No way out
With grim reports from Iraq and a June 30 deadline looming, many saw George Bush's waffling press conference this week as a failure of presidential leadership, DOUG SAUNDERS writes. While insisting he would stay his stubborn course, he was actually admitting defeat, adopting his Democratic opponents' Iraq line. But was it too little too late?
By DOUG SAUNDERS
Saturday, April 17, 2004
It had already been the bloodiest week of the Iraq occupation, with the highest death tolls and the most pitched and desperate battles, when the President of the United States entered the East Room of the White House to face his nation on Tuesday night.
In the next hour, George W. Bush gave one of the strangest and most opaque performances of his presidential career. At the time, for those of us watching, it seemed that he was stubbornly, blindly sticking to his guns, refusing to change his Iraq plans by an angstrom despite terrible failures on the ground.
Since then, it has become apparent that something entirely different had happened: The speech was a complete reversal and admission of defeat.
Certainly, he was deeply concerned with two fast-approaching dates. The first is June 30, when the United States has pledged to give up control of Iraq, regardless of the circumstances, to some unnamed non-American authority. The second is the election night of Nov. 2, when -- if things go as badly as feared on June 30, or if the transfer has to be postponed, or if June 30 leads to far worse circumstances in Iraq -- Mr. Bush may find himself handing his own authority over to Democrat John Kerry.
While claiming he was sticking to his guns, Mr. Bush let it be known that those guns were the ones belonging to his opponents -- to the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which he repeatedly urged on Tuesday night to take control of Iraq; and to John Kerry, whose Iraq plan has now been adopted, almost word for word, by the Bush administration.
A year ago, it seemed straightforward: The Americans had won an easy and relatively bloodless victory in Iraq. They would maintain order, rebuild civil society and oversee a gradual transformation to democracy that would be part of the White House's Greater Middle East Initiative, a long-term plan to bring democracy to the Arab world. A year later, none of that has happened, and this week made it apparent that June 30 will be an extremely difficult date.
"I think that what we're seeing now is the Bush administration, however reluctantly and however belatedly, adopting the policy proposals of its principal critics, which would include myself and John Kerry and the United Nations," said James Dobbins, who was Bill Clinton's chief diplomatic official in charge of nation-building efforts in places such as Kosovo and Haiti, and who has long criticized the plans, or the lack of them, for Iraq.
"It was France who argued that you should return sovereignty as soon as possible, and now Bush is doing it. The Democrats have been saying, 'Give NATO and the UN a central role,' and now Bush is doing it. I think he's made some important course corrections, but the question is whether he has done them in time."
In two telling statements Tuesday, Mr. Bush said questions about Iraq's security and its transition to democracy should be directed to Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN's Iraq envoy, and to NATO. Both organizations, which had been sidelined explicitly by the United States during the past year, were surprised to hear that the United States had suddenly deferred to their authority in a multilateral peacekeeping force. So were Republican Party loyalists, only a few of whom realized what had just happened.
"Those two statements are in my mind a failure of presidential leadership," William Kristol, the publisher of the Weekly Standard magazine and a central figure in U.S. conservative politics, said to the Los Angeles Times minutes after the press conference.
The next three days would leave Mr. Kristol and his fellow Republicans even more disappointed. On Thursday, Mr. Brahimi announced that he had consulted Iraqis and was prepared to establish a UN-appointed interim government on June 30. This council would take the place of the Iraqi Governing Council, whose U.S.-appointed members have been denounced by Iraqis as imperial agents.
The United States has devoted much of the past year to bolstering the credibility of the governing council. Yet Paul Bremer, the American governor of Iraq, indicated this week that he approved of Mr. Brahimi's plan, and in a dramatic turnaround, the White House welcomed it too. "In May, he will have an actual proposal, but we have no objections thus far to what he has proposed," Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, told The New York Times. Similar enthusiasm was expressed by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, and was attributed to Mr. Bush.
Even ardent supporters of the White House agenda acknowledged this week that June 30 will be the moment when the United States has to step aside. "We came in as liberators," said Michael O'Hanlon, a hawkish defence analyst with Washington's Brookings Institution. "We did not remain as the champions of the Iraqi people for very long, because we quickly allowed the country to descend into chaos. And then we refused to bring in the international community, so we lost the benefit of legitimacy."
That loss of legitimacy has created a terrible dilemma for Mr. Bush: By maintaining the June 30 deadline, he may be helping put Islamist extremists into power.
