Program Your VCR - It’s a Bush Press Conference!
Actually, don’t program your VCR - it’s bound to be incredibly dull. That’s the way it goes when the whole thing is scripted. I guess it only seems exciting because his press conferences are so rare. I had always thought the ability to speak extemperaneously with even a modest level of skill was a pre-requisite for the Presidency, but apparently not.
The recent flare-ups in Iraq have me genuinely agitated. As quoted in this New York Times article: “Six months of work is completely gone,” said a State Department official working in southern Iraq. “There is nothing to show for it.” Although I don’t think we should have gone into Iraq, now that we’re there, I don’t want to see us fail. So these events are disheartening, and they raise an important question.
Rumsfeld recently said the Iraqi uprisings were a “test of will.” While that’s true, I’d also say they are a test of purpose. What is the end goal? The first Gulf War involved a lot of debate over goals and “exit strategies,” but the political capital handed to the Bush administration by 9/11 gave it the maneuvering room to avoid such debates. With all the media attention being given to the handover of soveriegnty to the Iraqi governing council this summer, I imagine many think that is the goal. But it is at best a meager step. From what I’ve read, most Iraqis see the council as an American puppet, so I have grave doubts about how much authority they’ll really be able to exercise (other than at the point of a US gun). The US troops are not leaving anytime in the foreseeable future. I imagine the Bush plan is to keep a large contingent there until the country is “stabilized.” But I doubt it will ever stabilize while the troops are there: the New York Times article I linked to above points out that a factor in the uprising was the Israeli assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, and that Sadr has announced he is opening the Iraqi chapters of Hamas and Hezbollah. Do you see where this is going? Every time we engage in urban shootouts, every time innocents are caught in the crossfire, and every time we raid Iraqi homes looking for suspected miltants, we are essentially performing a recruitment drive for Sadr and his ilk. But if we don’t clamp down and strike back, then the militants will perceive us as weak and continue to foment rebellion anyway. As the Israelis and Palestinians have learned, it’s a downward spiral that has no end. We’ve focused on a series of “bad guys” in Iraq since the invasion. But removing a specific bad guy (like Sadr) doesn’t solve much - they only have power because they are tapping into feelings held by a lot of people. Things get very ugly when your troops can’t distinguish “the enemy” from “innocent civilians”, which leads me to invoke the “V” word - Vietnam.
Bush was actually asked specifically about the Vietnam comparison, before the invasion. This is from his March 2003 press conference:
QUESTION: …What can you say tonight, sir, to the sons and the daughters of the Americans who served in Vietnam to assure them that you will not lead this country down a similar path in Iraq?
BUSH: It’s a great question. Our mission is clear in Iraq. Should we have to go in, our mission is very clear: disarmament. In order to disarm, it will mean regime change. I’m confident that we’ll be able to achieve that objective in a way that minimizes the loss of life. No doubt there’s risks with any military operation. I know that. But it’s very clear what we intend to do. And our mission won’t change. The mission is precisely what I just stated. We’ve got a plan that will achieve that mission should we need to send forces in.
It’s clearly an inadequate answer, as it says nothing about what happens afterwards. Given the specificity and clarity of his response, it actually implies an “in and out” operation, but that clearly would not have been a realistic plan. To be fair, earlier in the press conference he did mention helping the Iraqis rebuild post-Saddam, but he didn’t get into what that might involve (in fact, prior the invasion, the Bush administration made barely any mention of what would happen in post-Saddam Iraq). If Bush said what he must have known - “and after that we’ll need to get into the messy and very expensive work of stabilizing the whole country and somehow setting up a new government that Iraqis will perceive as legitimate” he would have really opened up a can of worms for himself. It’s extraordinarly difficult to instill western values (democracy) and a US-friendly disposition in a place that has no history of either. The only example in the Middle East is Turkey, and it’s not exactly a shining star (and it has a unique history of internal changes to account for what successes it has achieved). It’s even harder to succeed, if not impossible, when such change is brought at the point of a gun. But since the press conference was scripted, no one had the opportunity to ask that tough follow-up question.
