Gap could sue U.S. for infringement of "Banana Republic" brand

I don’t even need to go into the Bush Administration’s first term transgressions, about which I have published an entire book called “The Bush Diaries.” Here are five revelations, from just the past few months, as to why the Gap, Inc. could sue the United States for infringing on its “Banana Republic” brand:

1. Week of July 2, 2007 – from various news reports: While commuting I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s sentence on July 2nd President Bush said, “I respect the jury's verdict. But I have concluded that the prison sentence given to Mr. Libby is excessive.” However, the very next day, President Bush refused to rule out a full pardon for Libby saying, “As to the future, I rule nothing in and nothing out.” Meanwhile, in an American Research Group poll, 64% of Americans voiced their disapproval of President Bush’s decision.

2. Jun 29, 2007 report by the Associated Press: “An assistant attorney general at the Justice Department announced her resignation on Friday, becoming the seventh official to quit the department since the Democratic-led Congress launched an investigation in March into the firing of nine federal prosecutors.” This exodus comes on the heels of Attorney General Gonzales’ April 19 testimony to Congress during which he suffered a bout of amnesia uttering variations of “I do not recall” over 70 times.

3. June 24, 2007 report in the Washington Post: Barton Gellman and Jo Becker’s four-part series “The Angler” provided sufficient evidence of a loose chameleon running amok in the White House. The Post reporters claimed that Vice President Cheney’s general counsel had asserted that “the vice presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch.”

4. May 16, 2007 report in the Washington Post: In March 2004 White House Consiglierie Alberto “Fredo” Gonzales made a midnight run on the intensive care unit of George Washington University Hospital. Fredo and White House chief of staff Andrew Card raced to ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft’s bedside in the ICU to force him to reauthorize President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program of U.S. citizens.

5. April 30, 2006 report in the Boston Globe: “President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.”

This sorry record reminds me of a joke that I had heard on TV from the Democratic Party pundit, Paul Begala. In the heat of the post-2000 election fiasco, Mr. Begala had wise-cracked,

“We are not a banana republic. We only have banana Republicans.”

At that time, he had it only half-right. Given the way the Bush Administration has governed since, the Gap could easily win its brand infringement case in a court of law, albeit, in a foreign one! The U.S. courts would probably need to recuse themselves due to a conflict of interest!

The 21st Century China Syndrome

Prior to 9/11 China was high on the Bush Administration’s priorities, but Iraq has pretty much consumed the Bush presidency since then. Here’s what BBC News reported on the eve of Secretary Powell’s first visit to Beijing in July 2001:

Almost immediately he arrived in the White House President Bush began talking tough on China. President Clinton liked to refer to China as a strategic ‘partner’. President Bush changed that to strategic ‘competitor’.

In the six years of the Bush presidency, the U.S. trade deficit with China has ballooned 180% from $83 billion in 2001 to $233 billion in 2006 per the Foreign Trade Statistics of the U.S. Census Bureau.

In January 2007, the Associated Press reported that

“China's foreign exchange reserves, already the world's largest, have passed US$1 trillion,”

and

“economists believe about 70 percent is in U.S. Treasuries.”

Given these statistics it would seem on the surface that the Bush Administration has only managed to further solidify China’s role as a “strategic partner” to the United States. In fact, with the U.S. economy now so heavily dependent on China, President Bush – in the little time that he has left in his term – and future U.S. presidents are going to find it increasingly difficult to change the status quo with China without a paradigm shift in our China policy.

So I was not at all surprised when George Will expressed his very own skepticism in a recent column, “Real Change In China?” using James Mann’s book, “The China Fantasy: How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression,” as a reference. However, it is important for Americans to realize that Mr. Will's “regime change” sought by President Nixon’s policy of engagement with China has still to bear fruit after 35 years. By comparison our policy of containment of the Soviet Union and communism, initiated by President Truman after World War II, achieved its objective in 45 years.

Coincidentally, containment was also beginning to languish as an ineffective doctrine around its 35th anniversary until President Reagan took office in 1981. He then jump-started it with his “evil empire” offensive and the Soviet Union collapsed barely a decade later.

As mentioned earlier, President Bush has been overwhelmed by the “global war on terror” that he initiated under the auspices of his very own “Bush Doctrine.” Unfortunately, the magnitude and complexity of conducting this preemption policy has rendered him incapable of seriously revisiting our China engagement policy – which happens to be languishing, like its Soviet containment cousin did, in its 35th anniversary.

