Bush's Position on Iraq Is Growing More Confusing
It is not a good sign that our president is unable to make up his mind which way to go on Iraq. And who can believe anything he says less than three weeks from an election? For that matter, who can believe the hundreds of Republicans running for office who are determined to distance themselves from Bush's policies after spending five years giving Bush everything he wants. Let's see: five years of rubber-stamping Bush's failed Iraq policy versus three weeks of appearing independent just before an election; which one might represent the real Republican philosophy?
Raw Story carries an Associated Press article by Jennifer Loven that suggests the president is back in his strange image-protection mode instead of admitting his mistakes and thinking seriously about what's best for the country:
Our goal is victory. Got that? That's our goal. And that's the problem in a nutshell. Vague public relations trumps real policy change. Once again, our strange president puts his cowboy foreign policy style over substance. Once again, our president is unable to admit his mistakes. Once again, the president is unable to understand that the war in Iraq, the war we did not need, is a strategic blunder. Bush's priority seems to be his political image rather than our troops or our foreign policy.
Larry Johnson, who worked for the CIA for many years, has a post in No Quarter on Iraq:
There's local strategic thinking and global strategic thinking. On both counts, it's not clear what Bush is trying to accomplish in Iraq but he's failing on both counts, particularly on global strategic thinking since the United States, thanks to Bush's bungling, is now in a weaker position in the world than it was four years ago.. 'Staying the course' cannot of itself improve our position since things are beginning to happen while we're tied down in Iraq that are not in our best interests.
Larry Johnson goes on to make some suggestions on how to proceed in Iraq. The first comment after his post is by Daniel A. Greenbaum who makes a good observation:
Greenbaum makes a good point (and I've read Cohen's useful book) and I don't want to diminish what he's saying but I have to mention the strong feeling I've had for the longest time that Bush has no goal in Iraq except to be remembered as a war president and as the son who supposedly finished his father's job. These are not the political goals in the sense that Greenbaum is talking about and, in a sense, they are only personal goals. They are goals not worthy of a foreign policy to be embraced by the American people. So we've had a public relations parade for four years of contradictory goals, none of which seem to have Bush's full commitment.
Raw Story carries an Associated Press article by Jennifer Loven that suggests the president is back in his strange image-protection mode instead of admitting his mistakes and thinking seriously about what's best for the country:
President Bush on Saturday reviewed Iraq strategy with top war commanders and national security advisers, but indicated little inclination for major changes to an increasingly divisive policy.
"Our goal in Iraq is clear and unchanging: Our goal is victory," Bush said in his weekly radio address. "What is changing are the tactics we use to achieve that goal."
Under bipartisan, pre-election pressure for a significant re-examination of the president's war plan, the White House is walking a fine line.
It made sure to publicize the president's high-level meeting on the deteriorating conditions in Iraq —October already is the deadliest month this year for U.S. troops. At the same time, officials characterized the session as routine and part of a continuing discussion that seeks merely tactical adjustments to —not a radical overhaul of —war policy.
Our goal is victory. Got that? That's our goal. And that's the problem in a nutshell. Vague public relations trumps real policy change. Once again, our strange president puts his cowboy foreign policy style over substance. Once again, our president is unable to admit his mistakes. Once again, the president is unable to understand that the war in Iraq, the war we did not need, is a strategic blunder. Bush's priority seems to be his political image rather than our troops or our foreign policy.
Larry Johnson, who worked for the CIA for many years, has a post in No Quarter on Iraq:
Hey, let's buy Tony Snow a copy of Carl von Clausewitz's classic, ON WAR, and help him understand the difference between "strategy" and "tactics". Tony's tap dancing today during the White House press briefing revealed a shallow political hack swimming in deep waters. When asked, "are we winning", poor Tony could not come up with a definition of victory. In fact, he responded rhetorically, "what is victory". According to Clausewitz:tactics teaches the use of armed forces in the engagement; strategy, the use of engagements for the object of the war.What is our objective in Iraq? Eliminating weapons of mass destruction? Promoting democracy? "Fighting them (the terrorists) there so we don't have to fight them here?" These are not mutually compatible objectives. It is the lack of a clear answer that accounts for our nation's inability to define victory in Iraq. Bush, Cheney, and Rummy need to figure out what in the hell we are trying to do. Once that is clearly defined then we will be in a position to devise tactics that will complement the strategic objective.
