A cynical man might suspect the President is having us all on.  Cynical men, thankfully, are hard to find in these happy times, and we are left with nothing but baseless speculations about George W. Bush's plan to end the war.

Well, not end it, exactly.  His plan is to...actually, I'm not sure what his plan is.  It was almost forty years ago that Richard Nixon was alleged to have made mention of his "secret plan" to end the war; as it happens, he said no such thing, and rehabilitationist historians have claimed that Nixon, in 1968, had no plan whatsoever to win the war, as if that's somehow better than having one but not telling anybody what it is.  Bush, that gooey, shriveled amalgam of Nixon and Harding, is practically allergic to spelling out his plans in any detail, lest the country rise as one and point out that the plans are idiotic, so he's done the myth of Tricky Dick one better:  he not only won't tell us what his plan consists of, he won't even tell us what it's supposed to accomplish. 

Any speech by this president that starts out with him claiming that victory, when it comes, will not come with grand pronouncements and gleeful celebrations on the deck of a naval vessel is one that reflects a dangerous disconnect with reality.  But the vagueness of his speech, and the utter contempt his proposed plan shows for the conclusions drawn by the Iraq Study Group, are nothing short of terrifying, leading to suspicions that if he has stopped listening to the gaggle of ideologues who got him into this mess, it has not been so he can start listening to his father's advisers, or to the press and the public, or even to the leaders of his own military, but to Henry Kissinger.  Never much for hearing what other people have to say, even if what they're saying is "Hey, look at that big gigantic disaster that everyone else can see", the President has apparently gone into an advanced state of obstinacy not unlike that of his idol, Ronald Reagan, during the days following the Iran-Contra scandal.  He's saying the things he knows, with great bitterness, that he has to say, but his words are in no way reflected in his actions.  He is a man totally disconnected from his necessary public face.

There will be no drawing down, no widening circle of diplomacy, no negotiation with religious leaders, no alteration of strategy, no tactical withdrawals, no scaling back, no attempt at engaging the surrounding region.  There will be almost nothing of the ISG's recommendations; and, as for the plans proposed by the Democrats and other naysayers, well, clearly they don't have any plans, which can be inferred by their inability to propose a solution which instantly fixes every problem in the Middle East in perpetuity.  (Many people would argue that having no plan, at a certain point, is preferable to continuing with a disastrous plan, but in the unlikely event that Bush concurs, he clearly doesn't think we've reached that point yet.)  Instead, we will continue on with a plan that is nearly identical to the one we've pursued thus far, trying the same thing and hoping for different results.  The Iraqis must do more, it is said (Vietnamization, anyone?), conjuring the money to do so out of the ether, training their security forces in the middle of a partisan atmosphere one bloodbath away from a massacre -- or is that one massacre away from a bloodbath?  More troops will come, and more money will be spent (this latter point was much emphasized, in clear hope that the public will percieve any attempt by the Democrats to block the President's non-plan as a cowardly, treacherous failure to support the troops), but the endgame is maddeningly nebulous, and the centerpiece of the "new strategy" -- a surge of troops in urban trouble spots and a crackdown on suspected insurgent beehives -- is likely to result in little more than more dead soldiers and more seething resentment on both sides.  There is no workable border security plan, no economic incentive, no diplomatic component, no clear goal, no exit strategy, no shift in tactics; nothing more than an indication that Bush is listening to the right-wing ideologues who blather that force is the only thing the Arab respects.

Already excuses are being prepared, blame is being readied for placement:  the Iraqis are not helping, the Democrats lack resolve, the McCainite branch of the G.O.P. has no plan.  The careful lining up of these justifications for future failure is a far easier task than working on a plan to ensure such failure is prevented.  Already new targets are being scouted:  in the distance, its clawed hands working a complex and invisible web of strings, Iran lurks, and suddenly, the government cares enough about Somalia to launch airstrikes that are said to have killed a major al-Q'aeda leader that no one bothered to tell us was there in the first place.  Soon enough, it will all be somebody else's problem, and the people who currently occupy the White House will no more have to worry about it than Kennedy had to worry about Vietnam in 1968.  If the other team's fans are obnoxious enough, maybe no one will notice how far you are from their end zone until the game is over.

A cynical man might suspect that the reason the President doesn't show a tremendous sense of urgency in coming up with a workable plan for Iraq is because, from his perspective, things aren't all that bad -- indeed, his grudging public claims to the contrary, he may well genuinely believe we've won the war.  Saddam Hussein is dead, which settles the score in the most direct sense for the literal-minded Texan; and given his own soap-bubble-thin conception of democracy, the existence of elections may be enough for him to sincerely think of Iraq as among the free nations of the world.  All the right people are getting rich off of the Iraq project, and its laws make it a free-market paradise on paper, at least, surely a notch on the victory belt.  And if Americans are dying, he may just be a big enough fool to believe the rhetoric of his own ideological backers that we more wisely fight them abroad than at home.  Sure, he's unpopular, but he's always scorned polls, and when his erstwhile Secretary of Defense said that leaders are always unpopular during wartime, Bush might just have believed him.  Indeed, he's made little secret of wearing the scorn of the global community like a badge of honor.  A cynical man might suspect that the President is behaving the way he is because the distance between his public claims about the state of the war and his private opinions about it are incredibly vast.

Luckily, a cynical man is hard to find these days.

Permanent Link
Previous Entry ~ Current Entry ~ Next Entry
E-mail the Ludic Log ~ ~ Find Me Out

"Fear is not in the habit of speaking truth; when perfect sincerity is expected, perfect freedom must be allowed; nor has anyone who is apt to be angry when he hears the truth any cause to wonder that he does not hear it." (Tacitus)