The Worst President in History?

Posted on April 20, 2006 by Team VCS

George W. Bush’s presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty — and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression’s onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.

Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a “failure.” Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration’s “pursuit of disastrous policies.” In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton — a category in which Bush is the only contestant.

The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.

Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole — a fact the president’s admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about “the current crop of history professors” than about Bush or about Bush’s eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled — and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating — reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled — nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success — flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush’s role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher.

Even worse for the president, the general public, having once given Bush the highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears to be coming around to the dismal view held by most historians. To be sure, the president retains a considerable base of supporters who believe in and adore him, and who reject all criticism with a mixture of disbelief and fierce contempt — about one-third of the electorate. (When the columnist Richard Reeves publicized the historians’ poll last year and suggested it might have merit, he drew thousands of abusive replies that called him an idiot and that praised Bush as, in one writer’s words, “a Christian who actually acts on his deeply held beliefs.”) Yet the ranks of the true believers have thinned dramatically. A majority of voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush’s handling of his job. Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush’s in his second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his resignation in 1974. No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush’s (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties). No president, including Harry Truman (whose ratings sometimes dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such a virtually unrelieved decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and after his re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment.

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How does any president’s reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures — an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.

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THE CREDIBILITY GAP

No previous president appears to have squandered the public’s trust more than Bush has. In the 1840s, President James Polk gained a reputation for deviousness over his alleged manufacturing of the war with Mexico and his supposedly covert pro-slavery views. Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois congressman, virtually labeled Polk a liar when he called him, from the floor of the House, “a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man” and denounced the war as “from beginning to end, the sheerest deception.” But the swift American victory in the war, Polk’s decision to stick by his pledge to serve only one term and his sudden death shortly after leaving office spared him the ignominy over slavery that befell his successors in the 1850s. With more than two years to go in Bush’s second term and no swift victory in sight, Bush’s reputation will probably have no such reprieve.

The problems besetting Bush are of a more modern kind than Polk’s, suited to the television age — a crisis both in confidence and credibility. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam travails gave birth to the phrase “credibility gap,” meaning the distance between a president’s professions and the public’s perceptions of reality. It took more than two years for Johnson’s disapproval rating in the Gallup Poll to reach fifty-two percent in March 1968 — a figure Bush long ago surpassed, but that was sufficient to persuade the proud LBJ not to seek re-election. Yet recently, just short of three years after Bush buoyantly declared “mission accomplished” in Iraq, his disapproval ratings have been running considerably higher than Johnson’s, at about sixty percent. More than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill Clinton — a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as “Slick Willie.”

Previous modern presidents, including Truman, Reagan and Clinton, managed to reverse plummeting ratings and regain the public’s trust by shifting attention away from political and policy setbacks, and by overhauling the White House’s inner circles. But Bush’s publicly expressed view that he has made no major mistakes, coupled with what even the conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. calls his “high-flown pronouncements” about failed policies, seems to foreclose the first option. Upping the ante in the Middle East and bombing Iranian nuclear sites, a strategy reportedly favored by some in the White House, could distract the public and gain Bush immediate political capital in advance of the 2006 midterm elections — but in the long term might severely worsen the already dire situation in Iraq, especially among Shiite Muslims linked to the Iranians. And given Bush’s ardent attachment to loyal aides, no matter how discredited, a major personnel shake-up is improbable, short of indictments. Replacing Andrew Card with Joshua Bolten as chief of staff — a move announced by the president in March in a tone that sounded more like defiance than contrition — represents a rededication to current policies and personnel, not a serious change. (Card, an old Bush family retainer, was widely considered more moderate than most of the men around the president and had little involvement in policy-making.) The power of Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, remains uncurbed. Were Cheney to announce he is stepping down due to health problems, normally a polite pretext for a political removal, one can be reasonably certain it would be because Cheney actually did have grave health problems.

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BUSH AT WAR

Until the twentieth century, American presidents managed foreign wars well — including those presidents who prosecuted unpopular wars. James Madison had no support from Federalist New England at the outset of the War of 1812, and the discontent grew amid mounting military setbacks in 1813. But Federalist political overreaching, combined with a reversal of America’s military fortunes and the negotiation of a peace with Britain, made Madison something of a hero again and ushered in a brief so-called Era of Good Feelings in which his Jeffersonian Republican Party coalition ruled virtually unopposed. The Mexican War under Polk was even more unpopular, but its quick and victorious conclusion redounded to Polk’s favor — much as the rapid American victory in the Spanish-American War helped William McKinley overcome anti-imperialist dissent.

The twentieth century was crueler to wartime presidents. After winning re-election in 1916 with the slogan “He Kept Us Out of War,” Woodrow Wilson oversaw American entry into the First World War. Yet while the doughboys returned home triumphant, Wilson’s idealistic and politically disastrous campaign for American entry into the League of Nations presaged a resurgence of the opposition Republican Party along with a redoubling of American isolationism that lasted until Pearl Harbor.

Bush has more in common with post-1945 Democratic presidents Truman and Johnson, who both became bogged down in overseas military conflicts with no end, let alone victory, in sight. But Bush has become bogged down in a singularly crippling way. On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush’s presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush’s simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership.

No other president — Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War — faced with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the president’s own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his policies — including retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill — suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president’s supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of national security. The wise men who counseled Bush’s father, including James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, found their entreaties brusquely ignored by his son. When asked if he ever sought advice from the elder Bush, the president responded, “There is a higher Father that I appeal to.”

All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the seeds for the crises to come by diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward an all-out effort to topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a deliberate political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and a traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now been demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an imminent Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House suggested included nuclear weapons. Instead of emphasizing any political, diplomatic or humanitarian aspects of a war on Iraq — an appeal that would have sounded too “sensitive,” as Cheney once sneered — the administration built a “Bush Doctrine” of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative threats and embracing principles previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S. foreign policy-makers, even at the height of the Cold War. The president did so with premises founded, in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking. He did so while proclaiming an expansive Wilsonian rhetoric of making the world safe for democracy — yet discarding the multilateralism and systems of international law (including the Geneva Conventions) that emanated from Wilson’s idealism. He did so while dismissing intelligence that an American invasion could spark a long and bloody civil war among Iraq’s fierce religious and ethnic rivals, reports that have since proved true. And he did so after repeated warnings by military officials such as Gen. Eric Shinseki that pacifying postwar Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of American troops — accurate estimates that Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush policy gurus ridiculed as “wildly off the mark.”

