World Affairs
What next? Don't ask Washington
Published 31 January 2005
Iraq elections - The principles of the Bush administration are elastic. The future of Iran and Iraq could be decided by its speechwriters
I have a friend here who is an Anglican clergyman, the father of three children, and the rector of a thriving parish in the Georgetown area of Washington, DC. He is also a chaplain with the DC National Guard and goes away for drills for a week or two every year; the rest of the time, he pays occasional visits to a local army barracks.
That all changed in December. My friend received a mobilisation order to report for duty on 1 February - first for training in New Jersey, then to go overseas. He immediately wrote a letter to his congregation, explaining that he would probably be sent to Afghanistan - or possibly Iraq, or even somewhere else in the Middle East - and that he was likely to be gone for a year. He prepared for his last service in the church on 30 January, and churchgoers duly started to write him letters and bid him emotional farewells.
Exactly a week before the Iraqi elections, however, the situation changed yet again. This time he had to announce at each of his Sunday services that although the mobilisation order was still theoretically in effect, he had heard from his battalion commander that he should stop preparations to leave on 1 February. It now looked as though they would not be heading out of DC after all - but it could still happen, none the less.
He and hundreds of men and women in his unit are thus going through identical ordeals - shelving plans to leave their families and jobs to head to Iraq or Afghanistan, and putting their lives on hold at the pleasure of the Bush administration.
They are, understandably, confused. And so is the rest of Washington. The city is seething with rumours about what will happen next in Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan. Will Donald Rumsfeld resign after the weekend elections in Iraq (a hot one, this)? Or will he stay on and become even more prominent by overseeing the bombing of suspected nuclear sites in Iran and a possible land invasion via Iraq and Afghanistan, through routes that were not previously available? Are covert US military units already doing their deeds inside Iran? Will Washington pronounce that democracy is alive and well in Iraq after the elections and immediately start withdrawing troops?
I dropped in to the British ambassador's residence here last Monday afternoon and found Jack Straw reeling from it all after meeting the not-quite-yet US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. "The United States," said Straw, "has a different historical perspective on Iran . . . sovereign government of Iraq . . . Resolution 1546 . . . mandate will end in 2005 . . . We're there with the consent of the Iraqi government and the Iraqi people . . . There's no way we'll overstay our welcome . . . it's essential for us to stay there." Poor Straw even tried to interpret George W Bush's ridiculous 21-minute inauguration address (the one that contained 27 references to "freedom" and 15 to "liberty"): "War between European states is now inconceivable . . . because they're now democracies," he thought. Well said, Jack.
The realities here in the US, however, are more prosaic. Boy George had no sooner finished his speech on inauguration day ("we will defend ourselves and our freedoms by force of arms if necessary") than Dad was wheeled out to put his boy's excesses in perspective: "People want to read a lot into it - that this means new aggression or newly asserted military forces," explained Bush the Elder on an impromptu visit to the White House briefing room. "That's not what that speech is about. It's about freedom."
In other words, the elder Bush might just as well have added, we should not be taking anything his son said on inauguration day seriously. Poppy was quite right: the principles of his boy's administration are endlessly elastic, ready to be bent or squeezed in any direction that Karl Rove and the indefatigable White House speechwriters might choose to take them - for immediate political purposes, as stirring new backdrops to pageantry, or as attempts to start laying down a presidential persona for posterity. Or, indeed, for any other eventualities that might crop up.
It was just over four years ago, for example, that Bush was contemptuously criticising his presidential opponent, Al Gore, for being in favour of sending US troops overseas for "nation-building". Now, apparently, he has had a rethink and is a passionate supporter of sending US troops to do just that - to build nations left, right and centre. An inauguration address? Just the opportunity for Rove and co to slide in some new guiding principles and to rewrite the reason for invading Iraq. This time, it was not to protect America from weapons of mass destruction (the 2003 reason) but to spread democracy and freedom there, because "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands". Geddit?
But less than five days after Bush's soaring address - actually, he didn't have the oratorical skills to bring to life the words that had been written for him - matters came down to earth with a bang for the administration, when it was quietly announced on 24 January that the White House will soon be asking Congress for a further $80bn to fund operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for this year alone. That will bring total expenditure in Iraq and Afghanistan for the current fiscal year to $105bn, increasing the 2005 federal deficit to $427bn. Simultaneously, we learned from Lieutenant General James Lovelace that the US military plans to keep 120,000 troops in Iraq at least until the end of 2006.
A senior Republican - one senior enough to know to ignore the inauguration festivities - tells me that, contrary to all the excited speculation, there is no masterplan, no blueprint, for how things will proceed in the historic drive towards freedom and goodwill for all mankind. For the time being, things will just muddle along, against a backdrop of the administration's continuing to claim not only the moral high ground, but also omniscient judgement on all things throughout the world. That, he hardly needed to point out, makes the outlook intrinsically unstable - whether you're Jack Straw or a clergyman in Georgetown or his family or congregants, all of whom now wonder what the future holds.
That will be the pattern for the next four years of Bushian Fantasiepolitik. Reasons for policies can still be recast, strategies redrawn, to fit the PR and other exigencies of the future - the unknown unknowns, as Rumsfeld might say. We shall all have to get used to it.
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