Petrelis Files

NY Review: Bush = Clueless, Pointless

I read a whole lot of truth to power in the October 6 New York Review of Books by Peter W. Galbraith, longtime American diplomat and writer, about Bush and Iraq that I want to share.

When I think of BushCo's war on Iraq, the words pointless and clueless easily come to mind, words that shout genuine concern from Galbraith in his essay, which I ask you to read in its entirety:

"Three days later, President Bush telephoned Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, a Shiite cleric who leads the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Iraq's largest and most pro-Iranian political party, to ask for concessions on behalf of the Sunni Arab negotiators on the controversial issues of federalism and de-Baathification. Hakim politely thanked the President who, not being well versed in the intricacies of Iraqi politics (or even its broad outlines), was reduced to pleading that his requests be taken seriously. The President then said something about protecting women's rights and Hakim assured him they were sacred.

"The call was pointless. Bush was asking Hakim to make concessions that the Sunni Arab negotiators themselves did not consider sufficient. Hakim's idea of women's rights is very different from what Bush wanted, but the President did not know enough to respond to the cleric. The Hakim episode reveals just how clueless the President and his advisers are about the divisions in Iraqi society.

"Small concessions cannot paper over the differences between the victims of horrific atrocities and those who deny that any crimes took place. There was also no small amount of hypocrisy in the President's expressions of concern about women. His diplomats had already agreed to soften key protections for women, and two days before expressing his concern to Hakim, Bush had publicly congratulated Iraq on 'a democratic constitution that honors women's rights.'

"While the President's personal intervention into the Middle East bargaining was predictably feckless, his ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, did much to produce the constitution that emerged. Days after taking up his post in early August, Khalilzad summoned Iraq's top leaders to the capital's Green Zone, initiating three weeks of nonstop talks that produced the Kurdish–Shiite deal that is expressed in Iraq's new constitution.

[...]

"The new constitution has received almost uniformly negative reviews in the United States (except, of course, from President Bush, whose opinions on Iraqi developments are no longer taken seriously)."