Bush and the house of cards

The chickens are coming home to roost for the Bush administration; as the situation in Iraq turns from bad to worse, the president’s re-election chances are slipping away

By MICHAEL HARRIS

According to the latest Harris Poll (No. 66), the much-ballyhooed bounce for the president out of the recent Republican convention in New York has vanished. Ahead of Democratic rival John Kerry by 10 points as recently as June, President Bush now finds himself a point behind in the race for the White House.

The main reason for the tightening of the race is this stark statistic: 51% of respondents do not believe that President Bush deserves to be re-elected, though 45% still believe that he does.

Republican prospects are shrivelling in the long, cold shadow of Iraq. As the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal slug it out for their chosen candidate, the objective information on the Iraq war has gone from bad to worse for the administration.

Yesterday, the National Intelligence Council, in a document approved by the National Intelligence Board chaired by the acting director of the CIA, John E. McLaughlin, gave its first formal assessment of the war in Iraq since October 2002. It was an ugly picture. Best case, Iraq will remain "tenuous" in political, economic, and security terms for the foreseeable future. Worst case, it will slide into a chaotic civil war in which the United States will become an active ally of one of the factions vying for power. In other words, the U.S. may have found its West Bank and Gaza.

The expert pessimism about the progress of the Iraq war stands in sharp contrast to rosy assessments from the White House. For months the president has been hawkishly optimistic about Iraq, despite the bloody evidence of nightly newscasts and more than 1,000 U.S. dead in a war that the secretary general of the UN told the BBC this week was "illegal."

The credibility gap between the president’s version of events in Iraq and the documented evidence to the contrary is growing ever wider. One of the administration’s stock defences of the Iraqi fiasco is that average Iraqis are "better off" now that they are rid of Saddam Hussein. But if the quality of their daily lives is used as the measure of that assertion, it is at the very least highly questionable.

The military situation has become so desperate on the ground in Iraq that the State Department is proposing to divert funds that were supposed to be used to reconstruct the country to police, border patrols and other security measures. Water and sewer programs would shrink from $4.2 billion to $1.9 billion. Funds to restore electricity would drop from $5.47 billion to a mere $1 billion. Three-and-a-half billion has also been scooped out of the Iraqi Oil Fund to pay for security costs — an odd way to try to win hearts and minds in this war-torn nation.

Strange as it may seem, a cross-party committee of the U.S. Congress this week vigorously criticized the Bush administration for its poor record in reconstructing Iraq. The facts are on their side. Only $1 billion of the $18 billion set aside for the reconstruction of Iraq’s shattered infrastructure has been spent. In the opinion of the committee, the U.S. was "failing to make use of its most potent tools to influence Iraq’s future." And the critics of the Bush record in Iraq include people from his own party. This is how Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel described the rebuilding effort in Iraq. "It’s beyond embarrassing, it’s now in the zone of dangerous."

Perhaps the biggest danger of all for President Bush and the Republicans is this incontrovertible fact: Both the bipartisan 9/11 Commission and the president’s own former anti-terrorism czar, Richard Clarke, have found that Iraq had nothing to do with the 2001 terrorist attack on U.S. soil. The question is forming like the eye of a political hurricane: If the $200 billion plus that has gone into a war in a country not involved in 9/11 had been spent either pursuing Osama bin Laden or securing America’s ports and borders, would the U.S. be safer today?

Luckily for President Bush, the only person in America who has misplayed the Iraq issue worse than he has is John Kerry. It is as if Kerry read Norman Mailer’s cynical pronouncement that you can’t become president of the U.S. by vilifying America and took it to heart. Instead of decrying the war unequivocally the way that former Democratic rival Howard Dean once did, John Kerry has draped himself in the same flag of manipulative patriotism that the president has used to say war is peace and ignorance is strength.

Which is why there is a photo finish to see who will be running the Ministry of Truth 50 days from now.

http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Ottawa/Michael_Harris/2004/09/16/pf-632069.html