Riding On Old Yeller

The Bush Doctrine of pre-emption was outdone on its own terms yesterday, as at least three hours passed in between Iran’s release of the British sailors they had detained and any sort of reaction from the White House. As damning as that silence became with each passing hour, it was compounded by the words of Vice President Cheney, who for some reason was running point on the response. Knowing what to expect from someone who may go down in history as the only man for whom the VP job was too much to handle, the idiot did not fail to prove why this great nation finds itself in a position where it is being upstaged everyday by the likes of Syria and Iran.

And since even at this juncture, after all that has transpired, if the best this outfit can come up with is to send out Cheney, there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind about whether or not our government is on auto-pilot from here on out. A couple days ago Bush spoke up about the situation in Iran, and referred to the British sailors as “hostages”. Tony Blair let him know that it wasn’t any of his business, and if he could just shut up about the matter altogether, it’d be the best thing for everyone. Realizing his input or words weren’t appreciated or even welcomed by his former wingman, anger brewed from within and naturally his release valve opened up into the direction of Democrats.

The profile of an addict is clearly evident in Bush’s behavior in this regard, as unlike in times past when he’d rightly assign the political rhetoric that was complete bullshit to minions, in the last couple days he’s been falling all over himself for the chance to deliver the bullshit personally. Chastising Democrats for leaving Washington DC during the Easter recess, and then going on vacation himself the next day, wasn’t a smart play. Nor was deciding to criticize Speaker Pelosi for venturing over to Syria without saying a word about the Republicans who had gone there as well.

A similar impulse decision to repeat, for what has seemed like the 100th time already, his plan to veto the Iraq spending bill in it’s current form only managed to reinforce this impression. As whether the repetition of this pledge is expected to matter more, when he holds a press conference to say it again tomorrow, than it did five days ago is the question. The answer he’s working with at this point resembles someone who desperately needs a fix. In President Bush’s specific case, the addiction isn’t simply about speaking out against his political enemies, but rather the need to feel relevant and important in times when he can’t claim either.

Not yet convinced? Well, on Tuesday he announced to the world that there will be no exchange of Iranians being held by the United States in negotiations for the release of 15 British “hostages”. At this point he knows full well that the United States has been cut out of the loop completely, and since there are already news accounts indicating that whatever Bush is saying on the topic is not helping, it becomes a necessity for him to create a false reality where none of this is true. For the sake of his addiction, the actual fate of those British captives isn’t as important as there being at least the impression that he hasn’t been left out of the loop.

For him to have discovered that not even 24 hours after he had answered this question that none of the countries involved had even asked, the sailors were released, it must have felt like there was a party going on and nobody invited him. His wingman was there without him and hung out with two of those countries he had planned on denying entry into the fraternity. Suddenly the “cool kids” table was excluding him, when all the while he simply assumed that wherever he sat naturally became the “cool kids” table by default. Indeed, the players involved decided to simply ignore the bully and take care of some business amongst themselves.

In this karma-packed chapter, the next part must really punctuate everything for Mr. “in the history books, Iraq will only be a comma”. An even meaner bully from Russia named Putin had already been poking fun at Bush and his war in Iraq throughout the past two years, side to side on a stage even, and here he was again around the time Bush was throwing around the “hostages” reference and talking about how he wouldn’t do this or that to get them back, saying that if the United States were to start a war with Iran, that we would lose. At this point our drunk fratboy has fallen down and puked all over himself several times already, and here’s an upper classman daring him to do another kegstand or else he’s a pussy.

Down, disgraced and irrelevant, with his addictive tendencies popping up all over the place, it’s a guarantee in my mind that he’d simply had enough and was determined to make someone else be President yesterday. And since that’s the case, wasn’t it a happy day? The world avoids a crisis, another war, with Iran’s democracy actually working from the bottom up by checking to make sure their President understood he wasn’t a king. Imagine that fact on its own and also consider that our own democracy wasn’t able to accomplish the very same thing even once in six full years. Iran’s President is smacked down and he smiles for the cameras, insists on getting a group photo with the sailors, while our own President carries on with tantrums and basically insists that he is in fact the king, not only of the United States, but of the world.

All to the detriment of this great republic, this constant litany of inescapable reminders of how much of a fuck-up this guy truly is and in turn how it serves as a damning piece of evidence against all of us, the nation that gave this fuck-up more votes than his opponent in 2004 according to the popular tally. We endorsed this team of mental midgets, and as result, on the day the sailors are released, the best our White House can come up with is a thoroughly disgraced Cheney pretending to know something about the world.

The very same ideas thought up by his smug, stupid cohorts in the 90s, that were unequivocally proven to be irrelevant by the day’s events, were all his brain could muster. Cheney being the aforementioned historical oddity, a man without the ability and knowledge to even hack it as a vice president, widely known to be the easiest job the White House has to offer, rather than change up in any way, he proceeded to explain how the release of those sailors might have been incorrectly handled (full transcript):

Q Do you think there was any quid pro quo for their release?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I don’t know.

