<<Home Niagara Falls Reporter Archive>> MCCAIN THINKS BUSH PRETTY MUCH ON TRACK WITH BAD ECONOMY, FAILED WAR

By Bill Gallagher

DETROIT -- George W. Bush's failed presidency has produced unprecedented dissatisfaction for the battered American people. More storms will rage this spring in a troubled economy hurtling into a serious recession.

The nation lost 80,000 jobs in March -- 250,000 in the first quarter. Unemployment is at 5.1 percent and indications are joblessness will grow. Real incomes are down and the junk loan crisis is affecting credit at nearly every level. The housing sector is a disaster and foreclosures are occurring at rates not seen since the Depression.

Gasoline prices are at an all-time high, driving transportation and food prices into staggering upward spirals. Painful inflation plagues the economy. The American dollar has become an international joke.

The economy primarily drives the misery, but Bush's endless war in Iraq and the lives and money squandered there certainly is an omnipresent subtext for the national mood of misery and sense of misdirection.

A New York Times/CBS News poll shows 81 percent of Americans believe "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track." The "wrong track" number has shot up from 69 percent a year ago and just 35 percent in 2002.

More Americans are dissatisfied with the nation's direction than at any time since the poll began measuring that sentiment in the early 1990s. I have long argued that when people wake up and figure out what's happening in the Bush years they will be livid. I think we are there.

Seventy-eight percent of the respondents in the poll said the country is worse off than five years ago. But perhaps a more telling number is the 4 percent who said it is better off. Who are these happy 4 percent, content with the Bush world so many others find miserable?

The 4 percent closely corresponds with the people at the income levels most benefiting from Bush's tax policies -- borrowing money to cut taxes at the highest brackets and passing that debt obligation off to wage-earning Americans for generations to come. Bush's spend-and-borrow sprees created a fiscal mess and did nothing to improve the broad economy.

But some narrow segments of the economy -- oil companies and military contractors, for instance -- are doing just dandy. Fat cats from those companies -- the martini-sippers at the Petroleum Club in Houston, Bush family members and intimates and the big campaign donors among them -- have never had it better.

The continuing bloodshed in Iraq is a dream come true for war profiteers, and the violence and instability there pushes oil prices even higher. For these few, Bush's "guvment" has been great for "bidness," as they say in Texas. Among them, we can find the charter members of Bush's "Happy 4 Percent Club."

This week, Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. military commander in Iraq, will report to congressional committees, sure to say the escalation is working and, although there have been a few bumps along the way, we must slog on.

Petraeus will have to do some clever dancing to explain why more than 1,000 Iraqi soldiers and police officers went AWOL or simply refused to fight when the government in Baghdad ordered them to attack Shiite militia in Basra.

That episode underscores the lack of readiness in the Iraqi forces and the failure of the U.S. troop surge to meaningfully foster any political reconciliation in the nation still torn in sectarian fighting.

The violence in recent weeks is the worst in 18 months, and the near-daily rocket attacks on the Green Zone has made the previously cozy and protected residents of the "Emerald City" face the grim reality of the bloody war.

Iranian backed cleric Moqtada al-Sadr is planning a demonstration with his Mahdi militia that will likely bring over 1 million people converging on the streets of Najaf, demanding a U.S. withdrawal.

The anti-U.S. demonstration is set for Wednesday, coinciding with the fifth anniversary of American soldiers marching into Baghdad. The image of the staged lopping of Saddam Hussein's statue lives in many minds. Yet it should be remembered as the first day of lawlessness and looting, and for the absence of planning for post-Saddam Iraq and an exit strategy.

The protesters heading for Najaf, a Shiite holy city, are being asked in a statement from Moqtada al-Sadr to wave Iraqi flags "to cement the unity of Iraq and demand its independence." The demonstrators are urged to "raise your voices high in the skies of Iraq against the oppressing occupier."

But Petraeus is sure to say -- to the delight of Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their neoconservative amen chorus -- that staying the course and keeping U.S. soldiers there indefinitely is the best way to assure "victory," whatever the hell that means.

Petraeus will also beat war drums with Iran, according to a report in Britain's Telegraph, using his congressional testimony as a platform that "could set the stage for a U.S. attack on Iranian military facilities."

A British diplomatic source told the Telegraph, "Petraeus is going to go very hard on Iran as the source of attacks on the American efforts in Iraq." The diplomat sees broadening violence and an effort to get Americans to rally around the flag: "Petraeus has put emphasis on America having to fight the battle on behalf of Iraq. In his report he can frame it in terms of our soldiers killed and diplomats dead in attacks on the Green Zone."

Don't expect Petraeus to say much about the role of Iran in brokering a ceasefire between the Shiite militias and Iraqi security forces. Iran always has to be portrayed as a diabolical, evil force in the region. Iran must be dealt with to achieve any pacification in Iraq. Among the many recommendations of The Iraq Study Group Report the Busheviks have completely ignored was the call for diplomatic efforts "to persuade Iran that it should take specific steps to improve the situation in Iraq."

The study group saw the opportunity where "Iran can use its influence, especially over Shia groups in Iraq, to encourage national reconciliation," and "Iran can also, in the right circumstances, help the economic reconstruction of Iraq."

While Petraeus has said Iraq cannot be pacified through military means alone, he still ducks the obvious questions: When do we say no more can be done militarily with U.S. troops? When do we say that, without Iraqis taking charge of their own affairs, continuing occupation only sustains political uncertainty and costs lives? Is the escalation just a bandage, and violence and bloodshed can erupt again at any time?

The bill for Bush's war in Iraq is now up to $12 billion a month, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz. That money is not budgeted for. How many peoples' unemployment benefits could we extend with $12 billion a month? How many foreclosures could be prevented? How much crumbling U.S. infrastructure could be rebuilt?

The cost of the war in the moral degradation of our nation is incalculable. The release last week of an 81-page torture memo from a former deputy assistant attorney general shows an administration craving for an endorsement of lawlessness.

John Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California in Berkeley, should be charged as the war criminal he is. Yoo essentially wrote that the president can do anything he wants in time of war, and statutes and international treaties banning torture be damned.

Yoo's analysis declared that if the president authorizes it, it's not illegal. With legal opinions alien in democracies and more suitable for kings and tyrants, Yoo's memo should make every defender of the rule of law shudder.

Nothing can restrain the commander in chief in Yoo's distorted views, crafted to please the White House. Yoo also found a way to exonerate those engaged in torture who might be charged with violating U.S. or international laws. Don't worry about criminal prohibitions on torture and the use of interrogation methods that might violate those prohibitions, Yoo assured, "necessity or self-defense could provide justifications for any criminal liability."

Yoo's memo was rescinded nine months later, but he had already sent it on to the Pentagon's top lawyer, William J. Haynes, and prisoner abuses at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad were in high gear. Torture became U.S. policy.

The unprecedented government assaults on fundamental freedoms, the wretched war and rotten economy -- the hallmarks of George W. Bush's presidency -- leave most Americans cringing in anxiety, convinced the nation is on the wrong track.

The election conversation the Republicans want is to focus on the condensed ranting of Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor and Sen. Hillary Clinton's "under sniper fire" fantasies. Instead it should be about Sen. John McCain's commitment to keeping the nation on the Bush track.