It’s Now Time for Bush Vindication

I’ve spent some of tonight watching the live coverage of our last combat troops leaving Iraq. Of course, we are leaving about 50,000 soldiers there (“military consultants” … kinda reminds me of the “military adviser” jargon in the early days of Vietnam) but I can accept that. It’s an acknowledgment that terrorism is still a problem there and some anti-terrorist presence is called for.

I didn’t like this war. Many didn’t. Iraq is still far from ideal. However, we’ve got some indisputable facts to celebrate tonight. First, the “surge” turned things around. It did not achieve its stated goal of giving the Iraqi government breathing room to clean up their act. The government is still shaky at best. But the mere increase in troops smacked down the enemy and allowed Iraqi forces to get a bit better at protecting their own. Without the surge, we wouldn’t be able to leave today.

Second, working with the Iraqi government, Bush committed to get us out of there. He agreed to a timetable of sorts, one which Barack Obama has made good on. One might go so far as to say Bush fought the wrong war the right way.

So now we wait and see what happens next. If in the next five to ten years Iraq emerges as a democracy it will be a grand victory directly traceable to George W. Bush. We will probably all acknowledge that the false pretense that got us into the war mattered less than the outcome, a democracy in a region badly in need of democracy.

I would hate to think the past seven years were a complete waste. So let’s hope that Iraq can keep its act together. And regardless of what happens, let’s pause to welcome our troops back home and honor the memory of those who were not so lucky to see this day of withdrawal.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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Afghanistan Clear as Mud

It has been over 24 hours since President Barack Obama made his speech announcing our strategy in Afghanistan going forward. Conservatives, as could be expected, used the speech as another opportunity to bash Obama. The speech was not perfect and the plan it described less so, but in the usual brain-dead fashion Conservatives seized upon the dumbest of talking points.

Karl Rove said the President took longer to give the generals 75% of what they asked for than it took Bush to defeat the Taliban back in 2001. Karl has clearly lost his mojo since we wouldn’t be talking about Afghanistan right now if Bush had defeated the Taliban in 2001.

Another criticism is that we have announced an exit date, giving our enemy the time period in which they can sit tight and wait to re-emerge. More foolishness. We are going to have an 18 month target to achieve our objectives and then depending on conditions on the ground, we will turn over responsibility to the Afghans.

When it comes to military exercises, I’m more or less a regular Joe. I have to distill all the complexities down to the basics. If the Conservatives had half a brain they would be making their complaints based on the basics.

Here are the basics:

1. We will teach the Afghan army and police how to kick Taliban ass.
2. We will nation build. Yes I know Obama calls it a “civilian strategy” but let’s be frank. If you are helping a government behave like a democracy in the image of America, you are nation building.
3. Stronger ties with Pakistan, vaguely stated.

My average Joe perspective on this is that the strategy is muddled at best. First, we cannot afford to go into every country where a corrupt central government is unable to protect its people from the local thugs. The Taliban may be a scourge but how are they a threat to the United States? They want to oppress fellow Afghans. Disturbing, shameful but really not our problem. Our problem is Al Qaeda which has all but disappeared from Afghanistan.

Second, nation building only works in a country that cries out for our brand of democracy. The notion that we will turn centuries of tribal tradition into a united people who respect a central government within 18 months is a wild stretch of the imagination. I have seen no reports of Afghan soldiers particularly wanting to be trained by us. In fact, the situation looks quite grim:

General Egon Ramms, a German commander in the NATO-led force in Afghanistan, warned last month that the current police force of around 68,000 is prone to corruption and training has been less than efficient.

Out of 94,000 Afghan soldiers trained so far, 10,000 have defected, he said, while estimating that 15 percent of the armed forces are drug addicts

via The Raw Story | Obama surge stands or falls with Afghan training.

Finally, the third leg in the stool is the wobbliest, the least well defined and yet to my mind the most important. Al Qaeda is in Pakistan. Pakistan has nukes. Pakistan seems more worried and paranoid about India than about the terrorist thugs within their own borders. The bold move and the most truly hawkish one would have been to issue an ultimatum to Zardari that either he cleans up the Al Qaeda mess in his country, including the capture of Osama Bin Laden, within a particular timeframe, or we will send troops into Pakistan and get the job done ourselves. Wonder what old Dick Cheney would have said about that?

As it stands now, we have to hope that the assumption that Afghanistan is a carbon copy of Iraq, just one surge away from stability is the correct one. It does not look like we will see the Afghan equivalent of the Sunni awakening to help us along. We have to hope that an illegally elected President with a drug kingpin for a brother will prove to be a reliable ally. We have to hope that Pakistan will act in good faith to combat the criminals in their own country.

To my average Joe mind, this seems like a lot of hope and not a lot of strategy.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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George W. Bush: A Final Assessment

Since I only became politically aware within the last two or so years, I’m always hesitant to use the phrase, “I’ve never seen …” but I’ve never seen an administration leave Washington with as much retroactive public relations as that of the Bush administration. It’s even been named by the media as the Bush Legacy Project Tour. We’ve seen the President, Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice and even the elusive Vice President, Dick Cheney on multiple talk shows proudly proclaiming the victories of the Bush administration. The latest example of this was the President’s final televised address to the nation.

