DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA How the Bush administration got
spooked By Tom Engelhardt
It's finally Wizard of Oz time in America.
You know - that moment when the curtains are
pulled back, the fearsome-looking wizard wreathed
in all that billowing smoke turns out to be some
pitiful little guy, and everybody looks around
sheepishly, wondering why they acted as they did
for so long.
Starting on September 11,
2001 - with a monstrous helping hand from Osama
bin Laden - the Bush administration played the
fear card with unbelievable effectiveness. For
years, with its companion "war on terror", it
trumped every other card in the American political
deck. With an absurd system for color-coding
dangers to Americans, the president, vice
president and the highest officials in this land
were able to paint the media a "high"
incendiary orange and the
Democrats an "elevated" bright yellow,
functionally sidelining them.
How
stunningly in recent weeks the landscape has
altered - almost like your basic hurricane
sweeping through some unprotected and unprepared
city. Now, to their amazement, Bush administration
officials find themselves thrust through the
equivalent of a Star-Trekkian wormhole into an
anti-universe where everything that once worked
for them seems to work against them. As always, in
the face of domestic challenge, they have
responded by attacking - a tactic that was
effective for years. The president, vice
president, national security adviser and others
have ramped up their assaults, functionally
accusing Democratic critics of little short of
treason - of essentially undermining American
forces in the field, if not offering aid and
comfort to the enemy. On his recent trip to Asia,
the president put it almost as bluntly as his vice
president did at home, "As our troops fight a
ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of
life, they deserve to know that their elected
leaders who voted to send them into war continue
to stand behind them." The Democrats were, he said
over and over, "irresponsible" in their attacks.
Dick Cheney called them spineless "opportunists"
peddling dishonestly for political advantage.
But instead of watching the Democrats fall
silent under assault as they have for years, they
unexpectedly found themselves facing a roiling
oppositional hubbub threatening the unity of their
own congressional party. In his sudden, heartfelt
attack on Bush administration Iraq plans ("a
flawed policy wrapped in illusion") and his call
for a six-month timetable for American troop
withdrawal, Democratic congressional hawk John
Murtha took on the Republicans over their attacks
more directly than any mainstream Democrat has
ever done. ("I like guys who've never been there
that criticize us who've been there. I like that.
I like guys who got five deferments and never been
there and send people to war, and then don't like
to hear suggestions about what needs to be done. I
resent the fact, on Veterans Day, he [Bush]
criticized Democrats for criticizing them.")
Perhaps more important, as an ex-Marine and
decorated Vietnam veteran clearly speaking for a
military constituency (and possibility some
Pentagon brass), he gave far milder and more
"liberal" Democrats cover.
For the first
time since the war in Iraq began, "tipping
points", constantly announced in Iraq but never
quite in sight, have headed for home. Dan
Bartlett, counselor to the president and drafter
of recent presidential attacks on the Democrats,
told David Sanger of the New York Times that
"Bush's decision to fight back ... arose after he
became concerned the [Iraq] debate was now at a
tipping point"; while Howard Fineman of Newsweek
dubbed Murtha himself a "one-man tipping point".
Something indeed did seem to tip, for when
the White House and associates took Murtha on,
John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats
leaped aggressively to his defense. In fact,
something quite unimaginable even a few days
earlier occurred. When Republican Representative
Jean Schmidt of Ohio, the most junior member of
the House, accused Murtha (via an unnamed Marine
colonel supposedly from her district) of being a
coward, Democratic Representative Harold Ford from
Tennessee "charged across the chamber's center
aisle to the Republican side screaming that
Schmidt's attack had been unwarranted. "You guys
are pathetic!" yelled Representative Martin
Meehan, Democrat of Massachusetts. "Pathetic."
There could, however, be no greater sign
of a politically changed landscape than the
decision of former president Bill Clinton (who
practically had himself adopted into the Bush
family over the last year) to tell a group of Arab
students in Dubai only two-and-a-half years late
that the Iraqi invasion was a "big mistake". Since
he is undoubtedly a stalking horse for his wife,
that great, cautious ship-of-nonstate, the Hillary
Clinton presidential campaign, should soon turn
its prow ever so slowly to catch the oppositional
winds.
