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Bush has a battle on his
hands
By Jim Lobe
(Posted
with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
As
the Washington, DC, area recovers from effects of
Hurricane Isabel, US President George W Bush keeps
trying to divert the potential "perfect storm" forming
from the combination of the constant stream of bad news
coming out of the Middle East and growing domestic
discontent over the war and occupation in Iraq.
That storm is likely to gain even more force
when the public has a chance to absorb this past week's
events, which mostly slid under the media radar as
Isabel approached the capital. Particularly striking
were signs of growing disarray at the highest levels of
the administration, revealed by remarks such as Bush's
assertion that there was "no evidence" linking Iraq to
the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the
Pentagon. This statement directly contradicted both what
Vice President Dick Cheney claimed as recently as
September 14 and what he and some Pentagon officials had
been advocating months before the war.
Similarly, the assertion by the US commander in
Iraq, Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez, that the
popular resistance to the US occupation might be broader
than radical Islamists, foreign infiltrators and
Ba'athist "dead-enders" appeared to contradict repeated
assurances by top administration officials in recent
weeks.
Other developments of the past week -
including the seemingly total collapse of the US-led
roadmap for Israel and the Palestinians, and the tepid
response to US appeals for more international support
for its efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan - suggest that
the Bush administration, already reeling from unexpected
setbacks in postwar Iraq, is in for a very stormy
autumn. Indeed, almost five months after Bush declared
an end to major hostilities, his poll and approval
ratings have continued falling in the past two weeks and
are now close to or below the lowest levels since before
the September 11 attacks.
At the same time, a
steadily growing chorus of Democrats, increasingly
confident that Bush has made a lethal political error in
diverting the "war on terrorism" to Iraq, is clamoring
for "heads to roll" at the highest levels of his
administration, as the Democratic leader in the House of
Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, said this week. Most of
those calls are being directed at the Pentagon's
civilian leadership, notably the top three officials:
Donald Rumsfeld; his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz; and Under
Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, who had
responsibility for postwar planning.
The White
House itself is coming under heavy fire, some of it
aimed at National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice,
whose passivity and lack of in-depth foreign-policy
experience are being blamed for letting the hawks around
Rumsfeld and Cheney manipulate the intelligence process
and thus capture the policy initiative.
Calls
for Rumsfeld to resign
The most striking call for
resignations this week came from John Murtha, the
powerful ranking member of the appropriations defense
subcommittee, who strongly supported the Iraq war.
Appearing with Pelosi, a pairing that the Capitol Hill
weekly Roll Call said "signaled a new level of unity
among House Democrats", the conservative Pennsylvania
Democrat, decorated Vietnam veteran and longtime
champion of big defense budgets accepted blame for
believing what administration officials told him before
the war about the threat posed by ousted Iraqi president
Saddam Hussein.
"I am part of it. I admit the
mistake," Murtha said. "We cannot allow these
bureaucrats to get off when these young people [in Iraq]
are paying the price ... Somebody's got to be held
responsible for this."
While absolving Rumsfeld
and declining to name others, Murtha has privately been
very critical of Wolfowitz and Cheney, whose ties to
Halliburton, the company that appears to have cornered
many of the most lucrative postwar contracts in Iraq,
have also become a political liability. Even staunch
Republican supporters of both the war and Bush are now
suggesting that the president's invasion of Iraq has
seriously undermined his war on terrorism. "If Iraq was
not a sanctuary for al-Qaeda before, it certainly is
now," noted the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman,
Kansas Republican Pat Roberts.
If that was not
enough, lawmakers from both parties are also expressing
growing alarm at the US$87 billion request Bush
submitted almost two weeks ago to fund operations in
Iraq and Afghanistan in the coming year. Not only have
administration officials conceded that sum will not be
sufficient to get them through the year, recent
soundings of foreign allies, which the administration
was counting on to cough up $10 billion to $20 billion
more, have been more than disappointing. With a donors'
conference scheduled in Madrid next month, analysts say
Washington will be lucky to get one-tenth of what it is
asking, unless it accepts a new United Nations Security
Council resolution that requires Washington to give up
control of the political and economic aspects of the
occupation.
While the administration, despite
the State Department's urging, is not yet inclined to do
so, it faces the brutal fact that any resulting
shortfall will have to be financed by Congress at a time
when polls show the skyrocketing fiscal deficit -
approaching a record $500 billion this year - is
destroying voters' confidence in Republicans to manage
the economy and hence their ability to retain the White
House in 2004.
Some senior Republicans are now
calling publicly for the State Department to assume
control of the occupation in Iraq. The chairman of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard Lugar,
backed by another top Republican foreign-policy
spokesman, Chuck Hagel, has already promised to hold
hearings to "think through what is the most appropriate
branch of government" to handle the situation.
Hawk infighting
Such moves clearly
threaten the Pentagon's hold over both Iraq and the
policies that have so far guided the administration's
"war on terror". It also threatens Cheney's position,
because, according to a recent article in the Los
Angeles Times, he personally lobbied the Republican
leadership in Congress to back off a bill earlier this
year that gave the State Department control over
reconstruction and humanitarian plans and assistance.
Rather than spurring the creation of a united
front, the recurring attacks have seemed to spark
infighting among the hawks. After Cheney revived a
two-year-old story on a nationally broadcast television
news program last Sunday about an alleged meeting
between one of the September 11 hijackers and an Iraqi
spy in Prague in April 2001, Rumsfeld told reporters
three days later he had seen nothing to connect Saddam
Hussein to the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, an
assessment backed up by Rice and then by Bush himself.
At the same time, neo-conservatives outside the
administration and close to Cheney, Wolfowitz and Feith
kept up an offensive this week denouncing Rumsfeld's
refusal to increase the number of US troops in Iraq to
reduce insecurity there. Several neo-cons, including
Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security
Policy, also assailed Bush's top political adviser, Karl
Rove, for allegedly warning Republicans that there must
be "no more wars" for the remainder of Bush's first
term. The public nature of this infighting is remarkable
in an administration that has obsessed about message
management and spin control.
Jim
Lobe (jlobe@starpower.net)
is a political analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus.
He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service.
(Posted with permission from Foreign
Policy in Focus)
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