Saving President Bush

While answering a question relating to the “war on terror” in August 2004, President Bush told Matt Lauer on NBC’s “Today” show,

“I don’t think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world — let's put it that way.”

With his then reelection a little over two months away, the President soon backtracked on the “cannot win it” part.

In September 2006 the New York Times published part of a leaked National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report, which suggested that the war in Iraq had only made the terrorism problem worse? Shortly after 9/11 and prior to the start of the Iraq war, the Bush Administration’s rhetoric was nowhere as critical of and as closely tied to the religious aspects of the “war on terror”. It is apparent that the Administration’s increasingly pointed linkage of Islam to terror has been directly proportional to the deteriorating situation in Iraq. In the lead up to the 2006 elections, we heard new phrases such as “Islamo-fascist”, “Islamic Caliphate”, “Islamic Totalitarianism”, “Islamism” enter the public consciousness. Such linkages inflamed not only the faithful but also the long dormant – as has been evidenced by the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

President Bush must surely know that there are over one billion Muslims in the world, totaling nearly one-sixth of humanity. He cannot continue to associate their religion with historically unpopular political dogma such as fascism, totalitarianism, caliphates, etc. and still expect to “create conditions” that come even remotely close to winning a “war on terror”. By conflating religion with politics, President Bush is making his own gut pronouncement to Matt Lauer come true – effectively putting victory, in what he has called the “defining struggle of the 21st century”, out of the western world’s reach.

With a Democratic Congress now ready to take over, we can finally expect some meaningful oversight of the President’s foreign policy. Unfortunately, trying to hold the President accountable for bad policy does not necessarily help make that policy better. One can only hope that the Iraq Study Group’s forthcoming recommendations make some progress in this regard. Nevertheless, I too would like to propose a new strategic direction for the larger foreign policy of the United States – one that I believe will help in saving President Bush. It may not guarantee him an enduring legacy, but I believe my five-point plan will help restore our country’s respect and leadership in the world.

1. Declare an end to the amorphous “global war on terror”.

The “war on terror” has been irrevocably lost, since it has become so clearly demarcated along religious lines both within and outside of Iraq. This is a war that should have never been explicitly declared, much less overtly fought. Following the attacks of 9/11, we knew exactly who its perpetrator (Osama Bin Laden) was and in which country he was based (Afghanistan). It was a no-brainer to declare war on Afghanistan, topple its government (the Taliban), and try to bring this perpetrator to justice.

We also knew that the perpetrator’s organization, Al Qaeda, had a network of terror cells around the world. We even surmised that many of these cells were organized as sleeper cells in various nations that were both friendly and unfriendly to the United States. Thus it should have been obvious that the disparate structure of this terror network would make an overt “war on terror” very difficult to successfully execute on a sustained basis. Following our overt military action in Afghanistan, we should have engaged the remainder of this terror network in a long “silent war” with the help of key western allies. The objective of this silent war would be to root out these terror cells around the world via covert action using “Special Ops” forces as and when required. In fact, I had recommended this “Silent War Doctrine” as a counter to the Bush Doctrine back in December 2001.

The Bush Administration’s conduct of the Iraq war, as a continuation of the global war on terror, has been an unmitigated disaster. Even if this had not been the original intent, it has become apparent that the Iraq war is causing the global war on terror to degenerate into a religious divide between the Judeo-Christian and Muslim worlds. There cannot conceivably be a healthy conclusion to a modern day crusade of this kind – as a result, we need to bring about a quick end to our occupation of Iraq. More importantly, we must find and kill Osama Bin Laden – even if this means reinforcing American troop strength in Afghanistan and engaging the Taliban inside Pakistan. After Osama Bin Laden has been taken “dead or alive”, we should declare an end to the overt global war on terror and let a covert silent war take its place to fulfill our ongoing post-9/11 objectives.

2. Dissolve the “axis of evil” and engage its two recalcitrant members in direct talks.

The reference to “axis of evil” was an unwise piece of rhetoric that should have never seen light of day and I indicated as much in an article that I wrote shortly after President Bush’s 2002 state of the union address, which gave birth to this monstrosity. Bush might have intended to emulate Reagan’s evil empire comparison – but Reagan took on an actual empire, with which there were no religious or theological affiliations to consider. Ironically, the application of the so-called Bush Doctrine to the first member of the axis of evil (Iraq) has resulted in the other two charter members of the axis of evil (Iran & North Korea) actually hastening their respective programs to acquire weapons of mass destruction. With preemptive action against these two nations no longer a viable option, diplomacy can make progress only if these nations are no longer vilified. In the long run, we stand to lose more by not talking directly with Iran and North Korea. If engaging these nations in direct talks requires that we “change our attitude”, we should do so – because it’s time that the Bush Administration realized that substance (producing meaningful outcomes) will eventually trump style (demanding or expecting certain types of behavior from lesser nations). As an indicator of our change in attitude towards Iran, President Bush must offer to re-establish diplomatic relations with Tehran.