Meanwhile, as the U.S. economy continues to get more and more interminably entwined and dependent on China, cold turkey disengagement is hardly a viable option and “real change in China” slips further into oblivion. No matter how China performs in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, it long ago won the gold medal for international statecraft.

Alas, we have already begun to witness the 21st century China Syndrome – in which China has already demonstrated its ability to launch a missile and destroy an orbiting satellite, to make and launch a satellite for Nigeria, and has also publicly announced its intention to land on the moon by 2010.

Thus, the strategic imperative for the United States is no longer in doubt – China has already morphed into a “worrisome competitor” – we must therefore redefine and pursue a more holistic relationship with this budding superpower, one that encompasses economic, foreign, and trade policies that are not only in sync with our core values, but also more cognizant of the 21st century China Syndrome.

Mayday Mission Deconstructed – GWOT morphs into the “GWOB”

In a bitter irony, the Democratic Congress will present President Bush a new war funding bill – which he has promised to veto – on the fourth anniversary of his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech of May 1, 2003. Meanwhile the American public is screaming, “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” because President Bush is surging troops four years after he had declared “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

After tolerating four years of incompetence, the American people had clearly expressed their desire in the 2006 mid-term elections – to change the status quo ante in Iraq. Nevertheless, President Bush persists with a military “surge” strategy that defies the will of a majority of the people. Tragically, the Associated Press reported today that “U.S. Military Deaths Toll Rises Above 100 for Month, Making April Deadliest of 2007 So Far” and it also confirmed that April “has been the deadliest month for British forces in Iraq since the first month of the war.” In a weird twist of fate, the United States has gone from being a purveyor of “shock and awe” to becoming its hapless witness – as is evidenced in the ever-increasing carnage wrought by Iraq’s warring sectarian factions.

It thus seemed even more ironical that on the same day that we learned about the death of former Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, we also read about the American military building the equivalent of the “Great Wall of Baghdad (GWOB).” One might recall the big bear from Moscow climbing atop a tank to defend Russia’s fledgling democracy in 1991– an action that came to symbolize the tipping point in the dismantling of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Exactly twenty months and ten days after the Berlin Wall fell, the great wall of totalitarianism surrounding the “evil empire” had also been irrevocably ruptured.

Given the significance of walls in political history, it was rather distressing to find out that the world’s greatest democracy had sanctioned the erection of the GWOB in the darkest traditions of Berlin and Belfast. Could the U.S. have emulated a worse symbol of authoritarian occupation in Iraq than through a Soviet-style balkanization of the Iraqi people? The Global War on Terror (GWOT) has just morphed into what could become its defining symbol – the GWOB. So much for bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East – yet another of the Bush Administration’s ever-changing Iraq objectives has been turned on its head.

Finally, with their reported attempts to appoint a war czar at home, it is apparent that the Bush Administration is no longer in a state of denial – they are clearly trying to finesse a war situation that is going from bad to worse. President Bush has surely seen the writing on the wall – but it is not the graffiti on the GWOB going up in Iraq. No, I suspect that he has finally foreseen the fate of his GWOT policy of preemption, a.k.a. the Bush Doctrine. No one should be surprised if there is a “Roving” hand behind this final preemptive strike – to appoint a fall guy to manage the chaos as “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight” heads for the exit on the greatest disaster in American foreign policy in history.

Foreign Policy Evolution – My Way to the High Way

The recent kidnapping and release of British sailors by Iran should provide much needed foreign policy therapy to the western world. If the west is ever going to win the “global war on terror,” without preemptively calling it off, it needs to exhibit more backbone. It’s no surprise that these British sailors have been chastised for having “sung like canaries” after barely two weeks in captivity.

Instead of hearing “name, rank, and serial number,” the world saw these sailors acting chummy with their captors, “confessing” to their guilt, wearing enemy-supplied business suits, and pumping the Iranian president’s hand in deference. We have had real American civilian hostages, held for years in the eighties by Iranian-backed groups in Lebanon, who behaved with more dignity than these British “hostages.”

More importantly, their behavior is in stark contrast to the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, who have been held for over five years and subjected to some unquestionably rough treatment, but have yet to cough up the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden or Ayman Al Zawahiri. So it has become quite apparent that the western world needs to shift gears in its fight in the war on terror – it needs to reacquire its “Cold War-style” mentality and rely on more human intelligence than raw firepower to win it. (This is the basis for a “Silent War” strategy – that I had advocated back in September 2002 – which is explained in my 2005 book, “The Bush Diaries.”)

