In an interview with GQ correspondent Robert Draper for his book Dead Certain, President Bush described his Iraq strategy as “playing for October-November.” He explained that his hope was to “get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence,” and, he said, “stay longer.”
In an interview with the The Examiner’s Bill Sammon for his book The Evangelical President, Bush goes even further, explaining that he is actively “providing back-channel advice” to the Democratic presidential candidates on Iraq. According to White House chief of staff Josh Bolten, Bush is urging the candidates to remain flexible enough in their rhetoric so that they can maintain a long-term occupation of Iraq:…“It’s different being a candidate and being the president,” Bush said in an Oval Office interview. “No matter who the president is, no matter what party, when they sit here in the Oval Office…they will then begin to understand the need to continue to support the young democracy.”
I’ve got a different interpretation of the news–via ThinkProgress–that Bush is advising Democrats to keep their options open to sustain the permanent war in Iraq.…Rather than some Rovian gimmick to gain advantage in the presidential election, I think this just suggests that Bush believes that when a Democrat becomes President in 2009 (and I do think this suggests he thinks it highly likely), she will review intelligence and get advice and realize that the US must stay in Iraq.
…Bush is suggesting that a review of facts on the ground in Iraq will look different from the Oval Office than they do from, say, the Senate. I think Bush is suggesting more than just that the responsibility of the presidency will make Democrats act differently. I think he’s saying the complexity of the problem will look different–presumably because the new President will have new and different information. Assume for the moment I’m correct in reading Bush’s message. Consider what that means. It suggests that even the Senators who are running for President don’t have a complete sense of what the war is about, much less the dirty fucking citizens. All the discussions about the war in Iraq have largely avoided the real underlying issues behind the war. Which is, as Alan Greenspan has told us, true. This is a war for oil, a war to maintain the dollar as reserve currency, a war to shake out the last advantages of the petroleum age before supplies dry up. This is, I’m sure Bush believes, a desperate war to sustain American hegemony at a time when it faces serious threat.But there’s the rub. If this war was designed to prevent the collapse of the dollar economy, it has failed. I would argue, though, that even from the perspective of 2003, the war was not the only possible response to the challenges facing the US. It was just the bloodiest and the bluntest, and perhaps not surprisingly, the one that guaranteed that the concentration of power that the petroleum lobby now enjoys would continue. The only way we would have been able to choose alternatives that were less violent and perhaps more efficacious, of course, is if everyone understood the underlying issues (or at least the Senate!). And that didn’t happen.
I believe Bush’s advice to Democrats suggests he understands the underlying reasons for the war to be dramatically different from those he has espoused publicly. That, in turn, suggests this country is avoiding a necessary debate. What is the United States? What should it be? What parts of our lifestyle are sustainable? Which are worth keeping? And what are we really willing to do to keep those things?
First Rule in Blogging: Don’t disagree with future Senator emptywheel because she’s the best compass in the business.
She says that they haven’t given us the facts. That has to be right. I even agree with her that they are hiding a dire mess [one they’ve created], one that has to do with our economy. I expect that the real pain in America is going to come when our Democratic President gets in the White House and has to clean out the Aegean Stables. Bush and Cheney have done a lot of horrid stuff, have ignored any number of important matters, and will spend the next year setting traps to discredit their replacements and make themselves look good in retrospect. Where I might hesitantly disagree with emptywheel is that I think that Bush and Cheney are not competent to even know what’s behind their own closed doors. They’re so focused on the American Enterprise Institute view of the world that what they see is danger in the world as they view it – from the perspective of greedy rich people [I expect that greedy rich people would do well to head for Dubai pretty soon]. After Nixon [Ford], Carter tried to straighten out the messes and got slammed by the Republican Nasty Machine. The coming Democrats face the same potential fate. What’s different is that the Republican Nasty Machine has so tarnished itself, I’m not sure they can bring it off.
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