spinoff

So finally – at long last – it seems that George W. Bush’s wheels are falling off. The forces of reason, dormant for so long within the Republican party, have started to wake. They have rubbed their eyes, noticed the catastrophic disaster that has beset the United States in Iraq and have spoken out against the party line.

 

But though in immanent danger of complete political collapse, one must not underestimate Bush, or more specifically his quite awesome propaganda wing (the word propaganda is appropriate here). Some of the PR twists executed by the Karl Rove machine have been quite jaw-dropping in their audacity and ambition. Has there ever been a more brilliantly-fudged piece of logic than: “we were attacked by a Saudi Arabian currently hiding in Afghanistan. Therefore, we must attack Iraq”?

 

One must also not underestimate the capacity for self-delusion. Yesterday, George W. Bush stood up and with a straight face told a crowd: “I want to tell you, yes, we can accomplish this fight and win in Iraq. And secondly, I want to tell you, we must, for the sake of our children and grandchildren.” The rhetoric has not changed. Perhaps that is the nature of the rhetorician – if one is the sum of one’s words, then those words must be consistent and therefore one cannot change tack.

 

One must not underestimate Bush – he still has potent weapons at his disposal. Nor should one underestimate the awfulness of the situation in which he now finds himself. Everything is turning against him: high-profile defections over Iraq have hurt his party; his most loyal ally has left Number 10 Downing Street, to be replaced by some guy who refuses even to use the phrase “War on Terror” and his popularity rating is at an all-time low.

 

So bad is his situation that the anxious President has even started meeting religious leaders and historians to discuss his legacy. One can imagine the question “how will they remember me, fellas?” being met by silence, broken only by the noise of uncomfortable squirming in Oval office chairs.

 

And so now he sits – to borrow a phrase – in office but not in power. The war has him in a horrific embrace from which he cannot extricate himself. He cannot continue with the same strategy because it will mean more deaths, more stagnation, more loss of international standing and more damage to the Republican party.

 

But on the other hand he cannot change course and bring troops home because to do so would be to rubbish the entire basis of his Iraq foray, to admit incompetence, to imply that the last two years have been a waste of time, money and worst of all US troops’ lives and to leave Iraq wide open as a playground for the Iranians, the Wahhabists, the bombers, the Shia death squads and civil war.

 

George W. Bush can go neither forward, nor back. He can neither advance nor retreat. He can neither effect a political nor a military solution. He is losing the support of his own party having long ago lost the support of both the wider US polity, the electorate, the domestic and global media and the rest of the world.

 

And there he stands, frozen and with no options left to him, other than to bicker with the increasing numbers of people who point out his egregious failures. Now his only hope is that news reports that start with paragraphs such as:

“U.S. counterterror officials are warning of an increased risk of an attack this summer, given Al Qaeda's apparent interest in summertime strikes and increased Al Qaeda training in the Afghan-Pakistani border region.”

will be sufficient to maintain the illusion that the United States is fighting Al-Qaeda on the streets of Baghdad. Certainly there is an Al-Qaeda presence in Iraq, but what is absolutely clear is that United States and UK forces are spending the majority of their time engaged as third parties in a sectarian civil war between Shia and Sunni insurgents. The truck bomb that killed 150 people in a Baghdad marketplace this weekend was not the work of Al-Qaeda, but Sunni militiamen. US troops have been reduced to playing the role of a police force.

 

This situation is of Bush’s own making. Iraq – like all his foreign policy moves – has been a catastrophic disaster. He was outmaneuvered by the revolting North Korean junta, which despite US efforts still got its bomb (any solution there will come as a result of Chinese intervention). He is currently being bested by Iran (undoubtedly the out and out winner in the whole Iraq fiasco. One must pray that Bush’s frustration does not lead to his authorizing a strike against Iranian nuclear facilities at Natanz).

 

At home he has been just as destructive. He has spent the US deficit and subjected the economy to a huge surge in debt, and the absence of a dollar crash has been nothing short of a miracle. He has embraced China as a trade partner, again entwining the US in a relationship that it cannot afford to exit, in this case because the US is now hooked on the deflationary effect of cheap imported Chinese goods. So long as this relationship continues, the export deficit will continue to grow to dizzying levels and the US will become increasingly unable to force the revaluation of the Renminbi which would offset, though only slightly, the effects of this growing trade imbalance. Here, again, Bush cannot act.

 

He also cannot act on illegal immigration, a totemic issue for the right of his party, which wants a wall along the southern border to keep immigrant Mexicans out. But again, the overheated economy requires cheap migrant labour because Americans are unwilling to take on the low paid manual agricultural work required during the harvest season. Higher input prices for farmers would be passed on to consumers, causing upward inflationary pressure. Bush wants a border wall, but realizes he cannot have one.

 

The inappropriately small force deployed in Afghanistan; the mismanagement of the Iraq war; the dissolution of global support for the US; the cack-handed dealings with North Korea; the rise of Iran; the fragility of the US economy; the forced departures of Donald Rumsfeld, secretary of defence, and of George Tenet, director of the C.I.A.; the Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby trial; the creation of a gulag in Cuba – the overriding picture that develops when considering the defining elements of the Bush presidency is of a man who simply has not understood the world around him.

 

If one were to be cruel, one might say that he suffered from an inability to interpret events and situations in ways that deviated from a highly restrictive philosophy, which was born of a Damascene conversion to evangelical Christianity after a prolonged period of alcoholism. Seen in this light, Bush was mentally restricted from the start and, as such, utterly inappropriate as a leader.

 

The cruel irony is that the most grotesque failure – Iraq – was not entirely Bush's fault. It wasn’t. Left wingers argue that Bush cruelly pursues some unspoken agenda on behalf of big business, big oil, or some such. Crazed, extreme left wingers think Bush arranged 9/11 to give an excuse to attack Iraq. They are just as foolish as their counterparts on the extreme right who claim Bush was a force for moral re-armament, for justice, truth and so on.

 

Just as foolish are the Jihadist, anti-Americans, who claim Bush invaded Muslim soil because he wanted to destroy Islam and steal the region’s oil. The first part of that statement is merely extremist propaganda, and the second half economic nonsense – if the US wants oil, it buys it. It has already spent $700bn on the war, an amount it can never hope to recoup from Iraqi oil sales. The ‘war for oil’ theory is an economic nonsense.

 

The Iraq war was waged for the best of reasons. Assessed objectively, Bush stands for values which seem reasonable: be good; encourage other people to be good; spread democracy and so on. Bush had good intentions. He also has a reputation for being an affable, humourous and persuasive individual, capable of charming both large audiences, as well as individuals.

 

He also had a crisis with which to deal. He stepped up and faced the test. We can now say without fear of contradiction, that he has failed it, catastrophically.

 

Yours etc.,

 

Spinoff.