Campaign coming off the rails
19 February 2004
Campaign coming off the rails
Middle East International: News Analysis
From Michael Brown in Washington
February 19th, 2004 — The electoral strategy of Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush is coming off the rails. He is by no means doomed to a single term, but the inevitable march to victory orchestrated by Karl Rove is no longer a sure thing. In fact, a CBS poll taken on 12-15 February shows Sen. John Kerry (Dem. Ma) running ahead of Bush in the polls by 48% to 43%.
Bush appears flat, perhaps dispirited or dismayed by the difficulties faced in Iraq. A flagging of will and intellectual toughness came to a head during a rare, hour-long Bush interview with NBC’s Tim Russert on Meet the Press on 8 February. Russert spent the majority of the interview attempting to pin Bush down on Iraq’s missing weapons of mass destruction. Bush’s lackadaisical performance followed hard on the heels of his uninspired State of the Union address, where the former baseball club owner appeared more attentive to finding illicit steroids in the locker rooms of big league ball-players than grappling with the difference between WMD and “WMD-related programme activities” in Iraq.
Bungling Bush
Bush came across in the Russert interview as shockingly unprepared and scarcely able to parry the most obvious questions. Repetition seemed to be either his mantra or his fall-back position. At one point he conceded: “I know I’m getting repetitive.” In fact, there seemed to be few original thoughts in his mind.
Conservative columnist David Brooks of the New York Times put it plainly when he explained that Bush, “like most of us, doesn’t have the facility for perfectly expressing his situation in conversation”. He then proceeded to note what the president should have said to Russert. Of course, many people lack the words to express themselves fully. Ordinarily, however, such individuals do not reside in the White House.
On both syntax and substance Bush failed to make a passing grade. By his third paragraph he had bungled both. “There is a lot of investigations going on about the intelligence service, particularly in the Congress, and that’s good as well. The Congress has got the capacity to look at the intelligence gathering without giving away state secrets, and I look forward to all the investigations and looks. Again, I repeat to you, the capacity to have good intelligence means that a president can make good calls about fighting this war on terror.”
Noun-verb agreement here is relatively unimportant. But little could be more absurd than Bush’s contention that he looks forward to all the investigations, particularly when he has been singularly un-helpful with previous ones. The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States, the independent commission investigating the 11 September attacks, has struggled with Bush from the outset. Only on the evening of 13 February did it finally secure the president’s agreement to private testimony. No agreement has been reached yet on possible public testimony. Yet one thing is certain, Bush needs to be better primed for the commission’s questions on the briefing he received on 6 August 2001, regarding a possible al-Qa’ida attack using commercial airliners, than he was to face Russert.
Toothless investigations
As for the one commission Bush reluctantly agreed to establish in order to investigate the failed WMD intelligence, it is invested with little of the clout needed to get the job done. Bush chose Laurence Silberman, a Republican, and Charles Robb, a Democrat, to head the body.
Silberman is an appeals court judge who served in the Nixon, Ford, and Reagan Administrations, while Robb is former senator for and governor of Virginia. They are impressive men, but not the sort whose final determination on intelligence matters – the March 2005 deadline is safely beyond this November’s election – will command enormous respect. They are joined by Sen. John McCain (Rep. Az); Richard Levin of Yale University; Adm. William Studeman, deputy director of the CIA under President Bush Sr.; Lloyd Cutler, White House counsel for Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton; and former appeals court judge Pat Wald, a Carter appointee. Two members remain to be named.
McCain, who lost the Republican nomination for president to Bush in 2000, is already on record as stating: “The president of the United States, I believe, did not manipulate any kind of information for political gain or otherwise.” Democrats are not impressed.
When pressed by Russert as to whether the American people should have the Commission’s results prior to the election, Bush fired back that he was a “war president”. He said: “Now, look, we are in a political season. I fully understand people saying he’s trying to avoid responsibility.”
The “war president” claim, however, does not wear well with the American people, who are growing increasingly disenchanted with Bush’s foray into Iraq. The CBS poll cited above maintains that 40% of Americans say Bush is a “war president” because of “world events”, while 51% say he can only lay claim to the title because of “his choices”. Bush insisted to Russert that people would have ample time to examine his record, but his handling of the WMD and intelligence investigations suggests that he intends to obscure significant aspects of his performance to date.
The interview with Bush did provide certain insights into his thinking. He clearly feels an enormous responsibility for the well-being of the country. He asserted that following 11 September “every threat had to be reanalyzed”. Yet he failed to make a convincing case that in the aftermath of this reassessment Saddam Hussein needed to be removed from power. Indeed, the CBS poll reports that 50% of Americans now think the war with Iraq was not worth the cost, only 41% clinging to the contention that the invasion was worthwhile. Furthermore, 57% think the WMD claim was “exaggerated to build support for war”.
Despite having the world’s most powerful intelligence service at his beck and call, Bush sounded like a conspiracy theorist – or the boy whose dog ate his homework – when he frantically cast about for what happened to the missing weapons. “There’s theories as to where the weapons went. They could have been destroyed during the war. Saddam and his henchmen could have destroyed them as we entered into Iraq. They could be hidden. They could have been transported to another country, and we’ll find out.”