There's local strategic thinking and global strategic thinking. On both counts, it's not clear what Bush is trying to accomplish in Iraq but he's failing on both counts, particularly on global strategic thinking since the United States, thanks to Bush's bungling, is now in a weaker position in the world than it was four years ago.. 'Staying the course' cannot of itself improve our position since things are beginning to happen while we're tied down in Iraq that are not in our best interests.
Larry Johnson goes on to make some suggestions on how to proceed in Iraq. The first comment after his post is by Daniel A. Greenbaum who makes a good observation:
One of the odder features of the war in Iraq is that it is totally unclear what George Bush thinks the goal is. There seems to be many groups or advisors or Cheney and Rumsfeld all of whom have a goal but what is Bush's goal or what was it?
One of the main points of Supreme Command by Eliot Cohen is that only the elected leader of a nation can really have the final say about the goal of war. War is ultimately about achieving some defined political goal. Military commanders can provide strategic and tactical means but not the political goal. Bush has been so vague and so out of command it is no doubt that the war in Iraq has been such a disaster.
Greenbaum makes a good point (and I've read Cohen's useful book) and I don't want to diminish what he's saying but I have to mention the strong feeling I've had for the longest time that Bush has no goal in Iraq except to be remembered as a war president and as the son who supposedly finished his father's job. These are not the political goals in the sense that Greenbaum is talking about and, in a sense, they are only personal goals. They are goals not worthy of a foreign policy to be embraced by the American people. So we've had a public relations parade for four years of contradictory goals, none of which seem to have Bush's full commitment.
posted by Craig at 3:49 PM
7 Comments:
I think the neocon Big Thinkers behind this debacle, Cheney and Rumsfield chief among them, and of course Bush himself, came to realize over the past couple of years how politically unacceptable their motives and plANS would be to most Americans.
So they can't give a candid, concrete definition of what constitutes victory.
Had they been honest about two years ago, Bush would have specified a stable, highly cooperative government overseeing an all but completely pacified population. The U.S. would be building and operating at least two, maybe three, permanent military bases. U.S. oil firms would be first in line for oil contracts at brother-in-law prices.
I think Bush is now in the position of partly being unwilling to accept, and partly being unwilling to admit that anything like those goals will be attainable.
As a side note, someone on one of the Friday night talk shows, McLaughlin's I think, predicted that after the election, Sens. Warner and Lugar will go to the White House to tell Bush big changes are necessary. And they will be telling him, not saying pretty please.
That struck me as at least a believable possibility.
Great observations on this surreal "war".
But isn't the real answer to the "goal" puzzle that Team Bush simply can't openly acknowledge what the true goal of the invasion was: to restore our access ("our" = American Big Oil) to the inconceivable oil wealth of Iraq? As a result, Bush cannot ever explain why exactly we are there!
Hence we get one false explanation after another, and of course the actual war policy can't track with stated "goals" that are simply false justifications for the invasion and occupation.
Bush should simply explain, "we're there for the indefinite duration to ensure that if anyone can exploit Iraq's oil wealth, it will be us. We'll be there as long as the oil reserves exist. End of story."
As soon as he does that, our tactics and strategy in Iraq become quite clear, and very comprehensible.
But since he can't even admit the goal of the operation, it's very hard to obtain it!
S.W., most of what you say is right on. To be honest, I'm not convinced that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were ever 100% in agreement on what they were trying to accomplish. Of course, the neoconservatives, in the narrow sense, like Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol and Richard Perle, just provided a bunch of intellectual framing that the Bush inner circle was all too happy to use, even if Cheney and Rumsfeld, in particular, largely ignored it.
Rumsfeld and Cheney, I believe, were reinventing the regime change formula of the 1950s (or maybe the more aggressive regime changes of the 1920s is a better analogy) without noticing how much the world has changed and how ineffectual some of those regime changes were in the long run.
I have to say that their strategy has turned out to be incredibly lame. We would have had more leverage in foreign policy and global economics after the fall of Afghanistan by not going to war in Iraq than in fact doing what we did.
As for Warner and Lugar, they've already done some useful things in the background so I think you're right that more might be expected from them after the election.
Euzosius, thanks for the comments. If oil was their primary goal, it's gotten a little pricy. Sort of ironic. Does make you wonder, though, if geologists have been quietly working some of these areas without any press attention?
