International Socialist Review Issue 45,
January–February 2006

Crisis in the Bush administration
Down, but not yet out

By PAUL D’AMATO

AFTER HIS reelection more than a year ago, George W. Bush spoke with undisguised triumph. “When you win,” he said, “there’s a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view.” Using an appropriate business metaphor, Bush vowed to spend the “political capital” he had earned by his reelection to push through his conservative agenda. Pundits fell all over themselves, using great red and blue maps, to explain how “conservative values” had triumphed in the election. Stunned liberals concluded that America had gone “red state.”

The administration has since taken a beating that has proven Bush and the pundits wrong. In a combination of events reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s ill-fated second term, Bush faces a deepening crisis on a number of fronts. This includes a failing war in Iraq, Washington’s abandonment of the people of the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Katrina, a spy-leak scandal that has already led to the indictment of Vice President Cheney’s aide, Louis “Scooter” Libby, the indictment of former Republican House Majority Leader Tom DeLay for money laundering, and a number of other corruption scandals that threaten to bring down several prominent members of Congress over the coming months. The crisis has created rifts within Bush’s own party.

Bush’s overall approval rating is at or below 40 percent from a post-election high of 54 percent last February. Among African Americans, according to an October Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll President Bush’s job approval rating is down to 2 percent—a figure below the margin of error of the poll. Opinion polls show that 54 percent or more of Americans want U.S. forces withdrawn promptly from Iraq, and three out of five believe it was a mistake to have sent troops in the first place. A November Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll asked people which party they wanted to control Congress in 2006, and the Democrats won out by a 48-to-37 percent margin, the largest gap since pollsters began asking the question in 1994.

The occupation of Iraq, the centerpiece of Bush’s “war on terror,” continues to stagger from crisis to crisis, and there is little reason to believe that the December parliamentary elections will change the picture. The occupation not only fuels the resistance it seeks to crush, but the U.S. appears to have hit upon a strategy that involves arming Shiite and Kurdish militias to suppress it, a surefire way to stoke the civil war they claim only their presence can prevent.

New revelations of torture in Iraq continue to surface, as well as new disclosures that the U.S. sends suspects to secret prisons in foreign countries to be tortured, a procedure it calls “rendition” (see Nicole Colson’s article in this issue). The State Department recently admitted that it had used phosphorous—a chemical weapon that burns through the skin when ignited—on Iraqi positions when they destroyed Fallujah in the fall of 2004. Whole sections of the military, and leading political figures from both parties worry that the war is creating a “broken” fighting force that threatens America’s ability to pursue its other imperial aims, and there is a growing consensus—though not everyone will admit it publicly—that the Iraq War is not “winnable.” As each “turning point” in the war proves false, the war in Iraq continues to go poorly for the U.S., and it is the war, more than anything else, that is driving all the other elements of the crisis.

The leak scandal threatens to do the most damage because it is tied closely to the war and threatens to topple not only Cheney’s closest aide, but also Bush’s chief political adviser Karl Rove. The scandal revolves around an apparently narrow question—finding out who in the Bush administration leaked to the press the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame. But the leak was almost certainly part of the administration’s efforts to sell a war on Iraq that most now agree was based on cooked intelligence. Plame’s identity was leaked days after her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, publicly criticized the Bush administration for using forged documents to “prove” that Saddam sought uranium for bomb making from Niger. Though the CIA knew the Niger story to be a fraud, Bush stated in his 2003 State of the Union Address, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald has so far only indicted Scooter Libby—for obstruction of justice, two counts of perjury, and two counts of making false statements, but not for leaking Plame’s identity. He clearly isn’t finished. It is already known that Rove failed to tell investigators in 2003 that he had spoken about Plame to Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper and conservative columnist Robert Novak, the first journalist to “out” Plame. More recently, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward of Watergate fame, has come forward to say that a still undisclosed administration official told him in June 2003 that Plame worked for the CIA.

Socialist Worker editor Alan Maass explained the broader significance of the case:

The scandal raises much deeper questions—above all, why and how the U.S. went to war in Iraq based on lies. The leaks to the press about Valerie Plame are at the end of a long chain of fraud and manipulation, managed by a government within the government—concretely, the White House Iraq Group, established in August 2002 with Rove as its chair, to come up with the strategy to sell the war.