What Obama could learn from Bush
Why is this woman alway laughing so hysterically?
I never thought I'd write the following words, but is it possible that Obama's handling of the I-P peace process might actually end up being worse than George Bush's? Stephen M. Walt
In his blog in Foreign Policy magazine, one of the sharpest critics of George W. Bush's policies in the Middle East, Stephen M. Walt, linked to a pair of devastatingly critical attacks on President Obama's treatment of the Israel/Palestine conflict by Tony Karon of Time magazine and by Robert Dreyfuss of The Nation.
Tony Karon summed up the general drift of both articles with this phrase:
The Obama Administration's bid to relaunch an Israeli-Palestinian peace process is falling apart faster than you can say settlement freeze -- in no small part because President Barack Obama began his effort by saying settlement freeze.And as we read in his quote above, Walt then compares Obama's handling of the Middle East unfavorably with Bush's.
And this brings me to the title of my post: "What Obama could learn from Bush".
We could sum up George W. Bush's policy in the Middle East succinctly as: to let the Israelis do anything they wanted, no matter how outrageous and give them all the military aid they ever requested and give them diplomatic cover in the UN or any other international body wherever their behavior might be questioned, at the same time putting them off from carrying out a catastrophic attack on Iran... all the while wrapping this mishgoss up in a mixture of the language of Wilsonian democracy and the Book of Revelations.
What did he achieve by this?
Basically he kept AIPAC off his back and this allowed him to pursue his main goals without being disturbed.
What were those goals, if to the public eye everything he and his administration ever did reeked of failure?
Here we enter the perilous jungle of politic-fiction and have to speculate without access to any inside information.
In my experience the most valuable guides in doing so are, first, Ockham's Razor plus Sherlock Homes's rough and ready dictum of eliminating the impossible and whatever you see left... is what you get.
Using this method, I begin with a risky hypothesis: George W. Bush is not as stupid as he looks. Which I then follow with a simple observation of fact: Richard Cheney neither looks stupid nor is rumored to be stupid.
From there I make a huge leap toward a totally libelous and unprovable (for the moment) supposition: That they were both in it for the money.
Imagine for a moment that both Bush and Cheney received a commission of 0.3 percent in some numbered offshore bank account for every discretionary contract they awarded for the reconstruction of Iraq. That would add up to a pretty penny and suddenly everything we have lived through since 9-11 would make more sense. What to everyone else would appear a total failure would in fact be a huge -- if private -- success.
Now, I don't think for a moment that Obama is on the take, so what can he learn from Bush?
Bush's lesson, if my wacky, just for the sake of argument, hypothesis is correct, is that to succeed you have to keep your eye on the main chance and establish priorities so that all your projects don't start bumping into each other in the dark.
By giving Israel and AIPAC everything they wanted Bush was able to secure their support or indifference on a raft of domestic issues. It always seemed strange to me that despite his total incompetent bumbling he endured relatively little pressure until the economy tanked.
That is the lesson.
Bush learned it from his dad, who always believed that his attempt at a settlement freeze is what cost him his reelection, despite having won a war and with the economy recovering.
It goes like this:
To succeed in freezing the settlements you have to confront AIPAC, to confront AIPAC, you have to be so popular, so powerful that you can frighten the senators and congressmen more than AIPAC does and so popular that you can drown out AIPAC's echochamber, Rupert Murdoch's Fox, which is what empowers the AstroTurf, teabagger-type, movements, that somehow spring up so spontaneously.
So Obama has gotten it all backwards. First he should have left the Israelis alone while he passed health legislation and reined in Wall Street and reactivated Main Street and got people jobs and then with his popularity soaring, he might have had some chance of winning a fight with AIPAC.
Now, as it is, just to survive politically, just to have any chance of second term, he finally may have to let the Israelis invade Lebanon and Gaza again this spring to prepare the ground for a full scale war with Iran this coming summer. Make no mistake, Iran is the big one and Obama's power to control the situation and avoid a catastrophe is weakening by the moment.
Advertisement
Lord, David, I sure hope you are wrong.
