The African Farewell Tour

What do you do when you’re the President of the most powerful nation on earth and your poll numbers hit 19%? Road trip! You run off to Africa; a continent long neglected and suffering with poverty and AIDs and act like the great white Santa Claus delivering good cheer and fat checks. In an effort to create a legacy and build some good will, it seems the Bushies decided that the best way to build large enthusiastic crowds would be to go to the place with the greatest need. Mr. Bush would have made a greater impact if he had went to some inner-city neighborhoods handing out all of that aid money. It is not that Africa is not worthy or in desperate need of the aid, but it seems odd that the same President that resisted taking action in the Darfur region of Sudan is now interested in Africa?

In a shameful display of irresponsibility, the leaders of key organizations—the U.N., NATO, the EU, and the AU—as well as of major countries like the U.S., France, and Britain have all remarked upon the horrors that have befallen Darfur, but then done nothing to stop the killing. The time for action is now.

If President Bush is serious about ending the genocide, he will have to do more than acquiesce in a role for the ICC. He will have to call these key leaders to Washington, lock them in a room, and not let them out until they have decided on a course of action. Only then will the ICC referral have real meaning.[1]

So the same President who watched the AIDs epidemic sweep across Africa, ruthless dictators murder their own citizens, and genocide now wants to tour Africa like some liberating hero. This liberator who has laid the ground work for a new strategic initiative that could put permanent US bases in Africa to counter Chinese influence and protect our “interests”. Hum, must be some valuable raw materials in need of protection from their native populations. I guess since his legislative agenda is laying around smoldering somewhere maybe it is time to do some of the things he was too busy to do earlier in his Presidency, like try being a statesman and not a war mongering chicken-hawk. Mr. Bush has given a new meaning to the word lame-duck. Whatever happen to all that political capital from 1984?

I can hardly wait to see how the McCain campaign is planning to use a President with a 19% approval rating. Maybe they can have him campaign in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia where I think he still enjoys a high approval rating. I am sure there are small areas in the US where the President enjoys some approval. My guess is that they will need him to shore up McCain’s cred with the social conservatives, he has already gotten a big boost from the recent furor over the NY Times story. However he will need George W. for the general election, despite his low ratings Bush still enjoys surprising support among the social wing of the Party. Will he be able to transfer that support to McCain still remains to be seen.

Unfortunately for W. it is going to take a lot more than a tour of Africa handing out aid checks to rehabilitate his legacy in the world. There have been times in his Presidency when he has been viewed by the world as second only to bin Laden himself as the most dangerous man on earth. Not the list you want the so-called leader of the free world to be on, but when you promote war and wanton destruction what can you expect. Will this trip help the world to forget Iraq? I doubt it, if anything the talk of the Africom project will only go to heighten suspicions.

George Bush is trying to end his Presidency the way it began with his infamous “compassionate conservatism”. There is only one small problem the seven and a half years in between have provided us with a war with no end in sight, a weaker Constitution, and a major recession. No amount of deodorant can get rid of the stench that will be the Bush legacy. The problem with these efforts on the part of the President is that they are seven years too late, maybe if he had been more interested in fighting poverty and disease in the world more than spreading violence he wouldn’t have needed to try to buy a piece of history.

COTONOU, Benin -- President Bush began a five-country journey through Africa on Saturday saying that U.S. aid to the continent comes with "great compassion."

On his trip, Bush is trying to show that the United States has a moral imperative as well as economic, political and national security interests in fighting poverty, disease and corruption across the continent.[2]

[1] http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2005/0405africa_daalder.aspx
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021501271.html

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A Country of Laws

Despite the passage of three new laws by the Iraqi Parliament, Iraq still remains a very divided place and now that our brilliant strategy of arming both parties in the civil conflict is about to explode in our faces, it is about to become a very dangerous place again. As our national history and the recorded history of many other countries can attest, nations are more than just laws. Nations are people, people with feelings and memories. These feelings and memories are not always subject to the ways of legal justice and have a way of causing people to implement laws in some unexpected ways. The Iraqi people are many years from national reconciliation and we are not even sure that they want it, the more we ride herd over the process and inject our own sensibilities into the process the more we prolong the day of reckoning.

