Robert Scheer: Just why is George W. Bush still smiling?
THAT idiotic “what me worry?” look just never leaves the man’s visage. Once again, there was our president, presiding over disasters, in part of his making and totally on his watch, grinning with an aplomb that suggested a serious disconnect between his worldview and reality. Be it in his announcement that Iraq is being secured on a day when bombs ripped through that sad land or posed between his treasury secretary and the Federal Reserve chairman to applaud the government’s bailout of a failed investment bank, President Bush was the only one inexplicably smiling.
Failure suits him. It is a stance he learned to wear well while presiding over one failed Texas business deal after another, and it served him splendidly as he claimed the title of president of the United States after losing the popular, and maybe even the electoral, vote. It carried him through the most ignominious chapter of U.S. foreign policy, from the lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to the unprecedented defense of torture by a U.S. president.
The arrogance of unwarranted assurance was there this week as the U.S. dollar fell into the toilet, which, along with the debacle of Iraq and his other failed Mideast policies, pushed oil prices to record highs. The Europeans, who didn’t support the U.S. intervention, are doing much better, not having to pay to guard besieged oil pipelines while U.S. taxpayers are saddled with trillions of dollars in future debt, not to mention the loss of
4,000 U.S. servicemen and women and the 30,000 wounded in a war the Bush administration had promised would be paid for with Iraqi oil revenues. Even in Baghdad last week, there wasn’t enough oil to keep the lights on for more than a few hours.
But the president is happy because his legacy issue, the war on terrorism, is intact. No matter that last week the Pentagon was forced to release a report conducted over the last five years that concluded, after surveying 600,000 official Iraqi documents captured by U.S. forces, that there is “no smoking gun” establishing any connection whatsoever between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.
The report was so embarrassing that we taxpayers were not going to be told of its existence, even though the explosive conclusions were declassified, until ABC News forced the administration to post it on the Joint Forces Command Website. The network reported that the Pentagon had canceled plans to issue a press release on the report or make it available by e-mail or online because, as one Pentagon official put it, the study is “too politically sensitive.” [more]