Instead of working gradually to bring in an open economy and a representative, non-extremist democracy, the United States will now have to work fast, put in place any form of government it can, and get out. "Had we mobilized sufficient forces and had an adequate plan, had we established a more secure environment for the Iraqi people, then doing this more slowly and carefully would have been an option. We would have had the option to take more time," Mr. Dobbins said. "But now we'll have to get out of the way, and even though our forces are going to have to be there for five more years or more, in the creation of an Iraqi government we're going to have to make some compromises about how representation and democracy work."
Those compromises could mean that Iraqis will elect a religious government when they hold their first elections next year. While they are still largely in favour of the ouster of Saddam Hussein and opposed to the notion of a theocracy, a poll conducted by ABC News last week indicates that their greatest concern, by a wide margin, is the lack of security. That means that an election could be dominated by religious leaders, such as cleric Ahmad Chalabi, or, in a nightmare scenario, someone like Shia strongman Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr, whose rebel forces have been battling U.S. Marines in southern Iraq all month.
But this need for security poses an even more serious dilemma for Mr. Bush, one that could explode in his face on Nov. 2: Even as the United States is forced to cede its authority over Iraq to international bodies, it is simultaneously forced to increase dramatically the number of troops it has in Iraq. This means that the American death toll, and the multibillion-dollar bill to U.S taxpayers, will continue to mount on election day, and for years beyond.
On Thursday, Donald Rumsfeld announced that 20,000 troops due to be sent home would remain in Iraq indefinitely, keeping 135,000 soldiers in Iraq, and hinted that this number might increase.
The reasons are deeply embarrassing: For one thing, it is now extremely likely that the June 30 deadline will not put an end to the violence taking place across Iraq, but deepen it. While some anti-American insurgents will be pleased by the handover of power, others will see the UN-appointed authority as another Western imposition. To make matters worse, key members of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, who have been told repeatedly by the White House that they will get to govern Iraq, expressed bitter opposition this week to the prospect of a government of international peacekeepers.
On Wednesday, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the security situation is dire enough that the UN may not be able to fully establish an interim government for the June 30 deadline. "Given the deteriorating situation and the violence on the ground, even that task has been rather difficult," Mr. Annan told reporters. "For the foreseeable future, insecurity is going to be a major constraint for us. And so I cannot say right now that I am going to be sending in a large UN team."
For another thing, only the Americans will be able to maintain civil peace in Iraq. Their hastily trained Iraqi police force has proved utterly unfit for the job. This week, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak pledged to train tens of thousands of police, whom he wants to replace American soldiers. (This is another paradox: In his grand plan to build a democratic Arab world, Mr. Bush has found a rare ally in the Egyptian autocrat.)
But even many anti-war observers acknowledge that the only force that can feasibly maintain the peace and help bring back economic order in the foreseeable future is the U.S. military.
"So here's Bush's dilemma," said Ivo Daadler, who was a member of the U.S. National Security Council in the 1990s. "Never has it been clearer that America needs international support and engagement in Iraq, and never has it been less likely that it will get that. That's the dilemma that we have created by starting the war and continuing in the way we have acted in the last year."
As Mr. Daadler pointed out at a symposium in Washington this week, the introduction of a UN government and a NATO military authority will do little or nothing to diminish the need for U.S. troops.
"At best, as I can see it, we can find maybe another 5,000 or, if you're lucky, 10,000 Brits or 5,000 or so Frenchmen to help. . . . So we will need, if we have to have more troops, to rely on U.S. troops because they're the only ones there," he said.
"It's not as if when you turn this over to NATO, you all of a sudden have 100,000 more troops. So anybody who's out there telling you, 'Let's turn this over to NATO so we can have more troops,' is smoking the same thing the administration is smoking."
This is the pinch Mr. Bush finds himself in: The semi-autonomy of June 30 will be possible only if he accedes to both a humiliating handover of U.S. authority to those hated international bodies, and a dramatic increase in U.S troops, spending and deaths -- all only 18 weeks from election day.
This has led some to question whether Mr. Bush, who has now given in on almost everything else, should quietly give in on the June 30 date -- even if he ends up claiming that this had always been his plan.
"The worst way to do it, in my view, is to stick to the June 30 deadline, frankly. Because the June 30 deadline is, one, artificial, but two, there is nothing you can do between now and then that guarantees that stability will happen in the next six, seven, eight months before elections will take place," Mr. Daadler said.
"So I think the June 30 deadline is now our problem, and we ought to get rid of it. We ought to understand that there is no government, there is no solution . . . that is going to give you a governing structure in Iraq that is capable of keeping it together, other than us. So why not just keep it [the way it is]?"
Of course, Mr. Daalder is a liberal critic, who would not be bothered if John Kerry became president on Nov. 2.