3. Initiate “six-party talks” on a divided Iraq.

Shortly after the Biden-Gelb plan on Iraq appeared in the New York Times on May 1st, I endorsed it with the following qualifications in my blog dated May 6th:

“Most of the Biden-Gelb plan for “Unity Through Autonomy in Iraq” makes a lot of sense. However, it did not take into consideration one very important geo-political consideration that is critical to the plan’s success – Iraq’s neighbors. When Saddam was in power he was a constant threat to his neighbors. Once the United States withdraws and with no unifying authoritarian figure in control of Iraq, its neighbors will become a threat to its unity. We cannot forget that Iraq was a country created by the British from disparate nomadic regions. The Turks have had historical issues with the Kurds and Iran will continue to become increasingly influential and meddlesome with the autonomous Shia portion of Iraq. So we need to involve all of Iraq’s neighbors ¬– Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey – upfront in a Dayton-type round of discussions to ensure that the Biden-Gelb plan is destined to succeed.”

Now, more than six months later, I might be so bold as to suggest that the Sunni region of Iraq might want to consider merging with Kuwait to ensure its economic survival – which would be an ironical but fitting twist to Saddam Hussein’s geopolitical mis-adventure of 1990. It is also apparent that the Shia region of Iraq will become a satellite state of Iran, in effect delivering Iran a much-belated victory in its 1980-88 war with Iraq. In order for the Kurdish region to survive a combined Turkish and Iranian threat, we will need to maintain substantial troop strength there for several years – as we have done in South Korea.

4. Appoint President Clinton as Special Ambassador to the Middle East.

There can be no long-term peace in the Middle East until we successfully resolve the Israeli-Palestine problem. President Clinton got very close in 2000 but was betrayed by a greedy Yasser Arafat, who was not happy with the return of 97% of the occupied territories, including joint-control of Jerusalem. With Arafat out of the picture and his Fatah party feuding with Hamas, now might be a good time to mediate a new peace settlement. President Bush can condition his re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Iran to their intervening with Hamas in the West Bank and Hezbollah in Lebanon. He can then appoint President Clinton as his special ambassador to the region with cabinet rank and full authority to negotiate a 2000-style peace accord.

5. Accept the resignation of Vice President Cheney and appoint a prominent Muslim-American to his cabinet.

President Bush must realize by now that the failure of his foreign policy has been largely due to an aggressive Vice President and his band of neoconservative advisors. The firing of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld can only be the first step in the rejection of a failed “stay the course” strategy. Conservative writer, Peggy Noonan, was on to something when she had headlined a column back in February, “Hit Refresh? Why Bush may be thinking about replacing Cheney.” If he wasn’t thinking about it then, he must do so now – a revised Bush foreign policy has no chance of succeeding in the next two years with its old architect still around. Ms. Noonan was right – a Cheney replacement would have two years to be groomed as a logical successor to President Bush in 2008. John McCain would be a good choice.

Finally, President Bush must appoint a prominent Muslim-American to his cabinet. This would be a terrific gesture to not only the Muslims at home, but it would also show Muslims worldwide that we are a tolerant and inclusive society. There is no vacancy in the cabinet right now, but if someone were to resign, I think such an appointment would go a long way in defusing tensions in the Muslim world more than anything else.

What happened to white America?

In his New York Times column of July 4th, with the attention-grabbing title “Disunited States of America”, John Tierney contemplated Americans acting like “the Red people in the South and the Blue people in the North had a border between them”. Ouch! Not exactly our very own version of a Shia-Sunni divide, but one that is becoming more and more jarring with each passing election.

In 1984 Ronald Reagan won reelection by a landslide capturing 49 of 50 states. Yet I can’t remember any divisive debates about red states and blue states from that era. In fact, the only red state that President Reagan was focused on back then was the one he derisively referred to as “the evil empire” – which he was passionate about defeating. And, the only ridicule that I recall following that lopsided election was a cartoon depicting the lonely “blue” state of Minnesota – as a part of Canada! The rest of the 49 states were not considered “red” – they just happened to represent the “United” States of America.

It was only after the split election of 2000 that the red state-blue state dichotomy began to get deeply ingrained into the American psyche. Candidate Bush, who had promised throughout that campaign to be a uniter and not a divider, ascended to the presidency despite losing the popular vote. President Bush then chose to further alienate the red and blue states throughout his first term. In fact, he successfully used this divisive “politics of color” to win reelection in 2004. In spite of a narrow victory, he claimed to have gained “political capital”.

