Shut Bush Up

It is too late to impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney, but we don’t have to listen to them anymore, do we? Last week there was a tremendous uproar about whether a head of state should be negotiating with “sponsors of terror” such as Iran and Syria. President Bush suggested that such talks would be tantamount to appeasing the Nazis.

Lost in the discussion and ignored by the media are other levels of contact. When the five former Secretaries of State were at the University of Georgia in Athens recently, as guests of The Southern Center for International Studies, Henry Kissinger spoke directly about how a process with Iran might work vis-a-vis his opening up China and the Soviet Union. He talked about discussions at lower levels, even through non-governmental emissaries. From those talks a framework emerges and those preconditions, missing in Senator Obama’s description of the process, can lead to heads of state signing agreements that have already been worked out. By the way, that is the naïveté of Obama’s description. It is not that the government would talk to them, but that the President would be the one doing it. By 2016, he will have learned that.

But here is the best part. While President Bush was tossing political hand grenades about talking to “sponsors of terror,” speaking to the Knesset, Israel was about to announce talks with Syria that will be held in Turkey, a NATO member.

Furthermore, on the rest of his trip, President Bush managed to alienate pretty much all of the Muslim world by talking about their governments’ need to reform, while having just lavished nothing but praise on Israel’s. The wake of his visit swept across the region as he was still flying home.

His policies in the region have been disastrous. He has indeed strengthened Iran by leaving an unstable Shia ally next door. By decimating the U.S. military, the strongest, most well trained and mightiest in history, he has left us impotent. President Bush, VP Cheney and their minions have left us in that condition, particularly in that region where factions rather than nations are our most dangerous enemies. They now know that our military is not made to fight such a war. In fact, they have shown that a terror campaign, with IEDs, suicide attacks and the like is the best strategy against us. No military force can defeat us on the battlefield, because we own the air and have devastating weapons. In Iraq, we are showing that those weapons are all but useless against an insurgency or terrorist group. We have carrier-based squadrons that do not drop one bomb in a full deployment in the Persian Gulf. This war is not for them.

The fact that days after Bush decries discussion with Syria the Israelis announce talks with Syria is an international embarrassment. Was Bush not aware of that? Was his domestic political motivation so strong that he just didn’t care? Either way what it tells me is that it is time for Mr. Bush to just head back to the ranch and cut brush until he has to attend the inauguration in January. Enough damage. Oil the chainsaw and shut up already!