Josh Marshall raised a good question over the weekend: “Is it just me or has George W. Bush checked out of the stumbling national crisis we know as ‘Iraq’?”
[S]ince the election he seems to have disappeared from the conversation entirely. Like he’s just checked out. It’s not his thing anymore. […]
Back when he was riding high President Bush used to say that he ‘didn’t do nuance’ — a point on which he was unquestionably right. And that being the case, there’s just nothing left for him to say. No more chest-thumping or rah-rah or daring his opponents to say he’s wrong. So he’s just gone silent. Like it’s not his problem any more.
As it turns out, it’s not just Bush’s approach to rhetorical leadership, and it’s not just Iraq. Slate’s Fred Kaplan wrote a very good piece today explaining that the world is “spinning out of control” and the president and his White House team dangerously unprepared to even try and deal with the competing crises. It leads Kaplan to ask, “What’s happened to statecraft?”
Iraq is only the most obvious, and deadliest, case in point. We have 140,000 troops in Iraq. Their only power at this point lies in the leverage that any large foreign-military presence can exert—and the baffling thing is, Bush isn’t exerting it. He’s not using their potential withdrawal to pressure the Maliki government’s policies. He hasn’t heeded calls, from observers of all stripes, to engage in diplomacy with Iraq’s neighbors or to convene an international conference — if only to get everyone used to talking in a common forum so they can all try to keep the conflagration from spreading across the region, should Iraq implode into anarchy.
So, instead, Maliki, on his own, is reaching out to Iran and Syria…. The United States should be mediating this conflict — not just to be an internationalist do-gooder but to promote our interests and to bolster our leverage. Instead, in the wake of Bush’s neglect, Iran and Syria are filling the vacuum.
The president’s approach, or lack of an approach, is equally problematic in Lebanon.
Of course, last week’s murder of Pierre Gemayel, Lebanon’s most outspokenly anti-Syrian Cabinet member, puts the United States in a bind. Even if Bush were inclined to change course and open a line of dialogue, he can’t now, out of a legitimate concern that doing so would send a message that he doesn’t care whether Syrian agents assassinate foreign officials. (It’s not yet known who killed Gemayel, but Syria must be regarded as a major suspect, given the recent history of such incidents.) On the other hand, if the two countries had already had diplomatic contact, Bush could have used it as leverage now.
Lebanon is another, only slightly less tragic, case in which Bush had vital interests and enormous leverage to advance them — yet did nothing. Lebanon, recall, was the prize exhibit in the freedom march that seemed, for a moment, to be blazing across the planet in the spring of 2005 (it seems like ages ago). Young crowds took to the streets of Beirut, protesting the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the popular former prime minister who had resigned over the illegal extension of the quisling Gen. Émile Lahoud’s term as president. They demanded the ouster of Syrian troops—and succeeded.
At that point, Bush should have saturated Lebanon with aid, investment, and security assistance — and rallied other powers with an interest in Middle Eastern stability and the future of democracy to do the same. Plenty of specialists were warning that Syria’s withdrawal would leave a vacuum in which age-old sectarian tensions would reignite and in which Hezbollah would emerge as a major political actor — unless outsiders helped bolster the new democratic government.
But Bush did nothing. What was at play here — incompetence or cluelessness?
Oh, if I only had a nickel for every time I’ve seen that question asked with regards to Bush….
Kaplan suggests that Bush believed (and continues to believe) that democracy is not only a gift from above, but a natural cultural/political evolution. Once a dictator falls, a liberal democracy flourishes. Once a liberal democracy takes root in one country, it will necessary spread to another.
In this sense, as far as the president is concerned, he toppled Saddam … and was done. He wasn’t just finished with worrying about Iraq, but it also apparently represented the end of his diplomatic/foreign policy concerns altogether.
One could almost hear Bush asking, “I brought down that statue in Baghdad. What, you want more?”