Return of the King – an Exit from Iraq

In his March 2nd column in The Washington Post, George Will quoted President Bush as having said, “Our strategy in Iraq is that the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down.” Therein lies the problem because the President is confusing strategy with objective. Training Iraqi security forces has often been mentioned as a strategy to meet the President’s objective of getting Iraqis to “stand up”. But then our tactics to execute that strategy have not been very effective either, as we learned recently that the number of “combat-ready Iraqi brigades” had dropped from one to zero.

Mr. Will also quoted Winston Churchill’s dire warning to Britons in 1940 that “Wars are not won by evacuations.” There is no way anyone, Americans or Iraqis, can win in Iraq by the evacuation of coalition forces at this point in time. Nonetheless, one hopes that we don’t have to witness “déjà vu all over again” – a helicopter airlift of Ambassador Khalilzad from the roof of our embassy in Baghdad in the near future. It’s more likely that a reminder of that infamous 1975 video from Saigon could force the Bush Administration away from what Mr. Will calls their “rhetoric of unreality”.

With the incessant media chatter about the likelihood of an impending civil war in Iraq, I was not the least surprised to read in yesterday’s New York Times about “The Conservative Epiphany”. In his column, Paul Krugman writes:

“Born-again Bush-bashers like Mr. Bartlett and Mr. Sullivan, however churlish, are intellectually and morally superior to the Bushist dead-enders who still insist that Saddam was allied with Al Qaeda, and will soon be claiming that we lost the war in Iraq because the liberal media stabbed the troops in the back. And reporters understandably consider it newsworthy that some conservative voices are now echoing longstanding liberal critiques of the Bush administration.”

Mr. Krugman concludes his liberal broadside with this incredulous question, “It's still fair, however, to ask people like Mr. Bartlett the obvious question: What took you so long?”

I would imagine the answer to that question is rather superfluous, since Mr. Bartlett is in the midst of peddling his new book, “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy”. It didn’t take me any time at all because I have been critiquing Bush Administration policies in real time throughout the President’s first term. In fact, I was constantly haranguing the media for not doing its oversight job, a role which a supine Republican Congress pretty much abdicated after 9/11. You can read all about my lonely crusade in “The Bush Diaries: A Citizens Review of the First Term” published by iUniverse in July 2005.

Also in yesterday’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman ("Mr. Nasty, Brutish and Short-Tempered") came up with a great idea for resolving the impasse in Iraq. However, instead of Ambassador Khalilzad and Vice President Cheney playing a good cop-bad cop routine at what Mr. Friedman calls “a national reconciliation conference”, I think that the U.S. delegation should actually pull off a “bad cop-badder cop” number. Such a meeting would surely produce desired results if Dick “Darth Vader” Cheney brought Saddam “Lord Voldemort” Hussein along to the party. All Iraqi factions, including the Sunnis, would quickly get in line – if they realized that an imminent U.S. withdrawal could herald the return of the king?

In the past few months, Don Imus (host of “Imus in the Morning” radio program) and Chris Matthews (host of “The Chris Matthews Show” and “Hardball”) have been rather facetiously touting the return of Saddam Hussein as our exit strategy from Iraq. Well, I had promoted a similar idea, quite seriously, in a letter to the Post on April 25, 2004. This letter, in response to an article by Robin Wright entitled, “U.S. Moves to Rehire Some From Baath Party, Military” appears in my book, “The Bush Diaries” (pg. 162) and is reproduced below:

“After reading Robin Wright's report, one wonders if the U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, might extend his “re-Baathification” strategy to include a “humbled” Saddam Hussein at some point of time in the near future. Outrageous and heretical as this suggestion might seem, we might recall that during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, the Reagan Administration not only supported Saddam Hussein but also supplied him with some of the raw materials for his chemical and biological programs. With the current situation in Iraq spiraling out of control, Mr. Bremer could conceivably seek the assistance of a “de-programmed” Saddam Hussein to restore law and order in the country? The Bush Administration could justify this action on several grounds:

• Without WMD, Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat to the United States or his neighbors
• Saddam Hussein is the only one who can prevent Iraq from breaking up into parts ala Yugoslavia
• Saddam Hussein is our best containment-cum-insurance policy against a virulent Iran
• Saddam Hussein was never aligned with Al Qaeda, which is our real enemy
• Re-Baathification, with Saddam Hussein back in the saddle, provides us the quickest, cleanest, and most inexpensive exit strategy out of Iraq

If one thinks this is a far-fetched scenario, which patriotic American would have believed even six months ago that we would resume business dealings with Libya's Moammar Gaddafi!”