When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder of the modern conservative movement, writes categorically, as he did in February, that “one can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed,” then something terrible has happened. Even as a brash young iconoclast, Buckley always took the long view. The Bush White House seems incapable of doing so, except insofar as a tiny trusted circle around the president constantly reassures him that he is a messianic liberator and profound freedom fighter, on a par with FDR and Lincoln, and that history will vindicate his every act and utterance.

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BUSH AT HOME

Bush came to office in 2001 pledging to govern as a “compassionate conservative,” more moderate on domestic policy than the dominant right wing of his party. The pledge proved hollow, as Bush tacked immediately to the hard right. Previous presidents and their parties have suffered when their actions have belied their campaign promises. Lyndon Johnson is the most conspicuous recent example, having declared in his 1964 run against the hawkish Republican Barry Goldwater that “we are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.” But no president has surpassed Bush in departing so thoroughly from his original campaign persona.

The heart of Bush’s domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts — a return, with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush’s father once ridiculed as “voodoo economics.” Bush crowed in triumph in February 2004, “We cut taxes, which basically meant people had more money in their pocket.” The claim is bogus for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led to impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping out the solid Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering record levels, Bush’s tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees, state and local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who rely on Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and college students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion’s share of benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest Americans, while new business investment has increased at a historically sluggish rate since the peak of the last business cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since 2001 has been anemic compared to the Bush administration’s original forecasts and is chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending, especially on defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been dropping since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.4 percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average inflation rate of 3.4 percent.

The monster deficits, caused by increased federal spending combined with the reduction of revenue resulting from the tax cuts, have also placed Bush’s administration in a historic class of its own with respect to government borrowing. According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever — with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush — sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that “prosperity is just around the corner” — insists that he will cut federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the deficit in the first place!

The rest of what remains of Bush’s skimpy domestic agenda is either failed or failing — a record unmatched since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The No Child Left Behind educational-reform act has proved so unwieldy, draconian and poorly funded that several states — including Utah, one of Bush’s last remaining political strongholds — have fought to opt out of it entirely. White House proposals for immigration reform and a guest-worker program have succeeded mainly in dividing pro-business Republicans (who want more low-wage immigrant workers) from paleo-conservatives fearful that hordes of Spanish-speaking newcomers will destroy American culture. The paleos’ call for tougher anti-immigrant laws — a return to the punitive spirit of exclusion that led to the notorious Immigration Act of 1924 that shut the door to immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe — has in turn deeply alienated Hispanic voters from the Republican Party, badly undermining the GOP’s hopes of using them to build a permanent national electoral majority. The recent pro-immigrant demonstrations, which drew millions of marchers nationwide, indicate how costly the Republican divide may prove.

The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently deferred is the Christian right, both in his selections for the federal bench and in his implications that he bases his policies on premillennialist, prophetic Christian doctrine. Previous presidents have regularly invoked the Almighty. McKinley is supposed to have fallen to his knees, seeking divine guidance about whether to take control of the Philippines in 1898, although the story may be apocryphal. But no president before Bush has allowed the press to disclose, through a close friend, his startling belief that he was ordained by God to lead the country. The White House’s sectarian positions — over stem-cell research, the teaching of pseudoscientific “intelligent design,” global population control, the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more — have led some to conclude that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls “the first religious party in U.S. history.”

Bush’s faith-based conception of his mission, which stands above and beyond reasoned inquiry, jibes well with his administration’s pro-business dogma on global warming and other urgent environmental issues. While forcing federally funded agencies to remove from their Web sites scientific information about reproductive health and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS, and while peremptorily overruling staff scientists at the Food and Drug Administration on making emergency contraception available over the counter, Bush officials have censored and suppressed research findings they don’t like by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture. Far from being the conservative he said he was, Bush has blazed a radical new path as the first American president in history who is outwardly hostile to science — dedicated, as a distinguished, bipartisan panel of educators and scientists (including forty-nine Nobel laureates) has declared, to “the distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends.”

The Bush White House’s indifference to domestic problems and science alike culminated in the catastrophic responses to Hurricane Katrina. Scientists had long warned that global warming was intensifying hurricanes, but Bush ignored them — much as he and his administration sloughed off warnings from the director of the National Hurricane Center before Katrina hit. Reorganized under the Department of Homeland Security, the once efficient Federal Emergency Management Agency turned out, under Bush, to have become a nest of cronyism and incompetence. During the months immediately after the storm, Bush traveled to New Orleans eight times to promise massive rebuilding aid from the federal government. On March 30th, however, Bush’s Gulf Coast recovery coordinator admitted that it could take as long as twenty-five years for the city to recover.

Karl Rove has sometimes likened Bush to the imposing, no-nonsense President Andrew Jackson. Yet Jackson took measures to prevent those he called “the rich and powerful” from bending “the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” Jackson also gained eternal renown by saving New Orleans from British invasion against terrible odds. Generations of Americans sang of Jackson’s famous victory. In 1959, Johnny Horton’s version of “The Battle of New Orleans” won the Grammy for best country & western performance. If anyone sings about George W. Bush and New Orleans, it will be a blues number.

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PRESIDENTIAL MISCONDUCT

Virtually every presidential administration dating back to George Washington’s has faced charges of misconduct and threats of impeachment against the president or his civil officers. The alleged offenses have usually involved matters of personal misbehavior and corruption, notably the payoff scandals that plagued Cabinet officials who served presidents Harding and Ulysses S. Grant. But the charges have also included alleged usurpation of power by the president and serious criminal conduct that threatens constitutional government and the rule of law — most notoriously, the charges that led to the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and to Richard Nixon’s resignation.

Historians remain divided over the actual grievousness of many of these allegations and crimes. Scholars reasonably describe the graft and corruption around the Grant administration, for example, as gargantuan, including a kickback scandal that led to the resignation of Grant’s secretary of war under the shadow of impeachment. Yet the scandals produced no indictments of Cabinet secretaries and only one of a White House aide, who was acquitted. By contrast, the most scandal-ridden administration in the modern era, apart from Nixon’s, was Ronald Reagan’s, now widely remembered through a haze of nostalgia as a paragon of virtue. A total of twenty-nine Reagan officials, including White House national security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, were convicted on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra affair, illegal lobbying and a looting scandal inside the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Three Cabinet officers — HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, Attorney General Edwin Meese and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger — left their posts under clouds of scandal. In contrast, not a single official in the Clinton administration was even indicted over his or her White House duties, despite repeated high-profile investigations and a successful, highly partisan impeachment drive.

