Here are just some of the many learned opinions about what's next with President Bush and Iraq, post-election and imminently post-Rumsfeld.
President Bush lost more than a midterm election and a cantankerous defense secretary on Tuesday. He also abandoned any lingering chance of remaking U.S. foreign policy into a radical force for democratic change in the Middle East and elsewhere.He had to. The American electorate showed emphatically that it had lost faith in his party and his promises. Bush's refreshing generic denunciations of foreign dictators — including those who played ball with Washington — could not make up for his failure to produce positive visible results to support the rhetoric. He needed an immediate firebreak, and so he named Bob Gates to replace Don Rumsfeld at the Pentagon....
For better and for worse, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran's quest for nuclear weapons and the bloody breakdown of Israel's occupation of the Palestinians have accelerated a profound radicalization of the Middle East that had already been unleashed by the pressures of globalization. Trying to get back to the 1990s is another bridge to nowhere....
But Bush's going on the defensive does not mean that the radical positive changes he had hoped for cannot come about on their own, even if on a different timetable and with much greater costs than he ever imagined. True realism lies in recognizing that his diagnosis of a crumbling order in the Middle East was sound, even if his prescriptions were disastrous.
Last Tuesday, 12 years of Republican control of the House ended because of the Bush administration's foreign policy equivalent of the Clinton administration's overreaching regarding health care. Republicans should feel relieved: Considering that in November 1942, 11 months after war was thrust upon America, President Roosevelt's party lost 45 House and nine Senate seats (there were then just 96 senators), Tuesday's losses were not excessive punishment for the party that has presided over what is arguably the worst foreign policy disaster in U.S. history.Subsequent elections will reveal whether this election is a harbinger of a new and chronic Republican weakness. For nearly two generations — since the Democratic Party fractured over Vietnam in 1968 and nominated George McGovern in 1972 — the Republican Party has benefited from a presumption of superior realism regarding the essential presidential competence, national security.
Time — actually, 2008 — will tell if Iraq will do the kind of lingering damage to the Republican Party that was done by the Depression, which made the party suspect for a generation regarding the conduct of domestic policy.
[W]hat has distinguished Mr. Bush's foreign policy, more than the Bush Doctrine itself, was the sense and belief that he would not abandon an ally. You may not like that, and may have just voted against it, but this country's global reputation is as allied with the people of Iraq as it was with the left-behind people of Vietnam. Or in 1991, the Shiites in southern Iraq.On Feb. 15 of that year, after routing Saddam's army in the south, President George H.W. Bush urged the Iraqi generals and people to "take matters into their own hands" against Saddam. Then on Feb. 27 came the White House order to Gen. Schwarzkopf to stand down and thus forgo the destruction of Saddam's tank army. The Bush 41 team expected Saddam's Baathist generals to finish him off and "stabilize" Iraq. That was realism. The secretary of state was Jim Baker and the deputy national security advisor to Brent Scowcroft was Robert Gates. Shortly, Saddam's systematic, tank-led slaughter began of the Shiites in the south and Kurds in the north. In April, U.N. Resolution 688 said the attacks "threaten international peace and security in the region." Mr. Gates acknowledged the miscalculation in the New Yorker last year.
The opinion of the American people matters, and this week's election reflected fatigue with Iraq. We may be seeking a "way out," but if the Iraq Survey Group proposes a solution with the merest whiff of selling out Iraq's popularly elected Shiites, expect crudely realistic leaders in Russia, China, Nigeria, Venezuela, Bolivia, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere to conclude they too can downgrade, or obliterate, their own U.S.-oriented democratic groups. Then we can roll back the real end to notions of democratic possibility to the end of World War II. And with Democratic Party assent.
George Bush's foreign policy is at a tipping point. The administration's thinking on Iran and North Korea looks stalemated. He has taken to talking about the need for "fresh eyes" on Iraq. Looking back over the roster of the Iraq Survey Group, I'd say the eyes focused on his foreign-policy legacy, all essentially retired from public life, are anything but fresh.
We are in a 30-year war. It is no good for it to be led by, identified with, one party. It is no good for half the nation to feel estranged from its government's decisions. It's no good for us to be broken up more than a nation normally would be. And straight down the middle is a bad break, the kind that snaps.We all have things we would say to the new Congress if we could. We are a country that makes as many speeches in the shower as it sings songs. I would say this: Focus on the age you live in. Know what it is. Know what's coming. The old way is over; the old days are over; the old facts and habits of mind do not pertain, or no longer fully pertain.
This is the age we live in: One day in the future either New York or Washington or both will be hit again, hard. It will be more deadly than 9/11. And on that day, those who experience it, who see the flash or hear the alarms, will try to help each other. They'll be good to each other. An elderly conservative congresswoman will be unable to make it down those big old Capitol steps, and a young liberal congressman will come by and pick her up in his arms and carry her. (I witnessed a moment somewhat like this during a Capitol alarm two years ago, when we were told to run for our lives.) I would say: Keep that picture in mind. Cut to the chase, be good to each other now.
Make believe it's already happened. That's the only attitude that will help us get through it when it does. I do not mean think like Rodney King. We can't all get along, not on this earth. But we can know what time it is. We can be serious, and humane. We can realize that we're all in this together and owe each other an assumption of good faith.
There are rogue states and rogue actors, there are forces and nations aligned against us, and they have nukes and other weapons of mass destruction, and some of them are mad. Know this. Walk to work each day knowing it, not in a pointlessly fearful way but in a spirit of "What can I do to make it better?"
What can you do in two years? The common wisdom says not much. But here's a governing attitude: First things first.
The choices made over the next few weeks will show us one important thing: whether or not George W. Bush is in actuality a conventional politician, in which case his attention is even now shifting to his "legacy" or if he himself is willing and able to perservere in the face of profound challenges. It's a personal moment of truth for him, and therefore for us all.
Posted by Alan at November 12, 2006 02:17 PM