How the Bush administration got spooked

How the Bush administration got spooked
By Tom Engelhardt

It's finally Wizard of Oz time in America. You know - that moment when the
curtains are pulled back, the fearsome-looking wizard wreathed in all that
billowing smoke turns out to be some pitiful little guy, and everybody looks
around sheepishly, wondering why they acted as they did for so long.

Starting on September 11, 2001 - with a monstrous helping hand from Osama
bin Laden - the Bush administration played the fear card with unbelievable
effectiveness. For years, with its companion "war on terror", it trumped
every other card in the American political deck. With an absurd system for
color-coding dangers to Americans, the president, vice president and the
highest officials in this land were able to paint the media a "high"



incendiary orange and the Democrats an "elevated" bright yellow,
functionally sidelining them.

How stunningly in recent weeks the landscape has altered - almost like your
basic hurricane sweeping through some unprotected and unprepared city. Now,
to their amazement, Bush administration officials find themselves thrust
through the equivalent of a Star-Trekkian wormhole into an anti-universe
where everything that once worked for them seems to work against them. As
always, in the face of domestic challenge, they have responded by
attacking - a tactic that was effective for years. The president, vice
president, national security adviser and others have ramped up their
assaults, functionally accusing Democratic critics of little short of
treason - of essentially undermining American forces in the field, if not
offering aid and comfort to the enemy. On his recent trip to Asia, the
president put it almost as bluntly as his vice president did at home, "As
our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life,
they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them into
war continue to stand behind them." The Democrats were, he said over and
over, "irresponsible" in their attacks. *** Cheney called them spineless
"opportunists" peddling dishonestly for political advantage.

But instead of watching the Democrats fall silent under assault as they have
for years, they unexpectedly found themselves facing a roiling oppositional
hubbub threatening the unity of their own congressional party. In his
sudden, heartfelt attack on Bush administration Iraq plans ("a flawed policy
wrapped in illusion") and his call for a six-month timetable for American
troop withdrawal, Democratic congressional hawk John Murtha took on the
Republicans over their attacks more directly than any mainstream Democrat
has ever done. ("I like guys who've never been there that criticize us
who've been there. I like that. I like guys who got five deferments and
never been there and send people to war, and then don't like to hear
suggestions about what needs to be done. I resent the fact, on Veterans Day,
he [Bush] criticized Democrats for criticizing them.") Perhaps more
important, as an ex-Marine and decorated Vietnam veteran clearly speaking
for a military constituency (and possibility some Pentagon brass), he gave
far milder and more "liberal" Democrats cover.

For the first time since the war in Iraq began, "tipping points", constantly
announced in Iraq but never quite in sight, have headed for home. Dan
Bartlett, counselor to the president and drafter of recent presidential
attacks on the Democrats, told David Sanger of the New York Times that
"Bush's decision to fight back ... arose after he became concerned the
[Iraq] debate was now at a tipping point"; while Howard Fineman of Newsweek
dubbed Murtha himself a "one-man tipping point".

Something indeed did seem to tip, for when the White House and associates
took Murtha on, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats leaped
aggressively to his defense. In fact, something quite unimaginable even a
few days earlier occurred. When Republican Representative Jean Schmidt of
Ohio, the most junior member of the House, accused Murtha (via an unnamed
Marine colonel supposedly from her district) of being a coward, Democratic
Representative Harold Ford from Tennessee "charged across the chamber's
center aisle to the Republican side screaming that Schmidt's attack had been
unwarranted. "You guys are pathetic!" yelled Representative Martin Meehan,
Democrat of Massachusetts. "Pathetic."

There could, however, be no greater sign of a politically changed landscape
than the decision of former president Bill Clinton (who practically had
himself adopted into the Bush family over the last year) to tell a group of
Arab students in Dubai only two-and-a-half years late that the Iraqi
invasion was a "big mistake". Since he is undoubtedly a stalking horse for
his wife, that great, cautious ship-of-nonstate, the Hillary Clinton
presidential campaign, should soon turn its prow ever so slowly to catch the
oppositional winds.