Bashar al-Asad might be excused for flinching. Unrepentant neo-cons continue to point an accusing finger at Syria – even Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage termed it a “possibility” – and this is likely to be what Bush had in mind. At this stage, Bush and his fellow blunderers will point anywhere other than at themselves.
At his worst, Bush came across as woefully out of touch and incapable of recognizing just how difficult the work ahead in Iraq will be. He maintained that “we are welcomed in Iraq”, despite the enormous evidence to the contrary in many parts of the country. More than 530 Americans have died during this “welcome.”
Fool’s gold
Ahmad Chalabi, of course, was one of the major purveyors of the fool’s gold notion that American forces would be greeted with open arms. Now comes new evidence that Chalabi and some of his exile compatriots in the Iraqi National Congress took US government money and then provided misinformation in return. That American intelligence agencies could not be more discerning about the angle of those providing this “intelligence” speaks volumes to the shoddiness of their work.
Similarly exposed this month (or further exposed) as a dupe, albeit a loyal one, was Secretary of State Colin Powell. Interviewed on 2 February by the Washington Post as to whether he would have recommended war with Iraq had CIA Director George Tenet and chief weapons inspector David Kay said there were no stockpiles, Powell came as close to saying no as a loyal soldier could. “I don’t know. I don’t know, because it was the stockpile that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and the world.” Moments later he remarked: “The absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus. It changes the answer you get, the formula I laid out.”
Yet the very next day a chastened Powell was marched back out to better justify the war. Speculation continues that Powell will not be back if Bush wins in November. That eventuality would only come after what is expected to be one of the fiercest and most partisan elections seen here in decades. The patrician Kerry, a war hero who turned against the war in Vietnam, and is already being shown in the company of Jane Fonda (including at least one doctored photograph), is matched by Bush, who was born on third base but thinks he hit his way there.
Film-maker and writer Michael Moore decried Bush as a “deserter” weeks ago on the campaign trail with Gen. Wesley Clark, and while the charge seems unlikely to stick, the term AWOL (Absent Without Leave) has come increasingly into play. Bush continues to have trouble accounting for his time, ostensibly spent in the National Guard, defending Alabama.
If Bush continues to slip, the matter of catching Usama bin Laden before polling day is sure to come to the fore. Iraq could unravel completely, but the capture of Bin Laden might well be enough to catapult Bush past Kerry. Most talk these days presumes Kerry will win the nomination, though it was only a few short weeks ago that Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont was almost certain to be the Democratic challenger.
AWOL on another front
While allegations that Bush was AWOL in Alabama whirl, there is little doubt he has been absent for three years on the Palestinian-Israeli front. The White House now appears willing to accept the initial stages of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s unilateral disengagement plan.
This, as it currently shapes up, involves either the evacuation of settlers from 17 settlements in the Gaza Strip or, perhaps more accurately, their redeployment to settlements in the West Bank that Sharon intends to retain. Yet just two months ago, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan declared: “We would oppose any unilateral steps that block the road towards negotiations under the road-map. The United States believes that a settlement must be negotiated and we would oppose any effort – any Israeli effort – to impose a settlement.”
Evidently, the Administration no longer thinks that Sharon’s unilateral actions are completely at odds with the road-map.
American concessions to Sharon are beginning early in this election year. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a weakened Powell is playing along. In testimony on 12 February to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Powell placed the blame squarely on the Palestinian Authority and Yaser Arafat. Still, he did hint that he suspects not all is right with the Sharon proposal when he allowed: “We want settlements closed, but we want to know exactly how that’s going to be done. And where will those settlers go? And how does that affect settlement activity in the West Bank? We have to understand the total picture.”
The next day, 13 February, White House spokesman Richard Boucher stated: “But Israeli moves – such as removing settlements – could reduce the friction between Israelis and Palestinians, could improve freedom of movement for the Palestinians, address some of Israel’s responsibilities in moving ahead towards the vision the President described on 24 June 2002.” McClellan used almost identical language in his White House briefing the same day.
There is no daylight between the State Department’s position and that of the White House. Clearly, the Administration has acceded to Sharon’s position. The question is how much. That was to be determined when Assistant Secretary of State William Burns, Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and the National Security Council’s Middle East chief, Elliot Abrams, travelled to Israel as MEI went to press to learn more fully what Sharon had in mind.
The Palestinians have been clear that no Palestinian will speak against the removal of Israeli settlements. But they have also been clear that Sharon’s motives are not to be trusted and that progress would be better arrived at through negotiations.
If Bush still regards Sharon as a “man of peace”, then the Israeli prime minister may have some choice real estate to show the visiting Americans in the West Bank. It is this land Sharon desires most. If he can gain time and flexibility from the Americans because of his actions in Gaza then Sharon may yet secure a tactical territorial victory courtesy of an accommodating White House.
Sharon’s ambitions, of course, are plain for all to see. Bush may well decide, however, that this election year is a good time to look the other way. Much of his political base would, after all, be disappointed were Bush to choose a modicum of justice for the Palestinians over an enormous swath of the West Bank for Israel.
