A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency (35 page)

The president and his supporters have spent the last several years insisting that the reason it is too dangerous to leave Iraq prior to the “completion of the mission”—whatever that might mean—is because premature withdrawal would create a “vacuum” that would enable Al Qaeda to use Iraq as a base for training and other activities. And it is possibly true that that could happen. But that (according to the U.S. military) is exactly what we
already
created in a substantial portion of Iraq, the Anbar province, where Sunni insurgents who at least claim the “Al Qaeda” name have all but exerted full dominion.

Worse still, the power vacuum we are told is so dangerous already exists not only in Iraq
but also in Afghanistan
. Remember Afghanistan—the one great success of the Bush administration—the country we rid of the evil Taliban and where we denied Al Qaeda free rein?…Except we have not done any of that. Quite the opposite, as the
Washington Post
documented in November 2006:

Al-Qaeda’s influence and numbers are rapidly growing in Afghanistan, with fighters operating from new havens and mimicking techniques learned on the Iraqi battlefield for use against U.S. and allied troops, the directors of the CIA and defense intelligence told Congress yesterday.

Five years after the United States drove al-Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the CIA, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that both groups are back, waging a “bloody insurgency” in the south and east of the country. U.S. support for the Kabul government of Hamid Karzai will be needed for “at least a decade” to ensure that the country does not fall again, he said.

Americans have been inundated with endless happy talk about how the U.S. shattered Al Qaeda’s infrastructure and has them on the run, impotently hiding in caves with no leadership. Excluded from that depiction are the rather striking exceptions of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the group’s two top leaders for the last decade. Yet all of that rosy rhetoric about how much the U.S. has crippled Al Qaeda is greatly exaggerated, as even the president’s handpicked CIA director acknowledged according to the same
Post
article:

Hayden told the Senate panel that the Taliban, aided by al-Qaeda, “has built momentum this year” in Afghanistan and that “the level of violence associated with the insurgency has increased significantly.” He also noted that Karzai’s government “is nowhere to be seen” in many rural areas where a lack of security is affecting millions of Afghans for whom the quality of life has not advanced since the U.S. military arrived in October 2001….

Hayden said yesterday that “the group’s cadre of seasoned, committed leaders” remains fairly cohesive and focused on strategic objectives, “despite having lost a number of veterans over the years.” Bin Laden himself, and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, continue to play a crucial role while hiding out somewhere along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

Hayden said the organization had lost a series of leaders since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But the losses have been “mitigated by what is, frankly, a pretty deep bench of low-ranking personnel capable of stepping up to assume leadership positions.” Hayden said the lower ranks are dominated by men in their early 40s with two decades of experience fighting.

Shortly before the November 2006 midterm elections, a CIA assessment was leaked to David Rohde and Jim Risen, who wrote an article in the
New York Times
describing the CIA’s concerns about the inability of the “Afghan Government” to “exert authority beyond Kabul,” as well as the corruption of the Afghani police force and army that is so pervasive that they likely must be rebuilt from scratch. Even Bush officials, on the record, are voicing extremely grim assessments of Afghanistan:

Ronald E. Neumann, the American ambassador in Kabul, said in an interview recently that the United States faced “stark choices” in Afghanistan. Averting failure, he said, would take “multiple years” and “multiple billions.” “We’re going to have to stay at it,” he said. “Or we’re going to fail and the country will fall apart again.”

What is the United States going to do about all of this? The remaining hard line, pro-Bush war advocates insist that all we need in Iraq are just some more troops and some more time. Except we do not have many more troops (according to the military itself), and the ones we do have are spread thin and are exhausted from multiple tours of duty. Even if we did have some magic troops materialize for Iraq, what would the U.S. do about Afghanistan, which—according to Bush’s own ambassador—requires a commitment of enormous additional resources over many years just to prevent the country from “fall[ing] apart again”?

And even if these severe and dangerous problems could be solved with a massive increase in resources (money and troops)—an extremely dubious premise—how would we pay for such an increase? The Bush propaganda machine has made even the mere mention of tax increases politically toxic, and the U.S. is swamped by massive federal deficits and dangerous levels of debt to foreign countries, particularly China. “Imperial overstretch” does not begin to describe the untenability of our predicament, and yet Bush and his movement endlessly call for still more and more military expansion and adventure.

The fundamental problem is that as a nation we do not actually debate the real issues because they are too politically radioactive, and because the simplistic appeals to victory over Evil obscure, by design, the genuine limits on American power and the drain these conflicts are placing on finite American resources. The real issue is whether the U.S. wants to maintain its presence and controlling influence in the Middle East and, if so, (a) why the U.S. wants to do that, and (b) what Americans are willing to sacrifice to preserve its dominance.

But Americans during the Bush presidency have had no significant, constructive discussion of whether the U.S. has any real interests in continuing to exert dominance in the Middle East, primarily because doing so requires a debate about the role of oil and our commitment to Israel, both of which are strictly off-limits, as the president himself told us in a January 2006 speech:

The American people know the difference between responsible and irresponsible debate when they see it. They know the difference between honest critics who question the way the war is being prosecuted and partisan critics who claim that we acted in Iraq
because of oil, or because of Israel, or because we misled the American people
. And they know the difference between a loyal opposition that points out what is wrong, and defeatists who refuse to see that anything is right [emphasis added].

It may be the case that the United States should seek to preserve its influence in the Middle East. Perhaps we want to control oil resources or assume primary responsibility for ensuring a steady and orderly world oil market. Or perhaps we want to commit ourselves to defending Israel as the only real outpost of Middle Eastern democracy and/or an ally of one degree or another in protecting our vital strategic interests, if any, in that region.