The full report, of course, has yet to come on the Bush administration. Because Bush, unlike Reagan or Clinton, enjoys a fiercely partisan and loyal majority in Congress, his administration has been spared scrutiny. Yet that mighty advantage has not prevented the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, on charges stemming from an alleged major security breach in the Valerie Plame matter. (The last White House official of comparable standing to be indicted while still in office was Grant’s personal secretary, in 1875.) It has not headed off the unprecedented scandal involving Larry Franklin, a high-ranking Defense Department official, who has pleaded guilty to divulging classified information to a foreign power while working at the Pentagon — a crime against national security. It has not forestalled the arrest and indictment of Bush’s top federal procurement official, David Safavian, and the continuing investigations into Safavian’s intrigues with the disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, recently sentenced to nearly six years in prison — investigations in which some prominent Republicans, including former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed (and current GOP aspirant for lieutenant governor of Georgia) have already been implicated, and could well produce the largest congressional corruption scandal in American history. It has not dispelled the cloud of possible indictment that hangs over others of Bush’s closest advisers.

History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding the powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution. There has always been a tension over the constitutional roles of the three branches of the federal government. The Framers intended as much, as part of the system of checks and balances they expected would minimize tyranny. When Andrew Jackson took drastic measures against the nation’s banking system, the Whig Senate censured him for conduct “dangerous to the liberties of the people.” During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s emergency decisions to suspend habeas corpus while Congress was out of session in 1861 and 1862 has led some Americans, to this day, to regard him as a despot. Richard Nixon’s conduct of the war in Southeast Asia and his covert domestic-surveillance programs prompted Congress to pass new statutes regulating executive power.

By contrast, the Bush administration — in seeking to restore what Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called “the legitimate authority of the presidency” — threatens to overturn the Framers’ healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that the president’s powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious “signing statements,” which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Earlier presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush doesn’t bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases — using the signing statements as if they were line-item vetoes. In those instances when Bush’s violations of federal law have come to light, as over domestic surveillance, the White House has devised a novel solution: Stonewall any investigation into the violations and bid a compliant Congress simply to rewrite the laws.

Bush’s alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic. One need go back in the record less than a decade to find prominent Republicans railing against far more minor presidential legal infractions as precursors to all-out totalitarianism. “I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the president,” Sen. Bill Frist declared of Bill Clinton’s efforts to conceal an illicit sexual liaison. “No man is above the law, and no man is below the law — that’s the principle that we all hold very dear in this country,” Rep. Tom DeLay asserted. “The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door,” warned Rep. Henry Hyde, one of Clinton’s chief accusers. In the face of Bush’s more definitive dismissal of federal law, the silence from these quarters is deafening.

The president’s defenders stoutly contend that war-time conditions fully justify Bush’s actions. And as Lincoln showed during the Civil War, there may be times of military emergency where the executive believes it imperative to take immediate, highly irregular, even unconstitutional steps. “I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful,” Lincoln wrote in 1864, “by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation.” Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he has been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a “war on terror” — a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln’s exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush’s could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry.

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Much as Bush still enjoys support from those who believe he can do no wrong, he now suffers opposition from liberals who believe he can do no right. Many of these liberals are in the awkward position of having supported Bush in the past, while offering little coherent as an alternative to Bush’s policies now. Yet it is difficult to see how this will benefit Bush’s reputation in history.

The president came to office calling himself “a uniter, not a divider” and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has had two enormous opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other president in living memory. Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious — much like James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called “a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen,” Bush has become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the country by outside forces.

No historian can responsibly predict the future with absolute certainty. There are too many imponderables still to come in the two and a half years left in Bush’s presidency to know exactly how it will look in 2009, let alone in 2059. There have been presidents — Harry Truman was one — who have left office in seeming disgrace, only to rebound in the estimates of later scholars. But so far the facts are not shaping up propitiously for George W. Bush. He still does his best to deny it. Having waved away the lessons of history in the making of his decisions, the present-minded Bush doesn’t seem to be concerned about his place in history. “History. We won’t know,” he told the journalist Bob Woodward in 2003. “We’ll all be dead.”

Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be defied or dismissed, even by a president. “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history,” said Abraham Lincoln. “We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”

SEAN WILENTZ

Posted Apr 21, 2006 12:34 PM

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Baghdad Slipping Into Civil War

Posted on April 20, 2006 by Team VCS

The new clashes between Shia militiamen dressed in Iraqi military and police uniforms and resistance fighters and residents from the Sunni Adhamiya district of Baghdad have convinced many that what Baghdad is witnessing is no less than a civil war.
For long now, some leaders from both Shia and Sunni communities have been making peace moves, but this has done little to check escalating sectarian violence following the Feb. 22 bombing of the Shia Golden Mosque in Samarra.

Over several weeks before new clashes Monday and Tuesday this week, Adhamiya residents had been barricading streets with tyres and the trunks of date palm trees to keep kidnappers and “death squads” away. But clashes broke out about 12.30 am Sunday night following a ‘police’ raid on the area.

“We’d had sporadic fighting for several nights before, but nothing like this,” a man who asked to be referred to as Abu Aziz told IPS.. “My family and I thought a war was happening because so many heavy guns, mortars and rocket propelled grenades were being used.”

IPS saw the sky over the area glow red through the night, as U.S. military helicopters hovered above.

Residents said the attack was clearly carried out by Shia militia.

“I have seen these members of the Badr militia and Mehdi Army wearing Iraqi Police (IP) uniforms and using IP pick-up trucks roaming our streets,” said Abu Aziz, “They tried to reach our sacred Abu Hanifa mosque, but they were stopped before they could do so, thanks to god. Some were just wearing civilian clothes with black face masks, others were definitely commandos from the ministry of interior.”

Last month Iraq’s minister of interior Bayan Jabr told reporters that “the deaths squads that we have captured are in the defence and interior ministries.. There are people who have infiltrated the army and the interior.”