If you want to wet an index finger yourself and hoist it airwards to see
which way the winds are blowing, then just check out how the media has been
framing in headlines the recent spate of administration attacks. Headline
writing is a curious in-house craft - and well worth following. Changing
headline language is a good signal that something's up. When the president
attacks, it's now commonly said that he's "lashing out" - an image of
emotional disarray distinctly at odds with the once-powerful sense of the
Bush administration as the most disciplined White House on record and of the
president and vice president as resolutely unflappable. Here's just a small
sampling:

The Miami Herald, "President lashes out at critics of Iraq war"; the
Associated Press, Cheney latest to lash out at critics; the Buffalo News,
Bush lashes out at war critics; even the Voice of America, Bush lashes out
at political opponents over Iraq accusations.

In other headlines last week, the administration was presented in post-Oz
style as beleaguered, under siege and powerless to control its own fate: The
Associated Press, for example, headlined a recent Jennifer Loven piece, Iraq
war criticism stalks Bush overseas; the New York Times, a David Sanger
report, Iraq dogs president as he crosses Asia to promote trade; and CNN
headlined the Murtha events, A hawk rattles GOP's cage.

The language used in such recent media accounts was no less revealing.
Sanger, for example, began his piece this way:

"President Bush may have come to Asia determined to show leaders here that
his agenda is far broader than Iraq and terrorism, but at every stop, and
every day, Mr Bush and his aides have been fighting a rearguard action to
justify how the United States got into Iraq and how to get out."

While Loven launched hers with, "His war policies under siege at home ...",
attributing the siege atmosphere and the Bush "counterattack" to "the
president's newly aggressive war critics".

Lashing out, stalked, dogged, under siege, counterattacking, fighting a
rearguard action - let's not just attribute this to "newly aggressive war
critics". It's a long-coming shift in the zeitgeist, as evident in the media
as in the halls of Congress.

On Thursday, for instance, ABC's Primetime TV news, which led with a story
on the president "lashing out" at critics, then offered a long,
up-close-and-personal segment in which a teary-eyed Murtha spoke of the
war-wounded he's regularly visited at hospitals and the fraudulence of
administration policy. That same night, another prime-time news broadcast
turned the president's claim that the Democrats were "irresponsible" in
their criticisms into a montage of Bush repeatedly saying "irresponsible" in
different poses - so many times in a row, in fact, that the segment could
easily have come from a sharp opening sequence on Jon Stewart's The Daily
Show.

None of this would have been possible even weeks ago in a country where it
was once gospel that you don't attack a president while he's representing
the United States abroad. That's why, in the Watergate era, Richard Nixon
had such a propensity for trips overseas and undoubtedly why our
stay-at-home president's handlers decided to turn him into a Latin American
and Asian globetrotter. The question is: How did this happen? What changed
the zeitgeist and where are we heading?

Poll-driven politics
Polls are, it might be said, what's left of American democracy. Privately
run, often for profit or advantage, they nonetheless are as close as we come
these days - actual elections being what they are - to the expression of
democratic opinion, serially, week after week. Everyone who matters in and
out of Washington and in the media reads them as if life itself were at
stake. They drive behavior and politics. Fear, too, is a poll-driven
phenomenon. Not surprisingly then, it was the moment late last spring when
presidential approval ratings fell decisively below the 50% mark, and looked
to be heading for 40%, that the White House took anxious note and so, no
less important, did a previously cowed media. Somewhere in that period, the
fear factor, right in the administration's hands, was transformed into a
feeling fearful factor. As I've written elsewhere, faced with the mother of
a dead soldier on their doorstep, all the president's men blinked and the
Camp Casey fiasco followed. Soon after, before hurricane Cindy could even
blow out of town, hurricane Katrina blew in and the president's ratings
headed for free fall. In just the last month, they look as if they had been
shoved over a small cliff, dipping in the latest Harris and Wall Street
Journal polls to an almost unheard of 34% (only five points above Richard
Nixon's at his Watergate nadir).