If you want to wet an index finger
yourself and hoist it airwards to see which way
the winds are blowing, then just check out how the
media has been framing in headlines the recent
spate of administration attacks. Headline writing
is a curious in-house craft - and well worth
following. Changing headline language is a good
signal that something's up. When the president
attacks, it's now commonly said that he's "lashing
out" - an image of emotional disarray distinctly
at odds with the once-powerful sense of the Bush
administration as the most disciplined White House
on record and of the president and vice president
as resolutely unflappable. Here's just a small
sampling:
The Miami Herald, "President
lashes out at critics of Iraq war"; the Associated
Press, Cheney latest to lash out at critics; the
Buffalo News, Bush lashes out at war critics; even
the Voice of America, Bush lashes out at political
opponents over Iraq accusations.
In other
headlines last week, the administration was
presented in post-Oz style as beleaguered, under
siege and powerless to control its own fate: The
Associated Press, for example, headlined a recent
Jennifer Loven piece, Iraq war criticism stalks
Bush overseas; the New York Times, a David Sanger
report, Iraq dogs president as he crosses Asia to
promote trade; and CNN headlined the Murtha
events, A hawk rattles GOP's cage.
The
language used in such recent media accounts was no
less revealing. Sanger, for example, began his
piece this way:
"President Bush may have
come to Asia determined to show leaders here that
his agenda is far broader than Iraq and terrorism,
but at every stop, and every day, Mr Bush and his
aides have been fighting a rearguard action to
justify how the United States got into Iraq and
how to get out."
While Loven launched hers
with, "His war policies under siege at home ...",
attributing the siege atmosphere and the Bush
"counterattack" to "the president's newly
aggressive war critics".
Lashing out,
stalked, dogged, under siege, counterattacking,
fighting a rearguard action - let's not just
attribute this to "newly aggressive war critics".
It's a long-coming shift in the zeitgeist, as
evident in the media as in the halls of Congress.
On Thursday, for instance, ABC's Primetime
TV news, which led with a story on the president
"lashing out" at critics, then offered a long,
up-close-and-personal segment in which a
teary-eyed Murtha spoke of the war-wounded he's
regularly visited at hospitals and the fraudulence
of administration policy. That same night, another
prime-time news broadcast turned the president's
claim that the Democrats were "irresponsible" in
their criticisms into a montage of Bush repeatedly
saying "irresponsible" in different poses - so
many times in a row, in fact, that the segment
could easily have come from a sharp opening
sequence on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show.
None of this would have been possible even
weeks ago in a country where it was once gospel
that you don't attack a president while he's
representing the United States abroad. That's why,
in the Watergate era, Richard Nixon had such a
propensity for trips overseas and undoubtedly why
our stay-at-home president's handlers decided to
turn him into a Latin American and Asian
globetrotter. The question is: How did this
happen? What changed the zeitgeist and where are
we heading?
Poll-driven
politics Polls are, it might be said,
what's left of American democracy. Privately run,
often for profit or advantage, they nonetheless
are as close as we come these days - actual
elections being what they are - to the expression
of democratic opinion, serially, week after week.
Everyone who matters in and out of Washington and
in the media reads them as if life itself were at
stake. They drive behavior and politics. Fear,
too, is a poll-driven phenomenon. Not surprisingly
then, it was the moment late last spring when
presidential approval ratings fell decisively
below the 50% mark, and looked to be heading for
40%, that the White House took anxious note and
so, no less important, did a previously cowed
media. Somewhere in that period, the fear factor,
right in the administration's hands, was
transformed into a feeling fearful factor. As I've
written elsewhere, faced with the mother of a dead
soldier on their doorstep, all the president's men
blinked and the Camp Casey fiasco followed. Soon
after, before hurricane Cindy could even blow out
of town, hurricane Katrina blew in and the
president's ratings headed for free fall. In just
the last month, they look as if they had been
shoved over a small cliff, dipping in the latest
Harris and Wall Street Journal polls to an almost
unheard of 34% (only five points above Richard
Nixon's at his Watergate nadir).
The poll
numbers, which once gave the administration's fear
factor meaning, have simply evaporated - as have
any figures that might indicate that this
administration is capable of stanching its own
wounds. Emboldening media and political opposition
in Washington, such figures give Murtha-like cover
to behavior that not long ago would have been
unthinkable. A record 60% of Americans surveyed in
the most recent USA Today poll, including one in
four Republicans, said "the war wasn't 'worth it'.
