Bush's Loosening Grip

Just as Democrats like Nancy Pelosi are beginning to organize little pockets of shadow government, the Bush renegades are slowly losing their grip on the rest of the government.

The best illustration of this is the continuing controversy over Iranian weapons in Iraq. Last Saturday, an anonymous "senior defense official" and two other equally anonymous experts claimed that effective roadside bombs called "explosively formed penetrators" or EFP were manufactured in Iran and handed over to Iraqi Shiite militias by the Quds units of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards under the orders of Iraqi leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Given that these kinds of claims were relentlessly hyped in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, there has been a lot of legitimate questioning over whether the anonymity of the presenters meant that the Bush administration wanted to distance itself from the potentially spurious claims. My sense though is that the Bush administration decided that an "anonymous" general would be more credible than senior Bush officials. Thus, the administration has decided that the President Bush himself, Dick Cheney, and Condoleeza Rice no longer have the credibility needed to convince the public that administration claims about Iran are true. So they used an "anonymous" presenter instead. In other words, the Bush administration has begun to lose its nerve.

Then today, General Peter Pace, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, directly contradicted the Bush administration's position on these same weapons, claiming that there was no basis for accusing the Iranian government of interfering in Iraq even if the "explosively-formed penetrators" were manufactured in Iran. Of course, Pace is right. If the weapons indeed are Iranian made (still a "big if"), there are lots of ways that don't involve the Iranian government to get weapons into Iraq and the Bush administration does not have good enough intelligence to determine how the weapons would be moving into Iraq. However, the larger point is that General Pace is "off the reservation" on such an important point for the Bush administration. As Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, General Pace is the most important political appointee in the American military. The fact that he has gone "off message" means both that he is dismissive of the Bush administration's campaign against Iran and that he does not fear retaliation from the higher levels of the administration. In other words, the Bush administration has lost control over General Pace. Normally, losing control over the military during a time of war would be a dangerous thing, but what Peter Pace's independence means is that the Bush administration is now a little less dangerous.

The Bush administration is not doing any better with Congressional Republicans. Although Sen. Mitch McConnell is fighting a rear-guard action for Bush in the Senate, House Republicans have decided not to defend the Bush administration's surge policy in this week's debate over Nancy Pelosi's anti-surge resolution. According to a letter obtained by Talking Points Memo, the Republican leadership is advising GOP representatives to talk about almost anything but the surge:

"The debate should not be about the surge or its details. This debate should not even be about the Iraq war to date, mistakes that have been made, or whether we can, or cannot, win militarily. If we let Democrats force us into a debate on the surge or the current situation in Iraq, we lose."

The Bush administration has always sneered at any idea that they need support from our major European allies. The Bush administration did not care if the intelligence community, retired generals, or public opinion did not support them either. The Bush administration didn't govern according to the polls and why would they care about what the "bureaucracy" thought anyway? But the Bush administration is gradually finding that no one except the Prime Minister of Australia wants to "carry their water" (to use a phrase from racist talk-show host Rush Limbaugh) anymore. The Bush administration is lucky that there is no tradition of coups in the United States. Otherwise, they would be very ripe for a coup d'etat.