Iraq, adding that it was plausible to think that they were viewing it as a place to make ‘a last stand’ against the United States.” A last stand? This is, I believe, genuinely delusional thinking – not to speak of the fact that usually in our mythology it’s been Americans (like the defenders of the Alamo, Custer, or the soldiers on Guam) who make those last stands which prove heroic mobilizing events for our national memory. But perhaps “last stands” don’t serve the same purpose when Arabs are the standees.
Here’s Independent reporter Robert Fisk’s clear-eyed assessment of the situation in Iraq after the recent brutal round of bombings, acts of sabotage, and killings (What Osama Might Learn from UN Bombing, Why the US Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals):
:
“This, in a sense, is the last heirloom that Saddam has handed to President George Bush: you can occupy this country, he is saying, but you can’t rule it. Saddam created enough pseudo-Wahabist [fundamentalist Islamic] groups to let off steam during his reign. Talk about Islam, they were told, but not about politics. But the moment the regime collapsed, these organisations, which had always been hostile to Saddam, were left to their own devices, and immediately opposed US rule in Iraq. They, not al-Qa’ida, or anyone else, are running this butchery of a war against America and its friends in Iraq.
“When the resistance to the Americans began in Lebanon in 1982-83, it started with stone-throwing after six months. Yet the assaults on the Americans in Baghdad are coming at a speed six times as fast. Six months ago, it would have been impossible to imagine such a scenario. Certainly, al-Qa’ida could not have organised its legions so quickly. So even Osama bin Laden may have something to learn from this debacle.”
Iraq has also been called Vietnam on crack cocaine. Paul McGeough of the Australian The Age reports recent Iraqi events in this fashion (U.S. fails to win Iraqi hearts):
“Speculation on the next target is endless while speculation about the perpetrators, particularly by key members of the American administration, is veering dangerously towards a fundamental error in understanding the challenge confronting the US in Iraq. It suits the White House to brand what is happening as terrorism – it sits neatly with the now discredited case that it used to justify the war.
“The Iraqi fightback against the US occupation bears many of the hallmarks of national resistance movements in history – wounded national pride (think France); decades of tutoring in hatred of the eventual occupying force (think Palestine), and foreign assistance (think IRA; think US funding for the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan). The Age is one of only a few news organisations to have interviewed members of the resistance. They made no pretence about the thousands of foreigners, all of them Arab, who have joined the fight. But they denied any active participation by al-Qaeda, Ansar al-Islam or Saddam Hussein.”
And Pepe Escobar of Asia Times adds (The plot thickens):
“The Pentagon’s response is predictable. It will send more troops. Not regular troops, but most of its 29,000 specialists in repression of urban guerrilla and terrorist groups with military training. They may kill thousands more Iraqis, but they won’t kill a national liberation movement, operated by people who lived for years in a militarized society awash with weapons. And the message of this national liberation movement to those who concocted and want to profit from the invasion of their country is stark: welcome to hell.”
If you’re already spinning from the analogies above, let me mention as well a Washington Post piece by a former CIA agent, Robert Baer, stationed in the Middle East for years, whose title says it all, Will Lebanon’s Horror Become Iraq’s? It begins:
“As soon as I heard about the truck bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad on Tuesday, my first thought was, oh, no, here we go again, the nightmare of Beirut, 1983.
“The U.N. bombing has all the markings of a professional terrorist attack, the same expertise we saw in Lebanon during the ’80s, even the same delivery system that was used to kill 241 U.S. servicemen in their Beirut barracks on Oct. 22, 1983 — the strike that brought U.S. policy in Lebanon to a halt and altered the course of Middle East politics If things go from bad to worse in Iraq, Washington will want to blame outside agitators. It will find it difficult to admit that the Iraqi population has turned against the occupation. We saw this happen in Lebanon”
And yet – to my mind, irrationally enough — Baer concludes:
“Leaving Iraq now, in a state of anarchy, would lead to civil war. And then almost anything could happen, from pulling in Iran to spreading chaos to the Arab states of the Gulf — which, by the way, control something like 60 percent of the world’s oil reserves. No matter how tough things get in Iraq, we cannot leave until it is mended.”