The Badr Organisation is the armed wing of the Shia Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and the Mehdi Army is the militia of the fiery Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Through the attack, in which scores of ‘IP’ men drove up to attack the district, at least six IP vehicles were burned, and at least one of the Shia militia members was killed, local residents told IPS.

They also reported that at least 10 residents including at a woman were killed in the clashes. This round of fighting continued until 12.30 pm Monday.

One resident wrote to IPS to say: “Men in police uniforms attacked the neighbourhood. The ministry of interior claimed the uniformed men don’t belong to the puppet (Iraqi government) forces, but local residents are quite sure they are special forces from the ministry of interior, probably Badr brigades. The neighbourhood was sealed off and the mobile phone network was disconnected until 10.45 pm. Electricity was cut off from 10 am.”

Resistance fighters with sniper rifles, Kalashnikov machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers lined rooftops to thwart the onslaught by the Shia militiamen, he said.

His note added: “When the uniformed forces entered the neighbourhood, the National Guards that are usually patrolling the streets left. Young armed men from the neighbourhood fought side by side with mujahedin against the attacking forces to protect al-Adhamiya. Several residents have been killed in the streets, but there are currently no figures available. U.S. troops also entered the neighbourhood. At first, they only stood by and watched; later on they too fired at the locals, who tried to repel the attacks.”

No independent confirmation of the account was available. Shia groups officially deny that they have been attacking Sunni targets in the guise of the army and police. And while the minister of the interior acknowledged earlier that these groups and infiltrated the police and army, it is rarely possibly to obtain independent or official views on every clash.

But U.S. forces were clearly involved in the fighting. The Associated Press reported that “Army officials said they had suffered no casualties, and planned to raid homes to search for the gunmen.” Residents said the U.S.. forces arrived to provide back-up support to the Shia militiamen wearing Iraqi Police uniforms and army fatigues.

The U.S. military spokesperson in Baghdad did not respond to phone calls and email messages from IPS requesting comment on the clashes.

The clashes have continued.. Scores of men wearing white robes and carrying guns, in a manner of suicide martyrs, arrived in Adhamiya Tuesday morning and moved to attack the Sunni Jalal mosque. Witnesses said the men fired at the mosque, and this led to clashes that lasted until 1 pm before the men were forced to retreat.

Other armed groups approached Adhamiya from three directions, but were repelled before they could reach the Abu Hanifa mosque. Clashes erupted near the al-Anbia mosque in the area. Fierce fighting broke out on one of the two main thoroughfares into Adhamiya, the Omar Abdul Aziz Avenue.

Tension has remained high in the area. Just across the Tigris river from the Adhamiya neighbourhood is the predominantly Shia Khadimiya area. Sporadic gunfire was heard Tuesday across various locations in Adhamiya. (END/2006)

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When Our Troops Come Home

Posted on April 20, 2006 by Team VCS

Last year, I was invited by Gen. B.B. Bell, commander of the U.S. Army in Europe and Korea, to speak to a group of active-duty military men and women and their families in Heidelberg, Germany. My goal that day was to give those brave servicemen and women some strategies for keeping the faith and their emotional equilibrium as they prepared to go home or back to the battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan. I also offered some coping ideas for their equally courageous families. I must admit that their inner strength and strong spirits moved me to tears.

Everyone knew that the war zone was a hellish place. Yet, as hard as it was for the soldiers going back, it may have been even harder for those coming home.

Although President Bush has said that American troops will be in Iraq at least through 2009, about 200,000 servicemen and women were discharged in the last year. Former soldiers and their families may joyfully look forward to the return to normal life, but that isn’t always what happens. Coming home can take on a dreamlike quality where expectations are sky-high for soldier and family—yet the reality can be very different.

As family, friends and fellow citizens, we can—and must—make the reentry of our military to civilian life easier.

Thankfully, we have learned as a nation not to blame the warriors for the war as we did when our soldiers came home from Vietnam. This time around, even fervent anti-war protesters support the troops. Virtually every soldier and Marine returning to this country is receiving a warm homecoming. In gymnasiums and mini-parades down main streets, at dockside and airport USO lounges, communities have been giving rousing welcomes to their hometown heroes.

And that’s good, because one of the best things we can do for these soldiers and Marines is to welcome them with open arms. Even more, we need to create opportunities at home for vets to use the skills they learned in the military. Vets are well trained to serve as volunteer firemen and EMTs and in other jobs that help people and save lives.

The dark side of homecoming. For some, the reintegration may be slow and painful. War changes everyone—the warriors themselves and often their families.

Wives who have set their hopes on getting back the same man they sent to war the year before have a rude awakening when they find themselves next to a virtual stranger weeks after his return. And kids who sent Daddy all those loving cards and drawings can be found crying, “Why don’t you go back to Iraq!” when their idea of Dad doesn’t match the angry, depressed or withdrawn man lying on the couch when they get home from school.

Today, we’re more knowledgeable about the roots of these kinds of problems. After decades of observing some Vietnam vets suffer from nightmares, sleeplessness, flashbacks and sudden anger, we now recognize this cluster of symptoms as a real illness: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Once called battle fatigue or shell shock, PTSD is a medically classified syndrome that can be effectively treated with drugs and therapy.

Alarming numbers. Not all returning soldiers will be haunted by war for the rest of their lives. But the few studies done on veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq reveal an alarming number of episodes of stress and anxiety disorders. According to a study led by Dr. Charles W. Hoge of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and published in July 2004 in The New England Journal of Medicine, 15{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of the Marines and 17{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of the soldiers surveyed after they returned from Iraq suffered major depression, generalized anxiety or PTSD.
The kind of combat the military face in this war produces nightmares. In Iraq there is no “front” and therefore no safe place to retreat for mental and emotional respite. In this environment, our servicemen and women have no place to hide and no one to trust. Artillery-assisted grenade launchers and improvised explosive weapons also have taken their toll, physically and mentally.

Indeed, those who have seen the closest combat and have been injured in the line of duty are most vulnerable to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. And that includes many of our troops: According to the Hoge study, 86{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of the soldiers and Marines in Iraq reported knowing someone who was seriously injured or killed. Half said they’d either handled or uncovered human remains; more than half said they had killed an enemy combatant; and 10{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} said they’d been responsible for the death of a noncombatant.

