Replied by(Ghost) Replied on (11/Sep/2006)

People are beginning to feel sorry for President George W. Bush. And with good reason.
Bush the Pitiful
by Paul Craig Roberts
People are beginning to feel sorry for President George W. Bush. And with good reason.
A new poll by Harris Interactive published in the Financial Times reveals that our traditional European allies regard the United States as a much greater threat to world stability than Iran, Iraq, and North Korea.
In European opinion, the axis of evil is Bush’s America.
Almost twice as many British, whose Prime Minister Tony Blair is complicit in Bush’s war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, see the US as the greatest threat to world stability than see Iran as the danger. In Spain three times more people regard the US as the threat than see Iran as the threat. Only in Italy does Iran edge out the US as the greatest perceived threat, a result no doubt due to the propaganda that spews from the media empire of Silvio Berlusconi, the Rupert Murdoch of Italy.
Another reason to feel sorry for Bush is because he is regarded by his own political party and his own Attorney General as a war criminal. Republicans recognize that Bush has committed felonies by violating the US War Crimes Act of 1996 (legislation aimed at the likes of Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic). Bush’s Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, and the Republican Congress have produced draft legislation that aims to protect Bush retroactively by gutting the 1996 War Crimes Act. Republicans hope to quietly pass this unconstitutional legislation before they are defeated in the November elections.
The fact that retroactive law is prohibited by the US Constitution adds to Bush’s shame.
Bush is also pitied because a large majority of Americans no longer believe in the single over-riding cause of Bush’s presidency – the "war on terror." A recent Ipsos-Public Affairs poll released by the Associated Press shows that 60 percent of Americans believe that Bush’s invasion of Iraq has created more terrorism and that Americans are less safe as a result of invading Iraq.
Talking heads on television now discuss whether Bush is an idiot. The frequency of such discussions is likely to increase as Bush makes such declarations as "the battle for Iraq is now central to the ideological struggle of the 21st century."
Bush evokes more pity, because he has lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In Iraq, the Kurds in the north have replaced the Iraqi flag with the Kurdish flag. The rest of Iraq is governed by Sunni insurgents or Shi'ite militias. The US puppet government is powerless and dares not leave its US-protected fortified bunker, and on September 5, the dominant Shi'ite political alliance prepared legislation that would divide Iraq into Kurd, Sunni, and Shi'ite autonomous regions.
Apparently, no one has told Bush that he is spending American lives and money on a cause that the Iraqis themselves have abandoned.
Bush still crows about his defeat of the Taliban. Those of us who have served in the government at high levels wonder every day about Bush’s daily briefing. Does he get one? Who gives it to him? I think Bush’s briefing must come from Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, and William Kristol. Where else could he get such bogus information?
Perhaps Bush’s wife or one of his daughters could smuggle him a copy of the recent report on Afghanistan by the Senlis Council, a security and development policy group that closely monitors the situation in Afghanistan.
According to this report, "Afghanistan is spiraling into uncontrollable violence." The Taliban have regained control over half of the country:
"Despite the international community’s concerted five-year focus on military operations, the security situation in Afghanistan is worse than in 2001. The Taliban now have a strong grip on the southern half of the country. Afghans perceive that the US and NATO troops in southern and eastern Afghanistan are being defeated by the Taliban. The legitimacy of the international community’s presence in Afghanistan is undermined by its incapacity to protect the Afghan population.”
Bush was betrayed by the neoconservatives he appointed, protected, and promoted. Public opinion polls in the Arab and Muslim world show that Bush’s invasions, aggressive stance toward Syria and Iran, and unconditional support for Israeli aggression have created a powerful Islamic political movement that experts say will sweep away the corrupt governments allied with the United States.
The ignorant actions of Bush the Pitiful have marginalized moderate Arabs and destroyed America’s standing both in Muslim lands and the wider world.
Bush has defeated no one, but he has destroyed American’s reputation and his own.

Five Years In, Bush Is Losing Terror War
by Jim Lobe
To consider whether U.S. President George W. Bush is winning his "global war on terror" (GWOT) five years after al-Qaeda's devastating 9/11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, one has only to look at the news of the past few days.
In Afghanistan, where the war began, NATO and U.S. forces are struggling to cope with a resurgent Taliban whose guerrillas have killed some two dozen western troops, including two U.S. soldiers in a suicide bombing in Kabul Friday, since Sep. 1.
NATO's U.S. commander, Gen. James L. Jones, admitted Thursday that the alliance was going through a "difficult period" and needs as many as 2,500 more troops, as well as additional aircraft, to bolster ongoing operations in southern Afghanistan, significant parts of which have reportedly fallen under the effective – if not yet permanent – control of the Taliban.
The government of neighboring Pakistan, meanwhile, has agreed to withdraw its troops from northern Waziristan, effectively returning full control of the region – as it did in southern Waziristan last year – to tribal militias dominated by close allies of the Taliban.
