DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA History ambushes the Bush
administration By
Tom Engelhardt
You can count on one thing.
All over Washington, Republicans are at least as
capable as I am of watching and interpreting the
polling version of the smash-up of the Bush
administration. With each new poll, the numbers
creep lower yet.
Presidential approval in
the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll dropped
another 3% in the past month and now sits at 38%,
while disapproval of President George W Bush
continues to strengthen - 47% of Americans now
"strongly disapprove" of his handling of the
presidency, while only 20% "strongly approve". (By
the way, 62% disapprove of Bush's handling of the
war in Iraq.)
Behind these figures lurk
worse ones. When asked, for instance, whether they
would vote for a generic Democrat or Republican
in
the
upcoming mid-term elections, those polled chose
the generic Democrat by a startling 55% to 40%,
the largest such gap yet. In addition, Democrats
have now become the default party Americans
"trust" almost across the board on issues, even in
this poll edging the Republicans out by a single
percentage point on the handling of terrorism.
Commenting on a recent Ipsos-Associated
Press (AP) poll showing Democrats and Republicans
in a tie on the question, "Who do you trust to do
a better job of protecting the country,"
Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio said: "These
numbers are scary. We've lost every advantage
we've ever had. The good news is Democrats don't
have much of a plan. The bad news is they may not
need one." Surprisingly, despite the way Democrats
have shied off the subject, a near-majority (45%)
of those polled were also in favor of some kind of
Feingold-like censure of the president for
listening in on citizens without prior court
approval. (Democratic Senator Russ Feingold sought
to censure Bush formally relating to domestic
spying.)
The words connected to almost any
new poll these days are "hit a new low". Other
recent new lows were reached by that AP-Ipsos poll
and by a Fox News poll where presidential approval
was at 36%. Or take a recent state poll in
California, where Bush has admittedly never been a
popular figure. Still, a 32% approval rating? Or
check out the trajectory of Bush polling approval
numbers from September 11, 2001, to today. Despite
various bumps and plateaus - including a
conveniently engineered, Karl Rovian bump (Rove is
a senior Bush adviser) just before election 2004 -
it's been a slow, ever-downward path that, in
early 2005, dipped decisively under 50%; by the
end of 2004 had crossed the 40% threshold; and is,
at present, in the mid-30% range.
There's
no reason to believe that the bottom has been
reached. After all, these polls precede the recent
disastrous flap over the federal court filing by
special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald on I Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's
former chief of staff, who is under indictment on
charges of perjury and obstruction of justice, and
the various "declassification" admissions of the
president and vice president (of which there is
guaranteed to be more to come).
These
figures also arrived before the (retired)
generals' revolt against Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, which is still spreading and to which
the president's staunch defense can only
contribute fuel ("Secretary Rumsfeld's energetic
and steady leadership is exactly what is needed at
this critical period. He has my full support and
deepest appreciation"); these figures precede by a
couple of months the beginning of the next
hurricane season along the never-reconstructed
Gulf Coast; they precede any indictment of Rove or
of other Bush administration figures in the
Valerie Plame case (she was outed as a Central
Intelligence Agency operative), and further even
more contorted presidential (and
vice-presidential) fall-back positions in the same
case; these polls come before the predictable
happens in Iraq and the sectarian war there
worsens while the US position weakens as well as
before the Iranian situation really kicks in; they
arrive before summer gasoline prices head above
US$3 a gallon (79 cents a liter) aiming for the
stratosphere; before any real economic bad news
comes down the pike; before other as yet unknown
crises hit that the Bush administration
predictably just won't be able to get its
collective head or its waning governmental powers
around.
This is the situation before some
future round of hideous polling figures sets off a
full-scale panic in the Republican Party, leading
possibly to a spreading revolt of the pols that
could put the present revolt of the generals in
the shade. Given the past couple of years, and
what we now know about the Bush administration's
inability to operate within the "reality-based
community" (as opposed to spinning it to death),
there is no reason to believe that a polling
bottom exists for this president, not even perhaps
the Nixonian age-of-Watergate nadir in the lower
20% range.
Toppling the colossus of
Washington A revolt of the Republican pols,
should it occur, would highlight the essential
contradiction between the two halves of the Bush
administration's long-term program, until recently
imagined as indissolubly joined at the hip.
Domestically, there was the DeLay-style
implanting of the Republican Party (and the ready
cash infusions from lobbyists that were to fuel
it) at the heart of the US political system for at
least a Rooseveltian generation, if not forever
and a day. The US was to be transformed into a
one-party Republican democracy, itself embedded in
the confines of a homeland-security state. Abroad,
there was the neo-con vision of a pacified planet
whose oil heartlands would be nailed down
militarily in an updated version of a Pax Romana
until hell froze over (or the supplies ran out).
