Let's talk about that 'Bush Doctine'

The Sarah Palin phenomenon is burning out faster than Lehman Brothers. Two weeks ago, her favorability ratings were off the charts. Now they're already in negative territory.

But who cares -- Americans hardly ever vote based on the bottom of the ticket. As for the health of John McCain should he be elected, we could all follow Joe Lieberman's lead. Asked at the Republican convention about Palin's qualifications, he said, "Well, you know, let's assume the best. John's in great shape; he's gonna be the president and let's assume that nothing bad will happen."

Great advice, senator. As Iraq proved, hope is a wonderful plan.

But as people are finding out more about Palin, there's too much that's not being said. We're familiar with McCain's take on foreign policy. Going back to January 2002, when he shouted, "Next stop, Baghdad!" while speaking to U.S. troops headed for Afghanistan, it's been clear he thinks, if anything, President Bush has been too timid in pursuing his policies.

About Palin, though, we don't know. In her first television sit-down, she famously didn't know what the "Bush Doctrine" is. This has been explained away by supporters saying, in effect, "So what? Most people on the street don't know what it is, either." To which one can only respond, most people on the street are not running for vice president.

But what's most important isn't her lack of knowledge (though that is a serious problem); it's that the Republicans are promising to keep these policies going.

In the ABC interview, after stalling for a moment, the governor got it wrong. So did her interviewer, Charles Gibson. "The Bush Doctrine, as I understand it,'' he said, "is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a pre-emptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us."

He's wrong. No one in the political mainstream disputes the right of "anticipatory self-defense" or a pre-emptive strike. If the country is going to be attacked, the nation has a right to defend itself.

The Bush Doctrine goes further. Leading up to the war in Iraq (which is still going on, by the way), the president laid out the right for our country to attack any other country that might -- someday; we don't know when, but it could happen -- somehow pose a threat. That's why we attacked Iraq (supposedly; to this day, no one but the president really knows). They weren't a threat at the time, but they could have become one someday, maybe.

That's not pre-emption. It is insane, but it is not pre-emption.

Bush favored "preventive" war. If that's our policy going forward, we should expect a lot of wars in the coming years. How many countries are there that might pose a threat someday? Russia, China, North Korea, Iran -- and we may have just added Spain. Are we supposed to invade all of them?

With the stock market crashing and the government nationalizing the finance industry, no one is talking about these things. But they matter. In a best-case scenario, American troops will be out of Iraq by 2011 or so -- a full eight years after we invaded. We spend the equivalent of an AIG bailout, $85 billion, over the course of a few months there.

And still, despite the happy talk from people who supported this war from the beginning (Chris Shays, that's you), Americans are still dying there -- fewer than a year ago, but they are still Americans who would otherwise be alive. Iraqis are still dying. Car bombs are exploding on a weekly basis. McCain, though, told Time magazine last month that Iraq is "a peaceful and stable country now."

He's wrong about a lot of things, but he will never top that one.

Palin gives every indication that she's OK with the way this country went to war. Since she might be president someday, she could at least tell us her thoughts on the matter.

Hugh S. Bailey is assistant editorial page editor at the Connecticut Post. He can be reached at 203-330-6233 or via e-mail at hbailey@ctpost.com.

Shays can't escape Iraq

7/12/08

For left-leaning 4th District voters, what’s so bad about Rep. Christopher Shays? He’ll again face a close race this fall, but is he worth tossing aside?

He’s pretty good on global warming. He supports alternative energy. He says he wants universal health care. What’s so bad about all that?

His biggest selling point may be that he no longer faces what could be called the “Lincoln Chaffee factor.” Chaffee, the moderate Republican who represented deep-blue Rhode Island in the Senate until 2006, faced anguished voters that year who, he said, wanted to support him but couldn’t bring themselves to vote for continued Republican leadership. Beloved or not, Chaffee was tossed aside.

Shays faced a similar problem. He’s never been much good in the arch-villain role, but he was an obstacle standing in the way of getting the GOP goon squad of Tom DeLay, et al., out of power.
But he squeaked through the past two races, and now the impetus driving the “Get Shays” movement has been lost — the Democrats already won.

