Salon: Iraq's worst week -- and Bush's
Cole in the Chronicle
My essay at Salon.com this week is:
Iraq's worst week -- and Bush's
As Americans finally begin to grasp the magnitude of the Iraq catastrophe, Bush's popularity hits a new low.
By Juan Cole
Here is an excerpt:
"The catastrophe in Iraq, the scope of which is now apparent to even the most disengaged observer, and his mishandling of the Dubai port issue have sent President George W. Bush's public approval ratings to the lowest of his presidency. According to a Reuters poll, only 34 percent of Americans believe he is doing a good job overall. Only 30 percent, less than a third, think he is managing the Iraq situation well. A remarkable 72 percent of American troops polled in Iraq think the U.S. should leave Iraq within the next year. Nor is there any hope for Bush on the horizon. The bloody events in Iraq have undermined American authority in that country and in the Middle East more generally. The Shiite clergy of Iran and Iraq have bolstered their own authority at Bush's expense. This development has already severely limited his scope of action in Iran, and will doubtless have many other negative consequences in the months and years ahead.
Tactically, strategically and politically Bush now finds himself in the worst of all possible worlds. With Americans increasingly fed up with the Iraq debacle, he needs to start drawing down troops soon, but he can't do it while the country teeters on the brink of civil war. If civil war does break out, a U.S. withdrawal will look even more like cutting and running -- under these circumstances, not even Karl Rove will be able to figure out a way to get away with simply declaring victory and going home. Yet if American troops stay, they have no good options either. . ."
Read the whole thing.
Also, my review of three books on al-Qaeda and related groups is out in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Sorry, it is behind a firewall for non-subscribers for the moment.
posted by Juan Cole @ 3/01/2006 12:30:00 AM
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4 Comments:
Hi - Bush certainly deserves the terrible opinion poll numbers. He a catastrophe for the entire world. Before any gloating occurs, though, just about every president, back to Nixon, has had a period of poll numbers as bad, or worse, than Bush has now.
It strikes me that this is an incredible opportunity for United States citizens blue and red alike to find common ground with one another. To look inside and ask ourselves not just "where did Bush go wrong?" but "How did we manage to be so blind to it as a nation!" For Reds to reconsider "what would Jesus REALLY do?" and Blues to think about whether or not a less timid left would have flayed Dean for expressing such outrage over a military action that was already in question from the moment the sword dropped.
What have we had thus far?
On one hand, you have right leaning blind loyalists attacking the patriotism of anyone daring to suggest that the emperor may have no clothes on while those with the actual common sense to advocate diplomacy over force are virtually branded traitors and arrested for such heretical acts as wearing "Give Peace a Chance" shirts!
Oh, but the left is uber cool, right? with a practically unified voice dehumanizing Bush and Cheney (okay, maybe Cheney) as the face of evil and shooting down, without even open-minded debate, gestures toward the Middle east that could reasonably be considered as conciliatory (the Dubai port issue).
How do you fix it? It's as if one side of the country is on one side of a five dollar bill and the other is on the other side. They are looking at the same nation but one side is seeing Lincoln and the other his memorial. They will go one and all, and that includes us (worst case scenario), convinced that their side was right and the other side was wrong!
Are we so hardened in our positions that it doesn't even cross our minds that maybe, just maybe, Bush could be persuaded to actually APOLOGIZE to Americans and Iraqis alike? To say, oops. I screwed up! Help me find a way out!"
It'll never happen! you'll say.
And I'll agree, because the whole entire country has found a fall guy and that makes it real easy to look "out there" instead of "in here" The fight is not with each other but within our own riven hearts; those riven hearts we can't bear to look inside for shame and sorrow that we could have failed as miserably as Bush.
We'll eat him alive and swallow our children's future before we'll do that. Unless we don't.
"The catastrophe in Iraq, the scope of which is now apparent to even the most disengaged observer...."
Except: "For all the bad news you hear — much of it viciously skewed — Baghdad is a city of hope." Ralph Peters.
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/64406.htm
and again:
March 1, 2006 -- THE reporting out of Baghdad continues to be hysterical and dishonest. There is no civil war in the streets. None. Period.
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/64407.htm
Ralph says everything is copacetic.
Except: "For all the bad news you hear — much of it viciously skewed — Baghdad is a city of hope." Ralph Peters.
Yes, Steve, I completely understand Ralph's point. Last time I went quail hunting, okay, I was careless! But I only hit the guy's forehead for crying out loud! The heart was, like, totally fine!
All this big deal about a few people, Iraqi's no less, dying (what, they think they're better than the Sudanese!?!) is really starting to wear on me. Thank Gosh for Fox and the New York Post, to keep that liberal media bias from gaining its deadly, cowardly, flower-toting, sway.
Makes me proud as hell to be Amermirman, I mean American. Okay, foul play! I mean quail play! Ad hominem argumentation... WAIT! "hominem?" Does that mean maybe Bush is a human being after all?
This could be big people. Good thing Bush wasn't with Cheney last time he went hunting. I hear people get mistaken for birds down that way. Good lord, which is it with these guys? Man, bird, devil? Now I'm as confused as Harriet Miers in second year Constitutional Law... Oh, how I do long for the old days of Republican ineptitude when a quail was a Quayle no matter how often it might fail.
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