Bush may be history, but sadly his work will outlast him:

Iain Macwhirter on the bewilderment felt by many Americans on what to do about Iraq

By Iain Macwhirter

03/05/06 "Sunday Herald" -- How many Americans does it take to build a memorial to 9/11? Apparently 2367 and counting. That’s the number of US servicemen who have died in Iraq in the four and a half years that Ground Zero in lower Manhattan has not been developed. There is still just a large hole, surrounded by street-traders selling lurid images of the attacks.
The victims groups have argued with the developers who’ve fallen out with the architects and the city council who have had issues with the firemen. It’s a mess. You don’t want to go there, Except, of course, that everyone does. It is the world’s number one destination for “dark tourism”.

The Ground Zero no show is also a convenient metaphor for the state of mind of America as the Iraq war turns into a nightmare from which it cannot awake. Americans, especially in New York, don’t like failing at things – whether it is erecting a suitable memorial to the thousands who died in the World Trade Centre, or losing nearly as many in a war which was supposed to achieve “closure” over the atrocity.

People here are, as they say, “pissed”, grumpy, confused, argumentative, ill at ease with themselves. They can’t quite remember how they got into this bloody conflict in this intractable and inscrutable Middle East country. But they now just wish it would go away – with its obscene car bombs, religious fanaticism and incomprehensible politics. But there is no way this is going to end in glory.

Most Americans think the war was a mistake and want their boys back before any more of them get killed or lose limbs or minds. Injured soldiers, many of whom have suffered severe brain damage, are a regular feature in the US press. But Americans have been through this movie before – in the 1960s – and they don’t want a repeat of Vietnam. Unfortunately, no-one seems to have any sensible ideas for getting the hell out of Iraq.

The notion that America is in there to create a democratic society is regarded as a sick joke. Liberals blame US neo-imperialism; conservatives increasingly regard it as confirmation that people in the Middle East are incapable of democratic politics. But neither side seems particularly keen on attacking the other over it.

Most now seem to be agreed that it was a dumb war – conceived in ignorance, prosecuted in deceit, and now a monument to American military hubris. There are still a few New Yorkers who support the war – though they are pretty hard to find. I came across just two in the course of a cold week in the city that never sleeps – neither of them sounded very comfortable.

“Would someone just tell me what else we could do after 9/11? Huh?” said a Republican media type with a conspicuous Ash Wednesday daubing on his forehead. I was tempted to say: “Just about anything apart from bombing the shit out of a country which had nothing to do with 9/11.” But I didn’t.

An investment analyst thought that Saddam was going to get WMD eventually. “It was right to take him out. Anyway, he was about to take over all the oil in the Middle East, so we had no choice.” But she wasn’t comfortable with it; you could tell by the way she couldn’t make eye contact.

No-one had a good word to say about Bush. Americans are still in denial about the true cost of the war. In some ways, ridiculing Bush has become a factor in that denial. Rubbishing the President is easier than facing up to the grim reality of mass bereavement. But in the not too distant future – perhaps when the number of casualties in Iraq equals that of 9/11 – then there is going to be some kind of moral reckoning. Careful management by the military has kept the coffins off the TV screens, but it can only be a matter of time before the media starts to ask why all these young Americans had to die.

Bush has never been regarded as the sharpest tool in the box, but it was always assumed that the folksy President had surrounded himself with capable advisers. In many areas he had. But as the Katrina tapes showed last week, good advice is pretty useless if the recipient is incapable of understanding it or responding appropriately.

The tapes, released last week by the Associated Press, reveal that Bush was warned that the Katrina hurricane was likely to be “the big one”. But he politely dismissed the warnings, content that his hotline to the Almighty would provide more compelling guidance.

Bush has also failed to respond to the widespread warnings that his visit to India, to seal a deal over the sale of civil nuclear technology, would be regarded as Christian hypocrisy. How can Bush deny Iran the right to develop a civil nuclear programme, when he is actively helping India acquire it? Muslim leaders are bound to regard this as another case of American hostility to Islam.

So, George Bush has few friends around right now, either in the media, Congress or Manhattan streets. But while no-one seems to have anything good to say about the President, no-one seems to have any clear idea what to do about the situation either. Get out of Iraq, certainly. But what about the nature of the political system that brought about this quasi-imperial misadventure? America doesn’t do colonialism. So, how did it end up occupying an ungovernable Muslim country, with inadequate forces and little political support?

Well, a number of US commentators have been reminding their readers of the thoughts of the former Republican president, Dwight D Eisenhower, who warned in 1961 of the growing power of the “military-industrial complex” (MIC). Eisenhower – a true war leader who had led American forces to victory in the second world war – knew the military and feared that the immense power and wealth of the arms manufacturers could overwhelm US democracy and pose a threat to the stability of the world.

During the cold war, when spending on defence remained high, the complex was content. But in the decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with rash talk of a “peace dividend”, the MIC clearly had an interest in hyping up the potential threats to American military hegemony; 9/11 provided the justification for rebuilding the US military. But because Bin Laden’s irregulars did not constitute a proper army, the masters of war began to look for more identifiable enemies – and alighted on Saddam Hussein.

The rest, as they say, is history. And so, they all say, is George W Bush. But the unfortunate reality for the rest of the world is that the President’s work is likely to out last him. Like the hole in the ground in Manhattan, there is a big hole in the new world order where the Middle East should be. And no-one has any idea yet what is going to fill it.

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