Blaming Bush....

When America goes to the polls next week, the single most important issue that could determine who becomes president will very likely be Iraq. Some voters may think about taxes, some about medicare and healthcare reform and the import of prescription drugs from Canada . Some may think about stem-cell research and abortion rights, other's about border control and immigration issues and most may think about jobs and the economy; but, rest-assured, everyone will be thinking about Iraq.­

It's a close race between Bush and Kerry, and with only a week to go before election day, there is news that tons... not a ton, but tons... of explosives have mysteriously gone missing in Iraq. It's bad enough that they can't find the WMD's. The mess in Iraq is no secret. Even Bush supporters know how bad it is. A couple of months ago, Bill Clinton was on the Late Show with David Letterman promoting his book. Letterman told Clinton that he asked his (Letterman's) dad who he was going to vote for and why. His dad replied that the Republicans kept sending him letters and calling him to solicit donations for the campaign, and he sent them the money so they would stop bothering him. So that tells me who you're voting for, Letterman said to his dad, but that doesn't tell me why, to which his father said that he didn't think it was a good idea to change leadership when you're in the middle of a mess like Iraq.

But if Americans vote against Bush come November 3rd, it should only be to avoid the impression of acquiescence to Bush's policies and his approach. If they disagree with the principles behind his policies, they have more to worry about than who becomes president. Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" makes it seem that Bush had a personal advantage in going after Saddam and protecting the Saudis, specifically the Bin Laden Family, who supposedly share common business/financial interests with the Bush family. But most of "Fahrenheit" is propaganda against Bush and offers little in the way of an intellectual and critical analysis of Bush government policies and actions. Most Kerry supporters may be under the impression that Kerry would not have gone to war in Iraq, but the truth is America would have gone to Iraq regardless of who was President.

­Hindsight is always 20/20 and it's easy to say it would have been better to invest more troops in Afghanistan to find Osama than to get entangled in Iraq, but the question is: based on the intelligence available at the time, would a different president have decided against moving into Iraq?­­

The President of a democracy is subject to the will of the people. US troops invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 and the Taliban regime was destabilized rather quickly. There was hardly any solid infrastructure to target in a country already in ruins. Before the end of the year, the US had taken control away from the Taliban regime. But Osama was still missing and the task of finding him in the mountains in Northern Pakistan was going to be a slow process even if the US deployed more troops for the search. In the mean time, the American public would have grown weary of waiting for the culprits of 9/11 to be brought to justice. Eventually there would have been pressure on the President to offer more... more than just arrests of people supposedly linked to Al Qaeda, more than just over throwing the Taliban regime who supposedly offered sanctuary to Osama and Al Qaeda operatives. Even as a nation with the highest literacy rate in the world, the American public would have wanted to see more immediate results. The president, in the interest of remaining in office and maintaining the support of the public would have conceded to an effort that would have supposedly had a more "satisfying", more tangible impact. Fighting a war against an enemy with no physical geographic boundaries made it difficult to measure success. The US needed an Enemy behind a specific geographic boundary. Enter Saddam Hussein.­­

Saddam already enjoyed notoriety from the Gulf War in the early 1990's. An effort had been underway to depose Saddam since then, except no one had been willing to deal with the consequent post Saddam Iraq. The pretext of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait pertained to internal OPEC deliberations where Saddam felt that Kuwaiti and Saudi refusal to forgive Iraq it's war debt and lower oil production and raise gas prices was a deliberate attempt on their part to weaken the Iraqi people and hurt their economy and their pride. Initially the Bush Sr. regime failed to send any warnings to Saddam, which Saddam considered a green light to invade and was sincerely surprised by the bellicose reaction of the US. Official US policy was to take no side in any border conflict, although unofficially the US had taken sides and provided unofficial aid both in the Afghan and the Iran/Iraq war during the 1980's. But here US interests in Kuwait were directly at stake and that meant going to War. Iraq had since been restrained with sanctions and subject to UN weapons inspections. In 1998 President Clinton declared that the great danger confronting the US and its allies was the "threat Iraq poses now-a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists, drug traffickers, or organized criminals who travel the world among us unnoticed."

Clinton furthered explained that:

Iraq "admitted, among other things, an offensive biological warfare capability, notably, 5,000 gallons of botulinum, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs. And I might say UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq has actually greatly understated its production. . . .

"Over the past few months, as [the weapons inspectors] have come closer and closer to rooting out Iraq's remaining nuclear capacity, Saddam has undertaken yet another gambit to thwart their ambitions by imposing debilitating conditions on the inspectors and declaring key sites which have still not been inspected off limits . . . .