Getting help without stigma. The Hoge study also showed that even though 80{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of those who suffered from a serious mental disorder acknowledged that they had a problem, only 44{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} were interested in receiving assistance, and just 35{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} actually got formal help. Clearly, many soldiers are concerned that they will be stigmatized for seeking help. Indeed, in today’s volunteer army, a large number of men and woman are loath to admit any “weakness” or to do anything that they perceive could hurt their military careers.

Soldiers and former soldiers can get help—if they ask for it. They need to call on their own courageous characters once more—and admit that they are hurting. Their families can help by recognizing the signs that something is wrong and directing their loved ones to federal or community services. (See below.)

The bright side is that medical know-how has allowed more than 94{cd9ac3671b356cd86fdb96f1eda7eb3bb1367f54cff58cc36abbd73c33c82e1d} of our troops wounded on the field to get back home alive. But the work of healing will take years. The wounds of this war have been horrendous. Vets with multiple amputations and brain injuries and shrapnel will fill many of the beds of Walter Reed Army Medical Center and challenge our country’s ability to care for their minds, spirits and broken bodies for decades to come.

As a nation, we must make our veterans a priority with increased funding for transitional psychotherapeutic and bereavement services. We have found plenty of money for the war. Now we need to step up to our responsibility to those who have done our national bidding. Any citizen can write a letter to Congress demanding adequate VA funding; others can seek out the more than 200 vet centers nationwide and offer to lend a hand.

Our understanding of our vets’ needs is a priceless gift. Let us embrace them in an all-enveloping support system so they really can come home again.

PARADE Contributing Editor Dr. Joyce Brothers is a distinguished psychologist, counselor and author.

When Families Give Support

Here are some things family and friends of vets can do to help them readjust to normal life:

• Give a vet some space. Most won’t want to talk about the violence they witnessed right away.

• Then lend an ear. When the time comes, prepare to listen. The recollections may come out over the course of weeks or months, as your loved one reformulates the memories into meaningful stories.

• Recognize that things are different now. The world has changed. A spouse may have taken on new responsibilities. There may be some jealousy over what has been missed. Bring your vet up to date slowly, one issue at a time. Realize that you may have to renegotiate family routines.

• Understand the vet’s need to spend time with war buddies. Families need to know that the vets’ lifeline to peers often makes the difference between coping and a withdrawal into isolation.

• Expect a period of adjustment. It can take six to eight weeks to get back to something that approaches normal, both physically and mentally.

• Get help. If problems persist for more than three months, professional help may be needed—for the individual or for couples. The Departments of Defense and VA both provide mental-health services.

• Take a screening test. A new online test offered by the Department of Defense, Office of Health Affairs, can help those who prefer anonymity. Called the Mental Health Self-Assessment, the program allows vets affected by deployment in every branch of the military (including National Guard and Reserves) and their family members to identify symptoms before problems become urgent. The program is accessible 24/7 at www.militarymentalhealth.org on the Web. The site also provides information about mental-health and substance-abuse services covered by the DoD.

When Families Need Support

Hospitalization puts tremendous stress on both vets and their families. A unique private/public partnership called the Fisher House Program tries to ease that stress by enabling family members to remain close to their loved ones while they are receiving medical care for an illness or injury incurred during active service. Families are provided with “comfort homes” built on the grounds of major military and VA medical centers for a minimal fee or free. Annually, the program assists more than 8,500 families. For information, see below or write: Fisher House, 1401 Rockville Pike, Suite 600, Rockville, Md. 20852.

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Anthrax escaped at Army lab in ’01, ’02

Posted on April 20, 2006 by Team VCS

The Army’s biological weapons defense laboratory at Fort Detrick probably had multiple episodes of anthrax contamination as workers strove to process a flood of samples sent there for testing in 2001 and 2002, an internal report says.

The report contains previously undisclosed details about the sometimes sloppy practices that allowed anthrax spores to escape from biosafety containment labs at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. No one was hurt by the released spores.

Security measures were tightened after the Army acknowledged one of the accidental releases in April 2002. No other breaches of containment – the confirmed presence of agents where they should not be – have since been reported.

The 361-page report, a copy of which was obtained by the Frederick News-Post, was compiled by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, which oversees the research institute.

The report shows that evidence of anthrax spores in supposedly clean areas began appearing months before the April 8, 2002, breach as the institute processed tens of thousands of items and environmental samples, including the anthrax-laced letters mailed to Democratic Sens. Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Patrick Leahy of Vermont in the fall of 2001.

In December 2001, an institute technician told Dr. Bruce Ivins, a microbiologist, that she might have been exposed to anthrax spores when handling an anthrax-laced letter, the report says. It said Ivins tested the technician’s desk area and found growth that had the earmarks of anthrax. He decontaminated her desk, computer, keypad and monitor but did not notify his superiors.

Ivins later told Army investigators he did the unauthorized testing because he was concerned that the powdered anthrax in the letters might not be adequately contained.

He said he again became suspicious of contamination April 8, 2002, when two researchers reported potential exposures after noticing that flasks they were working with had leaked anthrax, causing crusting on the outside of the glass. Ivins reported the concerns to institute officials, who then found spores on nasal swabs from one scientist involved in the incident. The scientist had been vaccinated and did not contract the disease.

 

 

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A Case for Accountability

Posted on April 20, 2006 by Team VCS

We have the best military in the world, hands down. We must complete what we started in Iraq, and there is no doubt in my mind that we have the military capacity to do that, provided the political will is there. Our success in Iraq is due to the incredible performance of our servicemen and women. I believe that I have an obligation and a duty to speak out.

I had the opportunity to observe high-level policy formulation in the Pentagon and experience firsthand its impact on the ground. I have concluded that we need new leadership in the Defense Department because of a pattern of poor strategic decisions and a leadership style that is contemptuous, dismissive, arrogant and abusive. This dismissive attitude has frayed long-standing alliances with our allies inside and outside NATO, alliances that are fundamental to our security and to building strong coalitions. It is time to hold our leaders accountable. A leader is responsible for everything an organization does or fails to do. It is time to address the axis of arrogance and the reinforcing of strategic failures in decision-making.

We went to war with the wrong war plan. Senior civilian leadership chose to radically alter the results of 12 years of deliberate and continuous war planning, which was improved and approved, year after year, by previous secretaries of defense, all supported by their associated chairmen and Joint Chiefs of Staffs. Previous planning identified the need for up to three times the troop strength we committed to remove the regime in Iraq and set the conditions for peace there. Building the peace is a tough business; for a host of reasons, it requires boots on the ground.

