Bush's "october Surprise"-- Magnanimity Of A Loser?, for Bush Iraq, Iran and Israel are now one Mideast issue Options

[Danielet]

Several indications in Wash DC and Baghdad circles
lead me to expect an "October Surprise" from GW Bush
as a result of the Iraq "troops surge." Anyone
studying the temporal correlations between radical
Bush step backwards, disentangling the US a little bit
more from Iraq, and upcoming 2004 and 2006 US national
elections will recall that there is much precedent for
the heads-up White House staff provided this week in
suggesting that before he leaves office Bush's
popularity polls will-- speaking to relatively where
they are now-- skyrocket to over 45%. What would make
this possible is yet another illusion of "Mission
Accomplished." This time, it is a real possibility,
would Bush be willing to impose limits on the "bottom
line" of those who pushed him into war for their
personal gain.

Just as Bush suddenly opened his cavernous cranium to
the idea of "more boots on the ground" after
harvesting total chaos from five years of war in
Iraq-- having nothing to lose after a catastrophic
2006 Congressional election-- he now accepts that an
Iraq solution is only part of a Middle East solution.
This requires first and foremost recognition that 9/11
happened because of Bill Clinton's almost pathological
belief that he can politically finesse it so that he
could have it both ways politically on any issue and
so would never have to make a stark-- and politically
costly-- decision. Thus, brilliance was squandered
over eight years trying NOT to have to make painful
choices.

The character of Clinton's Mideast policies was indeed
"immobilisme" as the sum total of his: yes, but on the
other hand, no....However, unable to top the golden
opportunities for peace provided him by Carter and
Bush 41, he just coasted on the residue good will from
the region's condition, terrorism not withstanding,
until a sense of history hit him and he became
determined in the last minute of his term to pull off
a take-off in the Middle East and win a Nobel Prize
with which to cover the cum-spot on Monica's dress and
on his Presidency.

For every radical action that brought great hope to
one side of the Mideast Crisis, he did something
radical to assuage the other side. In the end, he had
both the neocons and alQaeda out to do him in.

As one guided into the presidency by Prince Bandra,
the Saudi Ambassador, per Poppy Bush's request of the
Prince, GW decided to focus on grand geostrategic
issues such as surrounding China and coming to terms
with Russia and Europe. As a result of disregard by
two administrations, Clinton and Bush, binLaden sought
attention by sponsoring a second attack on the World
Trade Center.

This attack was based on two assumptions: (1)security
against skyjacking had so deteriorated in US
jetliners, that by ridding First Class, the
presumptive-shahids would always be able to see the
inside of the pilot's cabin as the door was ALWAYS
open in VIOLATION of Federal rules. Even after dry
runs, the airlines never bothered to tighten security;
that just ate into their profits. (2) So preoccupied
with great powers conflicts was the US that it would
never do more than the proforma anti-US terror
reactions of the Clinton Administration. binLaden, we
now know, believed that Bush would be stopped from
serious assault on Muslim lands by the very Arab
leaders the US depended on for a constant cascade of
oil....hence binLaden's insistence that terrorism
never be directed at the oil wells.

9/11 backfired as binLaden had totally misread Bush.
And that would have been the end of binLaden and
alQaeda, were it not for a basically intelligent man
turned into an idiot by avarice for the presidency,
Donald Rumsfeld, and his faithful dog, Dick Cheney.
Refusing the SecDef post, when offered to him in 2000,
because he wanted to be CIA Chief, Rumsfeld was
massaged by the neocons into taking the job, running a
clean fast and oil rewarded war against Iraq and then
reaping the benefits of neocon cash and connections to
become President in 2004. No one could avoid believing
that, through the Bush Administration, Rumsfeld was to
be the object of God's wrath, given his fate and that
of his war until he left government in 2006.

But Bush, with secret help from Poppy's friends,
turned Rumsfeld and Cheney into zombies and literally
embalmed the neocons. Their fate, resulting from their
later denunciations of Bush, only bespoke of Rove's
amazing ability to inflict pocks and pustules on all
who turn on Bush. The neocons to this day walk about
looking like Job, thanks to Rove. If it is true, as
some have claimed, that Job suffered from Syphilis,
then one could really insist that the neocons got
"screwed" by Rove. Not only did Rumsfeld disappear
into the darkness, but Cheney also was rendered
invisible in the light.

But Bush had no way of reversing the utter
recklessness which he had been blackmailed into
acquiescing to on Iraq. His solution was to use the
power of the Oval Office exactly as he used booze: to
block access of bad news to his consciousness during
the limited time of the day when it was awake.