If in 2002 or 2003 these seemed like two perfectly
fitted sides of a single vision of dominance, it
is now apparent that they were in essence always
at odds with each other. Both now seem at the edge
of collapse.
The dismantling of the
domestic half of the Bush program is embodied in
the tale of Tom DeLay. Not so long ago, "the
Hammer" ("If you want to play in our revolution,
you have to live by our rules ...") was a
Washington colossus in the process of creating a
Republican political machine built in part
"outside government, among Washington's thousands
of trade associations and corporate offices, their
tens of thousands of employees, and the hundreds
of millions of dollars in political money at their
disposal". With his K Street Project, he had
transformed the generally "bipartisan" nature of
money- and influence-peddling in Washington into a
largely Republican funding machine. Meanwhile,
with the gerrymandering scheme he rammed through
the Texas legislature, which chased local
Democrats all the way to Oklahoma and back, and
added six seats to the Republican House majority
in 2004, he seemed to be setting the course of the
ship of state for the foreseeable future.
Astride the political world, DeLay then
looked invulnerable, while the well-hammered
Democrats seemed consigned to the status of a
minority party for decades to come. Who could have
imagined that, less than two years later, DeLay
would be indicted for money-laundering in Texas
and, faced with the unraveling Jack Abramoff case
(Republican lobbyist who pleaded guilty to fraud
and corruption-related felonies), resign his House
leadership position, then withdraw from the
re-election campaign for his House seat, and
finally, with his top staff aides going down, find
himself possibly on the verge of indictment in
Washington?
DeLay's project was meant for
life, not for a life sentence. And if you're
honest with yourself, a couple of years back I'll
bet you didn't expect anything like this either.
You can certainly bet that, when they created
those fabulous fictions about Iraq and then
invaded, it never crossed the minds of George,
Dick, Don, Condi, Paul, Stephen and the rest that
anything like this might ever happen - not just to
DeLay or to the Republican Party, but to them.
Think of it this way: they were never putting
forward the "unitary executive theory" of
government and launching a commander-in-chief
state to turn it all over to a bunch of Democrats,
no less the thoroughly loathed Hillary Clinton.
How time flies and how, to quote
Rumsfeld's infamous phrase about looters in
Baghdad, "stuff happens". Looked at in the light
of history, the incipient collapse of the Bush
project seems to have occurred in hardly a blink.
Its brevity is, in a sense, nearly inexplicable,
as unexpected as water running uphill or an alien
visitation. We are, after all, talking about the
ruling officials of the globe's only "hyperpower"
who have faced next to no opposition at home. In
these years, the Democratic Party proved itself
hardly a party at all, no less an oppositional
one, and the active anti-war movement, gigantic
before the invasion of Iraq, has remained, at
best, modest-sized ever since. At the same time,
in Iraq the administration faced not a unified
national-liberation movement backed by a
superpower as in Vietnam, but a ragtag, if fierce,
Sunni resistance and recalcitrant Shi'ite
semi-allies, all now at each other's throats.
What makes the past few years so strange
is that the Bush administration has in essence
been losing its campaigns, at home and abroad, to
nobody. What comes to mind is the famous phrase of
cartoonist Walt Kelly's character, Pogo, "We have
met the enemy and he is us." Perhaps it's simply
the case that - in Rumsfeldian terms - it's hard
for people with the mentality of looters to create
a permanent edifice, even when they set their
minds to it.
And yet it wasn't so long ago
that every step the Bush people took on either
"front" came up dazzling code orange, brilliantly
staving off rising political problems. As a
result, it took just short of five miserable
years, which seemed a lifetime, to reach this
moment - years that, historically, added up to no
time at all. Is there another example of the
rulers of a dominant global power - who fancied
themselves the leaders of a new Rome - crashing
and burning quite so quickly? In less than five
years, Bush and his top officials ran their
project into the ground. In the process, they took
a great imperial power over a cliff and down the
falls, without safety vests, rubber dinghies, or
anyone at the bottom to fish us all out.
This process, though hardly noticed at the
time, began early indeed - and at its corrosive
heart was, of course, Iraq. How can you explain
the way the leaders of the world's pre-eminent
military power were chased through the night by
Iraq's unexpected set of rebellions and its
no-name resistance? How quickly - though,
unfortunately, not quickly enough - their various
elaborate tales and lies, their manipulated
intelligence and cherry-picked stories of Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein's
nefarious links to al-Qaeda were dismantled - a
process that has yet to end. Only last week,
another little tale of fraud was done away with by
the Washington Post.
