Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Others Safe From U.S. Attack
The good news is it's over when it's over. The better news is it's over. The much ballyhooed, eventual U.S. attack on Iran, Syria, Lebanon, or other Middle East states by order of President Bush is old fish.
The early headiness of the Bush Doctrine for preemptive war is perspiring in Iraq down to the size of a shrunken head. The message coming out from the half-sewn lips of the American people to willingly back their president's "generational commitment" in the Iraq region is an eerie silence. They have no stomach, wallet nor naiveness for further attempts to subjugate anyone else in the Middle East. With the hens coming home to roost in Iraq, they feel no duty to be duped again.
After the White House ruse of intensely pressuring the CIA to cook the intelligence books and then cherry pick only convenient items in order to paint Saddam Hussein's regime as a radioactive and terrorist threat to the U.S., anything the Bush administration proffers as evidence other Middle East countries are threats to the U.S. is suspect. By saying whatever they felt was expeditious in order to bamboozle America to get behind the President in his decision to unnecessarily invade Iraq, his chief foreign affairs advisors squandered their future credibility.
New calls by the administration for military actions will be met less with the stirrings of patriotism than with acquired skepticism. As a result of the administration's failure to come clean about the national sacrifices necessary for a long and costly occupation of Iraq, the citizenry's resolve to support an expanded involvement in the Middle East slips by the week.
With the country increasingly mindful of the administration's game of monopoly in Iraq, and with no signs the president is preparing Americans to face the hard challenges of another military action, the cause for the dissolution of other Middle East governments by superior force of arms is at the bottom of the deep blue sea. The president's own future is on a barbed hook tied to Iraq, with the only possible release, the appeasement of Iraqis by means of ship-fulls of American taxpayer money.
With the White House able to play America like a violin throughout the entire Iraq exercise, suggesting that further incursions are out of the question to the Bush mind may seem naïve. However, besides the national cooling and suspicion toward new conflict, two other principles pin the heedless conquest of the Bush Doctrine.
Militarily, U.S. readiness is eroding. In fact, after post-Iraq II, the Pentagon's doctrine of "full-spectrum dominance" may require adding "R not us." In the face of a rag-tag guerrilla insurgence in Iraq, it looks like a freckled faced kid with a pin can prick the world's mightiest military hegemon's balloon.
Of the U.S. army's 33 combat brigades, half are already in Iraq. Military doctrine suggests only a third of such brigades be oversees at once. Just about the last thing U.S. commanders want to hear is that they're going into Iran - or anywhere else unfriendly. Begrudging reservists continue being called up at an alarming rate. Troop morale, according to Stars & Stripes is of serious concern. Iraqi shopkeepers are delighted with free spending U.S. troops, but the G.I.'s are restless. Any talk about it is put down by the secretary of defense as in the nature of grunts in a stinking hellhole. As far as assistance or backing from U.S. allies for another liberation, it would make their lack of support for the current romp look like a Louisiana shrimp festival during Mardi Gras.
The third principle suggesting no fear of a new U.S. front on "terrorism" in the Middle East is the president's chief political advisor's pronouncement of "no wars in 2004." A sane political guru, Karl Rove, reads the tealeaves of the U.S. electorate and demurs like a bat out of hell from launching another war. The unpleasant poll slippage for the president over more wars might be greater than even the president's quarter billion-dollar campaign fund can fillet.
Even if the war hawks circling the president won't let up on spooking him into another act of belligerence, Mr. Rove now has the president's ear, and Mr. Bush's famous ability for visionary assessment and courageous decision have come down on the side of being reelected - not rebooted by a gang of war-by-computer hacks.
Squawk as they might, the boys and gal who brought the U.S. to a desert backyard of unripe figs and sticky oil wells, have had the keys to the kingdom taken back. In terms of taking action, the president will now simply ignore their reports of imminent threats from Iran and other bad places. Except for rudimentary presidential warnings and threats aimed at Mid East despots that the better behave, the president will go about his business stateside.
With necessary finger wagging, the president will cooperate with the whole bunch of Mid East nasties, or sic Secretary Powel to handle perceived threats from them against the future of humankind. Amazingly, the president may even consider these heads of state as potentially reliable partners in the war on terror. He will see-no-evil; he will ignore warmonger "intelligence;" he will disconnect from the advisors who persist in the message of doom who have the temerity to suggest he will be a one-term president if he heeds his political handler instead of their siren song. For the president, the war to end all wars has come, and the council of the people who talked him into it, (Cheney, Wolfowitz, Pearl, etc.) although not gone, is an inconvenient political distraction.
The words "terror, freedom, liberty" when uttered by these Druids to the President, should be like the sound of Osama bin Laden singing "Baby One More Time." There's just not enough daylight the president can put between himself and these, or other imposters of good council from his favored American Enterprise Institute. The accuracy of their rhetoric can no longer be reliable enough to sentence young American men and women to kill and be killed.
Based on their pre-war policy decisions, these brilliants handpicked flawed, faked and wizened intelligence as the basis on which to justify a course they had already decided. It is their credibility chasm that is becoming the president's credibility gap and which can undermine his reelection prospects. They refuse to back down from expanding their goal of conquering a strategic nation, installing a compliant government to privatize Iraqi oil and have U.S. corporates direct these resources, while also having it agree to permanent U.S. military bases there from which to control the rest of the independent oil producing nations of the region. It's a radical policy that has as much to do with "the war on terror" as "sweetbread" has to do with sweet or bread.
In their public pronouncements, these planners continue speaking as if they have a periscope into truth and everyone else swims in a black sea. Fortunately, the president is already hangin' with guru Rove by the White House pool, several stories underground and out of continuous hawkish earshot, and where the moment of truth went like:
"Mr. President, the time is here."
"Hey, Karl, nice shorts."
"It's time to put aside childish toys, sir."
"I'm not goin' up in the jet fighter no more?"
"The election draws near."
"Ya' know, Condi n' the boys are gonna get their girdles in a knot - whoop and holler about goin' soft on evil."
"Sir . . ."
"Right. Let their unddies snap. This president has an election to win!"
"That's my boy."
"By the way, Karl, when are we gonna catch bin Laden and Saddam?"
"Not yet, Mr. President. Not yet."
Regardless of President Bush's aggressive public comments aimed at keeping a lid on Iraq's neighbors, his partially sewn eyelids, compliments of his war wizards, have been cut loose by his political commander, and plans for wars beyond Iraq's boarders have been tossed into the drain for the duration of the presidential campaign - where the real battlefield is taking shape.
To be sure, in order to keep the electorate alarmed and in need of his protection, candidate Bush will employ the panoply of "terrorist threat" (an issue he owns by virtue of his courageously decisive risk taking in going after al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan). One can't blame him though. Dire messaging is just good practical politics, and terrorism has zero electoral constituency.
The only bomb to listen for now is the word "sacrifice." Should it enter Mr. Bush's prepared remarks on the campaign trail, then the pool has been drained, Karl Rove has lost the president's ear, and Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz is back gazing swooningly by candlelight into Mr. Bush's half-sewn eyes.
October 29, 2003