[NYTr] Bye, Bye Tora Bora; Hello Subprime Mortgages

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

IRC Right-Web - Dec 20, 2007
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/rw/4843

Commentary

Bye, Bye Tora Bora; Hello Subprime Mortgages

by Leon Hadar

The conventional wisdom de jour in Washington, DC, can be summed up in
a catchphrase popularized by Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign:
"It's the economy, stupid!" The former Arkansas governor was
challenging then-President George H.W. Bush, who had led the United
States into a military victory against Saddam Hussein during the first
Gulf War, criticizing Bush Senior for focusing too much attention on
foreign policy as opposed to dealing with the economic recession of the
early 1990s. Clinton and his aides were suggesting that American voters
were sick and tired of Iraq, the Middle East, and other global policy
issues and wanted the election campaign to concentrate on the economy.

According to pollsters and pundits, it's déjà vu all over again at the
end of George W. Bush's presidency, with the aftermath of another Gulf
War, the U.S. economy entering a recession, and Democrats seeming to
have a chance of regaining the White House. The promoters of this
conventional wisdom insist that Iraq, the Middle East, and foreign
policy issues have been pushed aside as issues in the 2007 presidential
race. Bye, bye Tora Bora, Mesopotamia, Persia. Hello, subprime
mortgages, troubled hedge funds, and a collapsing dollar. Out: Robert
Gates and Condoleezza Rice. In: Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson.
Potential war presidents Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Rudy Giuliani
are history. Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Mike Huckabee, the rookies,
are the future.

Peter Beinart, an editor of The New Republic and senior fellow with the
Council on Foreign Relations, and one of the Washington-Boston
corridor's leading "liberal imperialists"—I can't wait for the
"religious atheists"—started the "conversation" in a column in the
Washington Post. He noted that Iraq wasn't a major focus during recent
Democratic and Republican presidential debates. Hence, according to
Beinart, who like many other liberal imperialists could be described as
an early cheerleader of the Iraq War who later apologized but is now
pro-surge and in favor of attacking Iran: "In the biggest surprise of
the campaign so far, the election that almost everyone thought would be
about Iraq is turning out not to be."

American voters, as in the aftermath of the Cold War and Gulf War I,
are beginning to switch off the global-affairs channel and against the
backdrop of rising economic problems are focusing on domestic
bread-and-butter issues. So it's not surprising that "It's the economy,
stupid!" is being invoked again. But this time it might not work for
the Clinton running for office. Indeed, candidates like Clinton and
Giuliani, who were running for president by accentuating their policy
experience and their ability to deal with global threats like
international terrorism, seem to be losing ground in Iowa, New
Hampshire, and other states to the inexperienced Obama and Huckabee.

Beinart agues that this change is happening because the surge is
supposedly working and "not as many people are dying" in Iraq.
Neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer concurs with his buddy on
the left and argues that the many, many other great foreign policy
successes of the Bush administration—such as the nuclear accord with
North Korea, the Annapolis "peace conference," and the peaceful
political changes in Pakistan—are making us all feel that in the spirit
of the holidays, it's peace on earth and goodwill to all. In fact,
Krauthammer, pontificating on Inside Washington, suggested that the new
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran—which concluded Tehran had
terminated its nuclear weapons programs in 2003, among other things—was
actually a victory for Bush's strategy and that in any case, the NIE
makes it less likely that the United States and Iran would go to war
before 2008.

New York Times columnist David Brooks, another former Iraq War booster
and current surge enthusiast, employing the historical analogy of the
electoral defeat of WWII British Prime Minister Winston Churchill by
Clement Attlee in 1945, described the current campaign for the White
House as a "postwar election," contending that the American people are
"exhausted" with the war and changing from "a war mentality to a peace
mentality."

Well, this End-of-Iraq perspective doesn't sound either as earth
shaking as the End-of-History thesis or as profound as the
Clash-of-Civilization theorem. But to paraphrase Norma Desmond in Billy
Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, in a city where Beinart—not unlike
Krauthammer and Brooks—is considered to be a Big Man of Ideas, it's
just the paradigms that may be getting smaller.