November 9, 2009 4:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
I have always held the opinon that Bush was shrewd, cunning, and intelligent. I have also held the opinion that his government was highly competent and won nearly every battle during those 8 years. His malapropisms were not indicative of stupidity any more than dyslexia correlates to stupidity.
November 9, 2009 5:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
I was with you up to "intelligent." It's pretty clear he had some good, gut-level political instincts. But, beyond a basic political calculation, there is no evidence whatsoever that Bush did any of the intellectual heavy lifting as to administration policy, either in terms of policy priorities or their successful implementation. That was all taken up Cheney, Rove and the Republicans in Congress.
Bush was eviscerated in the presidential debates by Gore, and, even more devastatingly, by the (unfairly, IMO) laughably wooden and verbose John Kerry. No, George W. Bush is not "intelligent" by any standard definition of the term.
November 9, 2009 7:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
I hereby render unto you the Dayly Line of the Day Award for this here TPMCafe Site, given to all of you from all of me.
I feel that Cheney did get a percentage of some of those contracts. I think he has off shore account. If you recall, cheney was to receive a golden parachute totaling 20 mill in 2000. One of his tax returns reported 16 mill in income. I bet his wife, and children and close friends got a piece of those k's also.
Rummy was paid via the drug give-a-way and yes, you could figure in a percentage of that.
And what these war criminals did not get directly, their friends and contributors got.
November 9, 2009 6:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
In support of those watching their personal inventory of millinery supplies rapidly decline, we can only offer up our prayers that once again, Reynolds come through.
November 9, 2009 9:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen? You, spamming?
November 10, 2009 1:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't think Bush was intelligent. His apparent motivations and more particularly his results just don't support that hypothesis. And for six years he had a compliant congress do pretty much whatever he asked.
Of course you could argue that the things he 'achieved' are exactly what he sought. That would make him a genius. A decidedly evil one. But I don't think you'll hear Bush supporters making that argument. Objectively, that's even a stretch for his detractors.
The best I can offer is he was relatively dumb as presidents go, accompanied by a non-presidential mean streak. To be fair, Bush and his alterego Cheney were a perfect fit. For each other. For the country? Not so much.
November 10, 2009 6:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm sorry, nobody's going to beat a lobbying group, because they won't ever go head-to-head with you. Unless you either provide competing money to cancel theirs (illegal for a president to do), or make their ability to supply it illegal (this gets my vote), you can't stop them or even compete with them.
And a settlement freeze would finally mean that Israel was complying with a few international laws.
Once again, this was poorly thought out on your part, David.
November 10, 2009 8:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
Lobbying is about influencing public opinion or about influencing law makers. Law makers need lots of money in order to get reelected. This makes them easy prey for a lobby with communication sector, even better.
The attack by a lobbying group may also be indirect. For example, if Obama's mere popularity in itself is seen as a threat to the position of the Israeli settlers, the intelligent thing for AIPAC to do would be to simply degrade his popularity: for that any issue of opportunity would serve: health care, abortion, gays in the military, his middle name, Afghanistan, whatever.
That is why a frontal attack on the settlements was so maladroit on Obama's part.
November 10, 2009 11:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Obama committed the simplest error in the book -- promised something he could not deliver and, worse, made it the touch stone of whether or not peace negotiations would begin.
We give a lot to both sides of this conflict but we need to realize that Israel is not our 51st state or put more accurately they are not some protectorate of ours, where we, the colonial power, can simply order them to do what we wish.
The simplest headline examination of politics in Israel reveals that Netanyahu was elected with the help of forces backing the settlers. If you are asking the head of a state to commit political suicide you should at least see if he agrees beforehand, and if he doesn't you need to decide whether you have a lever you are willing to use to accomplish that outcome. We don't.
November 10, 2009 9:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, in terms of aid, Israel is more than the 51st state. The simple threat of withdrawing military aid was enough to halt the invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s. Israel survives by US sponsorship. However, this same level of aid is recycled into lobbying... and the relationship between Israeli security and the pervasive clout of the Pentagon is so intimate that in the case of the Bush years became co-equal.
November 10, 2009 9:55 AM | Reply | Permalink