So we have the Sunni part of a brutal homegrown resistance movement already in operation – with the Shia part just beginning to stir – backed by unknown amounts of outside support. And the mainstream “critics” in the U.S. are almost uniformly calling for us, in those old Vietnam terms, not just to “stay the course” but to escalate by sending in more troops – 18,000 suggests John McCain, 40-60,000 suggests Sen. Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee! He got us into this and now, no matter what we may have thought before, we are all obligated to tough it out.
My response is: Nuts! If you follow Baer’s logic, then we’re the Israelis and you know what happened to Israel in Lebanon. And if Eric Margolis of the Toronto Sun is right and the Busheviks have ignorantly created a perpetual-motion terror machine centered now in Iraq, then watch out. (“Last week,” he writes, “Iraqis responded to Bush’s foolish challenge, ‘Bring ’em on,’ by blowing up UN headquarters in Baghdad and inflicting serious sabotage on Iraq’s oil infrastructure. These attacks show the U.S. has got itself into a truly awesome mess in Iraq. Far from easily plundering Iraq’s oil wealth, U.S. occupation troops – almost half the U.S. Army’s combat forces – are now under siege, at a cost of $1 billion US weekly.” For more see below.) And, of course, how thoroughly terrifying and sad all this is for the Arab world too.
The point the critics refuse to grasp is that it’s not “we” who will be sticking it out in Iraq; it’s the same people who got us into this mess and they are capable of many terrible things, but they are incapable of making life better in this Iraq. That I believe to be a fact. Jonathan Schell in his recent book The Unconquerable World showed us that there is another path of far greater realism, another way than the hopeless use of force in this world. It’s a book I can’t recommend too highly (and I’ll return to that next week). But while a masterful survey of the last two centuries of state and imperial violence and of resistance of every sort to it, its main point is simple. The lesson of the last two centuries is that peoples everywhere refuse to be ruled from afar and imperially. “People,” as he said to me recently, “do not like to be taken over by other countries and ruled. I do think it’s an unconquerable world. It’s not just that we can’t do it; it’s that it can’t be done. People do not want to be occupied. It’s folly.”
Sending more troops, more money into the sinkhole this administration’s policies have already produced in Iraq (as in Afghanistan) is indeed a folly. More of the same will produce — more of the same. Our fundamentalists and theirs have married and are now settling down contentiously to create a thoroughly extreme and miserable world for the rest of us.
In the meantime, the administration is caught between Iraq and a hard place, struggling with an overstretched, unhappy military, and “critics” who are pushing for more troops and more funds that aren’t available. Their response, as with Don Rumsfeld recently, is more of the same – in his case, the further privatization of the military (like the privatization of Iraq, like the privatization of this country). His main proposal for freeing up troops, the New York Times reported recently: “Mr. Rumsfeld told Congress he wanted to transfer to civilians or contract workers an estimated 300,000 administrative jobs now performed by people in uniform.” I can hardly wait. (By the way, I noticed the other day that the Times had finally brought an expert in to report on our failing electricity grid — Neela Banerjee, just back from Iraq where failing electricity grids are on everyone’s mind.)
In Iraq, as Knowlton wrote in the Times piece cited above, “[Bremer] and [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs] General Myers said the growing numbers of Iraqis in security positions had eased the demands on the occupying forces. Mr. Bremer acknowledged, however, that the trustworthiness of some of those Iraqis could be problematic. The possibility that Iraqi guards employed by the United Nations played a part in the bombing there, he said, was “certainly a working hypothesis – one of many.” Since the Americans arrived in Iraq thoroughly alone (the British aside), remarkably ignorant, and reliant on small numbers of Iraqi exiles who hadn’t in many cases been home for decades, they’ve been flying blind. Now, Anthony Shadid and Daniel Williams report (U.S. Recruiting Hussein’s Spies):
“U.S.-led occupation authorities have begun a covert campaign to recruit and train agents with the once-dreaded Iraqi intelligence service to help identify resistance to American forces here Authorities have stepped up the recruitment over the past two weeks, one senior U.S. official said, despite sometimes adamant objections by members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council U.S. officials said they believed some agents remained ‘fairly untainted’ by Hussein’s government. But they said they recognized the potential pitfalls in relying on an instrument loathed by most Iraqis and renowned across the Arab world for its casual use of torture, fear, intimidation, rape and imprisonment.