In fact, there is little to indicate that postponing June 30 would help. Kofi Annan, for one, says the fury it would unleash among Iraqis would be far worse than any trouble posed by the early deadline.
"I think that because the date has been put out there, it has to happen on that date," Mr. Dobbins said. "It could only be the Iraqis who could decide to postpone it, and there is no indication that they want to."
No wonder that Mr. Bush is trying to wrap the leaden bulk of compromise in a golden sheath of stubborn determination: With June 30 looming, he must feel increasingly trapped. To move the date, to withdraw the troops, to try to maintain control and U.S. supremacy -- any of these would play into John Kerry's hands. His only hope is that Mr. Kerry, whose policy has been adopted wholesale by the Republicans, will have little of his own to add.
Indeed, Mr. Kerry spent the week attacking the Republican Iraq plan -- not the current one, but the one that was so dramatically abandoned this week. "I think the approach of this administration has been consistent and stubborn in the way that it persists in this American occupation and in proceeding down its own road," he told a New York audience on Wednesday. "It has made that mistake from Day One, and it is costing us money and I think it is costing us lives."
There was a shell-shocked sense in the White House this week that all the plans had gone terribly awry. Mr. Rumsfeld said frankly that he never could have predicted that things would be so bad.
In speaking to the world this week, Mr. Bush must have cast his eye on two earlier dates, both in the spring, both involving presidents who had found themselves in difficult military entanglements abroad.
On April 21, 1961, John F. Kennedy stood before his public to discuss why his efforts to bring democracy to the newly totalitarian Cuba, through the badly botched Bay of Pigs invasion, had become futile. "There's an old saying that victory has a hundred feathers and defeat is an orphan," he lamented. "Further statements, detailed discussions, are not to conceal responsibility, because I am the responsible officer of the government." Cuba would not be invaded again.
On March 31, 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson delivered a speech in the White House announcing that the effort to bring democracy to Vietnam had gone horribly wrong. "With America's sons in the fields far away . . . with our hopes and the world's hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president."
On April 13, 2004, George W. Bush said nothing of the sort. His speech and press conference were mostly notable for their utter lack of contrition or apology, and he certainly did not offer to step down. Nevertheless, those who best understand the politics of Iraq -- and the politics of American elections -- realized that Mr. Bush's words fit squarely into that tradition. He had conceded failure, not on the battlefield but in the political arena, at home and abroad.
With grim reports from Iraq and a June 30 deadline looming, many saw George Bush's waffling press conference this week as a failure of presidential leadership, DOUG SAUNDERS writes. While insisting he would stay his stubborn course, he was actually admitting defeat, adopting his Democratic opponents' Iraq line. But was it too little too late?
By DOUG SAUNDERS
Saturday, April 17, 2004
It had already been the bloodiest week of the Iraq occupation, with the highest death tolls and the most pitched and desperate battles, when the President of the United States entered the East Room of the White House to face his nation on Tuesday night.
In the next hour, George W. Bush gave one of the strangest and most opaque performances of his presidential career. At the time, for those of us watching, it seemed that he was stubbornly, blindly sticking to his guns, refusing to change his Iraq plans by an angstrom despite terrible failures on the ground.
Since then, it has become apparent that something entirely different had happened: The speech was a complete reversal and admission of defeat.
Certainly, he was deeply concerned with two fast-approaching dates. The first is June 30, when the United States has pledged to give up control of Iraq, regardless of the circumstances, to some unnamed non-American authority. The second is the election night of Nov. 2, when -- if things go as badly as feared on June 30, or if the transfer has to be postponed, or if June 30 leads to far worse circumstances in Iraq -- Mr. Bush may find himself handing his own authority over to Democrat John Kerry.
While claiming he was sticking to his guns, Mr. Bush let it be known that those guns were the ones belonging to his opponents -- to the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which he repeatedly urged on Tuesday night to take control of Iraq; and to John Kerry, whose Iraq plan has now been adopted, almost word for word, by the Bush administration.
A year ago, it seemed straightforward: The Americans had won an easy and relatively bloodless victory in Iraq. They would maintain order, rebuild civil society and oversee a gradual transformation to democracy that would be part of the White House's Greater Middle East Initiative, a long-term plan to bring democracy to the Arab world. A year later, none of that has happened, and this week made it apparent that June 30 will be an extremely difficult date.
"I think that what we're seeing now is the Bush administration, however reluctantly and however belatedly, adopting the policy proposals of its principal critics, which would include myself and John Kerry and the United Nations," said James Dobbins, who was Bill Clinton's chief diplomatic official in charge of nation-building efforts in places such as Kosovo and Haiti, and who has long criticized the plans, or the lack of them, for Iraq.