Several legislators emphasized after the voting on Wednesday that achieving true sectarian reconciliation was far more complex than simply passing a law.

“Reconciliation will hang on more than a law, it needs political will,” said Mithal al-Alusi, a Sunni legislator. “I believe there is no political will to achieve reconciliation. The law of amnesty is good, but not enough.”[1]

The Iraqi government has no incentive to reconcile so long as we continue to play powerbroker not only in Iraq but in the region as a whole. As long as we continue to provide political coverage and cannon fodder the deeply held sectarian rifts will continue to acerbate under the surface. You cannot force people to like one another or to respect one another, that has to come from a common desire and goal for a people. I do not see that commonness of purpose for the Iraqis at this time.

While the laws put in place can lay the groundwork for change or reconciliation, they still require the trust of the people that they will be enforced in an equitable manner. There has to be an underlying trust within the people to submit to the laws on the books. Can we say that the Iraqis have this underlying trust in each other? I doubt it, we can’t even say with confidence that we have it in each other. Laws are merely the framework, the skeleton that holds the society together. If the people do not have a faith in those executing the laws, there can be no peace or any justice.

An example of this would be the Amnesty Law recently passed as part of the three new laws from the Iraqi Parliament, there are tens of thousands, mostly Sunnis that are being held without charges. The Amnesty Law was suppose to help ease the over-crowding and the appearance of revenge by the Shias, the problem of course is in the details. While the central government may have one definition of who the law would affect, you still have local and provincial officials who may have a different interpretation. Because of the central governments lack of any real power of enforcement the locals will still have the last word. How many of those tens of thousands of prisoners are there due to some local vendetta? The sheer numbers make it next to impossible to fully investigate each individual case, thus leaving many to rot in the jails and prisons of Iraq.

Thanks to our “surge” strategy we have increased the numbers of imprisoned to well past the breaking point. It seems we have not only exported democracy, but also our penchant for locking people up. It is also a documented fact that many of the Sunni detainees have been tortured and killed by their Shia guards. The Amnesty Law will do nothing to correct these injustices and only serves to reinforce in the mind of the minorities in Iraq their need to continue to fight the majority’s dominance.

While the passage of these laws will provide political cover for the Republicans and war mongers in America they will actually produce little in the way of reconciliation in Iraq. The current administration and the Bush-lite nominee waiting in the wings will state that this is a good sign that the Iraqi’s are making progress on the “benchmarks”, the true test is not in the laws we are forcing them to enact to meet our own political agendas, but in the trust created and developed by the opposing parties. This trust cannot be legislated or thrust upon them, but must be developed over time. If Iraq remains a sovereign nation in its current form, it will be up to the Iraqis to make this happen. It will not be at the behest of an occupying army, the history of the colonial powers should make this fact abundantly clear. The nations that they fashioned for their political expediency decades ago are still suffering from the tribal and secular fragmentation of trying to create nations from groups who do not share a national identity.

The war in Iraq will continue to define not Iraq’s but our national identity for years to come. Make no mistake about it the war in Iraq was not and is not about al Qaeda or terrorists, it is about one nation imposing its will over another nation. We can decorate that fact with the bouquet of spreading democracy and freedom, but the stench of imperialism will not be easily covered. How can a nation that violated international law now claim a moral superiority to bring law to the lawless? One must first remove the log that is in one’s own eye before trying to remove the splinter in another’s eye. Are there times when compassion and the acts of blood thirsty tyrants require action? Of course there are, we are confronted with them daily in Darfur, in Bosnia, and Rwanda. Iraq however was not one of them.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/world/middleeast/14iraq.html?pagewanted=2

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