It is very hard to concoct an argument for some sort
of "change" in Bush's surge strategy. In fact, he
benefited from all the catastrophes that befell
previous Western ventures in the so-called Third
World. Our COIN success, the PRTs and the "more boots"
tactics of Petraeus bespeak command mediocrity allowed
independence from imbecilic civilian rule (as under
Rumsfeld). Five years later, we do a few things that
reverse our failures-- but not by design but by
desperation and limitations due to lack of assets.

(A)With most of our vehicles blown to bits by IEDs, we
resorted to foot patrols. With the "surge" the
distance between outposts became short enough so they
could cover each other.

(B)With a catastrophic drop in enlistments, soldiers
were forced to do repeat tours in Iraq. As a result,
US soldiers acquired a "blend in" gone-native skill
that made them other than the intel blind
shoot-at-everything-that-moves trigger pullers they
had been over the first five years of the Iraq War. We
saw this in Vietnam too where CAP and MAT teams would
live with the peasants in the Viet Cong dominated
villages, turning them into self-defense forces that
rejected Hanoi's land collectivization policies.
Similarly, many Anbar Province Sunni tribes accepted
US advisers enabling them to reject radical Sharia.

©In the cities, someone must have realized that the
enemy is not really the enemy. For example, during the
Indochina War of France against the Viet Minh
Stalinists, Gen. Chanson's expeditionary force
destroyed the Communist infrastructure and made the
countryside even more secure than under the US. But
what the French failed to appreciate is the "piaster
scandal" by which the French occupation was funding
Asia wide piaster traffic and criminal gangs in the
cities and how strong it made the gangs. Finally, it
was gangsters that killed Gen. Chanson, not the Viet
Minh Communists. But in Baghdad, the US forces that
had spend five years clumsily trying to play Shi'ite
factions (Sadr vs. Hakim) and Sunnis, one against the
other, in hope of erecting a puppet government that
would legitimize our great oil suck and bases, sought
to end the killing of Americans by stationing its
troops as a sort of roving constabulary while dividing
up the city between the various militia; the latter,
in turn, would kill criminals instead of each other.
Thus, Petraeus can walk the streets without the same
chance of assassination as faced Gen. Chanson of the
French Expeditionary Forces in Indochina.

(D)Squeezed between the Arab Iraqis and the Turks, the
Kurdish gangsters can no longer expect to run Mosul
and Kirkuk. Instead, their Peshmerga militias will
have to integrate with the Shia and Sunni militias as
they are doing in Baghdad under Petraeus. That this is
inevitable is proven by the British withdrawal from
Basra in the South. If democracy is the standard, then
the British war in the South was a total failure. But
in demanding that the militias clean up their act,
going after criminal gangs instead of after each
other, to gradually develop some sort of political
order, the British have bought quite a bit for their
mere withdrawal.

(E)Iraqi fatigue after so much war for so long is
certainly a factor. But far more important is the
joint Arab-Iranian demand of Bush on his visit: you
made such manure of the Middle East, so why don't you
provide us with an American overflow force, just in
case we decide to go after each other's throats, in
return for which we'll give you oil and buy your war
toys at over-valued prices. Ironically, in exchange
for a magical NIE that defined Iran as no longer a
nuclear threat to be attacked, Bush got himself an end
to Iran's interference in Iraq.

(F)Israel feels very much abandoned, especially given
how it started a terror war from the air against
Lebanon at Bush's request. But Olmert-- unlike Bush--
chose to value to lives of Israelis over his political
career, so he ended it without the expected attack
Lebanon-->Syria-->Iran, to justify the US jumping in
to save Israel by pulverizing Iran. As a result, Bush
had no choice but to accept an Iranian truce in Iraq
instead of a war for the nukes. Annapolis is merely an
attempt to give Palestinians hope so they would not
turn to Hamas as a way of cutting off your nose to
spite your face out of rage over how miserable is
their lot. If nothing else, it signals a Quartet
reinvestment in Gaza and Israel paying off on the
billions of $$$ it will get in what's left of the Bush
term so long as it acts humane towards the
Palestinians.

One may denounce all this as a house of cards. But it
is a house of cards into which everyone in the region
is invested. Is this an act of Bush brilliance we had
underestimated? I would rather recall what a great
popular science writer once said: if you put three
monkeys to bang each at a typewriter (much as I am
doing now) into infinity, you are bound to come up
with the play-script of Shakespeare's Hamlet. In the
same way, random proteins from space assembled
themselves to create life. Is it "intelligent design"?
I can't say but I am sure GW Bush will insist that it
all is.

Daniel E. Teodoru