Quagmire

It took the Clinton administration six years to substantially undo the damage that twenty years of Republican administrations had done to America. George Bush has not been president for even three years and the damage his administration has done will take a decade if not longer to even approximately correct. Even apart from the destruction and deaths, some can never be undone.


When Clinton took office, the American economy and position in the world was threatened by deficits and debts and the perception that the federal government was helpless if not clueless in dealing with them. Social problems were worsening and the natural environment was being heedlessly destroyed. Clinton maneuvered to win what he most needed to win out of what it was possible to win in Congress. He lost big on health care. He gave in big on welfare. He gambled that the injustices in welfare and in his trade and globalism efforts, and the mistakes in his environmental legislation, would be corrected, because prosperity and peace would give him or the next Democratic president the political muscle to do so.

He tried to reorient a foreign policy distorted by Vietnam, the reactions and subsequent adventurisms of the Reaganites. His record is mixed here as well, but despite a hostile military establishment (which seems remarkably unbothered by George Bush's draft dodging and lack of military experience) he managed to steer the ship of state away from tragically misconceived military interference and quasi-military conquest.

Now in 2003 we face the catastrophe of having Nixon and Reagan in one president. Bush has imposed his Reagan-Redux voodoo economics, presenting future presidents with the most enormous debt in history. Among the many astonishing elements of this black magic act is the lack of outcry, the fact that supply side economics, having proven to be worth less than the napkin the Laffer curve was reputedly first sketched on, is back without debate. It's as if the late 1980s never happened, that a book title of the period did not cry out "America: What Went Wrong?"

Yet forewarned has not proven to be forearmed. The United States had ample warning from knowledgeable analysts as well as governments of many nations and millions of people around the world that its military attack on Iraq would come to grief. How quickly everything has become its opposite. The policies and responses that lived by 9/11 are dying by terrorist bombs and counter-terrorist violence in the Middle East and Iraq. So quickly the quagmire, and we are beset with Reagan deficits and Nixonian warfare simultaneously.

Even the clearest achieved goal of the Iraq war has backfired. No, not deposing Saddam, but turning Iraq into an American military base so the military presence in Saudi Arabia could be ended. Now the withdrawal from Saudi Arabia has been essentially accomplished, and therefore the United States is forced to stay in Iraq or lose its land-based presence in the region. For this reason---which you will never hear officially articulated---there will be no quick end to the quagmire.

American troops, already unpopular among Iraqi people for aggressive and at times what has appeared to be criminally brutal operations, will be forced by recent blatant terrorist violence, to be even more aggressive and violent. The cost of the military presence will go higher, as the administration is compelled to actually accomplish some reconstruction, which will cost even more.

Recent polls and surveys indicate that the American people are not happy about this, and they are no longer enthralled with G.W. Bush, Commander in Chief. There are several Democratic candidates with the potential to be superior presidents. But their work is being made more difficult and more thankless every day, just to get back to where we were, more or less, in November 2000. Perhaps if this president is visionary enough, and can communicate that vision convincingly, and can back it up, such a scale won't be relevant. We will truly move on. But with a better than average, politics as usual president, it will take a very long time to get back to the condition of 2000, if we get there at all. If Bush is re-elected, I doubt we ever will.

For an all too pointed Labor Day message, look for Molly Ivins' August 28 column, which I hope you will find here.