9
November 2006
The
Bush doctrine: an electoral requiem
You knew it was
a bad election day for President George W. Bush when even an old
American foe, Daniel
Ortega, won the presidency
of Nicaragua. At the time
of writing, the
administration retained interpretative
latitude over the final results of the congressional voting because the Senate was
still up for grabs. But whichever way you
cut it, Bush is more vulnerable than ever on the
Middle East.
That's
not to say that things will immediately
change. The Democrats don't have any more of a clue
about how to resolve the
mess in Iraq than the Republicans do. Their strongest suit is the so-called Biden-Gelb
plan for the reorganization
of the country into three largely autonomous
regions. Given the situation, however, it's difficult to see how the United States can seriously advance
such a scheme in the face of strong Sunni resistance and the absence of a Shiite
consensus on the issue.
However, with 60 percent of voters
saying in exit polls that they oppose the war in Iraq, and 40 percent saying their vote was directed against Bush, the president can't just wager on Democratic
fuzziness. The election momentum means that Democrats,
but also Republicans critical of the conduct of the Iraq war, now have more room to tell the administration what to do, and Bush has almost none to tell them to mind their
own business. He can fiddle with
the machinery (though Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denied him one such opportunity by expressing an intention to resign),
but without a credible road
map on Iraq, the
administration will only
encourage others to provide
one, manhandling it in
directions it may not want to go.
Bush
may have to be careful with his
friends before worrying about his adversaries. A onetime secretary of state, James Baker, currently
heads a commission, the
Iraq Study Group, with a
former Democratic congressman,
Lee Hamilton, that has been tasked
to offer the administration
new ideas on Iraq. Baker is
not out to embarrass the president, and, if anything, Bush will use him to ensure the
commission doesn't do so. But
Baker isn't a potted plant,
and in return for protecting
the president, he will probably
try to advance his preferred agenda. This evidently includes engaging Syria and Iran on Iraq, which sounds dangerously like asking them
to save Washington's bacon.
But
in exchange for what? The range of possible answers is generating anxiety
in Lebanon's March 14 coalition opposing Syria. Walid Jumblatt reportedly received assurances in
Washington recently that the Bush administration had no
intention of making a deal with
Damascus that would undermine the United Nations investigation
of Rafik Hariri's murder. He even got
a public American statement
that Syria and Iran were trying
to bring down the government of Prime Minister
Fouad Siniora. Under the circumstances, this was quite a lot.
However, time is important. The
administration has no liking for Syria,
but without a compelling legal case against the regime of President
Bashar Assad in the coming months,
it will have trouble resisting growing calls in the US for it to "engage" Damascus
on Iraq. The likely failure of such an approach is irrelevant;
the virtual certainty that Assad won't hand Washington in a moment of relative strength what he
refused to when he was weak
is immaterial: Because the US has developed no tangible policy toward Syria,
"realists" and Democrats are in a position to urge that
the road not taken now be taken.
Only an accusation by the
UN against Syria in the Hariri case can ward off Assad's proliferating appeasers.
Domestically, Bush will still be able to use Hizbullah against Syria. The party
will remain a primary American target, and the
administration can thus rally congressional support against any effort by Syria, Iran, and Hizbullah to gain ground in Lebanon. But a key objective of the administration must be to clarify the deep
contradiction between making
a deal with the Syrians and Iranians
in Iraq and denying them and their
Lebanese allies more power in Lebanon.
Tehran and Damascus will take
it as a given that if the US runs to them for help, that will mean
more leeway to plot their counterattack in Beirut. For the moment, and dangerously, that is not intelligible to many in
Washington.
We can take it for a given that the Democrats'
victory will do nothing to advance Palestinian-Israeli peace. Bush's
detractors will continue to
blame him for that impasse, indifferent to the fact that
neither the Israelis nor the
Palestinians are in a condition today
to negotiate even partial withdrawals, let alone a durable
final settlement. But those
in Congress are more
discerning. Children
of an often cowardly
institution, they won't enter the
fray in a conflict promising little easy gain. Nor is anybody on Capitol
Hill going to take a political bullet for Hamas. For
all the talk about the need to respect Palestinian democracy, no one in Congress will push for peace
if the majority party in the Palestinian
government refuses to recognize
Israel within its 1967 borders.
The election results hammer the final nail into the
coffin of Bush's already moribund
democratization project in the Arab world. Republican realists long ago dismissed democracy
as a viable aim, while the Democrats are too insular today,
after more than a decade in the minority,
to care about open societies in the
Middle East. Other than Iraq, their program is largely
a domestic one - indeed, even their approach
to Iraq has been vigorously domestic
- so that Bush's ability to intervene militarily in the region, particularly in Iran, is more severely curtailed than it was before.
That doesn't mean an attack against Iranian nuclear facilities won't happen, but suddenly the ease with
which the administration can get this
by Congress has been greatly
reduced.
The elections also mean the end
of the already roughed up Bush doctrine, which, unnoticed, was partly the product
of an administration confident in its House and Senate majorities.
What happens next in the Middle East will be
commentary - management of a thorny
situation with no consensual
strategy as guide. Bush made the
mistake of putting himself
in this quandary, but Democrats haven't better to offer. Can both sides use their forced cohabitation to find a way out together?
Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY
STAR.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=5&article_id=76748#