Bush setbacks in Iraq indicative of deeper problems at home

By David Polhemus
Advertiser Editorial Writer

If you're paying attention to national issues, you saw President Bush's April 13 news conference (only the third prime-time news conference of his presidency), and then you viewed or read the analyses that followed.

If you concluded that the president's performance sparkled, that he was right on message and right on course, then — given today's unfortunate polarization of views — there's a really good chance you're not going to find anything to agree with in the rest of this commentary.

Call me crazy, but I insist on holding out hope that some of you independent thinkers are beginning to notice something different about Bush.

When President Bush held one of his rare news conferences this month, were you among those who had that "emperor has no clothes" awakening? Advertiser library photo • April 13, 2004

"Mr. President," asked ABC's Terry Moran, "before the war, you and members of your administration made several claims about Iraq: that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators with sweets and flowers, that Iraqi oil revenue would pay for most of the reconstruction, and that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction but — as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said — 'We know where they are.' How do you explain to Americans how you got that so wrong?"

All the facts were in the question, and none at all in Bush's answer. As in all of his answers that night, he evaded the question and ignored such facts as these:

• Saddam Hussein's WMD capabilities were wiped out during the 1990s, in the first Gulf War, in punitive operations under the Clinton administration, and because of the (in Washington) disdained U.N. inspectors.

If you don't believe this by now, ask yourself this: If the threat of weapons of mass destruction demanded pre-emptive war in Iraq, then how to explain Bush's three-year "time is on our side," back-burner approach to a genuine WMD threat, North Korea? It's a genuine crisis that Bush is ignoring, at least until after November.

• Saddam was never linked to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, although Bush shamelessly continues to imply such a link.

Still think Saddam and Osama bin Laden are blood brothers? Ask yourself this: If the president's daily intelligence briefing of Aug. 6, 2001, had said "Saddam Determined to Strike in U.S." instead of "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," would he still be insisting there was no "threat that required action"?

When the weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaida link explanations for the war began to come up empty, a new scenario was trotted out:

America will introduce a flowering oasis of democracy, spreading in the midst of Islamic backwardness.

This vision of rising instead of falling dominoes — first Iraq, then Syria, then Palestine, then Saudi Arabia, then Iran — actually appeals more to bleeding-heart liberals like me than to neo-conservatives like Bush, who detested the idea of nation-building until the need for a credible war aim could no longer be ignored.

Or it would appeal, if cultural complexities on the ground didn't render it a naive and sentimental pipe dream. The recent revolts in cities such as Fallujah and Najaf suggest the real difficulties are only beginning.

So if the new "land of milk and honey" scenario doesn't work, either, perhaps you favor unspoken motivations for war.

Oil as a motive for war?

How about oil? Dependence for energy on a Saudi Arabia that contributed most of the 9/11 hijackers no longer made sense, and Iraq's reserves, if ever fully developed, would make it the No. 2 oil producer.

It's a wild hunch, but I wouldn't be surprised if the reason Vice President Dick Cheney is fighting so hard (including treating Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to a duck-hunting trip) to keep secret Enron's input to his energy policy is that it somehow recommended taking control of Iraq's oil.

In more nuanced realpolitik, most of the growth in world oil use in the coming years will be in China, so American control of the Iraqi spigot, where most of that new oil will come from, would be a strategic plus.

I like to hope — and I hope you do too — that no one in the White House or the Pentagon saw any of these oil scenarios as worth the sacrifice of a single American life.

Which leaves us with a war with no operative rationale, a war that is beginning to go very badly.

That would be bad enough, but there's more — much more. There's a terrorist threat that has been made worse, not better, by invading Iraq. There's a half-hearted, underfinanced effort at nation-building in Afghanistan.

There's a White House that, perhaps understandably, reacted sluggishly to warnings before 9/11, but which has done nothing to address the intelligence failures that tragedy has exposed.

Erosion of civil liberties

There's a systematic attack in this country, in the name of the war on terrorism, on constitutional rights that have no relation to security. Uncounted detentions and arrests without charge have international human rights organizations comparing us to China.

Decades of progress in the fight to save our environment are being deliberately unraveled. The president wants to put the Social Security accounts of blue-collar workers into a stock market that is skimmed by hedged institutional investors and misled by lavishly overpaid CEOs.

Bush's huge tax cuts for the rich and near-elimination of taxes on large corporations signal a serious threat to entitlements to the poor and middle classes such as Social Security and Medicare, while job growth fails to keep pace with population growth, and while the elimination of the estate tax spells a dynastization of the rich more fabulous than the 1880s.

The No Child Left Behind Act is just another unfinanced federal mandate. And the exploding deficit threatens the world economy now and our children's future.

Now revisit Bush's performance at his April 13 news conference: the evasions, the prevarications, the total unwillingness or inability to play it straight with the American people.

And then go back and review his statements on all of these other policies: the environment is getting better, not worse; a jobs bonanza is just around the corner; the deficit will be cut in half by Bush's next budget.

What worries me is not that the press is overly critical of the Bush presidency, but that it extends to this White House the deference and latitude, the presumption of right action, that other presidencies earned and this one is forfeiting.

This presidency is not only stridently reckless in its actions at home and abroad and overtly, pathologically dishonest, but there's something vicious and even demented in its zeal to undo the America of Jefferson and Wilson, of Lincoln and Roosevelt.

It's time for Americans of all ideological stripes to wake up.

David Polhemus is an editorial writer at The Advertiser. You can reach him at letters@honoluluadvertiser.com.