Did Bush Really Get the Message?

Why do I have the dark growing impression that the post election prouncements and actions of the President have a scary similarity to those of his late friend, Kenneth Lay following the ENRON revelations?

Firing Don Rumsfeld strikes me somewhat like firing Andrew Fastow, the errant ENRON CFO. Did Bush REALLY get the message sent on Tuesday? Lay's firing Fastow for having had his hand in the cookie jar is like firing Rumsfeld for incompetence.

Thus far, the President has given no hint that it isn't only that things aren't going well in Iraq, but it is the entire policy of "democratizing the world," preemptive war and the confusion of complex intra Muslim faith battles with terrorism directed against us.

Rumsfeld was primarily simply another victim of the lousy intelligence...the part about being greeted in the streets with flowers...the part about how Iraqi oil revenues would pay the cost of the war. If these two falsehoods had been true, today we'd have around 20,000 troops in Iraq, chiefly stationed on Iraqi sanctioned U.S. air bases, and be in the process of recovering the relatively small cost of getting to Baghdad. Rumsfeld would be a hero, the neo-cons would be estatic and Republicans would still be in control of Congress. No one but a few anti-war extremists and misguided international law professors would be complaining. And, in the greater pragmatic realm of international diplomacy, even our traditional European allies (France, Germany, et al) might be kicking themselves and thinking, "damn, Bush was right."

But, a funny thing happened on the way to Baghdad. Both of those critical assumptions turned out to be false and in the absence of finding weapons of mass destruction and the discredited linkage between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terrorists, the President got "religion," sort of.

Curiously, it was only after failing to find WMD and the initial stirrings of a civil war, encouraged by a series of dumb post war occupation decisions (e.g. "deBathification" - thus preventing the strongest post-Hussein secular component of Iraqi society from staffing the government- sending the Iraqi Army home and failing to disarm them, etc.), we heard the first of "God wants the world to be free." I can reach only two conclusions from this. Either the President is insane or it was a cynical ploy to maintain a base of political support at home, among Christian fundamentalists, in the face of anticipated opposition to the war, based on the failure of intelligence.

To return to my scary analogy...today we seem to be on Iraq at about the same point ENRON was after Skilling had resigned, the stock had begun to fall and Kenneth Lay was reassuring the employees that although the stock was down, this was due to the market environment, that everything was under control and that the company was in good hands and had excellent plans for the future. If I remember correctly this was also shortly before the collapse, eventually followed by the indictments. For both the President and the country's sake (both ours and Iraq) let's hope that I am wrong. Let's hope that the neo-cons are truly gone and that the President is now talking to his father at least as much as he talks to God. Let's hope that the Baker-Hamilton intervention has not come too late and that the President has really gotten the message the American voter has sent him.