William Hartung: Bush Needs a 12-step Program

Bush Needs a Twelve-Step Program

By William D. Hartung
Global Beat Syndicate
(KRT)
NEW YORK—For those of us who have been paying even intermittent attention to the growing fiasco in Iraq, President Bush’s May 24 speech on his five-step plan for a transition to sovereignty and democracy in Iraq was far too little, far too late.
The central issue is the president’s credibility. After two years of spin, dissembling and outright lies about Iraq’s arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and Saddam Hussein’s ties to Al Qaeda, the Bush crowd abruptly changed their rationale for going to war.
The new rationale: spreading democracy in the Middle East and beyond. But, the photos of torture at Abu Ghraib prison send a different message. The torture demonstrates a disrespect for Iraqi life that is incompatible with the idea that Iraqis are democratic citizens worthy of the fundamental rights and responsibilities of self-governance.
The cavalier disregard for international law and basic human decency suggested by the torture photos starts at the top. If this scandal is about a “few bad apples,” as the Bush PR machine would have us believe, those apples are at the top of the tree—not the bottom—and their names are George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, White House Copunesl Albert Gonzalez, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his undersecretary, DougFeith and Defense Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen Cambone.
The Abu Ghraib scandal draws together all that is wrong with the Bush Doctrine in one deadly but concise package: 1) arrogance bordering on megalomania; 2) failure to take into account the history, culture, or dynamics of the society being acted upon; 3) poor coordination and confused lines of authority; and 4) a congenital inability to acknowledge or learn from past mistakes.
It will take a lot more than five steps to restore George W. Bush’s credibility on Iraq in particular, or foreign policy in general. What he really needs is a 12-step program to roll back his administration’s parallel addictions to aggressive unilateralism and excessive secrecy. Firing Donald Rumsfeld at this late date is probably beside the point, but heads should roll among the neo-conservative implementers of Rumsfeld’s Iraq policy, including Paul Wolfowitz, his chief deputy, who was apparently so busy thinking big thoughts that he could not even tell a Congressional committee how many U.S. military personnel had lost their lives in the Iraq war he helped to start; Douglas Feith, the raving ideologue who has been the Pentagon’s point man for overseeing the unbelievably inept Iraq rebuilding process; and Stephen Cambone, who may well have “set the conditions” for orders to be sent down the chain that led to the Abu Ghraib abuses.
The State Department should be given a much more robust role in running U.S. policy for the rebuilding of Iraq, in conjunction with the United Nations and key U.S. allies. The Bush administration should also invite UN inspectors back into Iraq to determine the state of Iraq’s weapons programs.
President Bush should openly renounce any designs on long-term U.S. bases in Iraq and announce a date for U.S. troop pullout. The absurd investment law rammed through by the Coalition Provisional Authority, allowing 100 percent of any Iraqi industry other than oil to be owned by foreign interests, should be dissolve to make room for Iraqi businesses. Future rebuilding contracts should be open to genuine competition, with preferences for Iraqi-owned concerns.
In short, instead of the narrow, aggressive, “with us or against us” approach that got us into Iraq, we should pursue a genuine change of course that suggests that “we’re all in this together.” That would mean giving up our role as “occupier-in-chief” in Iraq and sharing political, economic and military power with allies, the United Nations and indigenous Iraqis who suffered under Saddam Hussein’s rule.
Obviously, this kind of about-face in U.S. policy is more likely to occur along with a Washington regime change that sends the neo-conservatives and their imperial dreams packing in November 2004. There would still be plenty of work to do to get John “Stay the Course” Kerry to disengage from Iraq, but at least advocates of Iraqi independence from U.S. occupation would not have to contend with the Cheney-Feith-Wolfowitz “axis of arrogance.”