Iraqi President So I was trapped in the car last night during Bush's speech. It was that or radio with commercials, and it's a draw to which I hate more, so I listened to most of the speech. It sounded fine until I realized that the plan is to appoint a person to be head of Iraq, give all power over, and insist on elections by January. But...if some guy (I'm not under any illusions here) is appointed head of Iraq and has all the power, what enjoins him to hold elections? What stops that man from being Saddam II? The separation of powers? What is the government's structure? And if he DOESN'T have all the power, well then, it's not a complete handover, now is it?
I'll have to dig up a post I made before we attacked Iraq predicting the timing of the war and the election. I think I called that we would be done 18 months before the election (which May 2003 basically was) and the Prez would use the intervening months to try to get Iraq off the table. Hence the insistence on the June 30 date, which will have meaning only in how the symbolism of actions after it will translate in the Arab world.
There seems to be a whisper in the air lately about current events echoing LBJ's decision to escalate in Vietnam. Maybe I am just saying that because I caught 20 minutes of an HBO movie dramatizing the decision this weekend, but I think I heard it elsewhere too :) Anyway, I read a chilling sentence in the intro to
The Presidential Difference (VERY HIGHLY recommended--look for the edition with the bush/gore profiles in back, or for one with a bush/kerry comparison if it comes out). Whaddya know,
here is the exact page (chapter starts on the page before). The two options then: "salvage what little can be preserved with no major addition to our present military risks" or "use our military power in the Far East to force a change of communist policy." The more things change, eh? Did we not go into Iraq to use our military power in the Mideast to force a change of radical Islamist culture and concomitant Mideast governmental policies? And are we not now salvaging what little can be preserved with as little military risk as possible in withdrawing? Vietnam did change this country, that made me realize: it'd be politically impossible today to ramp up the war as it must have been possible then.
(Oh eerie, even the timing is about right. Dien Bien Phu is analogous to the first gulf war. Then the real decision, LBJ's, came a dozen years later. There's even paternal overtones; in this war we have vengeance and/or Freudian one-upmanship of the father. LBJ's attitudes towards the policies of JFK seem lots more reverent than they would have been had JFK not been killed, altho I'm no scholar of the man or the time.)
Supposedly there will be speeches every week laying out the handover more clearly. Why don't they just say "as soon as we find out, we'll let you know." That's clearly the size of it.
