Weakness Is Strength

If you’re a partisan Republican, October must’ve been pure hell. I can sympathize. As a liberal and lifelong Democrat, I know what bad stretches feel like.

But in this moment of presidential vulnerability, a few good things may have happened. A conservative chief justice joined the U.S. Supreme Court, replacing another conservative chief justice. I don’t imagine I’ll agree with John Roberts very often over the next 50 years (those SCOTUS guys don’t die young, and I figure I’m good for another half-century), but he is what a Supreme Court justice is supposed to be, and what Harriet Miers was not.

Another moment-of-weakness nominee, Ben Bernanke, is a stunningly good choice to replace Yoda as chairman of the Federal Reserve. Here’s what New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (who was hired by Bernanke as an economics professor at Princeton) has to say about the nomination:

By Bush administration standards, the choice of Ben Bernanke to succeed Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve was just weird.

For one thing, Mr. Bernanke is actually an expert in monetary policy, as opposed to, say, Arabian horses. …

Last but not least, Mr. Bernanke has no personal ties to the Bush family. It’s hard to imagine him doing something indictable to support his masters. It’s even hard to imagine him doing what Mr. Greenspan did: throwing his prestige as Fed chairman behind irresponsible tax cuts.

All of this raises a frightening prospect. Has President Bush been so damaged by scandals and public disapproval that he has no choice but to appoint qualified, principled people to important positions?

But, Krugman notes, the mere appointment of a qualified person to such an important job doesn’t mean that America is out of the woods:

The fact is that the U.S. economy’s growth over the past few years has depended on two unsustainable trends: a huge surge in house prices and a vast inflow of funds from Asia. Sooner or later, both trends will end, possibly abruptly.

It’s true that Mr. Bernanke has given speeches suggesting both that a “global savings glut” will continue to provide the United States with lots of capital inflows, and that housing prices don’t reflect a bubble. Well, soothing words are expected from a Fed chairman. He must know that he may be wrong.

Alas, the same can’t be said for President Coo-Coo Bananas. He’s still giving speeches saying the same old thing about Iraq — stay the course, stay the course, stay the course. Never mind that the war planners’ rationale for their invasion and occupation of Iraq was either despicable, insane, or some combustible mix of the two. (Everyone seems to agree that the execution of the occupation has been incompetent, but these days that’s a 50th-percentile assumption about anything Bush does. The more interesting questions always concern what led to the disastrous policies, not the policies themselves.)

Here’s how Juan Cole, an academic who actually has studied the Middle East (rather than simply fantasizing about it), describes the insane faction pushing for war in Iraq:

In [1996 David Wurmser] co-authored, with Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and others, a now-famous policy paper for incoming Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” that advocated a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein and install a Hashemite monarchy in Iraq as a way of moderating the Shiites of the region and securing “the realm” of Israel. Since post-Khomeini Shiites despise monarchy as un-Islamic, and since the Hashemites, who used to rule Iraq before 1958 and still rule Jordan, are Sunni Muslims, this plan was worse than science fiction. Science fiction is coherent and often involves some actual knowledge.

The neoconservatives were actually more concerned with Syria initially than Iraq, since it more directly threatened Israeli security. Indeed, “A Clean Break” advocated the removal of Saddam Hussein mainly as a way of pressuring Damascus. The policy paper said, with astonishing ignorance, “Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions. King Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon problem under control. The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf [sic] Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria. Shia retain strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet’s family, the direct descendants of which — and in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows — is King Hussein.”

This paragraph must be the most absurd, ill-informed and frankly lunatic pieces of prose ever produced by any policy advisor anywhere. It is full of false premises and ignorant assumptions. Saddam Hussein’s branch of the Baath Party was a rival of the Syrian Baath Party, not a supporter. Syria had joined Bush I’s coalition against Iraq, allying with the Americans in 1990-91. Removing the Iraqi Baath would more likely strengthen Syria than weaken it. As for the Shiites in Iraq and southern Lebanon, they had been deeply influenced by the ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini, who preached that monarchy is incompatible with Islam. The idea that the old Hashemite monarchy could be revived and reinstalled in revolutionary Iraq was itself absurd. That a Sunni king in Baghdad might have any appeal to the Shiites of southern Lebanon, who favored Hezbollah and Khomeinism, would only occur to someone completely ignorant of the actual politics of Tyre and Nabatiya. The tragedy is that this sort of hallucination appears actually to have underpinned real policy moves by the neoconservatives as they became powerful in Washington under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

The common denominator among the despicable and insane agendas for going to war is that they were all hidden from public view. What the public heard about was mushroom clouds, with no hint that the only mushrooms involved were the ones ingested by think-tank warriors back in the ’90s.

By the time I finish typing this, at least one of the peyote eaters may be officially under indictment. The devil himself may dodge the bullet this time around, but if the investigation continues, he’ll have to work harder to save his own ass than the president’s.

Perhaps, if we’re lucky, Bush’s political weakness will lead to another decent Supreme Court nominee. But the smart money seems to be on a fire-breathing radical whose views on abortion are beyond dispute.

Which is … well, it’s par for the course. But consider this: Two-thirds Americans believe the country is heading in the wrong direction under a president who’s already exhausted most of his political capital trying to enact the fire-breathers’ agenda. In fact …

In not a single state do 50 percent of adults think the country is headed in the right direction.

In only five states (Utah, Alaska, Idaho, Wyoming and Nebraska) do 40 percent of adults think the country is headed in the right direction.

In twenty-five states, fewer than 30 percent of adults think the country is headed in the right direction.

So how does the president “appeal to his base” with a radical Supreme Court nominee when, clearly, he has no base?

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