Our current leadership decided to discount professional military advice and ignore more than a decade of competent military planning. It failed to consider military lessons learned, while displaying ignorance of the tribal, ethnic and religious complexities that have always defined Iraq. We took down a regime but failed to provide the resources to build the peace. The shortage of troops never allowed commanders on the ground to deal properly with the insurgency and the unexpected. What could have been a deliberate victory is now a long, protracted challenge.

The national embarrassment of Abu Ghraib can be traced right back to strategic policy decisions. We provided young and often untrained and poorly led soldiers with ambiguous rules for prisoner treatment and interrogation. We challenged commanders with insufficient troop levels, which put them in the position of managing shortages rather than leading, planning and anticipating mission requirements. The tragedy of Abu Ghraib should have been no surprise to any of us.

We disbanded the Iraqi military. This created unbelievable chaos, which we were in no position to control, and gave the insurgency a huge source of manpower, weapons and military experience. Previous thinking associated with war planning depended on the Iraqi military to help build the peace. Retaining functioning institutions is critical in the rebuilding process. We failed to do this.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claims to be the man who started the Army’s transformation. This is not true. Army transformation started years before this administration came into office. The secretary’s definition of transformation was to reduce the Army to between five and seven divisions to fund programs in missile defense, space defense and high-tech weapons. The war on terrorism disrupted his work, and the Army remains under-resourced at a time when it is shouldering most of the war effort. Boots on the ground and high-tech weapons are important, and one cannot come at the expense of the other.

Civilian control of the military is fundamental, but we deserve competent leaders who do not lead by intimidation, who understand that respect is a two-way street, and who do not dismiss sound military advice. At the same time, we need senior military leaders who are grounded in the fundamental principles of war and who are not afraid to do the right thing. Our democracy depends on it. There are some who advocate that we gag this debate, but let me assure you that it is not in our national interest to do so. We must win this war, and we cannot allow senior leaders to continue to make decisions when their track record is so dismal.

For all these reasons, we need to hold leaders accountable. There is no question that we will succeed in Iraq. To move forward, we need a leader with the character and skills necessary to lead. To date, this war has been a strategic failure. On the ground, operationally and tactically, we are winning the war on the backs of our great soldiers, Marines, airmen, sailors and their families. Americans deserve accountability in our leaders. We need a fresh start.

The writer, a retired Army major general, commanded the First U.S. Infantry Division in Iraq. He is now president of Klein Steel Service Inc. in Rochester, N.Y.

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Kingston GI brought home hidden injuries

Posted on April 20, 2006 by Team VCS

When 23-year-old Michael Torok returned home to DeKalb County in September 2004 after serving in the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, he had more health issues than anyone had suspected.

Michael’s father, Roland, recalled recently that his son visited a veterans hospital Sept. 4 in Chicago.

“He had back pains and blood in his urine,” the elder Torok said.

Michael’s mother, Barbara, said the hospital did not screen Michael for post-traumatic stress disorder or for suicidal tendencies. The oversight, her husband speculates, might have been attributable to — but not ex-cused by — the fact that it was Labor Day weekend.

The next day, Michael left his Kingston home ostensibly to visit a friend in Shabbona in southern DeKalb County.

He never got there.

A 19-day search for Michael uncovered evidence that he had used a credit card at a Menards store in Cherry Valley and that a call to his cell phone had been picked up by a Verizon tower near Illinois 72.

On Sept. 24, Michael was found dead in his pickup truck in a rural area of Ogle County near Monroe Center, the victim of a self-inflicted stab wound. His parents were left to wonder whether his suicide might have been prevented by the kind of outreach and therapy options that have since been adopted at veterans hospitals.

At Hines VA Hospital near Chicago, all patients are now checked for PTSD, no matter how minor the other ailments for which they are seeking treatment.

“They should have been doing that a long time ago,” Roland said. “That should have been going on ever since the war (in Afghanistan and Iraq) started. They should have been doing it in Vietnam, too.”

Michael’s parents suspect that his death was at least partly because of his use of Lariam, an anti-malaria drug routinely given to U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

In 2003, the Food and Drug Administration warned that “Lariam may cause serious mental problems in some patients.” Traces of the drug were discovered in Michael’s system in a post-mortem examination of his body.

Nick Parnello, a Rockford veteran of the Vietnam War, agrees with the Toroks that the adoption of more aggressive strategies against PTSD by veterans hospitals is long overdue.

The 58-year-old Parnello, who was a door gunner on a Huey helicopter in Vietnam and now mentors fledgling inventors for a subsidiary of EIGERlab, said veterans hospitals too often failed to look for or effectively deal with the psychological problems plaguing troops returning from the conflict in Southeast Asia in the 1960s and ’70s.

“The hospitals weren’t prepared for it,” Parnello said. “We had guys who were all screwed up because of what they had seen or what they had done. We had thousands of guys committing suicide.”

Parnello said VietNow, a national veterans organization he co-founded, began organizing informal discussions among combat veterans about 25 years ago.

“The worst cases,” he said, “usually were with guys who wanted to bury their pain. It was just too much for them to deal with. But when we got them talking and listening with their brother vets, they usually were able to begin to heal.”

He recalled the case of one vet who was ashamed for years afterward for having been frozen with fear in a combat situation.

“His outfit was under fire, and he just laid there with his machine gun and didn’t move,” said Parnello. “He felt so guilty about the fact that he had been afraid. But when he talked to other vets in one of our groups, he got better.”

Parnello said some of the people coming home from military duty in Iraq and Afghanistan are facing psychological problems unique to the conflicts in which they’ve participated.

“Every war is different,” he said, “and the problems the veterans face are different.”

Staff writer Pat Cunningham can be reached at 815-987-1376 or at pcunningham@rrstar.com.

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U.S. botched war, defenders, foes say

Posted on April 19, 2006 by Team VCS

Even as retired generals engage in debate on whether Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld should resign over the Iraq war, critics and defenders appear to agree on one point: The war is not going as well as they expected.

In interviews, writings and public appearances, many of Rumsfeld’s military defenders have acknowledged the failure to predict the virulence of the insurgency and to aggressively impose order in Iraq was a mistake that could be difficult to repair.

