Bush's Iraqi debt plan: Foot. Shoot. Ouch!
There remains, in some quarters at least, a notion that the Bush administration -- whatever you think of it ideologically -- has its act together: That the Republicans running our country are seasoned, experienced, competent public servants who understand how to manipulate the levers of power, domestically and internationally, to achieve their goals. You can expect this notion to play a big part in the Bush campaign's war-of-images with its Democratic opponents, particularly if Howard Dean wins the nomination.
But events keeps playing havoc with the idea of the Bush administration's competence. This week's devastating case is the Iraqi contracts-and-debt fiasco. If you haven't followed closely, this is the sequence of events:
(1) President Bush announces that he's calling in his favorite fixer, James Baker, to handle a new diplomatic effort to obtain some relief for Iraqi debt from the many nations Saddam Hussein had run up debts with. Among Iraq's big creditors: Germany, France and Russia.
(2) The Pentagon publishes a rule that, on grounds of "national security," forbids nations that failed to join the military coalition against Saddam from bidding on contracts to help rebuild Iraq. Among those the rule blocks: Germany, France and Russia.
(3) Bush's and Baker's new Iraq debt-relief initiative has its knees kicked in before it even starts, as Russian and other leaders scorn the U.S.'s overtures.
Much of this sorry affair is chronicled in today's New York Times. As one official puts it in the Times: "What we did was toss away our leverage." In the short term, it means that Bush will have a much harder time trying to ease Iraq's debt burden; in the long term, it means that the total cost of the Iraq adventure to the deficit-strapped American people will end up far higher.
Is this foul-up evidence of a continuing internecine power struggle between the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz axis of hawks at Defense and the Powellite internationalists at State, for whom Baker is a sort of emeritus leader? Is revenge against perfidious "old Europe" -- and lucrative contracts for former employers and pals of Bush and Cheney -- more important than building a financial coalition to share the prodigious cost of Iraqi reconstruction? Or is the train wreck more simply a sign of an administration that can't coordinate important policies at the most basic levels?
Whatever the answer, shouldn't we expect our executive branch to not trip itself up in such bizarrely self-defeating ways? After all, it's not just Iraq's debt that Bush is messing around with. Since the U.S. has no choice but to remain strategically committed to making post-Saddam Iraq work, the U.S.'s fiscal future is equally at stake.
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