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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: Like A Rat Running for Daylight: Bush and the Politics of Perpetual War There is, I think, a misconception about the Bush administration’s military strategy for the Middle East. There is no military strategy. There is only a political strategy. The political strategy is to keep the pot boiling in the Middle East so that George Bush and Dick Cheney can continue to claim the privileges and protections of a wartime presidency. Because peace, truth, and time are the Bush administration's deadliest enemies. As soon as we opt for disengagement instead of victory and the Iraq war is defined as a failure, the Bush administration is stripped of the "war presidency" status that allows it to shield all its actions from public scrutiny by claiming the needs of urgency, security, and secrecy. Instead, the relative calm of peace, normalcy, or whatever passes for that in Iraq would turn the baleful attention of the American people and the president’s enemies inside and out of his party—and they are legion, believe me—on the gross errors, sordid motives, base actions, and criminal or near criminal activities of this unsuccessful, unpopular, and increasingly resented presidency. As Prime Minister Tojo could tell us, if he were here today, leaders who lose wars of choice can end up in a war crimes docket. The victors don’t just write history—they write the indictments, too. That’s how "The Decider" becomes "The Defendant". Maybe that’s where Bush and Cheney should end up, but the fact that defeat was partial and overseas instead of total and at home will shield them from the ultimate sanction. Instead, they would be subjected to a barrage of investigations, critical press coverage, and criminal proceedings amounting to virtual impeachment even if the real thing doesn’t bite them on the butt. The main disaster for the current administration is that the war in Iraq has overwhelmed the War on Terror as the defining narrative. After 9/11, it was all good for Bush: his arbitrary, authoritarian impulses were justified and advanced by the War on Terror, an eternal war with vague, unachievable goals, fought by a relatively small, professional, politically neutral security apparatus. It was a war fought without public scrutiny, and it enabled the arbitrary extension of presidential power into any sphere of public activity and private life. Then Bush and Cheney made the ruinous decision of invading Iraq. Instead of a quick, and inexpensive triumph, we became mired in a conventional, bloody, and costly war of occupation, with the metrics of failure, measured in time, money, and blood expended and the myriad undeniable disasters "on the ground", on humiliating display for all to see. The Iraq War, not 9/11, now defines the Bush presidency. But, to paraphrase the late, unlamented Donald Rumsfeld, "You don’t rape the nation and the Constitution with the war you want, you rape it with the war you have." There is always a chance that another terrorist outrage will wrench the political discourse from Iraq back to the War on Terror. Absent such a development, all the administration can do is try to keep the Iraq war—and the wartime presidency—rolling along. So we get an endless litany of "last chances" and "surges" meant to obscure the failure in Iraq with high tech military sound and fury and move the goalposts down the road six months at a time. And we get Iran. People appear mystified that the Bush administration is itching to expand a losing war in Iraq to multiple fronts, including Iran. The only reason we’re threatening war with Iran is because the Bush administration calculates that it can get away with it. Not because military conflict with Iran will solve the Iraq problem, or neutralize Iran. We couldn’t even finish off Iraq. We certainly don’t have the military, diplomatic, or economic horses to deal with Iran. The prognosis for an escalating program of confrontation against Iran is the emergence of a united, radicalized, and implacably hostile enemy that will recognize that removing the United States and its allies from the Middle East is not just a national priority—it is a matter of national survival. Patience, anger, and endurance will translate into a campaign over years and even decades to attack American interests where they are weakest: in Iraq, and through the rickety monarchies in Saudi Arabia and Jordan we are relying on as our local cat’s paws in the anti-Shi’a alliance. Our spooks, diplomats, and soldiers are fanning the globe to push the Iran war not because the one in ten thousand chance that bombing Iran will produce nirvana in the Middle East. They are doing it because there is enough fear and opportunism—here in America, within the Jewish community, and across party lines and within the pundit and professional classes—to make the prospect of a war with Iran politically palatable. And that’s all the encouragement the worst president in history needs to prolong his campaign of failure in the Middle East. Like a rat running for daylight, the Bush administration will seize on any politically defendable pretext for continuing the war in the Middle East--—and postponing accountability and the day of reckoning for his administration. It is a uniquely reckless game, trading American lives, money, long term strategic interests, and the balance of power in the Gulf for decades to come, in exchange for twenty-odd months of political immunity for a discredited and despised group of politicians. Bush gambles that the "surge" will buy him six months in Iraq—enough time for the demoralizing shock of the mid-term elections to wear off, allow him to prepare a political counterattack, and to foment the final crisis that should allow carry him through the next two years and into retirement with his wartime presidency political and legal shield intact—Iran. By encouraging his opponents to debate the minutiae of tactics in our Middle East quagmire, Bush is also able to turn the focus away from where it should be: an urgent repudiation of his reckless, dangerous, and failed presidency. He calculates that invoking the "Iranian threat" will sow enough doubt and division in American politics that a concerted move to rein in his presidency—stripping him of his war powers through mounting political pressure culminating in the threat of impeachment for any one of the multitude of political and constitutional sins that he has committed—will founder. On one level, I think he’s correct. U.S. politicians don’t have the backbone to explicitly attack Bush’s war policy while he’s pushing the Iran threat. But I think that U.S. politicians realize that Bush’s plans to goad Iran into an overt response that will make an Iran conflict a fait accompli—by attacking its consulates, threatening to detain and execute its personnel inside Iraq, conducting any number of black operations either directly or through Israel and Saudi Arabia—simply threatens to push us into an expanded regional conflict at the worst possible time, when we are bogged down in Iraq, bitterly divided, and led by an incapable, callous, and supremely opportunistic president. Let the next president fight the Iran war, not this guy, should be what Congresscritters are grumbling in the cloak room. And hopefully, G.O.P. Congresspeople are thinking, the only chance that the next president will be a Republican is if they put the brakes on Bush and Cheney’s runaway presidency right now. Perhaps Dick Cheney’s evidentiary and publicity travails at the Libby trial will mutate into a concerted effort to remove him from office and shut down this rogue regime. But as long as American politics and popular opinion provide enough daylight for these rats to run to, expect war without end in the Middle East.
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#1. To: ... (#0)
massive extermination bump
that pretty much says it all.
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