With U.S. military casualties again on the rise and public opinion turning against the war, such consensus is unsurprising. But for an administration whose political health is tied to its management of the conflict, and which has repeatedly insisted the war is going better than is generally portrayed, such pessimism from those close to Iraq policy could make the job of regaining public support difficult.

“Everyone is assuming and agreeing we botched this,” said Michael O’Hanlon, a military analyst with the Brookings Institution who has been critical of the retired generals’ speaking out against Rumsfeld. “We’re all agreeing this is not going to go down as one of the nation’s great accomplishments. It’s bad for (the Bush administration’s) place in history” and for Republican electoral prospects in November, he added.

There are notable exceptions to the consensus on Iraq. Neither retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the invasion, nor retired Gen. Tommy Franks, the former head of U.S. Central Command and the war plan’s primary architect, have acknowledged mistakes.

But several other former military leaders, including members of the Joint Chiefs during the war and a senior general who served as Franks’ deputy, have acknowledged that the plans for rebuilding and stabilizing Iraq were flawed.

“We all agree there were mistakes made,” retired Gen. John Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff during the Iraq war, said recently.

Retired Gen. John Keane, who was vice chief of staff of the U.S. Army during Iraq war planning and who has been outspoken in supporting Rumsfeld, said although he believes the invasion plan proved successful, the post-war plan should have included many more military engineers, translators and intelligence experts.

“If we knew the insurgency would emerge, the occupying force would have changed,” Keane said. “Those additional forces could have been in the queue.”

Some military experts say that because there is such widespread agreement over post-invasion failures, the recent denunciations of Rumsfeld can be seen as an effort to deflect blame from the uniformed military.

“The finger-pointing over Iraq has begun,” said retired Col. Douglas Macgregor, a defense analyst who was consulted on war planning when he was in the Army. “We have a disaster on our hands and the generals don’t want to be held accountable.”

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Report: Blair will not back Iran strike

Posted on April 19, 2006 by Team VCS

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has reportedly told US President Bush that Britain will not offer any military support to any strike on Iran.

The Scotsman reported Sunday that sources in the British Foreign Office told the paper that even if the idea of an attack wins support in the international community, Britain will not take part.

Blair is expected to support the call [by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice] for a “Chapter 7” resolution, which could effectively isolate Iran from the international community.

But, in the midst of international opposition to a pre-emptive strike on Tehran, and Britain’s military commitments around the world, the government maintains it cannot contribute to a military assault. “We will support the diplomatic moves, at best,” a Foreign Office source told Scotland on Sunday [the Sunday edition of the Scotsman]. “But we cannot commit our own resources to a military strike.”

The Scotsman also says that in a report to be published Wednesday, the Foreign Policy Center (FPC) – which the paper says is known as “Blair’s favorite think tank” – describes neoconservatives in the Bush administration as on a collision course with Iran. The FPC, however, says that diplomacy is the best option. Last week, The Times of London reported, the organization said, “We are in danger of talking ourselves into a war” over the speculation in Seymour Hersh’s article in The New Yorker that the US was considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons. 

FPC director Stephen Twigg, formerly a Labour minister, explained to The Scotsman: “It is essential UK policy on Iran is well informed… We want to engage with the various reformist elements in Iran, both inside and outside the structures of power.”

While the sense of crisis over Iran has been escalated by the fiery rhetoric between Tehran and the West – particularly Washington – many within the British government are now convinced that the impasse can be resolved by repeating the same sort of painstaking diplomatic activity that returned Libya to the international fold …

“The only long-term solution to Iran’s problems is democracy,” said Alex Bigham, co-author of the FPC report. “But it cannot be dictated, Iraq-style, or it will backfire. Iran may seem superficially like Iraq but we need to treat Iran more like Libya. Diplomatic engagement must be allowed to run its course. There need to be bigger carrots as well as bigger sticks.”

The Associated Press reports that even as Ms. Rice presses for the international community to take a tougher stance against Iran (saying, just as the US did before the Iraq war, that the Security Council’s handling of the Iranian nuclear issue would be a test of the international community’s credibility), Russia’s UN envoy Andrey Denisov has insisted that the confrontation be resolved diplomatically.

[Ambassador] Denisov suggested that the international community should not necessarily be discouraged by Iran’s insistence that it will not give up enrichment. “We all know that for centuries Iranians had a reputation of very tough bargainers,” Denisov said. “I hope that the final outcome will be positive. We prefer to be optimists.”

The Associated Press also reported over the weekend that not everyone in Iran is happy with hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s tough talk about nuclear weapons. While most Iranians support the government’s position that Iran has a right to develop its own nuclear program, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s attempts to claim the development of the program as his own is annoying his predecessors. And some Iranians are now openly saying that he is ignoring other important issues in Iran by focusing too much on the nuclear confrontation with the West.

Reformist Mohammad Khatami, who preceded Ahmadinejad as president, publicly reminded Iranians that the nuclear achievement was “the outcome of efforts by competent Iranian scientists, a process that had begun by previous governments.”

“Ahmadinejad has forgotten why he won the presidential vote. The needy voted for him because he promised to bring bread to people’s homes but nothing good has been done to improve living standards,” said Reza Lotfi, a student at Tehran University.

Mansour Ramezanpour, a construction worker, questioned why the government hasn‘t done more for the weak economy. “Previously, I went to work four days a week. Now, not more than two days. Recession is everywhere,” he said.

Political analyst Saeed Leilaz told AP that the biggest problem between the US and Iran is that the US treats Iran as a “non-grownup person. The Iranian leadership is very unhappy with this. Tehran wants America to treat Iran as a regional superpower.”

In an editorial Tuesday, the Toronto Star argues that while with each provocation the case grows for Security Council sanctions against Iran’s leaders, so does the case for direct US-Iran talks “before the Mideast is plunged into another war.”

Iran’s reckless course has been driven by decades of American-Iranian hostility since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution. US President George Bush’s war on Iraq has not helped. And US policy inconsistency in winking at the nuclear weapons that Israel, India and Pakistan now possess has emboldened Iran to seek such weapons. …

Many Iranians would welcome a US pledge not to press for regime change or to attack, if Iran agrees to shelve its military nuclear program, and to stop preaching Israel’s destruction and embracing terror. A deal would recognize that Iran has the right to civilian nuclear power, but only under UN safeguards and with fuel supplied from Russia and other partners. And it would reopen the door to Iran-US trade. A show of US goodwill, coupled with tough UN action, offers the best hope of heading off catastrophe.

