Bush Shows Why We're Losing in Iraq

President Bush's speech yesterday was a minor masterpiece of opportunism. Mounting a strong defense of Guantanamo, CIA prisons overseas, rendition of suspects to foreign countries, and the use of torture to interrogate suspects, President Bush argued that all of those illegal procedures had been important in heading off further terrorist attacks after 9-11. The President then capped off the performance by demanding that Congress pass legislation to legitimate military tribunals that used evidence gained through torture and deprived suspects of the right to know much of the evidence being used against them.

What made the speech masterful was that Bush and his team knows that most Americans support the extra-legal apparatus for dealing with terror suspects. As a result, Bush was able to remind voters of their bedrock support for prior Administration initiatives in the war on terror and then demand that the Democrats in Congress either affirm Bush's defiance of the Constitution, American law, and international law as valid or engage in their own defiance of American public opinion. Either way, the Democrats will end up looking weak--weak and ineffective in their opposition to the President or weak in their determination to fight terrorism.

It's all very clever. It's a bold stroke at a time when the Bush administration has looked increasingly inept in its efforts to cope with the deteriorating situation in Iraq.

However, the Bush administration's political opportunism is also a large part of the reason why we are doing so poorly in Iraq. For the Bush administration, the war in Iraq has first and foremost been a political war against the opposition Democrats. Much of the reason the Bush administration did not plan for the occupation, engaged in long-term denial of the seriousness of the insurgency, and took such a blase approach to Abu Ghraib was that they saw political disadvantage in admitting that there were problems to be addressed. After these mistakes, the administration then decided that doing what was necessary to retrieve the situation was intolerable because it would involve admitting errror. Consequently, Bush did not remove Donald Rumsfeld or re-evaluate the ineffective occupation tactics, did not move the increasingly disconnected Dick Cheney out of his policy-making roles, failed to send more troops to Iraq, and gave up on economic reconstruction despite the deterioration of the Iraqi economy.

This was the recipe for disaster in Iraq. Focused on not letting the Democrats get the upper hand in the political debates at home, the Bush administration neglected to do the basic things that were necessary for a successful mission in Iraq. The result has been an on-going failure that has the potential to turn into a major disaster.

Yesterday's speech by President Bush was more of the same. Although effective in the short term, it has to be seen as yet another example of the Bush administration's disastrous prioritizing of short-term political manuevering over effective policy.