The poll numbers, which once gave the administration's fear factor meaning,
have simply evaporated - as have any figures that might indicate that this
administration is capable of stanching its own wounds. Emboldening media and
political opposition in Washington, such figures give Murtha-like cover to
behavior that not long ago would have been unthinkable. A record 60% of
Americans surveyed in the most recent USA Today poll, including one in four
Republicans, said "the war wasn't 'worth it'. One in five Republicans said
the invasion of Iraq was a mistake." Those who felt things were "going well"
for the country as a whole dropped nine percentage points in a month.

Democrats long ago fled the ranks of presidential supporters, as more
recently have independents; now moderate Republicans are beginning to peel
away too. According to Tom Raum of the Associated Press,"[Bush's] approval
on handling Iraq fell from 87% among all Republicans in November 2004 to 78%
this month. Among Republican women, from 88% a year ago to 73% now. Among
independents, approval on Iraq fell from 49% in November 2004 to 33% now."
If you want a figure that, from the administration's viewpoint, offers a
frightening glimpse into a possible future, consider the 79% of Americans
who believe I Lewis Libby's indictment is "of importance to the nation";
this, despite Republican claims that the grounds for indicting were
insignificant, and a new Libby defense fund made up of Republican high
rollers and assorted neo-cons.

In other words, replace the still emotionally charged issues of the war in
Iraq and the president's actions, where, at 34%-40%, a bedrock base of
support remains more or less intact, with a less charged
ethics-in-government issue and that vaunted Rock of Gibraltar shatters. This
is the previously inconceivable future so many Republican politicians
suddenly fear.

Just for the heck of it, throw in another factor - "intensity" - and you
have an even more volatile picture, given the lack of positive, potentially
mobilizing news on the domestic and foreign horizons. E J Dionne of the
Washington Post suggests that the polling figures are even worse than they
look because intensity of feeling on the war issue is now "on the side of
the war's opponents". He adds:

"The findings on the strength of feelings about the war were matched by the
intensity of feelings about Bush himself: Only 20% of those surveyed said
they strongly approved of the overall job Bush was doing, while 47% strongly
disapproved. A president who has always played to his base finds that his
base is steadily shrinking."

In other words, doubt and demoralization are setting in - a political rot
that can do untold damage. Given how many independents and moderate
Republicans who once supported the war have changed their minds, the
scathing attacks on Democrats for mind-changing on the war may not prove a
winning strategy either. They may, as Raum comments, "backfire on
Republicans".

But here's a question: Can we trace Bush's polling near-collapse to its
origins anywhere? In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine under the
eerie title, "The Iraq Syndrome" (subscription only), John Mueller, an
expert on how wars affect presidencies, offers a canny, cool-eyed
interpretation of changing American opinion on Iraq. He tracks polling data
on the three sustained wars - Korea, Vietnam and Iraq - the US has fought in
the last half-century-plus where we took more than 300 casualties.

All three show about the same polling pattern: broad enthusiasm at the
outset, a relatively quick and steep falloff in support, followed by steady
erosion thereafter from which no long-term presidential recovery seems
possible (certainly not via heightened rhetoric). In all three wars, as
support fell, pro-withdrawal sentiment rose. Though some experts link this
pattern to an American "defeat-phobia" ,Mueller points out that, in cases
such as Lebanon in the Reagan years and Somalia in the Clinton era,
Americans have been quite capable of swallowing withdrawal and defeat (of a
sort) without making the presidents involved pay any significant political
cost.

The crucial factor in loss of support for each of these wars, Mueller
insists, is a growing casualty list and not just any casualties either -
only American ones. (The fact that "vastly more" Iraqis have died than all
the victims of "all international terrorists in all of history" matters
little, he observes, in American popular judgments on the war.) What makes
Iraq stand out in this list of three "is how much more quickly support has
eroded in the case of Iraq. By early 2005, when combat deaths were around
1,500, the percentage of respondents who considered the Iraq war a mistake -
more than half - was about the same as the percentage who considered the war
in Vietnam a mistake at the time of the 1968 Tet offensive, when nearly
20,000 soldiers had already died."

