WASHINGTON - While Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's continued tenure in
office has been the subject of a surge of speculation over the past weeks, it
may be US President George W Bush's continued reign - at least over Iraq policy
- that appears most endangered at the moment.
While no one is talking about a classic coup d'etat against the US president,
as is being rumored about the increasingly hapless and seemingly helpless
Maliki in Baghdad, Bush's mantra about
"staying the course" in Iraq is now seen as so delusory as to
require some form of serious adult intervention.
"Plan B" - that is, anything but "staying the course" - has been on the
lips of virtually every foreign-policy analyst who considers him or herself
worthy of the name this past week. It appeared that the entire capital appeared
to decide that whatever the US had been doing in Iraq for the past three years
was failing, and failing spectacularly.
The somber tone of last week's military briefings in Iraq certainly reflected
that view as active-duty senior officers finally went public with their growing
frustrations.
Indeed, the fact that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter
Pace, this month launched a comprehensive, 60-day review of Iraq strategy
belied Bush's notion that the current strategy was fundamentally sound.
Even a few of the war's most enthusiastic neo-conservative supporters have come
to admit that it may in fact have been a serious strategic mistake, although
they seem determined still to stave off the growing consensus - even among
Republican circles - in favor of some kind of timetable for withdrawal.
"The Iraq war was a mistake," wrote hardline war hawk Jonah Goldberg in the Los
Angeles Times, suggesting that Iraqis hold a special plebiscite on whether they
want the US to withdraw from their country.
"That the Iraq war is, if not a failure, failing requires little
demonstration," conceded Eliot Cohen, a member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy
Board, in a column titled "Plan B" published in the Wall Street Journal.
Cohen's 2002 book Supreme Command, about how the West's greatest
civilian wartime leaders constantly ignored or overruled their military
commanders, received widespread publicity when Bush took it on vacation with
him several months before the Iraq invasion. Cohen now argues that the loss in
"American prestige" resulting from the Iraq adventure is such that it "will not
be restored without a considerable and successful use of American military
power down the road".
Not only have about 16,000 US troops detailed to keep the peace in Baghdad
failed to stop sectarian bloodletting in the capital itself, they have also
shown themselves less able to protect themselves from increasingly potent and
sophisticated insurgent and militia attacks.
At some 75 military deaths so far, October is well on the way to becoming one
of the deadliest months for US forces since the invasion more than three years
ago. And the sacrifice implied by those deaths is increasingly under question
in Washington - both among the public at large and the elite - given the
growing unanimity among experts, many of whom still resisted the proposition as
recently as last month, that Iraq has reached a state of civil war.
"Almost all the indicators in Iraq point south, and America may already have
passed the make-or-break point in its intervention there," noted an article in
the well-respected National Journal titled "Endgame".
The gloom - not to say growing desperation - regarding the situation in Iraq is
compounded not only by the relentless daily media reports cataloguing yet more
violence in Iraq, and the Maliki government's failure or inability to do
anything about it, but also by the sense that the man at the top, Bush, either
doesn't understand how bad the situation has become or is so stubborn and
lacking in self-confidence that he wouldn't admit it if he did.
In his latest book, State of Denial, Washington Post reporter Bob
Woodward recounted a White House meeting late last year with Republican
lawmakers during which Bush tried to quell any doubts about his determination
to prevail in Iraq. "I will not withdraw even if [First Lady] Laura and Barney
are the only ones supporting me," he told them. Barney is his dog.
That declaration may have sounded vaguely Churchillian and inspiring to his
audience back then. But given the blindingly obvious deterioration of the
situation in Iraq - and the growing conviction among political pros in
Washington that the Republicans will lose up to 40 seats and their control of
the House of Representatives and may even lose their majority in the Senate in
the November 7 mid-term elections - it is likely to sound stupid, even
suicidal, to the same audience today.
Hence the sudden rise in talk not just about a coup d'etat in Baghdad that
could somehow produce a new political leadership capable of pacifying the
country - either through appeasement or ruthless repression (either of the
Sunni insurgency or of the Shi'ite militias) - but about effective "regime
change" at home as well.
Of course, a Democratic sweep in Congress could produce a new political
context. Indeed, a growing number of analysts believe that major Republican
losses would result at the very least in the long-awaited departure of Pentagon
chief Donald Rumsfeld.
But by itself, Rumsfeld's departure guarantees nothing in terms of a change of
strategy and, given the Democrats' own disunity on Iraq and their relative
spinelessness until recently in challenging the basic premises - as opposed to
competence - of Bush's foreign policy since September 11, 2001, a number of
foreign-policy heavyweights, most of them Republican "realists", are suggesting
some serious "adult supervision" of the president after the elections, whether
he likes it or not.
Indeed, none other than Harlan Ullman, a defense expert who coined the idea of
"shock and awe" in military strategy, noted in his column in the Washington
Times that Bush's stubbornness represented a real obstacle to sensible policies
not just in Iraq, but in East Asia, where North Korea's recent nuclear test has
been seen as yet another major Bush failure, and elsewhere.
"Since Mr Bush is so adamant in his views, perhaps a 'council of elders' could
persuade him to reconsider," wrote Ullman, who suggested that Senate Armed
Services Committee chairman John Warner, former secretaries of state George
Shultz and Henry Kissinger, and former Democratic national security adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski could be involved in a concerted effort to persuade the
president "to appreciate the possibility that many of our policies are failing
or founding and, unless we take new directions, events in East Asia could
follow the disastrous trajectory of what is happening in the Greater Middle
East".
Such a group, he suggested, should also include former secretary of state James
Baker, who now heads the bipartisan, congressionally-created Iraq Study Group -
the fast-growing focus of dwindling hope for a miracle cure for Iraq - and has,
like Warner, already made clear that "staying the course" is not a viable
option.
That has also become the refrain of a rapidly growing number of panicked
Republican incumbents who are ostentatiously distancing themselves from the
Bush mantra in hopes of extending their political life expectancy.