I suppose another reason to keep the oil angle quiet was the Iraqis themselves but they've been suspicious of our motives from the first day. Hence the frequent sabotage until the militias starting guarding some of the oil facilities and infrastructure for their own self-interest.
But again, if oil was the 'goal,' we spent a lot of money and time accomplishing what we probably already had in terms of access and military protection of the region's assets. We had and still have bases in Qatar and Bahrain. We had a nearly constant naval presence. And we had and lost, largely because of the Iraq invasion, a significant base in Saudi Arabia. All Bush has given us is a trillion dollar headache with still no energy plan. It's staggering when you begin to understand the enormity of the strategic blunder. Results so far? Russia and China are in better shape than ever.
By the way, I came across a better Clausiwitz quote than the one Larry Johnson provided. I found this on My Left Wing:
“No one starts a war--or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so--without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.”
-- Carl von Clausewitz
I still believe Cheney and Rumsfeld never came close to thoroughly thinking through what they're up to. And I dismiss Bush as the kind of bright PR type who goes, "Yep, sounds good to me!" while considering some of his own possible angles, including the political possibilities. But not too deeply.
The way Howard Phillips posits it, we're fast approaching what's referred to as "peak oil" — where current demand surpasses the oil companies' ability to find and develop new sources.
Phillips also points out Cheney and the neocon were acutely aware that Iraq has the second-largest oil reserves in the Mideast and the largest undeveloped reserves. That makes the country an especially rich prize.
As he put it (and this makes sense to me) Bush & Co. never intended to take over Iraq and just take all the oil. The idea was to ensure that while China, India and others are doing big business with Iran and Venezuela, U.S. companies would have assured access and favorable terms buying Iraq's oil.
The lack of forethought for what would happen after the invasion is unforgivable, as is the politically motivated refusal to even put enough troops in place to seal the borders and maintain order.
I'm not aware of any blunder in U.S. history to match it.
I'm certainly not going to be dogmatic on the blog of such a well informed analyst regarding such a topic.
Ultimately, I think you are right that there were a multiplicity of "reasons" for the Iraq invasion, each held in varying degrees by the main "players". And that Bush did indeed just say "Yep, sounds good to me!"
Some neocons (Wolfowitz, Perle) may very well have placed messianic top priority to their incantations of "speading democray" to the muslim world. But I doubt that was Cheney's principal motivation, and s.w. succinctly states what I think principally motivated oil and oil "services" man Cheney.
But I'd be happy if the oil factor would just start to be acknowlwdged as ONE of the "goals" of the invasion, instead of receiving guffaws from the mainstream press.
Historians are just not going to conclude that it was a complete coincidence that the largest oil consuming nation in the peak oil era invaded the country with the second largest known and undeveloped petroleum reserves, especially when the president's largest campaign contributors were Big Oil.
S.W., I'm still trying to catch up on the Cheney oil/energy angle. There's still too many missing pieces and I'm interested in anything you're aware of. I have many questions I haven't had time to check out. For example, did Cheney anticipate that there would be an explosion in the need for oil services around the world (for companies like Halliburton)? In some ways, there's more money in oil services than there is in oil. We need investigations by Congress because there's a host of important questions we need answers to (separate from any political or criminal investigations) in order to move forward. If Cheney was a believer in Peak Oil, he did a lot of very strange things, even if he, in his cockeyed way, may have been trying to protect our nation's oil interests. I'm also curious if Cheney's old paranoia about Russia played a role in all of this since Russia is now a major oil player.
Euzoius, I agree that the historians will correctly see oil as one of the factors. I very much appreciate your comments.
My above reference to Howard Phillips should, of course, be to Kevin Phillips. (For some reason, I keep wanting to call him Howard. He evidently reminds me of a Howard I've known or met at some time.)
Craig, much of what I've seen on Cheney, Big Oil and Iraq comes from Phillips' book, "American Theocracy." Some probably, arises from having read John Dean's excellent book about how secretive Bush and his cronies are, and why. Cheney is obsessive-compulsive about secrecy.
That secret confab Cheney hosted days after taking office was about more than lining up future campaign donations. Cheney hasn't fought tooth and nail ever since to keep details about who attended and what the agenda was secret for more than it being a matter of principle. That seems clear.
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