“Bremer said today that despite Iraqi objections, security will remain in the hands of U.S. forces. But many Iraqis, both former operatives and U.S.-allied officials, are dismissive of the U.S. ability to run intelligence inside the country. They say U.S. officials lack the means to recruit effective networks and are overwhelmed with information of dubious quality.”
Gee, and we’ve just been criticizing the UN for rehiring Saddam’s guards. But I guess we can trust former agents of the Iraqi intelligence service to help us. No bitter-enders likely to sneak through there. And by the way, if you believe that, I have a modest bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you for a song.
And, oh yes, back to our President, married to the mob: According to ABC prime time news, gas prices yesterday reached an all-time U.S. high (an average of $1.75 for a gallon of regular unleaded) due in part to the rise in crude oil prices thanks in turn to the “unsettled” nature of the Middle East. And, of course, the saddest thing may be that all that money is being siphoned into the giant oil companies, not into government coffers to be used to create a renewable world. What a surprise, more of the same. But I say, whatever your position once was on oil and the Middle East, now we’re all filling our tanks together and we have to stick it out. But let me leave you below with someone who evidently decided he had stuck it out long enough. Ed Vulliamy, the superb reporter for the British Observer, is finally leaving our shores for other assignments and he writes a long goodbye to all that. Tom
U.S. mired in a mess of its own making
By Eric Margolis, Contributing Foreign Editor
The Toronto Sun
August 24, 2003Misled and misread. That pretty well sums up America’s growing disaster in Iraq.
First, President George W. Bush, VP Dick Cheney and a coterie of neo-conservatives led by Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle misled Americans into an unprovoked, unnecessary war by claiming Iraq was about to attack the U.S. with nuclear and biowarfare weapons. This was a grotesque lie that anyone with knowledge of strategic weapons knew was arrant nonsense, but few had the courage or honesty to refute.
Next, the White House gravely misread the strategic situation by swallowing neo-con assurances the “liberation” of Iraq would be a cakewalk and oil bonanza. Last week, Iraqis responded to Bush’s foolish challenge, “Bring ’em on,” by blowing up UN headquarters in Baghdad and inflicting serious sabotage on Iraq’s oil infrastructure.
These attacks show the U.S. has got itself into a truly awesome mess in Iraq
To read more Margolis click here
Farewell America
After six years, The Observer’s award-winning US correspondent Ed Vulliamy takes his leave from a wounded and belligerent nation with which, reluctantly, he has now fallen out of love
By Ed Vulliamy
The Observer
August 24, 2003Once smitten, it should be impossible to fall out of love with America. Who could fall out of love with that New York adrenaline rush, or the clutter of the 7 Train as it grinds on stilts of iron from Manhattan out to Queens through the scents and sounds of 160 first languages? Who could fall out of love with the mighty desert when a lilac dawn fades out the constellations in its vast sky? Who could fall out of love with the muscular industry of America’s real capital, Chicago, ‘city of big shoulders’, as the poet Carl Sandburg described it? It was insurgent Chicago that first captured my heart for America as a visiting teenager in 1970.
Now it’s time to leave the United States as a supposed adult, having been a resident and correspondent for exactly as long as Tony Blair has been Prime Minister
To read more Vulliamy click here
Trouble Brewing
by Robert C. Byrd
CommonDreams
August 20, 2003In this steamy, stormy Washington summer, while the United States continues to focus its attention on the postwar turmoil in Iraq, I worry that other storms, capable of wreaking devastating damage to international stability, are brewing.
The forces in play are the escalating nuclear threat from North Korea, the possible emergence of Iran as a nuclear threat, the desperate and chaotic situation in Liberia, the near-forgotten war in Afghanistan, the violence-racked Middle East peace process and the unrelenting threat of international terrorism.
The president cannot afford merely to plot the course of the elements preparing to converge into a perfect storm. He must turn his attention to these far-flung countries and work with the international community to defuse the emerging crises. Half-hearted gestures will not suffice.