A Bad Weekend for Bush Foreign Policy

by Steve

These are the weekends that Karl Rove must dread, when the basic assumptions of the zealots controlling George W. Bush and his foreign policy wunderkids of Colin Powell and Condi Rice have proved themselves to be utter incompetents. Will it matter in November 2004? Maybe, maybe not. But if the world still disrespects us and if everything we have touched during Bush’s first term has turned to crap, then that picture coupled with a deficit-plagued economy that fails to produce enough jobs but plenty of tax cuts for the rich will be hung around W’s neck as Exhibit A on Why America Cannot Afford Another Four Years of These Wicked Clowns.

First, we learn this morning that the United States’ Iraq reconstruction effort is in such disarray that several key officials who were just appointed in the last couple of weeks are already being canned, even as Paul Bremer is showing up for work. The first to go is Barbara Bodine, who was to be an administrator over Baghdad. She is being sent packing back to Washington for another job. Bodine, it should be remembered, is best known for stopping the FBI and namely the late superagent John O’Neill in his quest to track down Osama Bin Laden and connect him and the Saudis to the USS Cole bombing. It was Bodine, as ambassador to Yemen at the time, who terminated O’Neill’s investigation just as he was getting too close to nailing those behind the bombing. Aside from Bodine, it appears that Jay Garner and most of his team will be canned as well in the coming weeks.

Bremer's appointment and Bodine's departure are occurring as concern grows in Washington and foreign capitals about the pace of the U.S. reconstruction program in Iraq. Several people involved in the process have said Garner and his staff -- as well as his superiors at the Pentagon -- did not properly plan for the task, from repairing damage suffered during the war to restarting government ministries and forming an Iraqi-led interim administration.

Iraqis have become increasingly frustrated with Garner's operation, saying that his team has failed to fulfill promises to hand out emergency payments, restore basic public services, address a wave of criminal activity and involve resident Iraqis in the planning for a new government. In Baghdad, many neighborhoods still lack electricity and running water, heaps of garbage line the streets and most shops remain closed because merchants are afraid of looters.

"There's large parts of the city that are in really bad shape," the senior official said. "The city is better than it was three weeks ago, but it has a long way to go." The shortage of visible progress appears to have sparked consternation at the State Department, where officials argued that a civilian with diplomatic skills and foreign policy experience should coordinate reconstruction activities. The Defense Department chafed at that idea and insisted the program remain under military control. Ultimately, the State Department view won out at the White House on the grounds that having a civilian at the helm would inspire other nations to support the costly and complicated chore of transforming Iraq into a stable, democratic nation.

Americans involved in the reconstruction effort said the departures of Bodine, Garner and other top officials likely would further roil what has been a chaotic and ill-prepared operation, depriving it of continuity and potentially delaying some programs as new leaders familiarize themselves with the operation.

And as the LA Times notes today, the PNAC crowd and Bush were totally unprepared for what they encountered when they took over Iraq.

Strike One for Rummy/Wolfowitz/Perle/Cheney.

Next, it is also being reported that the United States has virtually conceded that significant WMDs won’t be found in Iraq. As a result, we are actually throwing in the towel and sending the teams home, totally discrediting everything the Bushies said about an imminent WMD threat and destroying another assumption by the PNAC crowd.

The group directing all known U.S. search efforts for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is winding down operations without finding proof that President Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed arms, according to participants. The 75th Exploitation Task Force, as the group is formally known, has been described from the start as the principal component of the U.S. plan to discover and display forbidden Iraqi weapons. The group's departure, expected next month, marks a milestone in frustration for a major declared objective of the war.

Motivated and accomplished in their fields, task force members found themselves lacking vital tools. They consistently found targets identified by Washington to be inaccurate, looted and burned, or both. Leaders and members of five of the task force's eight teams, and some senior officers guiding them, said the weapons hunters were going through the motions now to "check the blocks" on a prewar list. U.S. Central Command began the war with a list of 19 top weapons sites. Only two remain to be searched. Another list enumerated 68 top "non-WMD sites," without known links to special weapons but judged to have the potential to offer clues. Of those, the tally at midweek showed 45 surveyed without success.

