Democrats have the Bush administration's foreign policy all wrong, and it could cost them dearly come November. For years, the Democrats and many Bush critics have pointed to administration incompetence as an explanation for the ongoing bloodbath in Iraq and the associated instability in the Middle East, most recently expressed in Lebanon.
I have held a similar view until recently, when I began to take seriously the notion that elements within our own government may have been complicit in allowing the 9/11 attacks to happen for political purposes. Once you accept that this administration has lied from the very beginning about the war on terror, it becomes much easier to understand their game plan.
By all appearances, this is an administration that can't shoot straight. Ostensibly, it fumbled numerous opportunities to uncover the 9/11 plot ahead of time, allowed Osama bin Laden to slip through their fingers when they had him cornered in Afghanistan, and turned a stable, if noxious, government in Iraq into the most chaotic situation seen in the Middle East in years. The instability it has created throughout the Middle East and the anti-American feelings it has fanned, threaten America's security for decades to come and pushed oil prices to record highs.
This could be the stupidest bunch of fools to ever hold the White House. Or things are going exactly according to plan. I now believe it's the latter.
Go back to the manifesto, Rebuilding America's Defenses, put out by the Project for a New American Century in the 1990s. If you've read it, you know it's the think piece that called for , among other things, toppling Saddam and maintaining a permanent U.S. presence in the country. It's also the piece that predicted it would take a "Pearl Harbor-like" attack to provide the political cover for PNAC's action plan.
How fortunate for the PNAC boys, who now occupy the White House, that Pearl Harbor came so soon in the form of 9/11.
And how fortunate for them that the Iraqis forgot the rose petals following the US invasion. Here's a reality check. If the PNAC boys' predictions had come true in Iraq, it would be pretty damn hard to justify a permanent US military presence to American taxpayers, the world community, or to Iraqis themselves.
But what if those predictions were made simply to sell the war to Americans, who like quick victory, even though Dick Cheney and others knew, and indeed, planned, for things to go badly. They knew, correctly as it turned out, that Americans would never toss Bush in 04 with a war on. That's no time to change horses, we all know that. And in a time of war, we don't need no flip-flopper. We need a strong leader. They already had their electoral game plan in place. All they needed was the war. A quick war would not have served their purposes. They needed a long one.
And they got exactly what they needed, a war that could last for years. They're either incompetent and very lucky, or a whole lot smarter than the Democrats think.
Who benefits from the mess in Iraq? Halliburton certainly, but they look like pikers compared to the profits that Bush's invasion has gifted to the oil industry. For the most part, oil analysts point to instability, not supply, as the primary factor behind recent oil spikes. The latest run-up is all due to Middle East violence and the prospect of regionwide war that is very much a possibility given Israel's aggressive retaliatory attacks against Hezbollah. Note that the Bush White House has done nothing to dissuade Israel from continuing its bombardment of Lebanon. Regionwide war raises the threat level in the minds of Americans and that means fear, the emotion that Republicans know so well.
We could assume that chaos in the Middle East and high oil prices are the result of Bush incompetence, or we could see it as exactly what they had in mind because it rewards Bush's friends in the oil patch and provides rationale for trashing the Constitution and ignoring international law.
Does it make a difference for the Democrats? The answer is absolutely. It won't be enough to argue Bush incompetence. Dukakis said in 1988 that the issue was competence, not ideology. It didn't work for him and it won't work for the Dems this time either.
The Dems have to truly turn the tables, not by arguing that they will wage Bush policies more effectively, but by charging the administration with intentionally inflaming Iraq and the rest of the middle east as part of their overall goal to establish an corporate-dominated, authoritarian state in the US through a policy of permanent war. Americans need to understand that only by replacing the current regime, can they achieve the peace and security they want, because the current regime doesn't want peace or security. Bush, by almost any measure, has engaged in treasonous acts, and if the Democrats won't call him on it, they likely won't win either the House or Senate this fall.