With zero danger of a GOP resurgence that would once again shift congressional leadership, voters can again take a close look at the contenders. And Shays, it’s true, looks good on a whole list of issues. Also, his contention that Republican moderates are a group worth having around isn’t without merit.

But then there’s the issue he’d love to go away, but won’t. He’s hoping, he says, the war in Iraq won’t be as big an issue as the past two races.

His hopes are misplaced.

As long as he keeps with the fantasy that Iraq is going, in his words, “incredibly well,” he will continue to be haunted by the war’s failures.

In a recent visit with this newspaper’s editorial board, Shays lauded, for what may have been the millionth time, the progress of the Iraqi military, and praised that country’s political advancements. All par for the course, if still misguided.

But he said something else interesting. When asked how far away the day is when a foreigner — say, an American — could take an unguarded stroll down a Baghdad street and not fear for his life, he said it was close, if not here already.

But he added that he would be worried about something bad happening on such an imaginary stroll, because, if someone important got hurt or killed, people would be liable to declare the whole thing a mistake.

By “the whole thing,” I think he meant the war — the decision to invade in the first place. And I hate to tell him this, but that ship, as the saying goes, has sailed.

Americans have made their decision about the war, and they don’t like it. Nothing that has happened in Iraq in years has affected public attitudes.

People, by large margins, want out. They don’t want to wait for some magical day when peace will reign and democracy will bloom. They want the war to end, and soon. (See www.pollingreport.com/iraq.htm for the details.)

Shays, despite his hopes, will again have to battle the fact that he’s in favor of staying until who-knows-when. Even the Iraqi government now wants us out.

It won’t matter how good his energy plan looks if he keeps supporting a policy that’s getting people killed for no discernable reason. If the “Get Shays” forces need a reason to mobilize, this is it.

Hugh S. Bailey is assistant editorial page editor of the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6233 or by e-mail at hbailey@ctpost.com.

Still waiting for Iraq answers

4/1/08

Maybe a year from now, when President McCain confers with newly installed Defense Secretary Joseph I. Lieberman, we’ll finally get a sense of what we’re doing in Iraq. That will be about the six-year anniversary of “Mission Accomplished,” so maybe that would be a good time to hear some answers.

The prognosis will probably sound something like this — conditions are improving, but not to the point that we can expect to leave anytime soon. That will line up with pretty much every official statement about the war since 2003.

We’ve reached the point today when the president can admit that he willfully lied to the public on multiple occasions about the war’s progress and no one bats an eye.

Speaking of positive statements he made during the summer of 2006, President Bush said this: “Look, you can’t have the commander in chief say to a bunch of kids who are sacrificing either, ‘It’s not worth it,’ or, ‘You’re losing.’ I mean, what does that do for morale?”

Much better for morale to flat-out lie. Didn’t we used to impeach presidents on this sort of thing?

Bush is an afterthought at this point, and his meanderings on the topic of the day don’t amount to much. (He also, in the same interview, admitted he was OK with top White House staff getting together to approve torture techniques. Whatever.)

So none of this would matter much if we didn’t have a candidate running for president who promised four more years of Bush foreign policy. But the McCain-Lieberman team is all in on Iraq, and their election would guarantee we wouldn’t be changing anything as long as they stayed in office.

Lieberman’s personal descent into self-parody, of course, continues as usual. Asked if he thought Senate colleague Barack Obama was a Marxist, he answered, “Well, you know, I must say that’s a good question,” before deeming Obama’s positions “far to the left of me and I think mainstream America.”

Just read that line again. Lieberman is equating his own positions with that of “mainstream America”? The same mainstream America that turned against this war years ago and wants nothing more than to just get out? The same mainstream that thinks maybe bombing Iran while we’re fighting two other wars might not be the smartest move at the moment?

Joe, too, knows his time is running short unless he can drag McCain over the finish line. When Senate Democrats, as seems likely, improve on their slim majority after November’s elections, party leadership will no longer be dependent on Mr. Sanctimony to stay in their caucus. Unless he gets that McCain cabinet post he’s surely counting on, no more “Meet the Press” for him.

