President Bush speaks at a press conference in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, July 12, 2007.
Picture:Jason Reed/Reuters
The US waits to see who will blink first in deciding the future of US involvement in Iraq,
writes Washington correspondent Geoff Elliott, in an extract from Weekend Australian, July 14 2007
IN a bubble. In denial. The worst US president in history. Or maybe he is right: we're in the fight of our lives. It's history's call. But watching George W. Bush at the lectern yesterday at the White House, one thing is clear: he's staying the course. He has little choice.
The week in Washington may have opened with more nervous Republicans in Congress bolting from the President's Iraq war policy but it ended in familiar fashion: Bush defending his decision to keep more than 160,000 troops in Iraq.
Bush was in full Churchillian mode yesterday. The President is known to compare the fight he is leading with the kind Winston Churchill waged against Adolf Hitler. He keeps a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office. In front of the press corps he steadfastly defended his administration's policy in Iraq. "I believe we can succeed in Iraq, and I know we must," Bush said. "When we start drawing down our forces in Iraq, it will be because our military commanders say the conditions on the ground are right, not because pollsters say it'll be good politics." Iraq can, and must be, won. There's no surrender to the enemy, which in Bush's mind is not only insurgents and al-Qa'ida in Iraq but also, it seems, the US Congress.
"I don't think Congress ought to be running the war," Bush said yesterday, with a pointed finger regularly jabbing the lectern. "Trying to run a war through resolution is a prescription for failure, as far as I'm concerned, and we can't afford to fail. Congress has got all the right to appropriate money, but the idea of telling our military how to conduct operations, for example, or how to, you know, deal with troop strength, I don't think it makes sense, I don't think it makes sense today, nor do I think it's a good precedent for the future."
WOULD a Barack Obama ascendancy in the US presidential election lead to a new war in the Middle East? There's quite a respectable case for thinking it might. Would it also lead to catastrophe in Iraq?
There is something a little weird about the Obama phenomenon. It's a bit like the Princess Di obsession. His is a candidacy of celebrity and identity. But we live in a world of celebrity and identity, and for a time the world probably would fall in love with president Obama.
At a deeper level, Obama's soaring rhetoric seems to serve no purpose beyond itself. Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt used magnificent speeches to argue specific causes: ending slavery, defeating Nazism. Obama's cadences are superbly non-specific: "Yes, we can!"
Nonetheless, Obama does have a record and it places him generally on the Left of the Democratic Party, although he has often used centrist and sometimes even hawkish rhetoric. But his closest advisers all come from the Left of the party.
Iraq has faded as an issue because the US strategy there is now working. There is a real chance the US could prevail in Iraq. This is what Clinton was worried about when she earlier hedged her bets on Iraq. But Obama, playing not least for the Hollywood Bush haters, has left little room to manoeuvre as president on Iraq. A sudden US withdrawal from Iraq could be catastrophic for the Middle East, and for US standing generally. Obama is all over the place on foreign policy. He has threatened to bomb Pakistan to kill terrorists (imagine if Bush or McCain had said such a thing) but also to journey to Tehran to fix a grand bargain with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His rhetoric on foreign policy, apart from Iraq, is scattered, which is a sure sign that he's never given the matter any serious thought.
So why do I think an Obama ascendancy could cause war in the Middle East? It's a simple calculation. Despite the recently released US National Intelligence Estimate that Iran is not working on nuclear weaponisation, no one seriously doubts that Iran is moving towards nuclear weapons. The NIE confirms it is continuing to pursue uranium enrichment and missile capabilities. Weaponisation is the easiest bit of the process.
Many Israeli leaders say that a nuclear armed Iran represents an existential threat to Israel. If they really believe this, they have no alternative but to strike Iran's nuclear facilities. If they believe McCain will win, they will have faith that the Americans, one way or another, will try to handle the Iranians. If they believe Obama will win, they not only believe he definitely won't handle Iran effectively, but he might even stop them from doing so.
The same calculations in a way apply to the Bush administration people. Almost no one in the Bush administration favoured the troop surge in Iraq except Bush himself. Yet he went ahead and did it, and it worked.
One of Bush's greatest criticisms of Bill Clinton is that he didn't confront problems but kicked them down the road and left them for his successor. If Bush believes Iran will go nuclear, he might have faith that McCain could handle it. He will have absolutely no faith that Obama would handle it.
The odds are against a US strike on Iran under any circumstances, and I would say the odds are even against an Israeli strike. But either or both are much more likely if it looks like Obama will win.
End of article