The Decider-in-Chief Is in Trouble

One of the things I noticed early in the Iraq war was Bush's tendency to sit on his hands and hope for the best; Karl Rove spins that as 'staying the course.' Staying the course has meant, to borrow a metaphor, not containing terrorism and getting it by the roots but throwing fertilizer around so that terrorism grows even more aggressively. It's been a disastrous policy.

It seems the only thing Bush decides these days is which angle of spin he will use that day to justify himself in the press or in front of his carefully selected audiences when he gives a speech. We like to think that our presidents are capable people and if by chance something comes up that they can't handle very well, we would then like to believe there are advisers who can lend a hand. I just Googled Condi Rice and her accomplishment of the week appears to be meeting with the attorney general of Antigua (heckuva job, Condi!).

Bob Woodward's book continues to make headlines, not so much for revealing that Bush is not as capable as his press would have us believe—we've known that for some time—but for the sheer details that confirm what we already know. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times has more on Woodward's book:

In Bob Woodward’s highly anticipated new book, “State of Denial,” President Bush emerges as a passive, impatient, sophomoric and intellectually incurious leader, presiding over a grossly dysfunctional war cabinet and given to an almost religious certainty that makes him disinclined to rethink or re-evaluate decisions he has made about the war. It’s a portrait that stands in stark contrast to the laudatory one Mr. Woodward drew in “Bush at War,” his 2002 book, which depicted the president — in terms that the White House press office itself has purveyed — as a judicious, resolute leader, blessed with the “vision thing” his father was accused of lacking and firmly in control of the ship of state.

Woodward, who seemed to overly praise Bush in his last two books lost access to Bush and Cheney this time around. It's amazing what a different picture emerges when those two are not spinning their own tales with the support of Karl Rove and the now absent Scooter Libby, though I'm sure there's more to Woodward's odd about-face.

As for the 'vision thing,' the only 'reality,' if one can call it that, that existed to Bush's vision was the image of himself as a war leader, while perhaps relishing one-upping his father in stature: no doubt the rest of the 'vision' was stuff added on, probably after being tested in focus groups. I don't mean to be so cynical, and cynicism is generally not in my nature, but Bush's war in Iraq has simply never made much sense. There is still a certain percentage of Americans who don't understand the profound contradiction and inconsistency of a president who advocates democracy while things like Abu Ghraib were going on in the background (the hardline right wingers still have trouble understanding that the Iraqi people knew about our behavior in Abu Ghraib before the American public did; little wonder that the average Iraqi quickly starting questioning what the United States was really doing in their country).

Let's return to The New York Times:

Mr. Woodward reports that after the 2004 election Andrew H. Card Jr., then White House chief of staff, pressed for Mr. Rumsfeld’s ouster (he recommended former Secretary of State James A. Baker III as a replacement), and that Laura Bush shared his concern, worrying that Mr. Rumsfeld was hurting her husband’s reputation. Vice President Dick Cheney, however, persuaded Mr. Bush to stay the course with Mr. Cheney’s old friend Mr. Rumsfeld, arguing that any change might be perceived as an expression of doubt and hesitation on the war...

(snip)

...Mr. Woodward writes that on July 10, 2001, Mr. Tenet and his counterterrorism coordinator, J. Cofer Black, met with Ms. Rice to warn her of mounting intelligence about an impending terrorist attack, but came away feeling they’d been given “the brush-off” — a revealing encounter, given Ms. Rice’s recent comments, rebutting former President Bill Clinton’s allegations that the Bush administration had failed to pursue counterterrorism measures aggressively before 9/11.

As depicted by Mr. Woodward, this is an administration in which virtually no one will speak truth to power, an administration in which the traditional policy-making process involving methodical analysis and debate is routinely subverted. He notes that experts — who recommended higher troop levels in Iraq, warned about the consequences of disbanding the Iraqi Army or worried about the lack of postwar planning— were continually ignored by the White House and Pentagon leadership, or themselves failed, out of cowardice or blind loyalty, to press insistently their case for an altered course in the war.

Condi Rice has said many things in her five years working for Bush that are not true, but she stays on because she says what Bush wants to hear. Even in the Reagan Administration, advisers were allowed to speak truth to power; if that had not been the case, Reagan would have been viewed very differently these days. Many things that Reagan was thinking of doing were reversed when the consequences of his ideas were explained to him. Think of Kenneth Lay for a moment; he was warned several times that there were problems at Enron but he convinced himself that he had all the answers; Enron became one of the largest corporate meltdowns in American history and it was almost completely self-inflicted. Kenneth Lay, and not Reagan, is Bush's model. Political ideologues, and there are plenty of them in the Bush Administration, specialize in rationalizing their failures. Fortunately, our constitution has a back up for failure called the US Congress. Unfortunately, our back up has failed thanks to a majority of Republican rubber stampers.

Let's hear more from Kakutani's article:

...A secret February 2005 report by Philip D. Zelikow, a State Department counselor, found that “Iraq remains a failed state shadowed by constant violence and undergoing revolutionary political change” and concluded that the American effort there suffered because it lacked a comprehensive, unified policy.

Startlingly little of this overall picture is new, of course. Mr. Woodward’s portrait of Mr. Bush as a prisoner of his own certitude owes a serious debt to a 2004 article in The New York Times Magazine by the veteran reporter Ron Suskind, just as his portrait of the Pentagon’s incompetent management of the war and occupation owes a serious debt to “Fiasco,” the Washington Post reporter Thomas E. Ricks’s devastating account of the war, published this summer. Other disclosures recapitulate information contained in books and articles by other journalists and former administration insiders.

(snip)

Mr. Woodward reports that when he told Mr. Rumsfeld that the number of insurgent attacks was going up, the defense secretary replied that they’re now “categorizing more things as attacks.” Mr. Woodward quotes Mr. Rumsfeld as saying, “A random round can be an attack and all the way up to killing 50 people someplace. So you’ve got a whole fruit bowl of different things — a banana and an apple and an orange.”

Mr. Woodward adds: “I was speechless. Even with the loosest and most careless use of language and analogy, I did not understand how the secretary of defense would compare insurgent attacks to a ‘fruit bowl,’ a metaphor that stripped them of all urgency and emotion. The official categories in the classified reports that Rumsfeld regularly received were the lethal I.E.D.’s, standoff attacks with mortars and close engagements such as ambushes.”

(snip)

There’s the president, who once said, “I don’t have the foggiest idea about what I think about international, foreign policy,” deciding that he’s going to remake the Middle East and alter the course of American foreign policy...

(snip)

Mr. Woodward suggests that Mr. Rumsfeld decided to make the Iraq war plan “his personal project” after seeing a rival agency, the C.I.A., step up to run operations in Afghanistan (when it became clear that the Pentagon was unprepared for a quick invasion of that country, right after 9/11). And he suggests that President Bush chose Mr. Rumsfeld as his defense secretary, in part, because he knew his father mistrusted Mr. Rumsfeld, and the younger Bush wanted to prove his father wrong.

It appears that when it comes to Donald Rumsfeld (and other things), the senior Bush knew what he was talking about and the the junior Bush did not. Running the country based partly on family psychodrama and partly on the fantasies of right wing talk shows is perhaps not the best way to serve our country.