Will voters
buy latest twist in Iraq tale? |
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| It would appear that two weeks before the election, President Bush may be revising the course as well as staying it. Perhaps this is the ultimate Karl Rove scam: We will stay the course until victory in Iraq, but we will set up "milestones" that will in effect be a schedule for withdrawal. We will have our cake and eat it too. After all, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself has said, Iraq belongs to the Iraqis; it's up to them to take it over. | ||
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The implicit message to voters who
are fed up with the nightly scenes of mass murder on television is that the
administration has a better way to get out of Iraq than the Democrats -- who
don't have any milestones -- and this better way at the same time will be
tough on terror. Will the voting public buy this double talk? They've accepted all previous spinning of the truth, why not this one, too? How can the Democrats who have demanded a scheduled pullout from Iraq attack the "milestones''? If it works, it will be the greatest shell game in political history. The only problem with it is, while it might win another election, what will happen when the bloody killing in Iraq continues despite the milestones? Never fear, the administration will find one more scam, even if it proves to be the ultimate repeal of the principle of contradiction. |
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The chairman of
the committee devising the strategy is former Secretary of State James
Baker, who managed, with the aid of the ineffable Nino Scalia, to turn
defeat into victory in the 2000 presidential election. There are few
prestidigitators in the Beltway who possess his skills. If it all works out, the killing may continue in Iraq but at least Americans will have left, flushed with victory no doubt. The president will be able to say that this is what God wanted him to do all along. Mission accomplished! As Bob Woodward makes clear in his State of Denial, there is a bureaucratic logjam that protects the president from the truth of what is happening in Iraq and thus enables him to talk about staying the course until victory. The iron law of oligarchy is that one always tells one's boss what the boss wants to hear instead of what he needs to know. (The law applies in all human organizations, including corporations, churches and universities.) Many layers of bureaucracy intervene between the men and women who fight and die in the war and the Oval Office -- the generals in Iraq, the generals at Central Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon (handsome men in tailor-made uniforms and loaded with medals who have seen very little combat and have very little influence), the secretary of defense, the National Security Council at the White House, the secretary of state (one of whose main responsibilities is protecting the president and keeping him happy), and then finally the Oval Office. As the facts go up the ladder, they are transformed unless the man at the top makes Herculean efforts to find out what he needs to know. Woodward argues that rarely does this president hear from anyone who would disagree with him and almost never does such a person say what he thinks. Woodward depicts the president as often shallow, vulgar, petulant and vindictive -- not the kind of boss that even a three-star general might want to take on. So Baker and the others who want to change Iraq policy have their work cut out for them. At no point dare they say, "We made mistakes." Rather, they will have to argue that the new policy is nothing more than staying the course in a different fashion. One is reminded of Ronald Reagan's reaction after he withdrew the Marines from Lebanon (where more than 100 had been killed by suicide bombers). He took full responsibility. If anyone were to face court-martial, he said, he should be the one. John Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco also assumed full responsibility, even though it was a scheme he inherited from the Eisenhower administration. Those were the days, however, when the buck stopped in the Oval Office..
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