Q Do you think there should have been?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: No, I don’t think there should have been. I think

Q Why?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I think it’s important that if you get into the business where you reward that kind of behavior, there will be more of that kind of behavior. Once people start taking hostages, or kidnaping folks on the high seas, and then are rewarded for it by getting some kind of political concession or some other thing of value, that would be unfortunate.

The British sailors haven’t even flown out of Iran yet, and the United States is providing notes to Tony Blair, the man who was actually able to make a deal to get his people out. Do we even have to guess what Cheney’s strategy would have entailed? My guess is it would have involved threats, bombs and in the end a failure to save even a single one of them. How can I be so sure about this? Consider the fact that Syria played a role in striking the deal between the UK and Iran that facilitated the release and prevented an escalation of violence in the region. Knowing that Syria was involved in making this happen, Cheney continues on with his lesson on how to guarantee failure in one’s foreign policy:

Q Speaker Pelosi is in Damascus. Will there be — will there be repercussions, negative repercussions from her visit today?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I think it’s unfortunate. The fact of the matter is, Bashir Assad has been a — I don’t want to say — a bad actor, in many respects. He was, for example, the conduit for Iranian support to Hezbollah when Hezbollah launched its military efforts against the Israelis last summer. There have been inside Syria, obviously, a flow of jihadists, terrorists, going into Iraq to participate in the conflict inside Iraq.

We have communicated with him in the past. He knows what he needs to do to be accepted internationally. He’s been isolated and cut off because of his bad behavior. And the unfortunate thing about the Speaker’s visit is it sort of breaks down that barrier. It means without him having done any of those things he should do in order to be acceptable, if you will, from an international standpoint, he gets a visit from a high-ranking American anyway. In other words, his bad behavior is being rewarded, in a sense.

Does anyone think this White House would have been capable of making a deal to save the lives of those sailors and the need for a war? This statement regarding Syria proves to me that if we had been in Britian’s situation, we would have failed. Cheney is basically saying here that it would be alright to fail as long as we failed for the sake of a principle that he believes in. That being the need to issue public statements referring to nation states as children in a large day care center that only someone like him can be in charge of. Clearly his philosophy differs from that of the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Iraq Study Group, United Kingdom and just about every career official at the CIA and within the state department, but all that is irrelevant to him.

Taking this aspect into consideration, as well as the fact that our President decided to play hokey and shirk his responsibilities, and it isn’t that difficult to imagine a scenario where an international incident could be choreographed by three separate nations that all shared a common goal, which was to send a message to a fourth nation badly in need of a reality check. Understanding that these men aren’t the type to realize such a thing and inject some basic leadership concepts into their game, perhaps then the message was aimed at the international audience watching the whole thing unfold. Seeing how easy it was to predict the United States’ response, what this coup de gras was really all about had to do with pulling back the curtain more than anything else. The facts had already bore out precisely what existed behind that curtain long ago, but it is important to understand what those facts are.

Refugees have poured into Syria by the hundreds of thousands, now past the point of “becoming” a problem, but in fact constituting a humanitarian crisis that will never go away on its own. British troops draw down and leave a portion of southern Iraq to the inevitable sectarian violence they realized couldn’t be prevented by a foreign military presence. Iran understands it is a target and realizes something must be done. How do they know it is a matter of time before bombs are dropped? Consider when our state department wanted to communicate with Afghanistan after 9/11, and Iran facilitated the discussion, acting as a conduit between our two nations, it was an act of generosity that should have opened up even more opportunities for diplomacy. To now be threatened by the greatest navy and air force the world has ever seen and all the while be denied a channel to communicate, the times truly demanded some outside-the-box thinking.

When the UK pulled out of Basra, Cheney said it was proof that things were going well in certain areas of Iraq. With the Iraq Study Group report in hand, Rumsfeld gone, the publics voice having loudly rejected his Iraq policy, Rice given more of a say and provided someone she can work with at the Pentagon…Bush still decided to send in more troops, amp up the rhetoric and violence towards Iran, and continue employing Cheney’s neoconservative dead end logic regarding diplomacy with Iraq’s neighbors. So why wouldn’t the region’s interested parties and perhaps even Russia decide to orchestrate a scenario where not only would Cheney’s objections to diplomacy be proven foolish in real time, but the Geneva Convention statutes that Blair would cite Iran as being in violation of end up exposing the true villain that continues to stand in the way of any progress being made?

Perhaps I give everyone too much credit in even considering this scenario, but from what I can tell at this point, not only are Bush and Cheney both limited in terms of smarts, along with being horrible managers, but if left to their own devices it’s only a matter of time before something tragic happens. A last ditch effort to get through to the boy in the bubble, that his father’s friends are right and this Nixon retread he decided to attach his legacy to needs a long vacation if anything positive is to come out of the rest of his presidency.

Focusing on small steps first though, the first has to be that the President actually shows up for work on time…something he failed to do yesterday. After that, he needs to shut out Cheney’s influence completely from here on out, and rely instead on what Gates, Rice and his father’s people tell him. Finally, he needs to see a therapist and perhaps go on some kind of medication that can keep him from appearing as crazy and impulsive as he’s been lately.

Bottom line: The United States is being made a fool of on the international stage right now.