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By Elton Beard There are two kinds of people in the world, those who divide people into two kinds and those who don't. I don't. |
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| ARCHIVE | ARCHIVE | ARCHIVE |
| Sunday, August 18, 2002 |
Ahead of the (NY) Times. In today's NY Times, Maureen Dowd speculates that "faithful family retainer" Brent Scowcroft's "Don't Attack Saddam" article in the Wall Street Journal was really an epistle from former President Bush to the current occupant of the White House. From Junior Gets a Spanking:
No one who knows how close Mr. Scowcroft is to former President Bush - they wrote a foreign policy memoir so symbiotic they alternated writing paragraphs - believes he didn't check with Poppy first. Did 41 allow his old foreign policy valet to send a message to 43 that he could not bear to impart himself?Does Maureen Dowd read LiberalOasis? Here is what was written there on August 16:
Just shooting from the hip, and playing off of a nugget of scuttlebutt in the previously mentioned NY Times editorial, but perchance did Poppy persaude Dubya to install an old crony of his, one not allied with Cheney's neocon pals, to keep a nervous parent's eye on his in-over-his-head boy?LiberalOasis, "where the Left is right and the Right is wrong", was certainly ahead of the curve on this one.
| Saturday, August 17, 2002 |
But it's OK, there was no quid pro quo.
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(AP) President Bush and first lady Laura Bush have invited dozens of friends and relatives to sleep over at the White House, from Republican fund-raisers to Texas pals such as pro golfer Ben Crenshaw and country singer Larry Gatlin.The issue of White House sleepovers arose during the Clinton administration when it was learned that the Democratic Party was rewarding big donors with overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom.
The Bushes' roughly 160 guests include at least six of the president's biggest fund-raisers and their families. White House spokeswoman Anne Womack said she didn't know whether donors, or any other Bush guests, have slept in the Lincoln Bedroom.
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The latest indication of no war comes today from a big blog, the Financial Times of London:
The US is willing to push for weapons inspectors to go back into Iraq, a senior administration official has told the Financial Times.Sounds more like no war for now, if this report is accurate.The official stressed that it would be a way of demonstrating to the growing number of sceptics at home and abroad that Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, is a barrier to eliminating weapons of destruction and therefore must be toppled.
| Friday, August 16, 2002 |
Collapse of confidence. Richard Perle is quoted in today's NY Times in response to Brent Scowcroft's recent no-war editorial:
I think Brent just got it wrong, the failure to take on Saddam after what the president said would produce such a collapse of confidence in the president that it would set back the war on terrorism.Both Atrios (my pointer to the link) and Charles Dodgson are properly impressed with the statement, but the logic is internally consistent. When a threat is not carried through you do lose credibility points, at least. A bad thing.
The problem with Perle's priorities is in some unfinished business:
President Bush appealed for patience in finding bin Laden. "I don't know whether we're going to get him tomorrow or a month from now or a year from now. ... But we're going to get him," Bush said. "I don't care, dead or alive ---- either way. It doesn't matter to me."That was on September 15 2001.
| Thursday, August 15, 2002 |
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| Brent Scowcroft |
...the central point is that any campaign against Iraq...is certain to divert us for some indefinite period from our war on terrorism. Worse, there is a virtual consensus in the world against an attack on Iraq at this time.... Ignoring that clear sentiment would result in a serious degradation in international cooperation with us against terrorism. And make no mistake, we simply cannot win that war without enthusiastic international cooperation, especially on intelligence.The former general now heads the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board for the current White House (this via Testify), so his opinion probably carries somewhat more weight than mine within the administration.
Also (unintentionally) lending support for the no-war theory is Michael Ledeen of NRO. This is what he wrote in response to earlier reports of Scowcroft's heresy:
[Scowcroft] fears that if we attack Iraq "I think we could have an explosion in the Middle East. It could turn the whole region into a caldron and destroy the War on Terror."Even for the current White House, turning the Middle East into a cauldron has got to be way out of scope. And not conducive to re-election. I don't think they'll take that risk.One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today.
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It's only little more than a hunch that I have at this point, based on clues too numerous to list. Mostly, it seems to me that the neo-cons have overplayed their hand, letting their enthusiasm get the better of them to the point where they imagine not just the overthrow of Saddam Hussein but a re-arrangement of the whole Middle East to their liking. I suspect that this is way beyond the scope of Bush's original intentions, especially given the state of the nation-building experiment in Afghanistan. That must give him some pause, at least. Throw into the mix objections from the likes of Rep. Dick Armey, General Norman Schwarzkopf and others, add the utter lack of international support for such an adventure, and war with Iraq starts to look less and less likely.
I'm not utterly fearless in making this forecast, so I make it with roughly 85% certitude - my highly unscientific guess is that the odds are about five to one against war with Iraq. One caveat: if the prime rate hits 0.5%, all bets are off.
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Busy, busy, busy. What bokononists whisper whenever they think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is. |
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