I just read an unsigned article Bush's Crisis: Articulating a Strategy in Iraq and the Wider War. It is a "sample:" from Stratfor a high-price subscription service offering insiders "strategic intelligence, analysis and insight to manage risk and identify opportunities". It is not easy reading, but it seems to be talking about something that has been bouncing around my outsider head for a while: there is starting to look to be something about the public positions on Iraq that Bush and Kerry have been taking that is setting up the initial electoral battle field in such a way that
unless Bush starts to reposition or things start to go a lot better in Iraq, Bush will lose to Kerry.
The language in the article bounces around a lot, but I think its basic argument can be boiled down like this:
- The actual strategic purpose of the occupation of Iraq is to position the US to be able to "redefine regional geopolitics" in the whole critical area.
- President Bush has from the start been unable or unwilling to publicly articulate that and now (having decided that the his initial WMD and 9/11 justifications are not working) has generated a "new core justification for the Iraq campaign: building a democratic Iraq".
- His opponent on the other hand has a big advantage: since he was not in charge "he can articulate a strategy without having to take responsibility for anything in the past" and, rather than calling for either a withdrawal, or an end to the effort to redefine regional geopolitics, he can and does "argue that Bush's impulses were correct, but that he lacked a systematic strategy."
- This sets up a situation where "The president's public presentation of the war is designed to exploit success, not to withstand reversals and hardships."
The article argues that while
It could be argued that in a democratic society like the United States, it is impossible to lay bare the cold-blooded reasoning behind a war, and that the war needs to be presented in a palatable fashion.
Still, just using "bringing democracy to Iraq" is something that will not be able to sustain public support in the face of setbacks like we are now seeing . For example the latest news from Iraq seems to be that we are cobbling together some sort of deals around Fallujah and Najar with people that we officially call terrorists, Islamic-extremists, and Saddam-backers. The article maintains that given the situation this is exactly the correct thing to do and is not inconsistent with our real war aims in Iraq, but it will be a problem politically because it strongly contradicts Bush's new public war aim.
If the only criterion is the creation of democracy, that is not only a distant goal, but also one that will be undermined by necessary U.S. deal-making.
Democracy -- by any definition that the American public can recognize -- is not coming to Iraq anytime soon. If that is the mark of success, Bush's only hope is that he won't be kept to a tight timetable. What is worse for Bush is that, in his news conference, he framed the coming presidential election as basically a referendum on his policy in Iraq. The less that policy is understood, and the more Iraq appears uncontrollable, the more vulnerable Bush will be to charges that the Iraq war was unjustified, and that it is a distraction from the wider war --
which the American electorate better understands and widely supports.
So the bottom line is that Bush has not only staked his presidency on a rather quick success in Iraq, but has wed himself to a justification that will be undercut by most of the steps he will need to take in the short term to stabilize Iraq. And he has given Kerry an easy way to suggest that any failure in Iraq is a result of tactical errors by Bush. Since the purpose of the article that lays out this argument is to alert its insider subscribers to long term trends before they are obvious, the meaning of its "insider tip" decodes as: "unless he changes course, Bush is toast".
I am not going to just sit back and hope for more bad new in Iraq, but I do think that this analysis has a lot of truth in it and should be considered when we hear people demand that Kerry take a strong anti-war position. We have a war to win here before we can do anything about Iraq.