One in five Republicans said the invasion of Iraq
was a mistake." Those who felt things were "going
well" for the country as a whole dropped nine
percentage points in a month.
Democrats
long ago fled the ranks of presidential
supporters, as more recently have independents;
now moderate Republicans are beginning to peel
away too. According to Tom Raum of the Associated
Press,"[Bush's] approval on handling Iraq fell
from 87% among all Republicans in November 2004 to
78% this month. Among Republican women, from 88% a
year ago to 73% now. Among independents, approval
on Iraq fell from 49% in November 2004 to 33%
now." If you want a figure that, from the
administration's viewpoint, offers a frightening
glimpse into a possible future, consider the 79%
of Americans who believe I Lewis Libby's
indictment is "of importance to the nation"; this,
despite Republican claims that the grounds for
indicting were insignificant, and a new Libby
defense fund made up of Republican high rollers
and assorted neo-cons.
In other words,
replace the still emotionally charged issues of
the war in Iraq and the president's actions,
where, at 34%-40%, a bedrock base of support
remains more or less intact, with a less charged
ethics-in-government issue and that vaunted Rock
of Gibraltar shatters. This is the previously
inconceivable future so many Republican
politicians suddenly fear.
Just for the
heck of it, throw in another factor - "intensity"
- and you have an even more volatile picture,
given the lack of positive, potentially mobilizing
news on the domestic and foreign horizons. E J
Dionne of the Washington Post suggests that the
polling figures are even worse than they look
because intensity of feeling on the war issue is
now "on the side of the war's opponents". He adds:
"The findings on the strength of feelings
about the war were matched by the intensity of
feelings about Bush himself: Only 20% of those
surveyed said they strongly approved of the
overall job Bush was doing, while 47% strongly
disapproved. A president who has always played to
his base finds that his base is steadily
shrinking."
In other words, doubt and
demoralization are setting in - a political rot
that can do untold damage. Given how many
independents and moderate Republicans who once
supported the war have changed their minds, the
scathing attacks on Democrats for mind-changing on
the war may not prove a winning strategy either.
They may, as Raum comments, "backfire on
Republicans".
But here's a question: Can
we trace Bush's polling near-collapse to its
origins anywhere? In the latest issue of Foreign
Affairs magazine under the eerie title, "The Iraq
Syndrome" (subscription only), John Mueller, an
expert on how wars affect presidencies, offers a
canny, cool-eyed interpretation of changing
American opinion on Iraq. He tracks polling data
on the three sustained wars - Korea, Vietnam and
Iraq - the US has fought in the last
half-century-plus where we took more than 300
casualties.
All three show about the same
polling pattern: broad enthusiasm at the outset, a
relatively quick and steep falloff in support,
followed by steady erosion thereafter from which
no long-term presidential recovery seems possible
(certainly not via heightened rhetoric). In all
three wars, as support fell, pro-withdrawal
sentiment rose. Though some experts link this
pattern to an American "defeat-phobia" ,Mueller
points out that, in cases such as Lebanon in the
Reagan years and Somalia in the Clinton era,
Americans have been quite capable of swallowing
withdrawal and defeat (of a sort) without making
the presidents involved pay any significant
political cost.
The crucial factor in loss
of support for each of these wars, Mueller
insists, is a growing casualty list and not just
any casualties either - only American ones. (The
fact that "vastly more" Iraqis have died than all
the victims of "all international terrorists in
all of history" matters little, he observes, in
American popular judgments on the war.) What makes
Iraq stand out in this list of three "is how much
more quickly support has eroded in the case of
Iraq. By early 2005, when combat deaths were
around 1,500, the percentage of respondents who
considered the Iraq war a mistake - more than half
- was about the same as the percentage who
considered the war in Vietnam a mistake at the
time of the 1968 Tet offensive, when nearly 20,000
soldiers had already died."