The deal, which reportedly includes the government's releasing al-Qaeda suspects in exchange for what is regarded here as the militias' highly dubious pledge to stop cross-border attacks into Afghanistan, has revived a high-level debate – last engaged immediately after 9/11 – over whether President Pervez Musharraf's regime is, on balance, a help or a hindrance in Washington's anti-terrorist war.
The news out of Iraq, which both Osama bin Laden and Bush agree should be considered the "central battlefield" in the war between the west and radical Islamists, is hardly more encouraging.
Hopeful assertions by senior officials earlier this year that as many as 30,000 U.S. troops could go home by this fall if security improves have yielded to the fact, confirmed by the Pentagon late last month, that there are now 140,000 troops in theater – 10,000 more than the beginning of the summer – due to growing sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing in Baghdad.
Moreover, Thursday's report by the Baghdad morgue that the number of killings last month fell only modestly from the all-time high of nearly 1,855 in July contradicted the Pentagon's claim earlier this week that the additional deployment had succeeded in cutting the death toll in half.
And when combined with reports of increased killings in nearby towns and villages, it tended to confirm what senior U.S. military officers have been publicly suggesting for the past month: that Iraq is indeed moving toward civil war which U.S. Forces may be able to slow, but not stop.
Bush himself has seemed in recent appearances to recognize that Iraq is going badly. After long insisting that the country was making "progress" on a variety of fronts, Bush has dropped the word from his Iraq vocabulary and focused instead on the potentially catastrophic consequences for the war on terror if the U.S. withdraws.
Meanwhile, however, the impact of the Iraq war on Muslim "hearts and minds," on which the fate of that war his administration itself has said will depend, has been devastating, according to recent surveys of opinion in Islamic countries stretching from Morocco to Indonesia.
"As the slaughter [in Iraq] continues," according to an essay this week by Alon Ben-Meir, an Israeli international relations professor at New York University, "the Arab and Muslim world are increasingly enraged over the plight of the Iraqi people, with hatred toward the United States reaching new heights."
Adding to that fury, of course, was last month's war between Israel and Hezbollah, depicted in a speech this week by Bush as a proxy battle between the United States and Iran and an integral part of his "war on terrorism."
It succeeded not only in inflaming anti-U.S. opinion throughout the Islamic world, including, significantly, the Shi'ite majority in Iraq, according to most regional experts here, but also in weakening the Sunni-dominated governments – notably Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan – that, as before 9/11, remain Washington's only allies in the region.
While devastating Lebanon, whose 2005 "Cedar Revolution" had been hailed by Bush as a landmark in his efforts to "transform" the Middle East, the war effectively elevated Hezbollah to hero status – including, significantly, for the region's increasingly popular Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. It also bolstered the positions of its chief sponsors, Syria and Iran, which, along with Hamas and Hezbollah, Bush recently lumped together with al-Qaeda as "Islamic fascists."
To many critics, Bush's expansion of his terrorist target list beyond al-Qaeda, and particularly to Iraq and perceived enemies of Israel, has been one of the great strategic mistakes in the conduct of his war on terror by effectively transforming what was originally a terrorist criminal conspiracy led by al-Qaeda with the tacit support of the Taliban to a "wide war extending from Lebanon through Afghanistan," as Amb. James Dobbins, Washington's top envoy in negotiations during and after the Afghanistan war, recently put it.
"In a search for moral clarity, the administration has tried to divide the Middle East into good guys and bad guys," he told an audience at the New America Foundation (NAF) late last month. "America tends to treat Middle East diplomacy as a win/lose or zero-sum game in which Syrian, Iranian, Hezbollah or Hamas gains are by definition American losses and vice-versa."
"The result, of course, is the United States always loses, because if you insist that the population of the region choose between Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, on the one hand, or the United States and Israel, on the other, they are going to choose the other side every time," said Dobbins, who currently directs international security programs at the RAND Corporation.
In that context, Washington's enthusiastic support for Israel in its war against Hezbollah could prove as counter-productive to its war against terrorism as the decision to go to war with Iraq without U.N. approval.
Coming at a time when al-Qaeda had been successfully expelled from Afghanistan, its operational capabilities severely reduced, and its top leaders either captured or forced into hiding, the Iraq invasion, by appearing to demonstrate that the United States was indeed bent on conquest in the heart of the Islamic world, gave the group new life and new recruits and affiliates. It effectively sowed dragon's teeth not only in the region, but among disaffected Muslims in Western Europe, as well.
Washington might still have been able to limit the damage by engaging Syria and Iran, as well as other regional powers, in efforts to stabilize Iraq after the war – as it had with Afghanistan's neighbors, including Iran, after the ouster of the Taliban. But, given its drive for "moral clarity" and over-confidence in military power, it rejected the two countries' overtures.
"Five years after 9/11, the United States is losing the war on terrorism," declared Flynt Leverett, who headed the Middle East desk at the National Security Council during Bush's first term, at a forum at the libertarian CATO Institute here Friday.