Task Force 75's experience, and its impending dissolution after seven weeks in action, square poorly with assertions in Washington that the search has barely begun. In his declaration of victory aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, President Bush said, "We've begun the search for hidden chemical and biological weapons, and already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigated." Stephen A. Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, told reporters at the Pentagon on Wednesday that U.S. forces had surveyed only 70 of the roughly 600 potential weapons facilities on the "integrated master site list" prepared by U.S. intelligence agencies before the war.

But here on the front lines of the search, the focus is on a smaller number of high-priority sites, and the results are uniformly disappointing, participants said.
"Why are we doing any planned targets?" Army Chief Warrant Officer Richard L. Gonzales, leader of Mobile Exploitation Team Alpha, said in disgust to a colleague during last Sunday's nightly report of weapons sites and survey results. "Answer me that. We know they're empty."

Strike Two for the PNAC cabal.

Third, we find that Colin Powell’s trip to the Middle East to get the Israelis and Palestinians to begin work on Bush’s worthy “road map” towards peace has failed to get either side moving. Remember that the PNAC cabal based their whole Pax Americana strategy on the claim that toppling Iraq would pressure other states in the region to negotiate on more favorable terms with the Israelis while reducing terrorism. Well, that assumption is being tested because our Likud foreign policy is putting no pressure whatsoever on Ariel Sharon, who knows that he has Bush in his pocket eighteen months before the 2004 elections.

Secretary of State Colin Powell ended a critical round of talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders on Sunday with no sign of progress toward persuading them to begin implementing a peace "road map." Powell, leading the highest-level U.S. peacemaking effort in more than a year, tried but apparently failed to squeeze concessions from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas for ending 31 months of violence.

Each side insisted the other move first in putting the U.S.-backed plan in motion, a recipe for stalemate in a conflict that has defied numerous earlier diplomatic peace initiatives. Expectations for a breakthrough had been low because of the gulf of mistrust between the two sides, sharp differences on key issues and skepticism about U.S. commitment.

And if Sharon doesn’t think Bush will pressure him to make real concessions, then why would Sharon blink?

Strike three for the PNAC cabal. Of course, the truth is that the cabal doesn’t want peace in the Middle East.

But they also thought that they would be welcomed as nationbuilders and could install friendly pro-US governments in their conquered territories. And that leads to the fourth problem today, where a leading Shiíte cleric has returned to Iraq, after two decades of exile in Iran, to demand that the US leave Iraq and let Iraqis rebuild their country. But that doesn’t square with Rummy now telling Iraqis that we will be there for at least a year, contrary to what the some of the PNAC cabal were saying in selling this war.

The leader of Iraq's largest Shiite Muslim group denounced the U.S.-led occupation forces Sunday and demanded they pull out and allow the Iraqi people to establish their own government. Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, who returned to his homeland Saturday after spending more than two decades in exile in neighboring Iran, made the call in this predominantly Shiite city despite the presence of a squad of U.S. Marines who were protecting him.

''We don't fear these (U.S. and British) forces. This nation wants to preserve its independence and the coalition forces must leave this country,'' al-Hakim said. As he spoke, about 4,000 supporters chanted ''Yes to Hakim'' and ''Hakim is our leader.''

While al-Hakim spoke, some children offered bread or flowers to the Marines.
''We wave to the Americans,'' said Hasan Jaberi, a teenager. ''But in Arabic, we tell them slaps will come if you don't leave.''

Strike four for the PNAC cabal. And exploding deficits and unpopular annual tax cuts won’t help Bush either in making a case for re-election next year while he faces overseas failure and an increasing risk and loss of life to our troops from these misguided and deceit-filled PNAC delusions of power and profits.