The final acts of G.W. Bush

George W. Bush, as the story goes, spends a lot of time pondering his legacy. For this to be true, one must assume that the president is interested in pondering anything beyond A-Rod’s home run total. Thus for the purposes of this brief essay, please go along with the notion that Bush is deeply concerned with history and future judgment of his presidency. As he enters the final 18 months of his tenure, with Iraq and his public image in a shambles, Bush is embarking on a final effort to salvage his legacy, to cement his place as a champion of freedom rather than as the man responsible for instigating an unnecessary war.

The first half of this plan involves bringing peace to the Middle East. Bush has called on Condoleezza Rice to conduct a meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with the hope of forging a lasting peace. Following the collapse of the unity government that handed political control to Abbas and temporarily sidelined Hamas, the White House sees an opening to create a Palestinian state. Perhaps now that the plan to create a pro-US, liberal democratic Iraqi state has failed Bush sees a Palestinian state, no doubt one that suits Israeli and American interests, as the last, best chance to move his “global democratic revolution” beyond the rhetorical stage. A major problem with this plan is that Israel has made it clear that it will drag its feet on peace negotiations and has no intentions of creating a Palestinian state any time soon.
The second half of this plan involves expanding the war in the Middle East. Bush appears content to maintain his current Iraq unstrategy until January 2009 and then dump it onto his successor, barring some unforeseen development in the Congress. Therefore it seems reasonable that Bush and Vice-President Cheney will pursue their ultimate goal of regime change in Iran. Since the “axis of evil” speech in 2002, Bush and Cheney made no secret that, in a perfect Neocon world, the United States military would be unchained to continue remaking the Middle East. In 2006, Bush supposedly stated that “Iran will be my legacy” or “Saving Iran will be my legacy”, and while these statements can carry many different interpretations, they both make clear the Bush vision for regime change.

At this point it appears that Iraq has Bush’s effectively tied with regard to Iran, or perhaps that it just wishful thinking. For Bush to begin a third war seems even more foolish than the Iraq invasion, but a military incursion in Iran would not be a full-scale invasion that would place American troops on the ground. Rather, Bush would employ so-called precision air strikes and covert actions to undermine the Ahmedinejad regime and, in keeping with Neocon thinking, inspire the Iranian people to overthrow the mullahs and embrace the nation that just bombed segments of their population to hell. Yet despite the persistent saber-rattling and bombast, and Seymour Hersh articles, Bush denies the existence of any plans to take action in Iran. The Guardian reports that a rift has developed between Bush and Cheney, who are excited over what war with Iran will do to Halliburton’s stock, and Rice and Defense Secretary Gates, who remain committed to finding a diplomatic solution.

If recent trends continue, or rather if the general incompetence of the Bush White House continues, it can be assumed that any plans for Israel/Palestine and Iran will be ill-conceived, bungled, and ultimately will leave the world a far more dangerous place than it is.

Bush’s Korea

Finally, George W. Bush is beginning to tell the truth about Iraq. After five years of misinformation and propaganda disguised as hard fact, after five years of talk of smoking guns and generational commitments, the Bush Administration is finally revealing publicly its intentions behind the March 2003.

White House spokesman Tony Snow explained that the president likens the American “presence” in Iraq to the role the US military has played in South Korea since the end of World War II. While these respective situations differ in several, crucial ways, the fact remains that the Pentagon intends to maintain a strong military presence in Iraq for decades. Some have pointed to the many dissimilarities between the two nations, and dismissed the comparison as another example of the Bush Administration’s ignorance of history, but to do so is to miss the main point. The United States military has been in the Korean Peninsula for sixty years, ostensibly to protect the South from invasion by the North. Moreover, the US is in South Korea to protect a pro-US, capitalist state in a geostrategically valuable area of the world.

Since the end of the Korean War, South Korea was ruled by military dictatorship for many years, having become a true democracy only recently, and has been transformed from a poor nation that had been decimated by war to one of the world’s richest states. The rise of the chaebol – large business conglomerates that flourished as a result of corporate welfare, some of which became major global corporations – is touted as a success story in the neoliberal revolution. The architects of the Iraq War, and the business interests that have benefited financially from it, undoubtedly would like to see a nation that promotes neoliberal ideals and protects the inviolable rights of the market and the corporation established in the Middle East.

Understand that when Bush and Cheney speak of a “free Iraq” and the “global democratic revolution”, they are not echoing Thomas Jefferson. Rather, for the neocons, freedom and democracy are employed in the Milton Friedman sense: freedom for business, for American-style capitalism to take place unfettered by the ambitions of small time thugs like Saddam. A democratic Iraq is one in which a consumer class can develop and shop at the first Wal-Mart in the Middle East. As has been the case in South Korea, and in Europe under the Marshall Plan, the United States has made a major investment in Iraq, and it expects a nice return on the billions of dollars and thousands of dead troops. The Pentagon and Wall Street will not accept failure. Iraq will be a safe place for the multinational corporation, if not for the Iraqi, even if it requires decades of rule by a repressive military regime.

When Bush compares Iraq to South Korea, he’s not merely getting history wrong. Rather, he’s giving a hint as to what the world should expect there: the continued presence of US troops, the expansion of American bases in Iraq, the possibility of a second Saddam (in the increasingly likely event that the current experiment in liberal democracy fails), and a “by-any-means-necessary” approach to ensure that his style of democracy takes hold.