Boo Frickin' Hoo

According to this Reuters missive, it hurts Poppa Bush's feelings that "elites and intellectuals on the campaign trail" are going after his poor defenseless Leader of the Free World son on the subject of Iraq.

He also decries the basic ignorance of those who fail to grasp that Bush, soldier for all that is good, is a hero because he got rid of a brutal dictator. Well, I find this cute. Because this is the same man who let Saddam get away in 1991, and, in the process, allowed the deaths of tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis he had just strongly encouraged to rebel against their brutal dictator. Bush Senior's drive into Iraq during the first Gulf War had greatly weakened Saddam's grip on power, and it was in this context that Bush called for the people of Iraq to rise up against their leader. And rise up they did, but without air cover from the Americans or any significant aid. In the end, it was the bodies of those rebels that Bush the younger would breathlessly invoke in the run-up to the current Iraq War.

For George H W Bush to weep over the criticisms of elites and intellectuals is not just absurd, not just bad theatre, but positively revolting. The new war against Saddam Hussein and his Baathist government that began over one year ago has been largely made possible by the elder president's failure to resolve the Persian Gulf conflict in a competent manner. If, as Powell has said, the rebels had no chance of defeating Saddam's military, why would Bush have so encouraged them? If the rebel's could have acheived a coup, why didn't American forces at least offer them air protection? I know that the Iranian regime figures heavily into the Bush I administration's calculus, but this excuses their decisions not at all. The fact that Dick Cheney, so gung-ho about toppling Saddam of late, was one of those principally responsible for the decision not to aid the rebels, is an awful tonic to the "moral clarity" malarkey the current Bush administration has offered. That the president's father and the current vice president hold some responsibility for the mass graves used to sell this war is nauseating.

As of this writing, roughly 600 Americans, and an untold number of Iraqis, are dead because of this war. But that is clearly not all. America has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this war. Military and other resources have been diverted from Afghanistan and Al Qaeda's leadership to Iraq. America has lost its credibilty on the world stage, and the forces of Islamic extremism have been handed fresh propaganda and recruiting. The great threat to America's security, namely what Chris Hitchens sloppily calls the forces of Islamofascism, instead of being dealt a blow, have new slogans, new propaganda footage, and new battlegrounds. There is no shortage of terrorist attacks in Iraq, with bombings almost daily against the American military, or the police, or the provisional government, or to spark a religious civil war. Yes, in many ways life is better now in Iraq than it was before the war. But an Iraq with so many daily tensions, with so much political violence, with an infrastructure that continues to provide basic services like electricity so inconsistently, and whose future is in such doubt, is hardly worth its cost. That the elder Bush sees the current situation as a miracle is either overheated rhetoric or delusion.

In addition, I'm tired of figures like Bush attacking their critics as elites or intellectuals, as if they were just plain folks. Bush was the 41st president of the United States. I think that qualifies one as a member of the elite. And even if that doesn't, we have to remember that Bush was the product of Phillips Academy at Andover and Yale University. And that he was the son of a Senator. And that he was a two-term congressman. And that he served as Ambassador to the UN, head of the RNC, head of the CIA, and Vice President of the USA. To paraphrase his son, if Bush isn't elite, the word has no meaning. Likewise, while "intellectual" is thrown about to mean pointy-headed effete snob, it is just a shorthand. If it weren't for intellectuals, it's hard to imagine how our government could craft sensible policy. Of course, that may be why the president's policies are so incoherent, so many of them panders to big donors and the Republican Party's paleolithic base.

Another note:
If, as many have speculated, the CPA installs INC flim-flam artist Achmad Chalabi as Iraqi Prime Minister when it hands over sovereignty to the Iraqis, it will have made a laughingstock of its claims to have fought this war for democracy. The same survey of Iraqi attitudes that the Bush administration has used to tout its war's popularity in Iraq has identified Chalabi as one of the country's most reviled figures. In addition, it is hard to see how stable such a government would be.