Robert Dreyfuss
BUSH: SINKING SHIP!
Wed Jan 21 17:59:12 2004
64.140.158.66

Sinking Ship
http://tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9800

Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Virginia, who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is currently working on a book about America's policy toward political Islam over the past 30 years.

Seemingly adrift from reality, President Bush last night firmly tied himself instead to a failed and sinking Iraq policy.

On one hand, the president told the nation that things were getting better and better in Iraq, that U.S. weapons specialists were finding more and more evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and that America doesn’t need no stinkin’ UN permission slip to wage war. On the other hand, his very own advisers were scrambling amidst UN diplomats, America’s Arab allies and Iraq’s swirling ethnic and religious factions to try to prevent Iraq from becoming completely undone. We can only hope that Jerry Bremer, Jim Baker, Colin Powell and Karl Rove weren’t listening to the speech.

Does the president know that Iraq is on the verge of coming unglued? That go-for-broke Kurdish warlords, angry Sunni sheikhs and turbaned, fundamentalist Iraqi Shiites are pushing the ruined nation to the brink of civil war? That the UN that he so cavalierly dismissed with a throwaway line of election rhetoric is America’s one last hope for salvaging a shaky political accord in Iraq? That our Arab allies—who didn’t support the war and who can help finance Iraq’s recovery—have nearly given up hoping that Washington will come to its senses? Listening to the speech, the answer has got to be: No.

Bremer knows. For the second time in two months, he’s rushed back to the United States with America’s post-war plans for Iraq in a shambles. It’s increasingly likely that the United States will have to abandon its vaunted June 30 deadline for Iraqi sovereignty, and Bremer knows that the pieces of Iraq’s political puzzle just don’t fit together. He’s trying to do his best to make them fit, but the task is way above his pay grade. Baker knows: The patrician eminence grise of the Republican realist circle is out there dealing with reality. First, talking to the Germans, French and Russians, he tried to win an agreement for them to write off the Iraqi debt they hold—and he seems to have been successful in getting the Pentagon’s mean-spirited ban on their participation in Iraqi reconstruction reversed. This week he’s engaged in an even tougher task: trying to do the same with the Arabs. Bush’s tough-guy rhetoric and rapturous vision of America as a "nation with a mission" and a "special calling" to remake the world in its image won’t help.

Powell knows. Powell and his disparaged diplomats are scrambling to convince the UN to come back to Iraq to help organize a political transition, or at least to talk some sense into the scowling, medieval Ayatollah Sistani and his benighted followers. We may not need the UN’s permission, but we do need their help now.

And Rove knows. Rove, sources say, is fed up with the neoconservatives’ Iraqi fantasy. It was a fairy tale, and it’s midnight now—and all of the neocons’ hopes for Iraq have turned to ashes. If you were Rove, and you were trying to get the hapless Bush reelected, would you stick with the neocons? Or would you place your bets elsewhere? Say, on Bremer, Baker, and Powell.

=======================

Marrying Man
by Bill Berkowitz
What's driving the president's new plan to "promote" marriage?
http://tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9798


Populism 101
by David Corn
Being a "for-the-people" guy is the hot new way to win votes.
http://tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9794


Signs Of The Times
by Dean Baker
In this week's review of economics reporting: Wal-Mart Strikes Again..."Free" Trade?...European budget deficts...and more.
http://tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9802


Broader, Not Broder
by Russ Baker
Voters deserve better from today's columnists
http://tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9795


Special Interest Spending
by Tom Daschle
Sen. Tom Daschle on why the omnibus spending bill isn't worthy.
http://tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9799


Sales Pitch
by Jonathan Tasini
From our Working In America series: When the president talks economic recovery tonight, remember his promises.
http://tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9793


Still A State Of Emergency
by David Bryden
The president has not kept his promise of emergency action on global AIDS.
http://tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9797


Iowa's Lessons
by Doug Ireland
Monday night was not so good for the party's left wing.
http://tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9790