On May 29, 2003, in a
television interview, Bush described two mobile
trailers found in Iraq by US and Kurdish soldiers
as "biological laboratories" and said: "We have
found the weapons of mass destruction." This claim
would be cited by senior administration officials
for months thereafter and yet, on May 27, a
"Pentagon-appointed team of technical experts had
strongly rejected the weapons claim in a field
report sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency",
as would other reports to come.
History's surprises Most
Americans are now aware that the administration's
various prewar tales have evaporated, including
presidential howlers such as the possibility that
Saddam would place (non-existent) unmanned aerial
vehicles off the US east coast (in some
unexplained fashion) to spray (non-existent)
chemical and biological weaponry over eastern
cities. (Maybe this was just some sort of
displaced Sunbelt wish-fulfillment fantasy.)
We think less, however, about the way
another set of tales - heroic yarns of battlefield
derring-do and US-style shock-and-awe triumph -
dissolved almost as they were created. Just two
weeks short of May 1, it seems appropriate to
glance back at a moment I'm sure no one has quite
forgotten, though the Bush administration would
undoubtedly prefer that we had. I'm thinking of
May 1, 2003, which David Swanson of the After
Downing Street website recently labeled M (for
"mission accomplished") Day, a holiday that, he
points out, lasted not even a single year.
Let's return, then, to the deck of the USS
Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier whose planes
had released more than a third of the 1.4 million
kilograms of ordnance that had just hit Iraq. It
had almost reached its home port, San Diego, the
previous day, but was held about 30 miles out in
the Pacific because the president, as New York
Times columnist Maureen Dowd would point out,
chose to co-pilot an S-3B Viking sub
reconnaissance naval jet on to its deck rather
than far less dramatically climb stairs.
That day certainly seemed like the
ultimate triumphalist political photo op, as well
as the launching pad for Bush's 2004 re-election
campaign. British journalist Matthew Engel
referred to the president then as "the stuntman in
the bomber jacket". It was actually a flight suit,
but the phrase caught something of the moment. The
Tom Cruise film Top Gun - made, by the way,
with copious help from the US Navy - was on
everyone's mind in what Elizabeth Bumiller of the
New York Times called "one of the most audacious
moments of presidential theater in American
history". It seemed to confirm that Bush was a
more skilled actor-president than Ronald Reagan
had ever been.
Unlike his father, former
president George H W Bush, the younger Bush was
visibly comfortable in the business of creating
fabulous fiction. We know that Scott Sforza, a
former ABC (American Broadcasting Co) producer,
"embedded" himself on that carrier days before the
president hit the deck. Along with Bob DeServi, a
former NBC (National Broadcasting Co) cameraman
and lighting specialist, and Greg Jenkins, a
former Fox News television producer, he planned
out every detail of the president's landing, as
Bumiller put it, "even down to the members of the
Lincoln crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors
over Mr Bush's right shoulder and the 'mission
accomplished' banner placed to perfectly capture
the president and the celebratory two words in a
single shot. The speech was specifically timed for
what image makers call 'magic-hour light', which
cast a golden glow on Mr Bush."
So, on
that thrilling day, the president landed on what
was in essence a movie set. After carefully taking
off his helmet in private - no goofy Michael
Dukakis moments here - he made a Top Gun
victory speech, avoiding Vietnam as politicians
had largely done for two decades. The speech had
World War II on the brain right down to the cribs
from Winston Churchill. ("We do not know the day
of final victory, but we have seen the turning of
the tide ...") The president cited "the character
of our military through history - the daring of
Normandy, the fierce courage of Iwo Jima ..."
Given his frame of reference, he probably meant
from The Sands of Iwo Jima to Saving
Private Ryan. Then he spoke of "the decency
and idealism that turned enemies into allies [and]
is fully present in this generation".
He
also delivered his now-infamous almost-victory
line against the background of that "mission
accomplished" banner, claiming that "major combat
operations in Iraq have ended".
Give Bush
credit: when it came to not-quite-battle footage,
he proved he could don a military uniform, get in
a military vehicle, and carry it off with panache.
His on-deck Tom Cruise "swagger" would be a staple
of media coverage for weeks. And above all, he
clearly loved landing on that deck, wearing that
outfit, making that speech. He was having the time
of his life.