"It was France who argued that you should return sovereignty as soon as possible, and now Bush is doing it. The Democrats have been saying, 'Give NATO and the UN a central role,' and now Bush is doing it. I think he's made some important course corrections, but the question is whether he has done them in time."
In two telling statements Tuesday, Mr. Bush said questions about Iraq's security and its transition to democracy should be directed to Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN's Iraq envoy, and to NATO. Both organizations, which had been sidelined explicitly by the United States during the past year, were surprised to hear that the United States had suddenly deferred to their authority in a multilateral peacekeeping force. So were Republican Party loyalists, only a few of whom realized what had just happened.
"Those two statements are in my mind a failure of presidential leadership," William Kristol, the publisher of the Weekly Standard magazine and a central figure in U.S. conservative politics, said to the Los Angeles Times minutes after the press conference.
The next three days would leave Mr. Kristol and his fellow Republicans even more disappointed. On Thursday, Mr. Brahimi announced that he had consulted Iraqis and was prepared to establish a UN-appointed interim government on June 30. This council would take the place of the Iraqi Governing Council, whose U.S.-appointed members have been denounced by Iraqis as imperial agents.
The United States has devoted much of the past year to bolstering the credibility of the governing council. Yet Paul Bremer, the American governor of Iraq, indicated this week that he approved of Mr. Brahimi's plan, and in a dramatic turnaround, the White House welcomed it too. "In May, he will have an actual proposal, but we have no objections thus far to what he has proposed," Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, told The New York Times. Similar enthusiasm was expressed by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, and was attributed to Mr. Bush.
Even ardent supporters of the White House agenda acknowledged this week that June 30 will be the moment when the United States has to step aside. "We came in as liberators," said Michael O'Hanlon, a hawkish defence analyst with Washington's Brookings Institution. "We did not remain as the champions of the Iraqi people for very long, because we quickly allowed the country to descend into chaos. And then we refused to bring in the international community, so we lost the benefit of legitimacy."
That loss of legitimacy has created a terrible dilemma for Mr. Bush: By maintaining the June 30 deadline, he may be helping put Islamist extremists into power.
Instead of working gradually to bring in an open economy and a representative, non-extremist democracy, the United States will now have to work fast, put in place any form of government it can, and get out. "Had we mobilized sufficient forces and had an adequate plan, had we established a more secure environment for the Iraqi people, then doing this more slowly and carefully would have been an option. We would have had the option to take more time," Mr. Dobbins said. "But now we'll have to get out of the way, and even though our forces are going to have to be there for five more years or more, in the creation of an Iraqi government we're going to have to make some compromises about how representation and democracy work."
Those compromises could mean that Iraqis will elect a religious government when they hold their first elections next year. While they are still largely in favour of the ouster of Saddam Hussein and opposed to the notion of a theocracy, a poll conducted by ABC News last week indicates that their greatest concern, by a wide margin, is the lack of security. That means that an election could be dominated by religious leaders, such as cleric Ahmad Chalabi, or, in a nightmare scenario, someone like Shia strongman Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr, whose rebel forces have been battling U.S. Marines in southern Iraq all month.
But this need for security poses an even more serious dilemma for Mr. Bush, one that could explode in his face on Nov. 2: Even as the United States is forced to cede its authority over Iraq to international bodies, it is simultaneously forced to increase dramatically the number of troops it has in Iraq. This means that the American death toll, and the multibillion-dollar bill to U.S taxpayers, will continue to mount on election day, and for years beyond.
On Thursday, Donald Rumsfeld announced that 20,000 troops due to be sent home would remain in Iraq indefinitely, keeping 135,000 soldiers in Iraq, and hinted that this number might increase.
The reasons are deeply embarrassing: For one thing, it is now extremely likely that the June 30 deadline will not put an end to the violence taking place across Iraq, but deepen it. While some anti-American insurgents will be pleased by the handover of power, others will see the UN-appointed authority as another Western imposition. To make matters worse, key members of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, who have been told repeatedly by the White House that they will get to govern Iraq, expressed bitter opposition this week to the prospect of a government of international peacekeepers.
On Wednesday, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the security situation is dire enough that the UN may not be able to fully establish an interim government for the June 30 deadline. "Given the deteriorating situation and the violence on the ground, even that task has been rather difficult," Mr. Annan told reporters. "For the foreseeable future, insecurity is going to be a major constraint for us. And so I cannot say right now that I am going to be sending in a large UN team."
For another thing, only the Americans will be able to maintain civil peace in Iraq. Their hastily trained Iraqi police force has proved utterly unfit for the job. This week, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak pledged to train tens of thousands of police, whom he wants to replace American soldiers. (This is another paradox: In his grand plan to build a democratic Arab world, Mr. Bush has found a rare ally in the Egyptian autocrat.)