Finally, The New York Times reports that oil futures hit a record level Monday on fears about a confrontation with Iran and production shortages in Nigeria. The Times says that prices are unlikely to fall soon, as “the diplomatic showdown over Iran’s nuclear ambitions is escalating….”

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Kyrgyz Leader Threatens to Expel US Troops

Posted on April 19, 2006 by Team VCS

 The president of Kyrgyzstan threatened on Wednesday to expel American troops from the strategically located Central Asian nation unless the United States agrees to pay more for its military presence.

About 1,000 troops are stationed at an air base set up in December 2001 at Kyrgyzstan’s main civilian airport near the capital, Bishkek. Most are American but there are also small French and Spanish contingents.

The facility is used as a transit point for troops going to or coming from Afghanistan and is a base for tanker planes that refuel military craft in Afghanistan.

Kyrgyzstan “reserves the right” to reconsider its agreement to host the U.S. troops, President Kurmanbek Bakiyev said on state television.

Bakiyev said the government could terminate the agreement if talks on new financial terms do not end successfully before June.

The U.S. Embassy had no immediate comment.

The threat comes amid Russian concern about the U.S. presence in Central Asia. Kyrgyzstan also hosts a Russian air base just east of Bishkek. Last summer a regional security body led by Russia and China called for the United States and its allies to set a date for the withdrawal of their forces from Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

Uzbekistan has since expelled its U.S. troops, angered by Western criticism of the government’s bloody crackdown on demonstrators last year.

Bakiyev came to power after a March 2005 uprising drove out President Askar Akayev, who had led Kyrgyzstan since the latter days of the Soviet Union.

The U.S. Embassy has been critical of Bakiyev’s government for holding up promised democratic reforms and failing to fight organized crime.

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Afghan poppy growers want protection from Cdn forces

Posted on April 19, 2006 by Team VCS

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — A large group of Afghan poppy farmers has handed Canadian soldiers an unusual offer, pledging not to grow the illicit flowers next year if they’re allowed to harvest their poppy crop this year with no interference from Afghan officials intent on smashing the country’s opium trade.

More than 15 village elders, representing hundreds of local farmers, recently made the plea to soldiers at Canada’s remote firebase near the town of Gombad, in the rugged countryside north of Kandahar.

“They’re afraid of the government plowing up their fields,” said Maj. Kirk Gallinger, who commands a company of Edmonton-based troops trying to fight the Taliban and bring security to the district around Gombad.

“They came and asked us to support them, and to pass on a request to the (Afghan) government not to eradicate their crops this year. In return, they’ll pledge not to grow any poppies next year.”

The farmers’ plea illustrates the awkward and dangerous position Canadian soldiers find themselves in this spring, as Afghanistan’s underground poppy harvest approaches.

Canada officially supports programs to tear out poppy fields and eradicate the illegal opium trade. Ottawa is also funding efforts to find alternative crops for poppy farmers. At the same time, Canadian troops on the ground are trying to bring peace to rural areas and win the loyalties of Afghan farmers, telling them the Canadian army itself has nothing to do with eradicating their crops.

“We are caught in the middle,” Gallinger said. “Soldiers realize the effect poppy growing has on Afghanistan and that opium has in the world. We understand the importance of the eradication program.

“But there’s also an immediate concern that the farmers might take up weapons against us (if soldiers are seen to support poppy eradication) and we’re also sympathetic with the farmers. Mostly they’re trying to earn an income to put food on their table.”

Gallinger did pass the farmers’ request to a local government official last week, but he said no one believes the farmers will uphold their pledge not to grow poppies next year in return for a grace period this year.

“I’m afraid that might be wishful thinking,” he said.

Poppy growing is at the heart of Afghanistan’s problems. An estimated 4,000 tonnes of opium is smuggled out of the country every year. The $3 billion UStrade is controlled exclusively by mafia-style drug barons, many of them connected to the Taliban insurgency.

Although the U.S.-led coalition and the fledgling Afghan government have been working to undermine the poppy business since 2002, vast fields are still cultivated each spring across southern Afghanistan, turning biscuit-brown valleys into green-and-lavender narcotics pasturelands.

“Flying over it, it’s like flying over the tulip lands in Holland,” a senior British officer based at Kandahar Airfield said in a recent interview.

In the poor and broken streets of Kandahar city, the riches of the drug trade are openly flaunted only blocks from the provincial reconstruction team site, the base from which Canadian soldiers run security patrols through the city.

“See those new houses,” said an Afghan driver while escorting a CanWest News reporter through the city one day. “Those belong to the drug guys,” he said, pointing to several new and glittering mansions rising up behind razor-wire fences.

Afghan authorities are trying to fight the opium trade at its roots through programs funded by the U.S. and Britain in which contractors travel to villages with tractors, ripping up the poppy fields.

However, the Senlis Council, an international security think-tank, issued a report earlier this month saying the forced eradication of Afghanistan’s poppy crops is fuelling the power of the Taliban in southern villages.

It said disgruntled farmers join the insurgency out of anger at having their crops plowed under. Others take up arms after losing their poppy-based livelihoods and becoming enslaved to the Taliban, which frequently pays farmers in advance for their poppy harvest.

Brig.-Gen. David Fraser, the Canadian commander of coalition forces in the south, said the opium trade must be destroyed and that Canadian forces do support the anti-poppy work of the national government in Kabul.

“Poppies will kill this country if left to go unchecked,” he said in a recent interview.

But Fraser is equally adamant that “we’re not here to do poppy eradication. That’s not our job.”

He said it’s a tough distinction for soldiers to finesse on the ground, in the poppy-dependent villages where Canada is trying to win friends and where most Afghans see the soldiers for what they are allies of the national government.

“From the people’s point of view, it’s hard for them to discern between one group that’s doing poppy eradication and another group that’s here to support Afghans and deal with the terrorist threat. They don’t see the distinction, and it’s the job of every soldier on the ground, every day, to make sure he explains it to them.”

In distancing themselves from poppy eradication, could Canada’s military be accused of duplicity in the matter?

“Hey, duplicity is a reality,” said the British officer in Kandahar. “We’re not arguing about some libertarian, lovely, sort of thing here. This isn’t Ottawa. This is Afghanistan, and this is realpolitik”

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