If Mueller's
right, then the steady drip of American casualties
- many less dead and many more wounded than in
Korea and Vietnam, in part because of improved
medical care and triage techniques - has seeped
deeply into American consciousness. This seems so,
despite the administration's careful attempt to
keep returning bodies and individual funerals out
of sight and so out of mind; despite the fact that
the American dead - 60 soldiers in the first 19
days of October - have largely been kept off the
front pages of American papers and photos of dead
Americans off television (where dead Iraqis can
regularly be seen). Short of massive draw-downs of
American forces in Iraq, there is no casualty end
in sight for this administration; and drawing down
ground forces (while substituting air power for
them), as Richard Nixon learned in his
"Vietnamization" program, only solves a home-front
problem at the cost of creating staggering
problems on the war front.
For an
administration still fighting "withdrawal" with
all its strength, this may prove a problem with no
exit - further casualties acting as a motor
propelling the unhappiness that changes more minds
and pushes falling polling figures ever downward,
propelling unease about the country, which only
leads to escalating casualty figures of another
kind - those growing defections from the ranks of
your core political supporters.
When
agendas go bump in the night To put the
current crisis in some perspective, you could say
that two central agendas of the Bush
administration proved to be in conflict, although
for years this was less than evident (even to the
players involved). There was the long-planned
neo-conservative drive to invade Iraq and, through
that act, begin to remake the Middle East. The
neo-cons were backed in this by Vice President
Cheney and his crew in the vice-presidential
office as well as allied figures like John Bolton,
Stephen Hadley, and (some of the time) Donald
Rumsfeld, none of whom were necessarily neo-cons.
The motives this disparate group held for remaking
the region in their image ranged from the urge to
establish a planetary, militarily enforced Pax
Americana and/or an urge to control the oil
heartlands of the planet to a desire - from the
Likudniks in the administration - to secure the
region for an ascendant Sharonista Israel.
Whatever the overlapping motivations, at
the heart of this policy lay an urge to unleash a
constitutionally unfettered "war president" on the
world. (Torture was a crucial issue in all of this
largely because, once established as an essential
tool of the "war on terror", it would be proof
beyond a shadow of a doubt that Bush's presidency
had been freed of all restraints.) Put into full
effect on March 20, 2003, when the "war on terror"
melded into an invasion of Iraq, the policy was
meant to place in the president's hands every
global lever of power that mattered for all time.
It now seems far clearer that the endless
fallout from the fatal decision to invade Iraq is
eating away at another agenda entirely, one that
emerged from the domestic political wing of this
administration - from Karl Rove, Andrew Card, Tom
DeLay and their ilk. This was the Republican
desire to nail down the country as a purely red
(as in red-meat) Republican land. The vetting of
the K-Street lobbying crowd, the increasing
control over the flow of corporate dollars into
politics, the gerrymandering of congressional
districts to create an election-proof House of
Representatives, the mobilization of a religious
base dedicated to an endless set of culture wars,
the ushering in of a right-wing Supreme Court, and
so many other activities were all meant to create
an impregnable Republican Party in control of
every lever of power in our country into an
endless future.
The unfettered, imperial
president and the unfettered, imperial Republican
Party were joined at the hip by the attacks of
September 11, 2001, which led to both the "war on
terror" abroad and the Patriot Act and the
Homeland Security Department domestically. Had the
Bush administration pursued both agendas, minus an
invasion of Iraq, the two might have remained
joined far longer. The crucial invasion decision,
made almost immediately by the neo-con war party
backed by the president, was supported by White
House Chief of Staff Andrew ("From a marketing
point of view, you don't introduce new products in
August") Card and Karl ("the architect") Rove,
both of whom believed that a good war,
well-promoted and correctly wielded domestically,
might drive a Republican agenda to eternal
domination in America. None of them expected that
it would prove to be the wedge driven between the
two agendas.
The first hint of this was
caught perfectly in a classic headline: On May 2,
2003, George Bush co-piloted an Air Force jet onto
the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln (carefully
kept 30 miles out of its San Diego homeport so
that the president could have his "top gun"
photo-op instead of climbing a gangplank like any
normal being). Following this "historic landing",
he stepped up to an on-deck podium where, under a
White House banner that read "Mission
Accomplished", he declared that "major combat
operations in Iraq have ended." This was clearly
meant to be the stunning start of the president's
campaign for reelection in 2004, a classic piece
of Rovian image manipulation and a nail in the
coffin of the Democratic Party. And so it seemed
to most at the time.