But even many anti-war observers acknowledge that the only force that can feasibly maintain the peace and help bring back economic order in the foreseeable future is the U.S. military.
"So here's Bush's dilemma," said Ivo Daadler, who was a member of the U.S. National Security Council in the 1990s. "Never has it been clearer that America needs international support and engagement in Iraq, and never has it been less likely that it will get that. That's the dilemma that we have created by starting the war and continuing in the way we have acted in the last year."
As Mr. Daadler pointed out at a symposium in Washington this week, the introduction of a UN government and a NATO military authority will do little or nothing to diminish the need for U.S. troops.
"At best, as I can see it, we can find maybe another 5,000 or, if you're lucky, 10,000 Brits or 5,000 or so Frenchmen to help. . . . So we will need, if we have to have more troops, to rely on U.S. troops because they're the only ones there," he said.
"It's not as if when you turn this over to NATO, you all of a sudden have 100,000 more troops. So anybody who's out there telling you, 'Let's turn this over to NATO so we can have more troops,' is smoking the same thing the administration is smoking."
This is the pinch Mr. Bush finds himself in: The semi-autonomy of June 30 will be possible only if he accedes to both a humiliating handover of U.S. authority to those hated international bodies, and a dramatic increase in U.S troops, spending and deaths -- all only 18 weeks from election day.
This has led some to question whether Mr. Bush, who has now given in on almost everything else, should quietly give in on the June 30 date -- even if he ends up claiming that this had always been his plan.
"The worst way to do it, in my view, is to stick to the June 30 deadline, frankly. Because the June 30 deadline is, one, artificial, but two, there is nothing you can do between now and then that guarantees that stability will happen in the next six, seven, eight months before elections will take place," Mr. Daadler said.
"So I think the June 30 deadline is now our problem, and we ought to get rid of it. We ought to understand that there is no government, there is no solution . . . that is going to give you a governing structure in Iraq that is capable of keeping it together, other than us. So why not just keep it [the way it is]?"
Of course, Mr. Daalder is a liberal critic, who would not be bothered if John Kerry became president on Nov. 2.
In fact, there is little to indicate that postponing June 30 would help. Kofi Annan, for one, says the fury it would unleash among Iraqis would be far worse than any trouble posed by the early deadline.
"I think that because the date has been put out there, it has to happen on that date," Mr. Dobbins said. "It could only be the Iraqis who could decide to postpone it, and there is no indication that they want to."
No wonder that Mr. Bush is trying to wrap the leaden bulk of compromise in a golden sheath of stubborn determination: With June 30 looming, he must feel increasingly trapped. To move the date, to withdraw the troops, to try to maintain control and U.S. supremacy -- any of these would play into John Kerry's hands. His only hope is that Mr. Kerry, whose policy has been adopted wholesale by the Republicans, will have little of his own to add.
Indeed, Mr. Kerry spent the week attacking the Republican Iraq plan -- not the current one, but the one that was so dramatically abandoned this week. "I think the approach of this administration has been consistent and stubborn in the way that it persists in this American occupation and in proceeding down its own road," he told a New York audience on Wednesday. "It has made that mistake from Day One, and it is costing us money and I think it is costing us lives."
There was a shell-shocked sense in the White House this week that all the plans had gone terribly awry. Mr. Rumsfeld said frankly that he never could have predicted that things would be so bad.
In speaking to the world this week, Mr. Bush must have cast his eye on two earlier dates, both in the spring, both involving presidents who had found themselves in difficult military entanglements abroad.
On April 21, 1961, John F. Kennedy stood before his public to discuss why his efforts to bring democracy to the newly totalitarian Cuba, through the badly botched Bay of Pigs invasion, had become futile. "There's an old saying that victory has a hundred feathers and defeat is an orphan," he lamented. "Further statements, detailed discussions, are not to conceal responsibility, because I am the responsible officer of the government." Cuba would not be invaded again.
On March 31, 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson delivered a speech in the White House announcing that the effort to bring democracy to Vietnam had gone horribly wrong. "With America's sons in the fields far away . . . with our hopes and the world's hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president."
On April 13, 2004, George W. Bush said nothing of the sort. His speech and press conference were mostly notable for their utter lack of contrition or apology, and he certainly did not offer to step down. Nevertheless, those who best understand the politics of Iraq -- and the politics of American elections -- realized that Mr. Bush's words fit squarely into that tradition. He had conceded failure, not on the battlefield but in the political arena, at home and abroad.
