May 30, 2006
Democratic Ideas, III: Bush’s Leadership and Competence
by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
In a brilliant editorial posted on May 24, our Editor/Publisher Mark Karlin discussed, among other things, the proposition: “Bush, the Man Who Never Accomplishes His Mission: ‘Violence in Afghanistan surges as Taliban appears more organized.’" It is certainly true that Bush has not accomplished the original stated mission of the Afghanistan invasion: to capture Osama bin Laden and destroy the Taliban as a viable military and (hopefully) political force. If one goes to the link in Mark’s editorial, one will find ample evidence that precisely the opposite is true. Certainly Bush’s famous “Mission Accomplished” utterance about the War on Iraq has been proven to be a total fantasy. It was a propaganda effort that has failed even as propaganda, much less as a true representation of achieving the goals of the invasion as Bush has over time announced them. First, as regular BuzzFlash readers know oh-so-well, those supposed goals were to find the WMD (that surely did not exist at the time, as Hans Blix was on his way to proving conclusively when the US forced him to leave) and to destroy the Saddam-Osama connection (which never existed). Then the stated Georgite goal became “establishing democracy in Iraq.” Well, we know well where that one is going.
And so, an oft-stated criticism of Bush from the Democratic (and other opposition) side has been that he and his administration are “incompetent” and “lacking in leadership.” Surely, when one looks at Afghanistan and Iraq, and at Katrina, and what has happened or is happening to the CIA, and US military might, and the US reputation on the world stage, and (as Mark pointed out in his editorial) US science, and US higher education, and the US health care system, and the US economy (despite the administration’s cherry-picked rosy numbers), it would appear that they are indeed incompetent and lacking in leadership.
But the examples listed above (and there are many more) fall into two classes of failure. One is in relation to the publicly-stated goals of the Bush Administration, e.g., improving the economic situation of all of our citizens. The other is in relation what for the past 100 years or so has become to be expected of any Federal government, whether Republican or Democratic, e.g., competently responding to major natural disasters. Incompetent? Totally. Lacking in leadership in these regards? Surely. However, in dealing with the real agenda of his Administration, which just happens to be for the most part a secret one, Bush has been anything but incompetent. He has been anything but lacking in leadership. Quite the opposite.
For example. The Georgites have massively cut taxes for what Bush himself has referred to as his “base” (famous quote, addressing a room full of major donors: “Some call you the elite; I call you my base”). As Mark discussed at length in his editorial, they have established the foundation for the eventual substitution of theocratic fascism for Constitutional Democracy. They have created a so-far fool-proof electoral-theft machine. They have so far reduced the elected political opposition to irrelevance. They are on their way to taking over the Federal courts with like-minded appointees at all three levels. They have to date cowed the mainstream media (although it seems to be waking up to reality a bit) while creating a Privatized Ministry of Propaganda. They are in the process of reducing to rubble all Federal government capability for doing the people’s business as spelled out in the Preamble to the Constitution (following the Grover Norquist dictum of shrinking the Federal government to the size of a bath-tub and then drowning it in the bathtub). They have made the Federal government the total ally of their principal patrons, the extractive industries. In terms of their true goals for the Iraq invasion, first they are well on their way to completing at least three huge permanent military bases there. Second, through the mouth of one of their favorite Democrats, Joe Biden, they are already test-flying what I have felt from the beginning was the other principal goal of the invasion: tri-furcating the country to create a Kurdish protectorate, an entity that would just happen to sit on top on oil reserves that may prove to be larger than those of Saudi Arabia.
Incompetent? Hardly. Lacking in leadership? Certainly
not. It just depends upon whether one focuses one’s attention on their
public or their private
agenda. Ammunition for the Democrats? Big-time. They only need to open
the armory.
Steven Jonas, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) a weekly Contributing Author for The Political Junkies (www.thepoliticaljunkies.net) and a Columnist for BuzzFlash.