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Lugar, Bush, and the permanent war in its first throes of crisis

Now we begin to see what synergy is all about. There's bad news for the Bush administration from Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, Israel. Late last week Richard Lugar, the Republican chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, publicly scolded the Bushmen and warned them that their victory in Iraq was "at risk." But Lugar pulled what might have been his most effective punch when he rather delicately pointed out that continued failure in Iraq would create "an incubator for terrorist cells and activity." The incubator Lugar alludes to is more like a factory, and it has been pumping out product since the invasion of Afghanistan. You have only to look to the waves of foreign volunteers who streamed into Iraq to wage jihad against the Americans at the outset of the war--more than 10,000, according to the European press. And events since then have no doubt galvanized countless more.

Lugar is promising an investigation of the Bush administration's planning for post-war Iraq. We'll see. Lugar is one of the few people in the entire government who could singlehandedly do serious damage to Bush next year, but only at the cost of making himself a lifelong pariah in Republican circles. He's really not the type. Jeff St. Clair of Counterpunch, an expert in all things Hoosier, says this of him:

Privately Lugar is said to have thought that Bush bungled diplomacy and that the war on Iraq was unnecessary and detracted from the hunt for al-Qaeda. He is often at odds with the neo-cons camped in the Bush inner sanctum and has a particular hatred of Rumsfeld. Lugar has bit his tongue for the last two years, but now that the Iraq war is over and his former staffer Mitch Daniels has left the administration to run for governor in Indiana, Lugar feels freer to speak out openly. But he's a fixer, not a revolutionary. He'll be the public voice of Colin Powell's agenda.

As I've written before, I believe the US entered Iraq with the sole intention of staying as long as possible and insinuating itself as deeply as possible in the fabric of the economy and of such government as exists there. So in that sense the Bushmen's current predicament cannot be altogether a surprise to them. But even if this was their "plan," there's no question that they did a wretched job of thinking through the contingencies. There is no sense in which it's in the administration's interest to have this level of anarchy in Baghdad, and yet they are only now awakening to the fact that it's probably not a good idea to occupy the city with combat troops. A larger force will be required in any case, and meanwhile Britain has been quietly and steadily withdrawing troops from the occupation force.

Bush and his people are now more than ever at the mercy of events beyond their control, though it's clear they don't see it that way. Their latest response to the growing fiasco in Iraq is to fire yet another warning shot in Iran's direction. Even as things sour around him, Bush, like Osama, remains anxious to carry the war on terror forward. The pretext need not be substantial (what follows is from the WashPost article linked in this paragraph):

A senior administration official who is skeptical of the Pentagon's arguments said most of the al Qaeda members -- fewer than a dozen -- appear to be located in an isolated area of northeastern Iran, near the border with Afghanistan. He described the area as a drug-smuggling terrorist haven that is tolerated by key members of the Revolutionary Guards in part because they skim money off some of the activities there. It is not clear how much control the central Iranian government has over this area, he said.

"I don't think the elected government knows much about it," he said. "Why should you punish the rest of Iran," he asked, just because the government cannot act in this area?

Perhaps it's because the war on terror is not really a war on terror, as our failure to do anything about Saudi Arabia attests.

Tomorrow--assuming, as always, that nothing else blows up in the meantime--I'll try to post something about a few other key players in the current drama: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, North Korea.