Blame game could start soon
msnbc.com
I’m waiting for war to break out—not in Iraq, but in the Bush administration. I’m wondering what’s going through Colin Powell’s mind. The secretary of State is looking pretty grim these days, like a man going through the motions. Might he bail out after a not-too-distant decent interval? Friends say no, he’s a team player. “But he’s not a happy camper,” one admits.
IN THE MEANTIME, who’s going to be blamed for the Turkey screwup, or the U.N. screwups? Who’s going to leak the authoritative—and explosive—estimates of the true cost of maintaining 100,000 troops in Iraq for the indefinite future? (One general already has been whacked for piping up, but there will be others.) Who’s going to take the fall for the fact that we’ve lost the international moral high ground? The world is blaming the president, of course, but that’s not the way things work here. Someone else goes down. Who? The “neocons”? Donald Rumsfeld? The State Department? Dick Cheney? Condi Rice?
We are embarrassingly alone diplomatically, and State Department underlings (privately) blame Rumsfeld & Co. Inside the Pentagon—but outside of Rumsfeld’s offfice—I’m told that E-Ring brass have adopted what one source calls a “Vietnam mentality,” a sense of resignation about a policy (military occupation of Iraq) they seriously doubt will work
The closer we get to the event, the less Bush is in control of events—and the greater the risk of a vicious blame game breaking out inside his own administration. Hardliners, never enamored of going the U.N. route, are saying “I told you so” in private, and soon will do it publicly. From the Powellites’ point of view, the bad guys are going out of their way to make things difficult. The latest example: Rumsfeld’s curt statement (later recanted) that the U.S. was prepared to go it alone without the British.
In fact, the U.S. has been humiliated, diplomatically and strategically. And just whose fault is that? The latest slap came the other day from Turkey’s soon-to-be-installed prime minister. Some 60,000 American soldiers are bobbing around on ships in the Eastern Mediterranean, denied permission to enter Turkey on their way to a northern front.
Not only did Recap Tayyip Erdogan say no, he went further. He said that the U.S. couldn’t even use airbases for launching sorties into Iraq. That was a huge step backward: The U.S. had long assumed the right to use those airbases; indeed, we’ve been using them for years. Did Powell or Rice warn the president that he’d be rebuffed—at least—by Erdogan?
We are reduced to begging Cameroon for a vote. Yes, they are a soverign nation entitled to respect. But who did the whip count for the White House?
The key now is Powell. He could unhinge the Bush administration in a New York minute. He’s never been fully trusted by the Bush innermost circle. He wasn’t among the group of advisers who briefed Bush in Austin as he prepared for a presidential campaign in 1999. More important, Powell has too much of an independent political (and media) base to suit the president.
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If Powell resigns he will regain my respect.
I sure hope he does.
I want to see Bush floundering like a flounder on desert sand.
M |
