In what at first blush would seem to be an unusual acknowledgment that presidential power actually has limits, the Bush administration says that it has dropped a provision from the U.S.’s pending business deal with the Iraqi government under which it would defend Iraq from both internal and external security threats.
It may well be that the president’s handlers have realized that trying to ram through the deal in the form of something other than a treaty, which would not require congressional approval, would provoke too great a backlash, and Defense Secretary Gates tacitly acknowledged as much this week.
But that explanation runs counter to the reality that George Bush has said in word and deed many times over the last long seven years that his power is pretty much limitless, most recently in yet another of his draconian signing statements, this one attached late last month to a defense spending bill that created a law banning the use of taxpayer funds to establish permanent bases in Iraq.
In the signing statement, the president yet again gave Congress the finger in asserting that as commander in chief he has the power to bypass that law.
The business deal, as I insist on calling it, would provide a long-term troop commitment in return for first dibs at Iraq’s vast oil resources. Its technical name is “A Declaration of Principles for a Long-Term Relationship of Cooperation and Friendship Between the Republic of Iraq and the United States of America. ” (Text here.)
So what’s really going on?
Methinks part reality check and part game playing, both long overdue and most welcome.
Although no presidential loyalist would put it in these terms, the reality check is that the White House has made such a hash of its Iraq “policy” that it has slowly come to realize one carelessly tossed match will reignite a civil war tamped down by the self-imposed exile of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr and the military successes of the Surge. (See “The Same Game” below for a pungent example.)
Military is in italics because that was only half — and in retrospect the easiest part despite the considerable blood shed by U.S. troops — of the Surge strategy, the other part being a good-faith effort by Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki to use the window of opportunity that those military successes afforded him to rev up national reconciliation efforts.
What has happened, of course, is that Al-Maliki and his Shiite henchmen have continued to act in bad faith knowing that Washington would not lean on them.
There has been no progress toward reconciliation. Zip, zero, nada, while the Sunni minority is busily consolidating its modest gains in the expectation that it won’t be invited to share power any time soon.
The game playing is the White House’s belated recognition of this sad state of affairs, if not that it is mostly to blame, hence the removal of the crucial internal and external security threat clause from the business deal. This is because the clause not only couldn’t pass congressional muster, but represented long-term coup insurance for Al-Maliki and without it his sorry ass is no longer covered.
Is this to say that the White House would approve a coup, however tacitly? Not exactly, but with the clause in place the U.S. had a whole lot less leverage.
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