Bush's War Drums Have Political Beat
By Les Payne
Columnist
Newsday
October 13, 2002
newsday.com
If the president's war drums were so urgent, why beat them in Cincinnati and not, say, in the Oval Office?
Politics, some say; politics on the hustings.
Not a bad speculation given that a third of the U.S. Senate and the House are up for election on Nov. 5. Democrats had planned to win by making the case that President George W. Bush has willfully urinated away the good economic times. "It's the economy stupid," however, has been reduced to an unpatriotic rant by a president got up in feathers and war paint.
Nothing silences the Democrat lambs like a Republican president whispering war talk into the ears of the American people. Such sweet nothings are particularly effective these days with the absence of the shadows of the Trade Center towers.
Rattling his own weapons of mass destruction, Bush has created a deafening silence on wanting domestic issues. In New York City, for example, finances are said to be in the worst straits since the 1970s brush with bankruptcy. The cleanup and repair around Ground Zero have been miraculous - and the feds have delivered - but the bills keep mounting and the services must continue apace.
"You are looking at a $5-billion budget gap at a time when that's a huge percentage of the city's discretionary spending," cried the City Council speaker. "We have to have a police force. We have to have firefighters. We have to have public education. The scope is tremendous and the crisis is grave."
Other cities may not be as hard hit as the one that bore the brunt of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But things are hurting all over the republic. The stock market is in the tub. Washed along with it are the 401(k) accounts that average Americans were counting on for retirement. Unemployment among the young is rising. A mounting federal deficit has sprung up where, when Bush took office, there was an extravagant surplus.
Wresting the microphone away from the president in war paint has not been easy. From his irrepressible bully pulpit, he has directed the eyes of the people away from their sputtering economy to the mansions and rail yards and mosques of Iraq. Nine months ago it was all Osama bin Laden, and it made sense. After leveling the mud huts in the foothills of Afghanistan, no further political capital could be wrung from this mad, secular mullah.
Ambiguity is unserviceable in the cause of political distraction. So, deprived of bin Laden, the president turned to the concrete visage of his father's old nemesis. Dusted of his back-curtain cobwebs, Saddam Hussein has been pulled back on stage and made to dance obscenely. He has no more weapons of mass destruction than six months ago, but, hey, he'll just have to do.
Even the CIA, careful not to be wrong this time, reports that Hussein poses no threat to the United States. The agency's national intelligence estimate said the murderous dictator is unlikely to initiate biological, chemical or other terrorist attacks against America. The report had all the earmarks of a rebuttal to, if not a contradiction of, the president's call for a national-security, preemptive strike. Such a strike, the CIA concluded, might provoke Hussein into using whatever weapons he has stockpiled.
In his Cincinnati speech Monday, the president apparently resorted to the worst-case Iraq scenario. Still, the campaign speech left enough slack in his planning to allow for the results of the Nov. 5 elections. Even the congressional resolution granting Bush the power to attack Iraq was anticipated with an eye out for Election Day.
"Approving this resolution does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable," he said.
The presidential war drums, however, seem calculated to hold the Democrats in Congress and elsewhere in check patriotically.
Just as disturbing is the White House plan for Iraq, post Hussein, as printed in The New York Times. Modeled on the occupation of Japan, this nifty piece of neo-colonialism would occupy the land, dominate the people and shape Iraq in America's image, a horrible idea.
As for the Iraqi military leaders, who as all such professionals are sworn to defend their country against invasion, the United States would try them as war criminals. Bush should be told that, unlike Japan in 1941, Iraq did not attack the United States and that its generals, were they simply to defend their country, would not be war criminals, per se.
The most galling aspect of this Japan-model U.S. occupation has America, yes, seizing Iraq's oil. The Bush administration, according to the Times, "would put an American officer in charge of Iraq for a year or more while the United States and its allies searched for weapons and maintained Iraq's oil fields."
Reasoned, apolitical Americans will find it hard to defend such bare-knuckled imperialism against the blizzard of world criticism likely to accrue. Stripped of its thin veneer of exaggeration and billingsgate, the Bush policy, according to critics, is either a political diversion or a veiled, though nonetheless heavy-handed, grab for Iraq's oil.
Both, depending upon the election, may prove true. After Nov. 5, the fulcrum of the Iraq issue is certain to shift. Just wait.
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