When Lieberman delivers the keynote address at the Republican National Convention this year, proving to independent voters how eager McCain is to reach across the aisle to someone who thinks exactly like him on most issues, he’s sure to tell us we’re on our way to victory in Iraq. Since we’re so far past the point of even knowing what “victory” means, it will be interesting to see if anyone calls him on it.

It may not matter much. Americans like a winner, after all. We’re not into “retreat and defeat” or “the blame game,” but we do enjoy a good rhyme scheme, apparently.

So what’s to be done? We aren’t in a dramatically different position on Iraq now than at any time over the past five years. The violence ebbs and spikes, U.S. troop deaths continue unabated, up to 10 percent of the Iraqi population has been killed or displaced from their homes by the fighting — but our presidential debates focus on flag lapel pins.

McCain has made his promise. “There’s going to be other wars,” he says. We won’t be able to say he didn’t warn us.

Hugh S. Bailey is assistant editorial page editor of the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6233 or by e-mail at hbailey@ctpost.com.

Don't treat your voters like children

3/2/08

What was most impressive about Barack Obama’s speech last week wasn’t the subject matter or the delivery. What leaves the biggest impression is the fact that, by all accounts, he wrote it himself.

It’s hard to internalize the idea of a president who talks to people like grownups. We’ve had seven years of one disaster after another, all delivered by someone who sounds like he’s talking to a bunch of 6-year-olds. It might be nice to get past that.

For instance, we’ve heard a lot of talk about terrorists — or “evildoers” — who kill people because they “hate our freedom.” That’s one way to put it. Even accepting that formulation, the question of why we had to invade a country that had nothing to do with attacking us remains unanswered.

But President Bush and his tortured — so to speak — explanations have been the rule all these years. People once thought to be at least mildly intelligent (if usually wrong) have reduced themselves to bizarre non sequiturs when it comes to national security policy.

Our own Sen. Joe Lieberman, apparently confused by his party affiliation, recently decided laws against torture don’t matter anymore. “We are at war,” he said. That solves that, apparently.

He was one of 45 senators who voted in opposition to a bill that would have prohibited waterboarding. “It is not like putting burning coals on people’s bodies. The person is in no real danger,” he said. OK, then.

Lieberman has cast his lot with the Republicans, allowing his full-on descent into demagoguery to continue unabated. Even he has to know he doesn’t make sense anymore, but next to his friend John McCain, he’s the voice of reason.

It’s McCain who has had trouble lately differentiating Sunnis from Shiites. When it comes to Iraq, those groups tend to disagree with each other, but to McCain, they’re all one looming menace out to kill freedom-lovers everywhere.

“Al-Qaida is going back into Iran and is receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran,” he said, and on more than one occasion. It took a prompting from his pal Joe to set him straight.

“I’m sorry; the Iranians are training the extremists, not al-Qaida,” he said later. Same difference. All bad guys.

Obama, whatever else you say about him and his speech, didn’t go that path. Speaking about his pastor’s history of controversial remarks and racial tensions in general, he didn’t insult anyone’s intelligence. He didn’t call anyone evil or tell us his political opponents are endangering America. It’s a nice change.

The Bush-Lieberman-McCain team has been at it so long they hardly remember anything different. What was refreshing about Obama last week was how little he sounded like his fellow Democrats, who spend so much time being scared of looking weak that they end up looking weak because of it.

It’s what led Hillary Clinton, not to mention John Kerry and John Edwards, to support this five-year-old catastrophe of a war back when their opposition might have made a difference. But no, they were worried about future Republican attack ads, and petrified the war would go well and they’d look foolish.

In late 2002, real opposition from Clinton, who once lived in the White House, or Kerry, an early favorite for his party’s presidential nomination, could have meant something. But they played along, accepting all the logical flaws that went into the war’s rationale.

Saddam has weapons, he supports terrorists, he’s an evil dictator, he’s a threat to this country — some of the arguments were true, most were not and none of them added up to a legitimate reason to start a war. But the opposition at the highest levels was missing.

Maybe a leading politician who didn’t treat voters like children would’ve been helpful. Obama wasn’t in Congress then, so maybe he doesn’t get credit for opposing this disaster. But say this for him — at least he wasn’t for it.

