[NYTr] 2008: Bush’s Twilight Year Looks Grim

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

IPS News - Dec 30, 2007
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40644

Bush’s Twilight Year Looks Grim

Analysis by Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 30 (IPS) - If the last days of 2007 are any indication,
U.S. President George W. Bush’s last year in office is shaping up as
grim and lonely.

Grim, because Bush’s signature "war on terror" is nowhere near the kind
of "victory" on which he had placed so much hope. Hundreds of billions
of dollars from the U.S. Treasury have been spent, but the democratic
transformation of the Middle East and the wider Islamic world has not
materialised.

Indeed, while Bush’s Surge strategy has helped reduce violence in Iraq
over the past year, his top military commanders stress that the
relative peace that has been achieved to date is fragile and that
prospects for national reconciliation -- the Surge’s political goal --
remain dim.

Meanwhile, victory in the larger terror effort is nowhere in sight, as
this week’s assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir
Bhutto, helped illustrate.

Grim, because the economic news -- which has generally remained upbeat
over Bush’s tenure -- has turned decidedly negative in recent months.
The chances that his successor may inherit a recession, as well as the
many foreign-policy fiascos created by the disastrous combination of
the administration’s ideological rigidity and incompetence, are growing
steadily.

Lonely, not only because of the departure during the past year of
virtually all of his closest and most long-standing loyalists -- Dan
Barlett, Karen Hughes, Harriet Miers, Alberto Gonzales, and Karl Rove
-- but also because he is seen increasingly as both a lame duck and an
albatross around the necks of his party’s candidates.

Indeed, the focus of national and international attention -- so far as
the U.S. is concerned -- appears to have shifted to the race to succeed
him in next November’s elections. Remarkably, the mainstream U.S. media
this week devoted as much space to the reactions of the main
presidential candidates to Bhutto’s assassination as to the
administration’s.

The fact that all of the major Republican candidates not only rarely
evoke his name, but often suggest that his performance in office has
been less than stellar, serves only to underline his marginalisation.

As for the Democrats, Bush, whose public-approval ratings have hovered
around 32 percent for more than a year (the worst sustained ratings of
any president in more than 50 years), is the rhetorical target against
whom they find it easiest to rally the party faithful. According to
recent surveys, the Democratic party has grown substantially over the
past four years, largely as a result of what Bush’s defenders have
called "Bush hatred".

Bush, of course, is still hoping that 2008 may yet deliver his
presidency from the fate of being judged as one of the very worst -- if
not the worst -- in history.

A number of eminent historians have in fact already reached that
judgement, based, among other things, on the strategic disaster of the
Iraq war; the squandering of Washington’s overseas image as a champion
of international law and human rights; the defiance of constitutional
safeguards at home; the politicisation of the system of justice; and
the distortion of scientific research regarding global warming and
other critical issues.

His hopes of escaping that assessment rest primarily in the area of
foreign policy, on which, as a "war-time president", he has staked his
reputation.

Possible achievements that could help to redeem Bush’s overall record
before the end of his term would be the continued reduction of violence
-- if not reconciliation among the three main communal groups -- in
Iraq; a major breakthrough in the Israel-Palestinian negotiations
leading to the establishment of a Palestinian state; or the
de-nuclearisation of North Korea.

But even the most likely of these three -- North Korean
de-nuclearisation -- remains highly uncertain. Most analysts here
believe that Pyongyang has not yet made a strategic decision to give up
its nuclear programme as demanded by Washington.

Similarly, the initial indications after last month’s
Israeli-Palestinian Summit in Annapolis do not look particularly
favourable. Israel has spurned a cease- fire offer by Hamas -- which,
in any event, retains the ability to spoil any accord reached by
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas -- and, despite U.S. pressure, is
playing coy about settlement activity in the contested Jerusalem area.
Just how hard Bush is prepared to press Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert remains unknown.

As for Iraq, a big question mark is whether the planned withdrawal of
30,000 U.S. troops by July and 60,000 by the end of next year will
spark a new round in the Sunni-Shi’a civil war, which the Surge has
helped to tamp down but not resolve. Another big question as 2007 draws
to a close is whether Kurdistan - - until now the most peaceful and
pro-U.S. part of Iraq -- will find its stability at risk due to
U.S.-backed Turkish attacks on Kurdish guerrillas or by the approach of
the newly-scheduled referendum on the status of Kirkuk.

While these three areas may offer the brightest prospects for
redemption, new crises -- particularly those arising from the "war on
terror" -- could divert the administration’s attention and further
damage Bush’s record.

Bhutto’s assassination, for example, offered yet another example that
Bush’s war has been at best incompetently pursued, if not misconceived
from the very beginning.

Not only did Bush’s diversion of both money and troops from Afghanistan
to Iraq immediately after the defeat of the Taliban permit both Taliban
and al Qaeda to regroup and eventually extend their influence in the
rugged tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border, but his virtually
unconditional backing -- including more than 10 billion dollars in
mostly military aid -- for the regime of General Pervez Musharraf
served mainly to strengthen the Islamist parties at the expense of the
secular, "moderate" forces to which his administration has given mainly
rhetorical support.

When it became clear last summer that Pakistan’s Taliban was making
major advances and that Musharraf’s popular base had dried up, the
administration sought to forge an agreement between the military
commander and the exiled Bhutto, whom it had long ignored.

The agreement, which included free elections that would likely result
in Bhutto’s election as prime minister, was designed, in the words of
Bruce Reidel -- a former senior CIA analyst now with the Brookings
Institution -- to give the Musharraf government "a democratic façade",
bolster the moderates, and encourage the army to co-operate with U.S.
counter-terror efforts.

The cynicism of the manoeuvre, combined with Washington’s enduring
support for Musharraf -- even when he declared a state of emergency
earlier this fall -- forced Bhutto to back away, leaving the accord
unconsummated. Now that she has been eliminated, a number of experts
here have noted, Bush, predictably, lacks a "Plan B".

The prospect of a failed, nuclear-armed Pakistan makes even Iraq -- not
to mention a uranium-enrichment programme in Iran -- look benign. It
could be a rough final year.

(END/2007)