If Mueller's right, then the steady drip of American casualties - many less
dead and many more wounded than in Korea and Vietnam, in part because of
improved medical care and triage techniques - has seeped deeply into
American consciousness. This seems so, despite the administration's careful
attempt to keep returning bodies and individual funerals out of sight and so
out of mind; despite the fact that the American dead - 60 soldiers in the
first 19 days of October - have largely been kept off the front pages of
American papers and photos of dead Americans off television (where dead
Iraqis can regularly be seen). Short of massive draw-downs of American
forces in Iraq, there is no casualty end in sight for this administration;
and drawing down ground forces (while substituting air power for them), as
Richard Nixon learned in his "Vietnamization" program, only solves a
home-front problem at the cost of creating staggering problems on the war
front.

For an administration still fighting "withdrawal" with all its strength,
this may prove a problem with no exit - further casualties acting as a motor
propelling the unhappiness that changes more minds and pushes falling
polling figures ever downward, propelling unease about the country, which
only leads to escalating casualty figures of another kind - those growing
defections from the ranks of your core political supporters.

When agendas go bump in the night
To put the current crisis in some perspective, you could say that two
central agendas of the Bush administration proved to be in conflict,
although for years this was less than evident (even to the players
involved). There was the long-planned neo-conservative drive to invade Iraq
and, through that act, begin to remake the Middle East. The neo-cons were
backed in this by Vice President Cheney and his crew in the
vice-presidential office as well as allied figures like John Bolton, Stephen
Hadley, and (some of the time) Donald Rumsfeld, none of whom were
necessarily neo-cons. The motives this disparate group held for remaking the
region in their image ranged from the urge to establish a planetary,
militarily enforced Pax Americana and/or an urge to control the oil
heartlands of the planet to a desire - from the Likudniks in the
administration - to secure the region for an ascendant Sharonista Israel.

Whatever the overlapping motivations, at the heart of this policy lay an
urge to unleash a constitutionally unfettered "war president" on the world.
(Torture was a crucial issue in all of this largely because, once
established as an essential tool of the "war on terror", it would be proof
beyond a shadow of a doubt that Bush's presidency had been freed of all
restraints.) Put into full effect on March 20, 2003, when the "war on
terror" melded into an invasion of Iraq, the policy was meant to place in
the president's hands every global lever of power that mattered for all
time.

It now seems far clearer that the endless fallout from the fatal decision to
invade Iraq is eating away at another agenda entirely, one that emerged from
the domestic political wing of this administration - from Karl Rove, Andrew
Card, Tom DeLay and their ilk. This was the Republican desire to nail down
the country as a purely red (as in red-meat) Republican land. The vetting of
the K-Street lobbying crowd, the increasing control over the flow of
corporate dollars into politics, the gerrymandering of congressional
districts to create an election-proof House of Representatives, the
mobilization of a religious base dedicated to an endless set of culture
wars, the ushering in of a right-wing Supreme Court, and so many other
activities were all meant to create an impregnable Republican Party in
control of every lever of power in our country into an endless future.

The unfettered, imperial president and the unfettered, imperial Republican
Party were joined at the hip by the attacks of September 11, 2001, which led
to both the "war on terror" abroad and the Patriot Act and the Homeland
Security Department domestically. Had the Bush administration pursued both
agendas, minus an invasion of Iraq, the two might have remained joined far
longer. The crucial invasion decision, made almost immediately by the
neo-con war party backed by the president, was supported by White House
Chief of Staff Andrew ("From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce
new products in August") Card and Karl ("the architect") Rove, both of whom
believed that a good war, well-promoted and correctly wielded domestically,
might drive a Republican agenda to eternal domination in America. None of
them expected that it would prove to be the wedge driven between the two
agendas.

The first hint of this was caught perfectly in a classic headline: On May 2,
2003, George Bush co-piloted an Air Force jet onto the deck of the USS
Abraham Lincoln (carefully kept 30 miles out of its San Diego homeport so
that the president could have his "top gun" photo-op instead of climbing a
gangplank like any normal being). Following this "historic landing", he
stepped up to an on-deck podium where, under a White House banner that read
"Mission Accomplished", he declared that "major combat operations in Iraq
have ended." This was clearly meant to be the stunning start of the
president's campaign for reelection in 2004, a classic piece of Rovian image
manipulation and a nail in the coffin of the Democratic Party. And so it
seemed to most at the time.