He quickly managed to spend that capital and some. One would have hoped that the outcome of the 2006 mid-term elections would inject a dose of reality into the remaining two years of his presidency. However, recent indications from the White House seem to suggest that “stay the course”, on all manner of Bush policy, is here to stay – in spite of the American people having expressed their displeasure at the status quo.

The Clinton impeachment over lying about a personal indiscretion now seems Kafkaesque in its absurdity when compared to the steady string of whoppers that the Bush Administration has fed us over the past six years regarding vital matters of state. Nonetheless, impeaching this president, especially in a time of war, would be a cop out – it is imperative that President Bush get us out of the mess that his own “untruths” have created. We the people have elected a Democratic Congress so that we can finally hold the Bush Administration accountable for its actions.

Through his rash conduct of foreign policy, President Bush has seriously degraded the reputation and standing of the United States in the eyes of the world. It is imperative that we set our differences aside in our attempts to repair our international image. In the spirit of which I ask this seemingly provocative question “What happened to white America?” However, I do not ask this question in a pejorative manner implying race, but in the patriotic spirit of red, white and blue! Instead of our constant focus on red vs. blue in every aspect of policy making, I suggest that we all look at a compromising, neutral “white” – which could become the bright white light of enlightenment that guides US to glory!

The Accidental Pundit

It was the best birthday present that I had received in a long time. In the wee hours of the morning of November 8, 2006, about 3.15 am to be precise, I decided to call it a night. The Democrats had recaptured the House and they were just 2 seats shy from getting control of the Senate – it was time to get some shut-eye.

I awoke again at 5.30 am, only to learn that Burns and Macaca were hanging in there – damn, why couldn’t they just throw in the towel? Nevertheless, it turned out to be the birthday that kept on giving. President Bush called a press conference at 1 pm to announce that he had fired Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. The president also announced that Bill Gates was taking over from Rummy!

I thought that was kind of weird – why would the President want the retired marketing genius from Microsoft running the Defense Department? Honestly, it was kind of late in the day to expect Iraq 3.0 to work. After all, Bill might do Windows and philanthropy well, but honestly what did he know about a war gone bad? Besides, Bill would just throw a whole lot of money and people into the mix – the President had already tried the former and consistently rejected the latter.

Suddenly the phone rang and I woke up. I had dozed off just as the President’s press conference got rolling. I had actually heard Bob Gates being mentioned and then drifted off into a blissful sleep… it was during that brief interlude that I got to wondering how on earth could the Microsoft marketing machine salvage Iraq, when those “nattering nabobs of neocons” had failed to do so?

My son was calling to say that he had been up until four that morning in his college dorm waiting for Burns to go down in flames. After we discussed the exciting turn of events, I let him into my little secret.

I sang it to him in my best Britney Spears imitation, “Oops, I did it again!”

“What on earth are you talking about, Dad?” my son asked in an exasperated voice.

“You are not going to believe this, Jay,” I said, “but I had entered Al Kamen’s ‘In the Loop’ contest about a month ago.”

“Oh, that Post guy who does all that sarcastic stuff on the Federal Page of ‘The Washington Post’?” Jay asked rather impatiently.

“That’s right, son. I had called the mid-term election in his contest as follows – 51 to 49 in favor of the Democrats in the Senate and 239 to 196 in favor of the Democrats in the House.” I said quite proudly.

“Wow! That’s great.” Jay replied.

“Yeah, but Macaca could throw a monkey-wrench into my Senate plan. I know Burns doesn’t have much fire left in him. Also, MSNBC is projecting the final House tally at 234-201 for the Dems. That ain’t bad. I think I am going to nail this puppy.” I told Jay quite animatedly.

Then I went on to remind him about my last great call on the eve of the millennium (December 31, 1999) – almost a year before that infamous 2000 election – when I had prophesized about the first split election in over a century! I still smart from the fact that I got no recognition for that prescient piece of punditry. Maybe if someone from Gore’s staff had read my piece (“Musings for the New Millennium”) in a timely fashion, they would have been better prepared to deal with those “hanging chads”.

Nonetheless, the inconvenient truth is I blew my subsequent predictions in 2002, when I wrote that the Democrats would capture the Senate 53-47, and in 2004 when I went out on a limb for Senator Kerry and “stuck” with a 53% to 47% victory in his favor! What had I been smokin’?

