Bush’s SOUA: His credibility gap

Some days it’s just not worth getting up. George W. Bush must have felt that way the other day when he delivered his State of the Union address before the US Congress.

Shortly after the President finished his speech, Democrat Senator Jim Webb, a Vietnam veteran, was already delivering a response which basically tore the SOUA to shreds.

Despite Bush’s attempt to draw attention to other pressing domestic issues such as health insurance and gas prices, the focus was, inevitably, on Iraq or what his critics persist in calling his "failed Iraq policy."

Faced with the reality that the US is not winning in Iraq, as well as Bush’s resolve to send 21,500 more troops to ‘turn events to victory", both Republicans and Democrats were working on draft resolutions to oppose putting "more American personnel in harm’s way." It’s beginning to look unlikely that Bush will get his 21,500 additional troops.

The Bush approach of adding troops rather than begin a deliberate but phased withdrawal of US personnel is, of course, fundamentally at odds with the recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group which had been tasked with finding "the way forward" in handling the rapidly deteriorating situation in that country.

Even his allies seem hard put trying to discern whether the Bush stubbornness is one of three possibilities: courageous and visionary statesmanship, plain and self-destructive hubris, or just the tantrums of a spoiled kid who doesn’t know when to pick up his marbles and go home. Analysts argue strenuously over whether it’s one of the last two. They swear it can’t be the first.

But there is a bigger picture: Bush’s unapologetic intransigence may not only have doomed his additional troop request, he may have also managed to bring to a halt his arguably sincere efforts to promote democracy throughout the world.

Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria has this somber assessment: "Democracy proponents are on the defensive in many places…What explains this paradox – of freedom’s retreat, even with a US administration vociferous in promoting democracy? Some part of the explanation lies in the global antipathy to the US president."

Zakaria quotes Larry Diamond of the Journal of Democracy: "Bush’s arrogance has turned people off the idea of democracy…We need to face up to the fact that in many developing countries democracy is not working very well."

The basic problem confronting the developing world today, Zakaria writes, is not an absence of democracy but an absence of governance. In Iraq, while Bush likes to claim "amazing political progress over the last four years" which was "undermined by violence," the fact is that that country’s "politics and institutions" have fallen apart since the Americans invaded and ousted Saddam Hussein.

Although Zakaria does not argue that regime change in Iraq was wrong, he insists that what Iraqis ultimately saw was a state dismantled, an economy disrupted, a social order overturned and civic institutions and community eroded by sectarianism.

The Americans insisted, as usual, on elections. Those elections, Zakaria says, had "wondrous aspects," but they also divided the country into three communities and hardened these splits. His conclusion: "To describe the last four years as a period of political progress requires a strange definition of political development."

This is about as close as one can come to asserting that Bush didn’t know what the hell he was getting into, that his claim of "weapons of mass destruction" secreted throughout Iraq was mere pretext for reckless adventurism which masked a primordial instinct to avenge 9-11, and that this cowboy naively thought that a simplistic superimposition of "democracy" over Saddam’s systematic tyranny would be a cure-all for all that country’s ills.

Now that Bush is mired in his own Vietnam, which has so far cost over 3,000 American lives, thousands of Iraqi lives, and tens of billions of dollars (at a time of massive budgetary deficits), he is scrambling to avoid a "legacy" of having been the worst President in US history.

All this, plus the reality of his having lost control of the US Congress in the elections of 2006, constituted the backdrop of his State of the Union address earlier this week. He spoke across a yawning credibility gap. Sticking to his theme of additional troops, and talking about health insurance reform or cheaper alternatives to fossil fuel for the American motorist, simply galvanized the image of a leader out of touch with reality while hanging on to an irretrievably sinking presidency.

Bush’s problems with the Democrats, the Republicans and the American people as a whole, are not the result of Monday morning quarterbacking. Sure, everyone’s a genius in retrospect and a leader is not expected to be a seer. Further, it is true that it is often preferable that the man on top take risks rather than move only when the outcome is predictable or, worse, do nothing at all.

But that’s not the general perception in Bush’s case. The beef against him, precisely, is that he led a nation into an unnecessary and unwinnable war on the basis of false or falsified information, made one wrong decision after another, refused to heed sound advice and, when his route was shown by actual events to have been the wrong path, refused to make sensible course corrections. In the process, American lives were lost and public funds wasted.

In context, therefore, Bush’s personal appeal to the US Congress for national unity and for bipartisan support of his "new strategy" in Iraq, sounded less like a clarion call than a distress signal.

The conventional wisdom is that Republican days in the White House are nearing an end. For their part, the Democrats are reportedly rejoicing that George W. Bush himself is the best argument for ensuring that end.