In the interim, by its very definition, the conduct of the “global war on terror” needs to be subject to international scrutiny. While speaking before a House appropriations subcommittee about Guantanamo Bay prisoners recently, Defense Secretary Gates requested Congress “to address the concerns about some of these people who really need to be incarcerated forever, but that doesn’t get them involved in a judicial system where there is the potential of them being released, frankly.”

Secretary Gates’ statement was troubling in many ways:

1. It implied continued distrust in the U.S. judicial system, which the Bush Administration has repeatedly tried to circumvent in the handling of suspects related to the attacks of 9/11.
2. By suggesting that some of these people “need to be incarcerated forever,” Mr. Gates was prejudging the gravity of their guilt, which thus far has not been proven in a court of law.
3. Whatever happened to the basic tenet – innocent until proven guilty – of modern western law?
4. Asking Congress to legislate the equivalent of what former Judge John J. Gibbons has referred to as “law-free zones” within the United States sets a dangerous precedent – imagine American citizens being held in foreign countries that established their own “law-free zones?”

As horrific as the events of 9/11 were, the United States has since been viewed internationally as subverting the rule of law at Guantanamo Bay – akin to changing the rules in the middle of the ball game to ensure that it wins. If President Bush is serious about bringing democracy to the Middle East, he must realize that it is not a zero sum game – it does not have to be restricted at home to export it abroad. In clichéd terms – democracy, like happiness, is not a destination but a journey. How one gets there is as important as actually getting there? Noble ends do not justify ignoble means – habeas corpus rights ought to be universal and sacrosanct. Winning over the hearts and minds of those Middle East monarchies has become harder with the Bush Administration’s “do as I say, not as I do” approach to fundamental human rights.

Speaking of monarchies, Jim Hoagland wrote about “Bush’s Royal Trouble” recently in his Washington Post column and why King Abdullah had turned down one of those rare Bush White House state dinner invitations. In my judgment, this trouble is not as much of an indicator that “Saudis, too, know how to read election returns” in the United States, as it is their recognition of the new realpolitik in the Middle East. Apparently, Jordan's King Abdullah has also told the White House – guess who else is not coming to dinner? It is therefore pretty obvious that major foreign policy realignment is in the works amongst the Sunni nations of the Middle East.

It’s clear that the Sunni command structure has been threatened by the outcome of the Iraq war. In essence, they have seen an oil-rich, Sunni-ruled nation fall under the influence of Iran – a rising symbol of Shia power, which supports the likes of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Palestinian territories. But they have also seen the growth of this Shia power emanating from their people via popular elections, whereas Sunni supremacy continues to be sustained through unpopular monarchies. The Sunni royals recognize that going forward Islam could be their great uniter, if not their savior – and thus, they must try to co-opt Iran before the West does.

However, co-opting Iran is anathema to the Bush Administration – they won’t even talk to Iran or, for that matter, Syria. Given the Sunni realignment taking place in the Middle East, one would imagine that the Bush Administration would engage these two neighbors of Iraq to ensure that its Iraq policy does not get burned at both – Sunni and Shia – ends of the stick. But then, charity begins at home – if the Bush Administration has a basic problem uniting domestic opposition to its war policies, how is it going to bring foreign opponents to the Iraq table?

This “my way or the highway” culture is inbred – most domestic opponents of President Bush’s “global war on terror” policies are constantly harangued by all manner of conservatives as being unpatriotic. It stems from their extension of Bush’s “you’re either with us or against us” philosophy to ordinary American citizens who have a different viewpoint. Again, had the Iraq war – a war of choice – not been a “sacrifice-free” war for most Americans, they would have found it harder to polarize the populace so effectively. Also, if President Bush has been unable to convince a majority of Americans as to the reasons for continuing with the Iraq war, now in its fifth year, he is going to find it increasingly difficult to win there. It can therefore be argued that it is the president who is being unpatriotic by deliberately persisting with a policy that most Americans believe is causing long term damage to the foreign policy and overall reputation of the United States?

Is it any wonder then that we had neoconservative David Brooks lamenting in his recent New York Times column that “a new Republican governing philosophy did not emerge” prior to the last election? Mr. Brooks even suggested that the GOP needed to “shift mentalities.” If this is any indication that the neoconservative movement has finally started to unravel, there still maybe hope going forward. It should clearly begin with a new direction in U.S. foreign policy – one that will take the high road to restore the principles, respect, and leadership of the United States, and one that let all the neocons bail out at the last exit entitled, “My Way.”