Scorched-Earth Strategy
Find a Conversation
| Fri, 10-08-2004 - 8:17pm |
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6206022/site/newsweek/
By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
Updated: 11:54 a.m. ET Oct. 8, 2004Oct. 8 - The rationale for war in Iraq has collapsed, so President George W. Bush has declared another war, this one on John Kerry. Bush's blistering attack on Kerry as weak and wavering on war and the worst kind of tax-and-spend liberal foreshadows the next four weeks. Get ready for a scorched-earth campaign from the Bushies, beginning with tonight’s debate in St. Louis.
Bush can't defend his policies, so he's conjuring up an image of Kerry as a looming threat whose “strategy of defeat" and insistence on global cooperation would "paralyze America in dangerous times." The dirty little secret is that Bush, if elected, is more likely to pull out of Iraq once elections are held in January, while Kerry, with his commitment to international norms and behavior, would be inclined to stay the course with the assistance of the world community.
Let's review the bidding: there are no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq, a finding confirmed with finality this week by chief U.S. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer. Iraq was not a "grave and gathering threat" as Bush said. It was a diminishing threat. Former Coalition Provisional Authority head Paul Bremer blew Bush's cover when he revealed this week that he had repeatedly requested additional troops for Iraq and been turned down. Bush maintains that he’s never been asked for more troops. Bremer's revelation was followed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's contention that he never saw hard evidence connecting Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda.
Bush’s image as a decisive leader is undercut by these developments, yet the campaign war machine grinds on undeterred. Vice President Dick Cheney continues to repeat the same discredited information he's been dishing out since the start of the war. When he debated rival John Edwards in Cleveland Tuesday evening, Cheney glided from the little lie, falsely asserting he had never met Edwards before that night, to the big lie, the administration's rationale for the war. Saying the world is better off without Hussein is not the issue. The world would be better off without a lot of petty tyrants and dictators, but at what cost?
Senior Republicans on Capitol Hill know that Iraq is a mess. A few brave senators like John McCain, Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar have spoken out, but most are staying silent in solidarity with their party. They’ll tell the truth after the election. The incompetence, hubris and arrogance of this administration has cost American lives and treasure, and left whoever is president over the next four years a situation that will be almost impossible to correct. "If we could hear the inner deliberations of this administration, it would scare us," says a former Republican operative, who knows how the Bushies play the game. "They know they've been caught. Their strategy is to throw up enough monkey dust to get through the next four weeks."
With only four weeks left before the election, the Bush campaign appears to have made the decision to brazen it out by portraying Bush as a successful war president despite the growing misgivings about his leadership, and on the war in Iraq.
This is the moment of truth for American foreign policy. Will Bush's bald-faced lies carry the day? Can Cheney con the American public into four more years? The Duelfer report this week "shows Bush jumped the gun," says Allen Holmes, a policy analyst who served under Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bush I in the State Department, and under President Bill Clinton in the Defense Department. "A lot of people told we didn't need to go to war. He wasn't listening. He created a battlefield in Iraq. The jihadists love it, particularly when innocent women and children are killed. It's a recruiting tool."
Holmes is a member of Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change, which counts retired general Anthony Zinni, retired admiral William Crowe and former Air Force chief of staff Tony McPeak among its founding members. Holmes never found the case for going to war in Iraq a compelling one. He thinks Bush wanted to finish the job his father started, which he finds ironic because "in dad's book, he says the reason he didn't go to Baghdad is he didn't want to own the chaos we're involved in today."
Among those warning against war was the State Department’s elite and independent Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), one of the few neocon-free zones in the administration. In a piece that appeared this week on Salon.com, a veteran foreign-service officer currently serving in the State Department writes under the byline Anonymous that, “INR kept telling Powell the truth about Saddam’s nonexistent WMD.†The career diplomat who headed State’s Future of Iraq project laid out the pitfalls of what might happen in a war of liberation in Iraq. When bureaucrats feel their advice is ignored, they don’t always quit, they leak, and that’s what is happening. “It’s the revolt of the professionals,†says Amb. Joseph Wilson, who exposed the faulty 16 words that made it into Bush’s State of the Union address concerning Iraq’s alleged attempt to purchase uranium.
The Duelfer report, Bremer’s words and Rumsfeld’s confession may take some time to sink in with voters. It’s like a bad marriage, says Wilson. You have to first come to grips with the fact that you’re in a bad relationship. Then you have to decide to do something about it—and finally you have to muster the courage to go out with somebody new. The country has a lot invested in Bush as protector in chief. Admitting that confidence was misplaced is hard, and that’s what makes this such a close race.
| Fri, 10-08-2004 - 8:41pm |
| Fri, 10-08-2004 - 10:58pm |
| Sat, 10-09-2004 - 12:44am |
| Sat, 10-09-2004 - 1:07am |
| Sat, 10-09-2004 - 1:21am |
| Sat, 10-09-2004 - 1:29am |
| Sat, 10-09-2004 - 1:55am |
| Sat, 10-09-2004 - 3:04am |
