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COMMENTARY
Will the UN bail out
Bush?
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- Make no mistake: US President George W Bush is in big
trouble.
Whereas a week ago, Americans were
talking about the dread "V" word - for Vietnam - this
week the dreaded "W" word - for Watergate - was back in
vogue, even as the "V" word was still in use. Watergate
plus Vietnam is about the worst combination for a
sitting president that anyone could possibly imagine.
And the almost daily announcement on the news
that another US soldier has been killed in an attack in
Iraq, bringing to 32, 33, 34, the number of troops
killed since Bush declared an end to major hostilities
in the war, recalls nothing so much as the daily
reminders on the evening news 23 years ago that killed
the presidency of Jimmy Carter: "Day 385 of the American
hostage crisis in Iran."
Short of a miracle -
such as the discovery of a cache of weapons of mass
destruction in an Iraqi mountainside in circumstances
that clearly indicate that it was under Saddam Hussein's
control as of March 18, 2003, or the return of robust US
economic growth that can quickly bring the unemployment
rate down to five percent - there is probably only one
way that Bush can save his presidency at this point.
But the cost in personal pride and policy will
be extremely high.
To save his administration,
Bush must now essentially abandon the aggressive
unilateralism that has dominated his foreign policy
since even before September 11, 2001; ask forgiveness
from US allies who refused to join his "coalition of the
willing" in Iraq; and return to the United Nations
Security Council for a new resolution that will give the
world body control over the occupation.
As India
- whose rejection of Bush's request for as many as
20,000 troops to act as mercenaries for US foreign
policy struck a devastating blow to the imperial dreams
of the Pentagon hawks - made clear this week, it, as
well as other nations, would be willing to provide
peacekeepers and other kinds of support to the Iraqi
occupation only if the UN Security Council authorizes
it.
That is what US lawmakers - both Republicans
and Democrats - want desperately, as UN
Secretary-General Kofi Annan found out during a brief
visit with many of them after a White House visit with
Bush himself Monday. That is also what the US
foreign-policy establishment - whose cautions about the
rush to war were ignored or mocked by the
neo-conservatives and rightwing hawks who hijacked
foreign policy after September 11 - are calling for.
That is even what Bush's own economic and political
advisers have begun to whisper.
Their message:
"The United States cannot by itself afford the burdens -
either economically or politically - of occupying Iraq.
We need help, and lots of it, even though we know that
we will have to give up control to get it. "
Even more, it is the message of what many here
refer to as "the permanent government"- the
professionals and civil servants who staff the
national-security bureaucracies, in particular. They are
clearly fed up with the arrogance and hubris of the
hawks centered in the offices of Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney who, in
their view, have driven the country into a quagmire.
Thus, CIA Director George Tenet, grilled by
senators in a closed hearing Wednesday, while taking
full responsibility for the reference in Bush's State of
the Union speech to Saddam's alleged efforts to obtain
uranium from Africa, also deftly pointed his finger
directly at hawks in the White House and the Pentagon as
the parties who pushed hard for its inclusion.
Thus, General John Abizaid, the new commander of
allied forces in Iraq, hand-picked by Rumsfeld,
explicitly contradicted his boss in his first appearance
before Congress Wednesday when he said that US forces
there are facing a "classical guerrilla-type campaign"
that is becoming more effective and may be organized at
the regional level.
Thus, officials at the State
Department and the CIA are leaking damning information
about the hawks' efforts to silence, intimidate, and
circumvent analysts who disagreed with their cocksure
predictions about how the Iraqis would greet US forces
as "liberators", how few troops would be needed for the
occupation, how easily the country could be transformed
into a working democracy; and how quickly the economy
would be back on its feet and pumping millions of
barrels of oil.
Come September, these deep
throats are likely to be singing publicly in hearings on
Capitol Hill, unless something changes radically.
Even if Bush and the hawks could stand up to
them, however, there are also the soldiers who are
actually in Iraq and who are making no secret about how
angry they are. While radio talk show hosts debated
whether the uranium reference in Bush's speech was
justified or not this week, the story that carried the
most wallop in Washington was the interviews on ABC's
Good Morning America with troops in Fallujah that
aired Wednesday.
"If Donald Rumsfeld were here,"
said one, "I'd ask him for his resignation." Another
told a reporter that he had his own "Most Wanted" deck
of cards. "The aces in my deck are Paul Bremer, Donald
Rumsfeld, George Bush and Paul Wolfowitz." Meanwhile,
career officers are telling reporters that the Iraq
deployment threatens to destroy the army's ability to
recruit and retain its troops.
This is poison
for a president.
There are signs that Bush
realizes this, particularly after meeting with Annan.
Before this week, Washington showed little interest in
returning to the UN for a new resolution. But that
changed this week, as Secretary of State Colin Powell
began sounding out US allies - including German Foreign
Minister Joschka Fischer - about what kind of resolution
could persuade Berlin to help out.
Annan himself
was encouraging. Diplomatic sources pointed to his
statement Wednesday in which, after noting the divisions
that existed in the Security Council before the war, he
stressed that "Now that the war is over, we should focus
on stabilizing and building a peaceful and prosperous
Iraq."
"It's getting more and more obvious that
the [Security] Council's leverage [vis-a-vis Washington]
is increasing," said one source who noted the growing
sense in the US capital that the optimistic predictions
of the hawks had put the president in serious peril.
The question is, what will be the UN's price for
bailing the administration out, and will Bush be willing
to pay it?
(Inter Press Service) |
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