As I watched him, I could see how he could be the target of both sympathy and utter disdain simultaneously. When George Bush says that he always had our country’s best interests at heart, I believe him. I have no reason to doubt that. He comes from a family that has given decades of service to this country. With the exception of relatively minor acts of terrorism (World Trade Center of 2/23/93, and Oklahoma City) our country had not sustained a direct attack from an enemy since Pearl Harbor and then September 11 came. Bush was faced with an unprecedented loss of life on our shores, lives taken not from a warring country but from a nebulous network of international thugs. Conservatives are right when they say that most Americans in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 would have given Bush carte blanche to make sure this never happened again.

Was the appropriate way to end WWII and avenge Pearl Harbor to drop two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 and bring an horrific end to the lives of many innocent civilians? President Harry Truman did what he thought best for his country. He stands much higher in history then he did immediately upon leaving office. Bush made terrible choices in response to 9/11 but he did so to protect his country. This is where I do feel a sympathy for him. I find his exit from the world stage a sad one. I’m annoyed by folks who say they want to prosecute him for war crimes. I feel he should just be left alone.

But then I listen to some of what Bush says in his farewell address and the disdain starts to creep in. Not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a “disappointment” to Bush. On MSNBC’s “Hardball”, Chris Matthews gave a brilliant analogy. When a cop sees a man reaching for his wallet and shoots and kills him because he thought the man was reaching for a gun, he doesn’t say “I’m disappointed that the man didn’t have a gun.” He says that he’s sorry he made a terrible mistake in judgement. Instead of regretting his decision based on faulty intelligence, Bush only regrets that the intelligence didn’t justify his decision. He’s happy with the decision and unhappy that he can’t justify it. When you hear this kind of logic you just want to slap the guy.

Bush angrily told a reporter at his last press conference that the government response to Katrina was not slow. He pointed to thousands of people being rescued from rooftops by “chopper drivers” (apparently George forgot the word “pilot”) as evidence of the government’s effective response, as support of his original assessment of “Good job Brownie”. His regrets about Katrina seem limited to whether or not he availed himself of a photo-op during the crisis. He seems oblivious to the fact that thousands were stranded without clean water and care in the immediate aftermath of the flood and that to this day many are still displaced. You watch Bush talk about this stuff and you say “the man just doesn’t get it.” You want to shake him and wake him up.

It is hard to look at the Bush presidency and come away with any sort of success story. To some extent, his administration was a victim of circumstance but sometimes it is not what happens to you but how you react to it that shapes public and historical opinion. I don’t blame Bush for 9/11 even though it happened on his watch. I do blame him for attacking the wrong country. I don’t blame him for Katrina. I do blame him for not taking the role of an empathetic leader at the time and not mobilizing his government to take proper action.

I believe the final assessment of George W. Bush is that he was a man not ready to be President, faced with challenges even the greatest of Presidents would have found daunting. He did his best but within his limitations, his best was no where good enough. Just as he wishes Barack Obama well, I wish him well. I hope he has a peaceful retirement and finds a way to use the role of ex-President to help the world in much the same way that Jimmy Carter, George-41, and Bill Clinton have.

I think given the choice between sympathy and disdain, I fall on the side of sympathy. I think we should let George W. Bush return quietly to citizen Bush and allow history to judge him in good time. That will be more than enough punishment for his sins.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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The Surge: Premature Joculation

Much has been made lately of Barack Obama’s refusal to admit that the surge has worked. Even the liberal MSM has questioned why Obama won’t give McCain his props for supporting such a great military strategy.

What am I missing here? We are not even at pre-surge troop levels yet and the oft cited reduction in violence has not had much time to endure. In fact, just today three female suicide bombers struck Baghdad and another struck Kirkuk killing and wounding loads of innocent citizens. We won’t even go into the fact that the goal of the surge, to provide Maliki’s government some air cover while they get their act together, has not yet been completely achieved.

It’s way too early to celebrate, folks, and Barack is right to not ring the victory bell too loudly. That McCain is making the “successful surge” one of his talking points should be no surprise. He’s part and parcel of an administration that declared “mission accomplished” before sending thousands more young American men and women to die.

Respectfully,
Rutherford

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Democracy in Israel vs Iraq

On a recent edition of Real Time with Bill Maher, the stand-up comedian turned political commentator interviewed a former intelligence officer who suggested that establishing or defending democracy in a foreign country was not worth the money or spilled blood of Americans. Maher, who delights in outraging others was, for once outraged himself when the intelligence officer included Israel in his list of countries we should not defend. As panelist Janeane Garafolo correctly observed, Maher nearly bit the fella’s head off.

The question here is an interesting one that should not be ignored. Is it the job of the United States of America to establish and defend democracies throughout the world? If our long standing alliance with Israel is based, as Maher suggested, on maintaining one of the few democracies in the region, then what is wrong with our presence in Iraq to (supposedly) establish democracy there?

History has shown us that isolationism is a dangerous foreign policy. Now that we live in a global economy with truly global communication, isolationism is not only dangerous, it is near impossible. Yet, the nagging question remains, is the spread of democracy the answer to world peace and prosperity and if it is, is it our job to do the spreading?

The jury is out for me on this one. I can tell you one thing. If the answer truly is that we are the defenders of “freedom” (whatever that is), then we need more consistency. How ’bout some freedom fighting in Darfur?

Respectfully,
Rutherford