Now, I'll be first to applaud any news that U.S. troops are withdrawing
from Iraq, that Washington is promoting a diplomatic bargain as part of
an opening to Tehran, that we've finally captured Osama bin Laden and
his gang and have no need to maintain Pakistani Gen. Pervez Musharraf
as an ally, that we've adopted a benign neglect approach to the
never-ending ethnic and religious struggles in Palestine, and finally,
that the political elites in Washington are engaging in a debate on how
to start reducing U.S. military intervention in the world. Under such
conditions, the American public's renewed preoccupation with the
economy would make sense, and the notion that the next president should
know more about financial "securitization" and SPVs (special purpose
vehicles) than about asymmetric warfare and WMD (weapons of mass
destruction) would prove to be more than just a figment of pundits'
imagination.

Indeed, thanks to the ultimate spin perpetrated by Beinart and company,
the American public seems to be taking seriously the media events
seemingly staged by the Bush administration—Middle East "peace" talks
at Annapolis; Musharraf "taking off" his military uniform—by breathing
a huge sigh of relief and launching a search for another folksy
Arkansas governor to put in the White House.

But this fantasy may be another example of the disdain felt by the
elites in Washington toward the American public. It assumes that the
American people actually buy into the tall tales being told by Bush and
Rice. Such whoppers include: that the short-term and limited tactical
achievement of the surge would bring about long-term political
reconciliation between Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds in Iraq, so that U.S.
forces can return home; that one day of scripted televised events in
Annapolis would lead to Israeli-Palestinian peace, which would permit
U.S. presidents to invest less energy in Mideast diplomacy; that
Pakistan is cooperating with Washington in the struggle against
al-Qaida, which suggests that the Islamist radicals are in retreat
there and in Afghanistan; and that the Bush administration actually
knows what it is doing vis-à-vis Iran. In fact, there is no sign of any
move toward political accommodation in Iraq; there is simply less
violence in some parts of Iraq where ethnic cleansing has already been
accomplished. Palestinians and Israelis are not going to make peace
anytime soon; if anything, the Palestinian political groups of Fatah
and Hamas would need to resolve their own differences before they could
deal with Israel. And the situation in Pakistan as well as in
Afghanistan remains as explosive as ever.

The majority of Americans may not be geostrategic thinkers, but they
probably understand that thanks to Bush, the broader Middle East has
become more unstable and threatening to U.S. interests. Most of the
polls that I've seen indicate that while Americans applaud the efforts
of the U.S. military to reduce violence in Iraq, they remain skeptical
about the chances for national reconciliation there. More important,
they continue to regard the Iraq War as a major strategic mistake and
want to see U.S. forces out of Iraq as soon as possible. And there
hasn't been any major change in Bush's low approval ratings on foreign
policy and the economy. What did happen was that the current economic
woes in the form of home foreclosures, credit card delinquencies, and
rising gas prices, can be felt by most Americans in a more direct,
immediate, and personal way than the continuing fighting in Iraq and
Afghanistan—a reality that would have changed if the military draft
would have been reinstated.

In short, Americans have concluded that Bush will be leaving them not
only with the messes in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and
elsewhere that are being translated into enormous human and financial
costs, but that another part of his legacy will be the troubled U.S.
economy—expanding budget, trade, and current-account deficits, a
housing market crisis, and a failing financial system—not to mention
the declining value of the dollar and the rising costs of energy. In a
way, foreign policy and the economy are not separate policy issues.
After all, the growing deficits have been driven by the mushrooming
spending on U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, which has
had a major impact on global energy prices. These deficits that pay for
the American Empire are being financed by China, which is emerging as
the top geo-economic and geopolitical U.S. competitor. At the same
time, the weakening dollar diminishes the U.S. geopolitical leverage
vis-à-vis allies and rivals. You don't have to be an economic expert to
figure out how the financial problems facing America are intertwined
with its foreign policy failures.

It seems that Americans are finally beginning to recognize that
maintaining a gigantic welfare-warfare state is a costly proposition.
And indeed, the presidential candidate who frames the debate in such a
way will be in a better position to win the race to the White House.


[Leon Hadar, a Washington-based journalist and contributor to the IRC's
Right Web (rightweb.irc-online.org), is author most recently of
"Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East" (2006). He blogs at
http://globalparadigms.blogspot.com ]