Hugh S. Bailey is assistant editorial page editor of the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6233 or by e-mail at hbailey@ctpost.com.

Shays stays the course on Iraq

1/20/08
Rep. Christopher Shays just can’t understand it. Why can’t he convince everyone about Iraq?
The congressman is either the truest of true believers or a world-class actor. In his most recent visit with this newspaper’s editorial board, he struggled to understand why his listeners wouldn’t grant him the benefit of the doubt when he talked about improving conditions in Iraq.
He’s the expert, having been there 19 times (at last count). But he hurt his credibility when he threw out the old line about the Iraqi military, and how well their training was going. As though no one had heard that one in the past five years.
The fundamental confusion is this: Shays says he supports a time line to get American troops out of Iraq, but he is supporting John McCain for president, and McCain is talking about a multigenerational U.S. commitment there. Shays says these points are not contradictory.
The real question, then, is this: If Chris Shays alone made Iraq policy, what would he do? If he instituted his time lines, how many U.S. troops would be in Iraq after they’d expired? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Because McCain is talking 50 years, minimum. Iraq’s defense minister recently said U.S. help will be required there for another 10 years, at least. And we’re building some serious long-term bases over there.
McCain’s point is that Americans will accept such a commitment as long as American troops aren’t dying. Look at Korea and Germany, he says. And that’s fine, if he believes that, but we’ve been hearing something different about Iraq for a few years now.
Here’s George W. Bush on April 13, 2004: “In terms of how long we’ll be there: as long as necessary, and not one day more.” That’s been the official line from the start.
Does Shays agree with this? Does McCain? Will it be “necessary” to stay 50 years?
I don’t think it’s bizarre that people can’t understand Shays’ position. He says it hasn’t changed. Maybe it hasn’t, but it doesn’t matter because no one knows what it was to begin with.
Later in the meeting, Shays repeated his contention that the media’s treatment of the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib prison — and not the abuse itself — led directly to the deaths of American troops. It became a recruiting tool for Islamic extremists, he said, who went out and killed Americans.
His first mistake here is, as usual, understating the extent of the abuse. This was not a “night crew run amuck,” as he likes to say. Official military reports have confirmed that.
Even granting him that, though, he says the problem would have been uncovered by some visiting official — maybe Shays himself — and then handled, quietly. No need to tell anyone anything.
What was left unsaid was how long members of the media, once they found out about the abuse, were supposed to wait for Shays or someone else to fix it. He says he doesn’t want censorship, he wants the media to show better judgment. But in whose interest is it to let abuse go unreported?
His position is devoid of logic. Suppose, for argument’s sake, in the midst of battle the American military accidentally blows up a bus filled with schoolchildren. It’s a war; bad things happen. Should the media refrain from saying what happened because it makes the military look bad?
The media is not in business to do PR for the military. Reporters, photographers and support staff put themselves at considerable personal risk to tell what happens. If evidence of American abuse makes more news than bad behavior by our enemies, that’s how it should be. U.S. troops are supposed to be held to a higher standard than insurgents.
Each time I write anything about Iraq, a place I’ve never been and know nothing about other than what I read, I get all sorts of reader feedback, positive and negative. Much of the latter focuses on how I’m undermining our troops or hating America or something because I take issue with whatever Joe Lieberman said that week, but that kind of thing I’m used to.
But I had one exchange with the father of someone serving in Iraq who was unhappy with something I wrote, and we exchanged a number of messages, all of them civil and most of them pleasant.
Buried in one of them, though, I’m guessing in reference to his son, was this: “Stop making it sound like you have a personal interest in it.”
This, honestly, stuns me.
It’s true, I don’t have a directly personal interest in the war; no one in my immediate family and none of my close friends are there. But I refuse to believe that it’s commendable for people to just ignore what happens there.
I’m trying to imagine how it would be better to take at face value everything this country’s leadership has to say about Iraq. When I hear Lieberman or Bush or Shays making the same arguments they’ve been making for five years with nothing to show for it, I think that’s worth a mention.
Maybe I’m wrong.

Hugh S. Bailey is assistant editorial page editor at the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6233 or via e-mail at hbailey@ctpost.com.