It's the Incompetence, Stupid

When Osama bin Laden reappeared on our television screens a mere four days before Election Day, he did indeed deliver the much-anticipated "October Surprise." But contrary to the predictions of paranoid liberals and optimistic conservatives, his reappearance did not mark the veritable coup de grace for the Bush re-election campaign.

The sight of a well-rested, healthy bin Laden — with no dialysis machine in sight and sporting a tan that he clearly could not have acquired in an underground cave — was a poke in the eye of a White House that has done its best to frame him as a desperate fugitive of justice. The videotape was instead a sour reminder of the administration's unqualified failure in fighting terrorism: bin laden, still standing strong and tall after three years of the much-touted "war on terror."

It's no accident that bin Laden's turn in the spotlight came at the end of a week marked by a furious political debate over the missing 360 tons of explosives from the Al Qaqqa facility in Iraq. The White House variously tried to pin the blame on Saddam Hussein (They were moved before Baghdad fell!); revive its tattered justifications for the Iraq War (Aha! We thought liberals said there were no WMDs!); minimize the situation (What is 360 tons in the grand scheme of things?); or simply pass the buck (Liberal New York Times targets Bush). In other words, the Bush administration did everything except admit its mistake — in this case, errors in its post-war planning, or rather, the lack thereof.

bin Laden’s reappearance and the missing munitions are part of the same story. It's the story of a president who has consistently mistaken blind conviction for strength. It's the story of a man who, irrespective of partisanship, lacks the most important quality of a good leader: judgment. Each time George W. Bush has been faced with a set of choices on Iraq — before, during, and after the war — he has unerringly picked the worst option available.

As Bill Maher observed on HBO a couple of weeks ago: "It's the incompetence, stupid!"

Unilateralism, the New American Way

Four years ago, Candidate Bush pledged to create a "humble" U.S. foreign policy based on international cooperation, and scoffed at the idea of "nation building." Those turned out to be the proverbial famous last words as the rhetoric of the campaign was replaced by the radical foreign policy of the Bush presidency.

The transformation required the right trigger, the right justification. And al Qaeda provided it on Sept. 11, 2001.

The radical reorientation of U.S. foreign policy manifested itself almost immediately after the attacks, made plain in the president's now infamous assertion: "(E)ither you are with the United States or you are with the terrorists." It marked the birth of what would come to be known as the Bush Doctrine. Nine months later, he clarified the tenets of this uber-aggressive philosophy to West Point graduates: preemptive strikes, military unilateralism, preservation of the United States' status as the sole superpower, and a crusade to spread "democracy" around the world, by any means necessary.

It was a doctrine in search of a war. And that the war came to be with Iraq was hardly surprising. It was no secret that senior ranking officials in the administration were itching to finish the job that they perceived as left undone by the President’s father in the first Gulf War. As former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and Bush’s own Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill would later attest, Vice President Dick Cheney was eager to use the Sept. 11 attacks as an excuse to move against Iraq within hours of the tragedy.

George Bush was faced with a clear choice: Option A, crack down on al Qaeda at a time when its members were on the run; Option B, pursue a war that would at best deliver an ideological victory of dubious value. He chose war with Iraq.