There are coherent (if not persuasive) arguments, pro and con, for all of those positions, but these issues have been embargoed by social and political orthodoxy, and no examination of them is allowed (if one wants to continue to be heard in the mainstream). So we dance around the real questions and are stuck with superficial and contrived “debates” about what we are actually doing—about all the new Hitlers and the “Evil” we must confront and our need to be Churchill instead of Chamberlain—all of which obscures our choices, our limits, and basic reality.

If preserving our dominance of the Middle East is a goal we want to prioritize, then we need to decide what sacrifices we are willing to bear in order to reach it. We must determine whether and how we will massively expand our military, the increase in indiscriminate force we are willing to accept, and how we are going to pay for our imperial missions. Because as long as we are committed to dominating that region, we are going to be engaged in a long and likely endless series of brutal wars against religious fanatics and various nationalists who simply do not want us there and are willing to fight to the death—making all sorts of sacrifices themselves—to prevent us from dominating their countries.

If we, the American people, want to fight the wars necessary to maintain our dominance in the Middle East, then we should do so. And if we do not, then we should not. But this middle course—where we plod along aimlessly, starting wars and constantly threatening new ones that we are not really committed to winning—is not only the most incoherent course but also the most destructive one.

Indisputably, the course charted by President Bush is totally unsustainable. That is just reality. It is not merely that things have progressed too slowly in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is that the situation has deteriorated in both countries to the point where Al Qaeda now has not one but two countries (not counting a nuclear-armed Pakistan) in which it can operate.

And the stronger they get, the more of our resources are needed to keep up. Yet we lack the willingness—and perhaps the ability—to make the sacrifices necessary to sustain imperial domination in that region. The president has literally pretended that this is not the case by insisting on our divine entitlement to magical victory over Evil, and depicting those who claim otherwise as people who hate the troops and do not want to win.

The damage done to the United States by the Bush administration over the last six years is truly severe. It is fundamental damage, and it requires much, much more than some tinkering around the edges. America urgently needs to debate and re-examine the core premises of our foreign policy and our role in the world. That, in turn, requires a willingness to transcend the taboos and most sacred orthodoxies and to dispense with the Manichean delusions that have substituted for rational debate.

“EVIL” IRAN: A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY

T
he president’s rhetoric of threats and demonization severely exacerbates almost every Iran-related problem. By refusing even to negotiate with Iran and directing unambiguous threats to it, the president is(a) emboldening the very Iranian extremists whom the administration claims pose the real threat, (b) forcing the Iranians into an increasing militaristic posture, and (c) moving the U.S. ever closer to a military confrontation which—whether commenced deliberately or accidentally—could not possibly be in America’s interests under any conceivable scenario.

Since the mid-1990s, Iran has been torn by internal divisiveness between its ruling fundamentalist mullahs and its more reform-minded moderates. It is not an exaggeration to say that few things have solidified the power of Iran’s religious extremists more than President Bush’s treatment of that country. Such a result is tragic in its own right, but particularly so considering that the president himself has identified the promotion of Islamic moderates as one of the centerpieces to defeating the terrorist threat.

Writing in
Salon
in February 2002, Iranian journalist Haleh Anvari described the almost immediate sociopolitical changes in Iran resulting from the president’s inclusion of Iran in the “axis of evil,” beginning with a newfound unity between previously warring moderate and extremist political factions:

Bush’s speech dismayed Iranians of all political stripes. Reformers and conservatives have been locked in a bitter power struggle, but they suspended their infighting to make common cause against a speech widely regarded here as bullying, ignorant, and counterproductive.

As Anvari noted, Iranian leaders who were previously considered moderate and who had been spearheading cooperation with the U.S. had little choice but to return the rhetorical fire:

Iran’s leaders fired back fiercely. The country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, called the tone of the U.S. president’s speech “bloodthirsty.” President Khatami, leader of the reformers, was equally blunt.

During his five years in office, Khatami has made a concerted effort to tone down hostile rhetoric toward the U.S. as part of a more pragmatic foreign policy, but he condemned Bush’s demonizing of Iran as “meddling, warmongering, insulting and a repetition of old propaganda.”

It was perhaps the strongest language Khatami has yet used against the U.S., and belied his dismay at the abrupt change in the U.S. position towards Iran, which most observers believe has been softening in the past four years….

The spokesman of the powerful Guardian Council, which oversees all legislation to make sure it adheres to the values of the Islamic Revolution, called for unity among Iran’s internal camps—an appeal that would have little chance of being heard before Bush’s speech.

These results were hardly surprising. The dynamic whereby warring political factions in a country become united in opposition to hostility from an outside force is hardly unique to Iran. Quite the contrary, it is as close to a universal political phenomenon as one can find. The 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington elevated an American president who was elected with fewer votes than his opponent to one whose job approval rating skyrocketed near 90 percent.

Bush’s hostile rhetorical attack on Iran in 2002 vindicated the worldview of the extremists there that the U.S. was Iran’s enemy ( just as an ever-new hostile pronouncement from Ahmadinejad emboldens hard-liners in the U.S.). Conversely, it severely undercut the worldview of the moderates that Iran could establish a mutually beneficial and peaceful relationship with the U.S. Anvari noted the “irony in the fact that what is good for a right-wing American president is also good for the right-wing Iranian administration.” As journalist Saiid Layaz put it: “For some bizarre reason, whenever the USA decides to talk about Iran, it accidentally ends up benefiting the hard-liners.”

The president’s bellicose denunciations of Iran as an Evil enemy of the U.S.—which embolden Iranian extremists, and even provide justification for the Iranian nuclear program—are only intensifying. In April 2006, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Ray Takeyh lamented: “To properly address the complexities of the Iranian challenge, Washington should appreciate that its policy of relentlessly threatening Iran with economic coercion and even military reprisals only empowers reactionaries and validates their pro-nuclear argument.”