"It is obvious that there is an attempt here, based on the whole history of this operation since 1991, to protect whatever remains of his capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, the missiles to deliver them, and the feed stocks necessary to produce them. The UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions, a small force of Scud-type missiles, and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons. . . ."

The Clinton administration had maintained a policy of sporadic air-strikes against Iraqi infrastructure, but kept short of risking a showdown. The Republicans had always viewed such use of military power as feckless and weak and during the run up to the 2000 elections, Bush and his posse had made clear that they would jettison this Clinton era approach. But once in office, George W. appeared to follow suit with Clinton's policy. The about-face on his campaign rhetoric could have been explained by the perspective gained by assuming the seat of president where one is held accountable for the consequence of one's actions as well as the limited appetite at the time of the American people for another large-scale Gulf war.

But the events of September 11, 2001 changed that. American hearts were bleeding for their dead. An opportunity reared it's head. There may not have been a direct connection between Iraq and the September 11 attacks, and there wasn't any way to prove a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, but the case against Iraq had already been made... astonishingly, by a different president who wasn't even republican, long before September 11 ever happened. It wouldn't have been very hard for a charismatic president with a good speech writer to convince the world that in spite of UN weapons inspections, Iraq did pose a threat as a potential supplier of WMD's to Al Qaeda or other terrorist operations against the US, even if in truth it was no where close.

Bush's failure lies in that he is not a politician. He made his intention to enter Iraq with our without international support, with or without a UN mandate, too apparent. He didn't play the political game. That's the reason half of America wants a new president. It's also the same reason why the other half wants to keep him in office. They see him as a straight shooter, a man of ideals and conviction. They like that he was a C-grader and that he isn't an intellectual, that he thinks and acts the way they would. George W. thought that if the ideology of the war in Iraq appealed to him, it would appeal to the rest of the world. he believed in the principle so strongly that he figured there could be no way that anyone could not see that it was the right thing to do. Unfortunately, being a C-grader, he never realized that the rest of the world would see through American ideology for the self-serving policy it truly is, or that not all countries in the world, not even the NATO members shared a common ideology with the US. That is why political gaming is important. A different president would have played the political game. He would have still gone to war.... perhaps seeking US control over oil in Iraq, perhaps to protect the rich Saudi's who have Billions invested in the US and in other US interests around the world and ticking them off could hurt the US as a whole or maybe just the financial interests of particular shareholders and board-members who are also active members of the current US regime, perhaps.... I will not speculate on the basis of US foreign policy... but, a different president would have made a better case and done a better job of convincing his public and the rest of the world, or the parts of the world that count, that his actions were worth undertaking and deserved support.

An interesting thing to note is that the US has maintained a somewhat consistent foreign policy for decades and through various regimes and administrations, regardless of political slant, with only slight differences in implementation depending on the personal touch of the particular Chief Executive in office. I do not know what the principles underlying this foreign policy are, nor do I thoroughly know the policy unofficially maintained by the US. Officially, the US maintains a neutral stance on border conflicts. Officially, the US maintains that a country's internal political and civil conflicts are it's own to resolve. Officially, the US does everything in it's power to safeguard the rights of humanity. Unofficial US policy is, as we know now, very different. All the Bush regime has done is that it has brought the truth about US foreign policy out into the open. It has exposed it's self-serving nature. American never really did care for international opinion, it just did a better job of pretending it did. America has always carried out it's plans at will. When Clinton sent US planes to strike locations in Iraq when former president Bush was allegedly attacked on his visit to Kuwait, he didn't wait for international permission, nor did he seek international approval. The UN has always been powerless against the US, just as it is now. The US could go into Iraq to save people from a tyrant who was letting them live in meager conditions, but the US relies on the UN, the same UN it termed ineffective when it refused to give the green light for Iraq, to resolve the conflict in Darfur while it does nothing to save thousands from being massacred by a militia group possibly protected by the Sudanese government. It is no different than the US charging ahead to save innocent Kuwaiti's from a bloodless invasion by Iraq and standing by for the UN to save the Bosnians from the devastation and genocide at the hands of Milosevic's army.

Americans cannot blame Bush for the current US policy. If they disagree with the policy, they must delve deeper in their search for the premise. I do not know that premise. I suspect that it is to protect and/or further particular US interests/agendas, the nature and purpose of which I am not aware of, nor do I know or understand why so many different presidents would continue to stand by it... unless the assassination of JFK was a result of his dissent... but I am just speculating. My object is to make the public realize that a new president will not change the current policy. It will only serve to cover up what of that policy has been revealed. If Kerry wins, Bush will serve as a scapegoat and the political games of lying, bribing, threatening and convincing allies and non-allies of the virtues of American philosophy will recommence. If Americans can blame Bush for anything, it would be exposing the sinister truth about US policy.