The moral of this story is that punditry has as much to do with your political skills, as it has to do with premonition and luck. Just ask triple-crown winner, Karl Rove, and all the conservative talk radio gasbags that he invited on to the lawns of the White House in the week prior to this election. They all blew so much hot air from under those tents that day, one could have floated across the mall and landed right on the steps of the Capitol to witness a new Republican Congress being sworn in.

In any event, as I write this, Macaca has decided to settle for the “real world of Virginia” and ride into the sunset (at least, for now). So I could hit the mother lode again this time, but I no longer pine for my fifteen minutes. I am trying to be happy just being an accidental pundit, who happens to get it right once in a while. But maybe just this one time, say, later “this week”, I would love to “meet the press” and then “face the nation” squarely – and, tell them about my plans for “Saving President Bush” (the title of my upcoming blog, which has a metaphorical reference to the movie, “Saving Private Ryan”).

With sincere apologies to Harold Ford, and minus the wink, I conclude my commercial with this appeal, “George, Tim, Bob… call me!”

A Consistent Foreign Policy Based on Core American Values – How Convenient?

John Tierney, talking about Republican and Democratic stereotypes in the voters’ minds, wrote in his October 10th column in The New York Times, “At one time these stereotypes made sense, but not anymore.” But why would they? Back in 2000 would anyone have predicted that the party that would get – reckless about government spending, suffused by sexual scandals, tainted by powerful lobbyists, mired in another unpopular war, etc. – so removed from its traditional image, would be the party of Eisenhower and Reagan? Therefore it is not the voter who is confused, as Mr. Tierney implies in his column, but the GOP. Having been in control of both branches of our government for most of the past six years, the GOP seems to have lost its way.

This stereotype would have us believe that foreign policy has always been the strong suit in the GOP armor, especially after President Reagan’s efforts in ending the Cold War. However, in the aftermath of the Bush Doctrine, we have seen a litany of foreign policy setbacks. Afghanistan is witnessing a resurgence of the Taliban, Iraq seems to be mired in a civil war, Iran in brazen defiance of the UN is on the verge of going nuclear, and North Korea has already tested its first WMD. Even outside the "axis of evil", freedom and democracy seem to be stumbling?

It looks like Thailand did not get the State Department’s memo on President Bush’s preference for democracy over stability? With violence challenging the fledgling democracies produced by the Bush Doctrine, we cannot afford to have otherwise stable U.S. allies fall off the democracy wagon as well. In fact, Thailand could be sending the wrong message to Pakistan, whose General Musharraf might be now tempted to postpone general elections next year under the garb of ensuring stability for his country?

President Reagan is credited with having ended the Cold War but, in his October 25th column in The New York Times, Thomas Friedman resurrects what he calls “The Really Cold War”. Mr. Friedman’s “‘First Law of Petropolitics,’ which posits that the price of oil and the pace of freedom operate in an inverse relationship in petrolist states” is undoubtedly emboldening Russia to backslide on freedom and democracy. President Bush, who had “looked the man in the eye” back in 2001 and got “a sense of his soul”, has clearly misread Mr. Putin. In fact, Russia started a slow march away from freedom and democracy, soon after the ex-chief of the KGB took over as President on the eve of the new Millennium. The upsurge in the price of oil over the past couple of years has only hastened this march.

Mr. Friedman in another recent column also suggested that the rise in radical Islamic power has been directly proportional to the rise in the price of oil. Iran did not appear as much of a threat a couple of years ago when crude oil was under $40 a barrel. In the $60-$70 range, even the Shia in Iraq are having “pipe dreams” about ruling their own country without the “infidel Americans” – which is probably another reason why the sectarian violence there has spiraled towards civil war. It won’t be long before the Sunni oil cartel led by Saudi Arabia (another stable ally?) starts acting up, now that they don’t have to worry about Saddam Hussein any more? This is fallout from a wrong turn in the “war on terror” that the American taxpayer will be paying for a long time – at least, until we are no longer “addicted to oil”.

It is therefore quite distressing to watch President Bush fawn over petro-authoritarianists such as Russia’s Putin, Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev, and Saudi Arabia’s Abdullah, while he simultaneously condemns leaders that he has never met such as North Korea’ Kim Jong Il, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. In the long run this inverted diplomacy could also prove to be a “lose-lose” approach in our overall foreign policy efforts.

Now does anyone in the Bush Administration really have a clue about the Middle East? Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had characterized the recent Israel-Lebanon conflict as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East” when civilians were being brutally killed on both sides. When a truce finally went into effect after a month of senseless fighting, Hezbollah (a U.S.-designated terrorist organization) appears to have emerged politically and morally stronger – and, the “new Middle East” seems to have been still born.