This letter was written almost two years ago! The bitter truth is that it contains a strategy that might still work and is probably a more effective one than Thomas Friedman’s proposed shot gun approach with Dick Cheney.

Shot Gun Approach

In his Post column “Quell Quailgate” dated February 17, 2006 Charles Krauthammer writes, “Something happened involving the vice president that was interesting and unusual but of no great significance beyond that.” I wish the rest of us could be as sanguine about this infamous shooting incident. Mr. Krauthammer concludes wistfully that “Cheney got a judgment call wrong” and that’s all there was to it.

However, Mr. Krauthammer must recall that this is the same vice president, who assured us three days prior to the start of the war that “we will be greeted as liberators” in Iraq. Over two years later, despite a still-raging insurgency in Iraq, Vice President Cheney famously declared it was “in the last throes”. One wonders how many more such Cheney judgment calls it will take, before other conservatives “get religion” as Peggy Noonan did a couple of days ago. Ms Noonan concluded in her Wall Street Journal op-ed column that

“Mr. Bush may feel in time that he has reason to want to put in a new vice president”.

Meanwhile on the liberal side of town Eugene Robinson erred only slightly, when he wrote in his Post column on Tuesday that “out-of-control is the way this whole administration operates: Ready, fire, aim.” I believe that it’s actually been more like: Fire, aim, not ready! We can’t forget that the Bush Administration took a shot gun approach into Iraq as well – in the misguided belief that their “shock and awe” strategy did not require a need to “aim”. Three years later, the Bush Administration has discovered that the American public is “not ready” for what they are now calling a “long war” in Iraq.

In fact, this friendly fire, shot gun approach has proven to be a metaphor for the Bush Administration’s handling of major domestic crises as well. Senior citizens have been peppered by a confusing array of options with the Administration’s new prescription drug plan – it’s apparent now that no one was ready for it. The hodge-podge of the Administration’s post-Katrina efforts included cash payments, hotel stays, extensions, evictions, vacant trailer lots, etc. – yet, almost six months later, New Orleans is still a mess and the new hurricane season is barely four months away.

Finally, a word about the vice president’s judgment in selecting Fox News to tell his side of the shooting story – Mr. Cheney was responsible for sending our soldiers into a war where they were hardly greeted as liberators, Mr. Cheney even shot a dear friend in the face, yet Mr. Cheney lacks the chutzpah to host a more open national press conference? With their record of warrantless surveillance, a Pravda-like reliance on Fox News, and a never-ending “war on terror” deteriorating into a modern day crusade – I am tempted to conclude with a Woodwardian warning “be afraid, be very afraid”. But instead, I can only hope that this “friendly fire” incident is a wake-up call to the larger American public. We can no longer be duped by this Administration’s trump card – crying wolf on "national security" whenever it’s convenient to mask its larger failings – that shot gun approach is only for the birds!

The Other Side of US Economic Policy

The Bush Administration keeps touting the strength of the US economy, which in 2005 saw annual GDP growth of 3.5% and a 15% hike in federal revenues over 2004 to a record $2.15 trillion. In today’s Washington Post, Paul Blustein’s “Trade Gap Hits Record For 4th Year In a Row” tells only a part of the other side of this story – at what cost has this “economic success” been achieved?

The US trade deficit almost doubled from $370 billion in 2000 to $725 billion in 2005, while the national debt increased 44% from $5.7 trillion to $8.2 trillion during the same period. The US personal savings rate was -0.5% in 2005, which means that Americans spent more than they earned after taxes – this is the first time that this has happened since the Great Depression. According to the Chicago Tribune, “The savings rate has been negative for an entire year only twice before, in 1932 and 1933.” So not only is our government living beyond its means, now “we the people” are doing so too!