But if you revisit the CNN story about the landing and speech, headlined
"Bush calls end to 'major combat'," it's hard now not to note the subhead
lurking just under it: US Central Command: Seven hurt in Fallujah grenade
attack. Seven wounded American soldiers - that really says it all. The
photo-op that was meant for the reelection campaign was already being
undermined by another story; two policies yoked together were already
pulling in different directions. Our present moment was already being born,
unnoticed but in plain sight.

Now both agendas are in disarray with no help whatsoever on the horizon.
Imagine, for instance, that the South Koreans timed the announcement of the
withdrawal of the first of their troops from (Kurdish) northern Iraq for the
moment the president arrived in their country. Imagine that Tony Blair's
people are now said to be perfecting total withdrawal plans for next year,
and that the president recently may have had to slap down the top American
general in Iraq for suggesting withdrawal (or at least draw down) plans of
his own. Imagine that various European nations are now investigating (or in
the case of an Italian court charging) American agents in the "war on
terror" with crimes. Imagine that the president, who often insisted Saddam
had been overthrown to rid Iraq of its torture chambers ("the torture
chambers and the secret police are gone forever") and to end the reign of a
"murderous tyrant who ... used chemical weapons to kill thousands of
people", now faces a "tip-of-the-iceberg" torture scandal in Iraq involving
the people we've brought to power and another spreading scandal about the
American use of a chemical-like weapon, white phosphorous, on civilians in
the city of Fallujah. Imagine that we proved less capable than Saddam of
delivering basics like electricity and potable water to the people of Iraq,
that we squandered billions of taxpayer dollars in "reconstruction" funds
there, and that we face an insurgency that continues to grow and spread in
opposition to a shabby elected government all but in league with the
Iranians. Imagine that the president's Iraq war is now devouring his
presidency and that it can only get worse.

The Middle East is a sea of political gasoline just waiting for the odd
administration match or two; American foreign policy is in a kind of
disarray for which even the final days of Vietnam offer no comparison; while
at home, the DeLay, Frist, Libby and Abramoff scandals (and associated
indictments) can only grow and spread. Special Counsel Fitzgerald has just
announced his decision to empanel a new grand jury, sure to drive the Plame
scandal ever deeper and higher into the administration and ever closer to
the 2006 elections or possibly beyond. It would be easy to go on, but you
get the idea.

It is a truism of American politics that voters are almost never driven to
the polls by foreign policy. In this case, however, the war in Iraq has
chased the president and his men ever since he landed on that carrier deck.
How little he knew what he was asking for when, in a moment of bravado, he
said of the Iraqi insurgents, "Bring 'em on." He just barely beat the
erosive effects of his war to the polls in November 2004. Now, it continues
to eat inexorably into the heartland of Republican political domination.
Even Republican discipline in Congress - without the Hammer's hammer - has
disintegrated under the heat of the war. As Chris Nelson wrote recently in
his Washington insider's newsletter, The Nelson Report:

"The stunning swiftness of the bipartisan Congressional collapse of support
for the administration's conduct of the war in Iraq, and by extension the
entire anti-terrorism effort, is such that it has not been fully appreciated
by the 'leadership' of either party. That's the real meaning of a Senate
vote, which Republicans tried to spin into a victory for the president,
because they avoided the Democrat's amendment to set performance-based
withdrawal deadlines."

Now, the war threatens to crack open the Republican base and chase the dream
of a single-party Republican political future - only recently so close -
right off the map. No wonder the Democrats have just come out swinging (sort
of). The political shock and awe the administration so regularly deployed
after September 11, 2001 no longer works. The Democrats suddenly have
discovered that - no thanks to them - the American people are somewhere else
and they have little to fear from George Bush or *** Cheney. No
presidential "counterattack", no "lashing out", no set of speeches or new
agenda (to be announced in the 2006 State of the Union Address or anywhere
else) is likely to change any of this for the better for this president.
Fear is no longer on the Bush administration's side. No wonder they're now
afraid - very, very afraid.


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