Then we had the transfer of fourteen suspected terrorists from secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo Bay. Not one of these fourteen prisoners is a national of Afghanistan, Iraq, or Iran. Nine of these fourteen terrorists were captured in Pakistan, a country that also contributed three of these high-value prisoners. It really makes one wonder on what basis President Bush constituted his “axis of evil” after the events of 9/11, which were largely planned in and executed by nationals of two of our allies – Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. It is almost like President Bush’s version of the Sun Tzu strategy, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”

In any event, the transfer of these prisoners from secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo Bay was a forced result of the Supreme Court’s ruling in late June. Vice President Cheney did not help the United States’ already tarnished image on human rights, when he had this exchange (as reported in The Washington Post) with Scott Hennen, a conservative talk show host, in an interview on October 24th:

“Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?” Hennen asked.
“Well, it's a no-brainer for me,” Cheney said, “but for a while there, I was criticized as being the vice president for torture. We don’t torture. That’s not what we're involved in.”

Earlier in the summer, in another jarring reference, President Bush classified the people behind the London airlines plot as “Islamofascists”. By thus conflating religion with politics, which is what a made-up term such as "Islamofascists" does, the Bush Administration is effectively putting victory in the “war on terror” out of the western world’s reach. On Labor Day, the New York Times published my letter in which I had cautioned:

“…with the passage of time, this war is getting increasingly divided along religious lines. History has proved that religious fundamentalists are the last ones to accept that they are the children of a lesser god.”

President Bush must surely understand that Muslims make up one-sixth of the world’s population and trying to win a “war on terror” by associating their religion with fascism is simply foolhardy.

So Republicans, who often compare President Bush to President Reagan, would do well by reading George Will’s October 5th column in The Washington Post “What Goeth Before the Fall”. In it Mr. Will defines “unresolved tensions between, two flavors of conservatism -- Western and Southern”. In applying Mr. Will’s reasoning, I consider President Reagan as a western “libertarian” conservative, whereas President Bush is a southern “religious” one. The long Cold War was eventually won by a western conservative president at the helm. I believe that we will be hard-pressed to win a long “war on terror”, given its increasingly religious overtones, with a southern conservative president in charge.

Remember those two slogans – relating to his Iraq policy – that had been used effectively by President Bush during and after his successful 2004 reelection campaign up until very recently. The first catchphrase was “cut and run”, which is what he accused the Democrats would do, from Iraq. The other option was naturally to “stay the course”, which he proudly claimed the Republicans would continue to do under his leadership. But that was then and this is now – ten days prior to the 2006 mid-term election, which increasingly looks like it is going to be a 1994-style blowout – and, a very likely end to the long Republican stranglehold on Congress.

The president who claimed to never rule by polls seems to have finally been rattled by them. So President Bush did what he had accused Senator Kerry of doing all through the 2004 campaign – he flip-flopped on Iraq! The president finally “cut and run” on “stay the course” in Iraq, when he told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News on the October 22nd edition of “This Week”,

“Well, listen, we’ve never been stay the course, George.”

With that admission, President Bush appears to have overcome an unusually lengthy “state of denial” over his disastrous foreign policy undertaking in Iraq. However, I believe that it will take him equally long to acknowledge reality. I suspect that the Bush Administration and the GOP will go through the other four classical stages of coping with loss – anger (which will manifest itself in their reaction to the results of the upcoming midterm elections), bargaining (with a Democratic Congress in 2007 to contain their humiliation), depression (as 2008 nears, they might pretend not to care anymore), and finally, acceptance (arising more from a need to protect their legacy). Hopefully, some conscientious leader in the Bush Administration or the GOP will quickly seek to redeem the nation’s prestige before any attempts at salvaging their own pride?

Meanwhile the road to the other “state of denial”, a.k.a. Darfur, littered with corpses, will have to unfortunately wait its turn – wait, to even make it onto our foreign policy agenda in the near future, since our human rights agenda has been severely compromised by this wrong turn in the “war on terror”. However, we could start to make at least some headway in addressing the root cause of terrorism, if we at least tried what I had suggested in my October 6th letter to The Wall Street Journal:

“The U.S. could make serious progress with this reasoning if it showed some consistency in the application of its core values to its foreign policy. This would necessarily imply that we make no exceptions of convenience even in the short-term: Musharraf, Mubarak, Nazarbayev, Abdallah, et al. We insult the intelligence of the common Muslim populace with these exceptions of convenience -- this is the core issue, it seems to me.”

To my mind, it’s these three C’s of distinction in our foreign policy – core values, consistency, and no exceptions of convenience – that will restore the United States as a beacon of freedom and democracy throughout the world.