But even as his advance men
were bringing it off, even as he was glorying in
his color-coded tale of battle triumph, something
was beginning to devour that moment of
presidential glory. A headline that went with the
CNN account of his landing that day caught this
well: "Bush calls end to 'major combat'," it said,
but there was also a subhead, little noted at the
time: "US Central Command: Seven [American
soldiers] hurt in Fallujah grenade attack". Those
two headlines would struggle for dominance for the
next couple of years, a struggle now long over.
Let's consider the odd fate of the perfect
fiction Bush's men put together on the Abraham
Lincoln, because it was typical of what has
happened to administration image-making and
story-telling. Only six months later, Time
magazine was already writing, "The perfect
photo-op has flopped," and claiming that, shades
of Vietnam, the president had a "growing
credibility problem".
By then, instead of
preparing for a series of Top Gun
re-election ads, the president and his advance men
were busy bobbing and weaving when it came to that
fateful "mission accomplished" banner. By then,
those Iraqi grenades had multiplied into a Sunni
insurrection and Fallujah had morphed into a
resistant enemy city that, in November 2004, would
be largely destroyed by US firepower without ever
being fully subdued; and the president was already
pinning the idea for creating that banner on the
sailors and airmen of the Abraham Lincoln; only to
have the White House finally admit that it had
produced the banner - supposedly at the request of
those same sailors and airmen; and then, well ...
not. Long before May 1 rolled around again,
"mission accomplished" would be a scarlet phrase
of shame - useful only to Bush critics and
despised Democrats.
By July 2003, as we
now all know, top Bush officials were in a panic,
already sensing that the other part of their
victory story - their far-fetched set of
explanations for why the US had to invade Iraq -
was being gnawed away at. That was why, when
Joseph Wilson, who had emerged as a potentially
dangerous Bush administration critic, published
his famed op-ed on Niger uranium in the New York
Times that July 6, the administration gathered its
forces to whack him and his wife, Plame, and so
offer a warning to others - with all the
disastrous consequences for Bush and his key
officials with which we now live.
By
November 2003, Bush's presidency was already
beginning to be eaten alive by a growing, if
chaotic, Iraqi rebellion; while the movie version
of Bush's War was already guaranteed never to make
it into DVD. All its mini-tales - of the Jessica
Lynch rescue, the tearing down of Saddam's statue
in Firdos Square, Pat Tillman's last stand in
Afghanistan - would, like those missing weapons of
mass destruction, like the US occupation of Iraq
itself, crash and burn. In most cases, this
happened almost as the stories were being created.
Take Private Lynch, who was "rescued" by
US Special Forces arriving at the hospital where
she was being treated by Iraqi doctors armed with
night-vision cameras and a flag to drape over her.
They shot their film of the rescue, and
transmitted it in real time to Centcom (Central
Command) headquarters in Doha, where it was edited
and released. The result was a dreamy media frenzy
of patriotism back home, complete with a wave of
Jessica T-shirts and other paraphernalia and an
NBC movie of the week.
And yet Lynch's
story, like the story of that toppled statue in
Baghdad, like the story of Saddam's vast arsenal
of weapons of mass destruction, was soon in
tatters. An unheroic version that lacked gun or
knife wounds, mistreatment, or even Iraqi captors
from which to be rescued practically galloped on
to the scene. By the time Lynch herself more or
less rejected the story told about her in a book,
I Am a Soldier, Too, it was too late. It
almost immediately hit not the best-seller lists
but the remainder tables, because her story had
already evaporated.
We Americans, of
course, like victory. We prefer to be in a
triumphalist culture, and undoubtedly much of the
turn of events of the last couple of years -
including the recent revolt of the generals along
with those sagging presidential polling figures
and the multiplying conversion experiences of all
sorts of conservatives and even former neo-cons -
can simply be accounted for by the resulting
not-victory in Iraq.
Undoubtedly, the Bush
administration is not yet out of ammunition,
either figuratively or literally. Even as they
stand in the rubble of their world, top Bush
officials remain quite capable of making decisions
that will export ruins to, say, Iran and create
further chaos in the oil heartlands of the planet
as well as at home. I don't sell them short, nor
do I see a Democratic Party capable of taking the
reins of the globe's last standing imperial power
and doing a heck of a lot better. Still, there's
something consoling in knowing that history
remains filled with surprises and that the short,
rubble-filled, disastrous career of the Bush
administration looks likely to be one of them.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the
Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com("a
regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the
co-founder of the American Empire Project and the
author of The End of Victory Culture, a
history of US triumphalism in the Cold War. His
novel The Last Days of Publishing has
recently come out in paperback.
(Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt. Used with
permission
of Tomdispatch.)
