Just ask Alice

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Bush's thinking gets ever curiouser
Les Payne

January 14, 2007

Is President George W. Bush taking us down the Rabbit Hole?

The one thing he got right in his Wednesday speech he also got wrong. "Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved," he said of his projected triumph in Iraq. Indeed, to the rest of us, Bush's "victory" is likely to look very much like defeat.

This fairy-tale lens seems to have worked for him in the 2000 election. His "victory" then did not look at all like the one his father achieved in 1988. The race that Bush lost by 543,895 popular votes was pitched to him with critical assistance from the controversial tally in the state governed by his younger brother.

That victory, under the wand of adviser Karl Rove and the William Rehnquist court, left Bush with a seeming distaste for the popular will and a distorted view of his performance.

The Iraq policy has been shaped in just such a Bush world behind the looking glass, peopled by Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Lion, Jabberwocky and the Unicorn.

Stepping up the Iraq conflict with 21,500 additional U.S. combat troops, Bush insists, is not an escalation, as his secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, argues for him, but a "surge." This Karl Rovian term suggests a debilitating - though experts say unlikely - shock to the Baghdad insurgency, and it avoids the dreaded "e" word reminiscent of failed U.S. policy in Vietnam.

Were we to liken Bush's Iraq policy to Vietnam, however, it would resemble not the U.S. misadventure but the even more culpable criminality of the colonizing French. Under the banner of European dominance, they set about killing the leaders of this Southeast Asian nation, restructuring its government and exploiting its human and natural resources.

Only when the Vietnamese humiliated the French at Dien Bien Phu did the United States step up for its first major defeat in war. Bush, as well as the cowardly Vice President Dick Cheney, avoided the Vietnam battlefield and the instructive lessons of that defeat.

The Bush-Cheney war policy is doomed no matter the untidy details of their announced escalation of troops and their calls for the upgrading of the Iraqi constabulary, the Kurds' redeployment and the impending face-slapping of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. The inevit-able failure of the Bush policy was sown with the '03 launching of his preemptive war of aggression against a sovereign, non-threatening nation under false pretenses.

"Mistakes have been made," admitted an uncomfortable president whom adviser Rove posed in the White House Library, instead of, say, the gym, as if to intellectualize Bush as the First Librarian Spouse. The backdrop for his speech recalled a hapless Alice falling down the Rabbit Hole with walls "filled with cupboards and bookshelves and ... maps and pictures hung upon pegs."

In urban terms, the execution of the Iraq war can be likened to a sheriff's acquiring a warrant to search the estate of a man he despises.

After convincing the judge that the abusive father has an illicit arsenal, the sheriff stages a murderous raid, kills the man's sons, slaughters his friends and acquaintances, wrecks his property, and, because he can, lays siege to the entire county.

After a show trial, the sheriff turns the condemned man over to his fiercest enemies, who taunt him publicly as they stretch the rope around his neck.

After viewing video footage of Saddam Hussein's hanging, Bush declares the show trial "fair" and the hanging a civil expression of "justice."

Perhaps we should not expect Bush to act otherwise. This spoiled-brat scion of a pretentious ruling-class American family is cursed with a profound mule-headed swagger. Since childhood, he has displayed a numbing inability to process unexpected information. After a youth and adulthood wasted by alcoholism and alleged recovery, Bush is a born-again Christian, so-called, as stubborn as ever.

By escalating the war he rejects the advice of his generals, Congress, the safety-net report of the Iraq Study Group and the November election sentiments and will of the governed. Yet, he promises a "democratic Iraq" that "upholds the rule of law" and "answers to its people."

Our Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, provided a mechanism for saving the republic from a president and a vice president who would take the republic down the Rabbit Hole. Perhaps it is time to start that discussion.

Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.