But if you revisit
the CNN story about the landing and speech,
headlined "Bush calls end to 'major combat'," it's
hard now not to note the subhead lurking just
under it: US Central Command: Seven hurt in
Fallujah grenade attack. Seven wounded American
soldiers - that really says it all. The photo-op
that was meant for the reelection campaign was
already being undermined by another story; two
policies yoked together were already pulling in
different directions. Our present moment was
already being born, unnoticed but in plain sight.
Now both agendas are in disarray with no
help whatsoever on the horizon. Imagine, for
instance, that the South Koreans timed the
announcement of the withdrawal of the first of
their troops from (Kurdish) northern Iraq for the
moment the president arrived in their country.
Imagine that Tony Blair's people are now said to
be perfecting total withdrawal plans for next
year, and that the president recently may have had
to slap down the top American general in Iraq for
suggesting withdrawal (or at least draw down)
plans of his own. Imagine that various European
nations are now investigating (or in the case of
an Italian court charging) American agents in the
"war on terror" with crimes. Imagine that the
president, who often insisted Saddam had been
overthrown to rid Iraq of its torture chambers
("the torture chambers and the secret police are
gone forever") and to end the reign of a
"murderous tyrant who ... used chemical weapons to
kill thousands of people", now faces a
"tip-of-the-iceberg" torture scandal in Iraq
involving the people we've brought to power and
another spreading scandal about the American use
of a chemical-like weapon, white phosphorous, on
civilians in the city of Fallujah. Imagine that we
proved less capable than Saddam of delivering
basics like electricity and potable water to the
people of Iraq, that we squandered billions of
taxpayer dollars in "reconstruction" funds there,
and that we face an insurgency that continues to
grow and spread in opposition to a shabby elected
government all but in league with the Iranians.
Imagine that the president's Iraq war is now
devouring his presidency and that it can only get
worse.
The Middle East is a sea of
political gasoline just waiting for the odd
administration match or two; American foreign
policy is in a kind of disarray for which even the
final days of Vietnam offer no comparison; while
at home, the DeLay, Frist, Libby and Abramoff
scandals (and associated indictments) can only
grow and spread. Special Counsel Fitzgerald has
just announced his decision to empanel a new grand
jury, sure to drive the Plame scandal ever deeper
and higher into the administration and ever closer
to the 2006 elections or possibly beyond. It would
be easy to go on, but you get the idea.
It
is a truism of American politics that voters are
almost never driven to the polls by foreign
policy. In this case, however, the war in Iraq has
chased the president and his men ever since he
landed on that carrier deck. How little he knew
what he was asking for when, in a moment of
bravado, he said of the Iraqi insurgents, "Bring
'em on." He just barely beat the erosive effects
of his war to the polls in November 2004. Now, it
continues to eat inexorably into the heartland of
Republican political domination. Even Republican
discipline in Congress - without the Hammer's
hammer - has disintegrated under the heat of the
war. As Chris Nelson wrote recently in his
Washington insider's newsletter, The Nelson
Report:
"The stunning swiftness of the
bipartisan Congressional collapse of support for
the administration's conduct of the war in Iraq,
and by extension the entire anti-terrorism effort,
is such that it has not been fully appreciated by
the 'leadership' of either party. That's the real
meaning of a Senate vote, which Republicans tried
to spin into a victory for the president, because
they avoided the Democrat's amendment to set
performance-based withdrawal deadlines."
Now, the war threatens to crack open the
Republican base and chase the dream of a
single-party Republican political future - only
recently so close - right off the map. No wonder
the Democrats have just come out swinging (sort
of). The political shock and awe the
administration so regularly deployed after
September 11, 2001 no longer works. The Democrats
suddenly have discovered that - no thanks to them
- the American people are somewhere else and they
have little to fear from George Bush or Dick
Cheney. No presidential "counterattack", no
"lashing out", no set of speeches or new agenda
(to be announced in the 2006 State of the Union
Address or anywhere else) is likely to change any
of this for the better for this president. Fear is
no longer on the Bush administration's side. No
wonder they're now afraid - very, very afraid.
Tom Engelhardt is editor of Tomdispatch and the
author of The End of Victory Culture.
(Copyright 2005 Tomdispatch. Used by
permission.)