Meanwhile China continues to eat our lunch on the economic front. Recently the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported, “China's economy grew by a red-hot 9.9 per cent in 2005, the Chinese government announced Wednesday – enough to overtake Britain as the fourth biggest economy in the world, after the U.S., Japan, and Germany.” However, as the CBC noted, “Exports surged 28.4 per cent to $878 billion and helped to lead China to record a trade surplus of almost $118 billion.” To make matters worse, Mr. Blustein points out in today’s Post article, “the mounting U.S. deficit with China, which rose 24.5 percent to $201.6 billion last year, the biggest gap the United States has ever posted with a single country.”

If only that were all we had to worry about – Peter S. Goodman of The Washington Post had warned last month that China’s “foreign currency reserves swelled by more than one-third last year to a record $819 billion”. Mr. Goodman also notes that “Traditionally, China has sunk three-fourths of its reserves into U.S.-dollar-denominated investments, such as U.S. Treasury bills.” Is there any doubt as to how easy it has become for China to adversely impact US monetary policy? Never mind, how increasingly difficult it has become for the US to convince China to allow its currency to float!

Finally, we have all heard of the saying, “Like father, like son”. In the geopolitical context, this can be interpreted to mean, “Like nation, like people”. The day after Mr. Goodman’s story appeared in the Post, the Chinese Embassy in the US put out a news release stating “The country had a record 14 trillion yuan (US$1.7 trillion) in personal savings by the end of 2005”.

Candidate Bush had campaigned in 2000 that he would treat China as a “strategic competitor” and not as a “strategic partner” – which is the way he claimed then that President Clinton had dealt with China throughout his presidency. Ironically, President Bush’s own economic policy has now pretty much tied up his hands and severely limited his options in effecting any dramatic change in the overall nature of our relationship with China. It’s the other side of US economic policy that the Bush Administration never talks about!

A Tale of Two Cities — the Big Easy and the Huge Messy — Will Define the Bush Legacy

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…"
— Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities”

In the immediate aftermath of Katrina – as the world learned that it was largely the poor and the destitute that got left behind in New Orleans – The Washington Post reported, “The poverty rate climbed in 2004 to 12.7 percent, from 12.5 percent in 2003 -- the fourth year in a row that poverty has risen.” After falling throughout the Clinton presidency, from a ten-year high of 15.1% in 1993 to a 27-year low of 11.3% in 2000, the poverty rate resumed its upward march during President George W. Bush’s first term. This climb has been analogous to the hike in the poverty rate through much of his father’s term (1990-92), which had then followed a near identical (to Clinton) slide in the poverty rate during the Reagan “seven fat years (1983-89)”. Coincidentally, Hurricane Andrew, which devastated the southern Florida peninsula and south-central Louisiana in 1992, had been the most expensive natural disaster in United States history prior to Hurricane Katrina. It would seem to me that the Bush Karma, which I wrote about in my recent book, “The Bush Diaries”, continues to dog this presidency.

As the President now simultaneously grapples with the myriad problems of having to manage a war abroad and a crisis of gargantuan proportions at home, he might want to come to terms with the implications of this biblical prophecy:

“Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” – Galatians 6:7

In the light of the Bush Administration’s dismal performance in the wake of Katrina, whose progress had been closely monitored and whose after-effects had been widely anticipated, it’s only logical that a majority of American citizens are expressing “shock and awe” at the gross incompetence of the Bush Administration. It might have taken President Bush seven long minutes to get off his chair in that Florida elementary school after being informed about a second plane hitting the World Trade Center, but this time around it took him closer to 7000 minutes after Katrina had made landfall to finally show up in New Orleans!

It’s quite apparent, from his recent televised address to the nation from the Big Easy, that President Bush has realized that his legacy is going to be determined by the "tale of two cities": Baghdad and New Orleans. By the end of his second term, he will have likely spent upwards of $200 billion each in the reconstruction of Iraq and the U.S. Gulf states. We all know that he, and the indomitable American spirit, will succeed in restoring the Big Easy—because throughout history Man has eventually prevailed over Nature's wrath. The more questionable outcome is going to be in the Huge Messy—will President Bush succeed in rebuilding Iraq and be able to leave it with a functioning government and an orderly society—since recovery from this disaster, one largely of his own making, is highly unpredictable. I suspect that 9/11 and the tale of those two other “Bush Doctrine-bestowing” cities, New York and Washington, will fade into the background as far as the ultimate Bush legacy is concerned—and for this the President has only himself to blame!