Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - View Single Post - SOTU Address: Is This What a Failed Presidency Looks Like?

host · 01-24-2007, 11:58 AM

Quote:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/...n1005327.shtml
President Richard Nixon's approval rating fell as the Watergate scandal became public in the first half of 1973, and was at about 25 percent during 1974.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012300787.html
.........Only two presidents have had lower approval ratings on the eve of a State of the Union speech. Richard Nixon was at 26 percent in 1974, seven months before he resigned in disgrace because of the Watergate scandal. Harry S. Truman was at 23 percent in January 1952, driven down by public disapproval of the Korean conflict and his firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur..........

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/...n2384943.shtml
.....Mr. Bush’s overall approval rating has fallen to just 28 percent, a new low, while more than twice as many (64 percent) disapprove of the way he's handling his job. .....

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...v=rss_politics
President's Portrayal of 'The Enemy' Often Flawed

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 24, 2007; A13

In his State of the Union address last night, President Bush presented an arguably misleading and often flawed description of "the enemy" that the United States faces overseas, lumping together disparate groups with opposing ideologies to suggest that they have a single-minded focus in attacking the United States.

Under Bush's rubric, a country such as Iran -- which enjoys diplomatic representation and billions of dollars in trade with major European countries -- is lumped together with al-Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "The Shia and Sunni extremists are different faces of the same totalitarian threat," Bush said, referring to the different branches of the Muslim religion.

Similarly, Bush asserted that Shia Hezbollah, which has won seats in the Lebanese government, is a terrorist group "second only to al-Qaeda in the American lives it has taken." Bush is referring to attacks nearly a quarter-century ago on a U.S. embassy and a Marine barracks when the United States intervened in Lebanon's civil war by shelling Hezbollah strongholds. Hezbollah has evolved into primarily an anti-Israeli militant organization -- it fought a war with Israel last summer -- but the European Union does not list it as a terrorist organization.

At one point, Bush catalogued what he described as advances in the quest for freedom in the Middle East during 2005 -- such as the departure of Syrian troops from Lebanon and elections in Iraq. Then, Bush asserted, "a thinking enemy watched all of these scenes, adjusted their tactics and in 2006 they struck back." But his description of the actions of "the enemy" tried to tie together a series of diplomatic and military setbacks that had virtually no connection to one another, from an attack on a Sunni mosque in Iraq to the assassination of Maronite Lebanese political figure.

In his speech, Bush argued that "free people are not drawn to violent and malignant ideologies -- and most will choose a better way when they are given a chance." He also said that terrorist groups "want to overthrow moderate governments."

In the two of the most liberal and diverse societies in the Middle East -- Lebanon and the Palestinian territories -- events have undercut Bush's argument in the past year. Hezbollah has gained power and strength in Lebanon, partly at the ballot box. Meanwhile, Palestinians ousted the Fatah party -- which wants to pursue peace with Israel -- from the legislature in favor of Hamas, which is committed to Israel's destruction and is considered a terrorist organization by the State Department.

In fact, many of the countries that Bush considers "moderate" -- such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia -- are autocratic dictatorships rated among the worst of the "not free" nations by the nonpartisan Freedom House. Their Freedom House ratings are virtually indistinguishable from Cuba, Belarus and Burma, which Bush last night listed as nations in desperate need of freedom.

Bush also claimed that "we have a diplomatic strategy that is rallying the world to join in the fight against extremism." But Monday, a poll of 26,000 people in 25 countries was released that showed that global opinion of U.S. foreign policy has sharply deteriorated in the past two years. Nearly three-quarters of those polled by GlobeScan, an international polling company, disapprove of U.S. policies toward Iraq, and nearly half said the United States is playing a mainly negative role in the world.

In his State of the Union address a year ago, Bush said that progress in Iraq meant "we should be able to further decrease our troop levels" but that "those decisions will be made by our military commanders, not by politicians in Washington, D.C." Bush now proposes to increase troop levels, after having overruled the concerns of commanders. In his speech last night, he sidestepped this contradiction, saying that "our military commanders and I have carefully weighed the options" and "in the end, I chose this course of action."

On domestic policy, Bush at one point said that "the recovery" has added more than 7.2 million jobs since August 2003. But the net number of jobs created since Bush became president in January 2001, is much lower -- just 3.6 million. The Bush administration's performance is fairly mediocre for the sixth year of a presidency, according to historical statistics maintained by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nearly 18 million jobs were added by the sixth year of Bill Clinton's presidency -- and nearly 10 million were added at this point in Ronald Reagan's presidency.

Bush claimed credit for cutting the budget deficit ahead of schedule and proposed to eliminate it over the next five years. He did not mention that he inherited a huge budget surplus -- $236 billion in 2000 -- compared with a $296 billion deficit in the 2006 fiscal year, largely as a result of Bush's tax cuts and spending increases. Bush claimed that the No Child Left Behind Act has helped students to "perform better at reading and math, and minority students are closing the achievement gap." But states made stronger average annual gains in reading during the decade before the law took effect, education researchers have found, and half a dozen recent studies have shown little progress in narrowing the test-score gap between minority and white students.

Staff writer Amit R. Paley contributed to this report.

If you argue that there was no surplus in 2000, you must hold Mr. Bush to the same standard...by comparing the increase in the amount of the federal treasury debt YOY. The increase was just about eliminated in 2000, and under Mr. Bush, off-budget appropriations for the "wars", arguably budgetable in large measure, 3 years after the invasion of Iraq, were not included, enabling Mr. Bush to tout a false impression that the increasing debt has been mitigated. Fiscally, this is a failed presidency, judging from the debt trend reversal:

Quote:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...012301075.html
President Bush's 2007 State of the Union Address

.....Tonight, I want to discuss three economic reforms that deserve to be priorities for this Congress.

First, we must balance the federal budget.

(APPLAUSE)

BUSH: We can do so without raising taxes.

(APPLAUSE)

What we need is spending discipline in Washington, D.C. We set a goal of cutting the deficit in half by 2009 and met that goal three years ahead of schedule.......

Quote:

http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdpdodt.htm
09/28/2000 $5,674,178,209,886.86 (Total debt increased just $18 billn)
09/30/1999 $5,656,270,901,633.43

01/23/2007 $8,681,645,622,941.55 (4 month debt increase= $164 billn)
09/29/2006 $8,506,973,899,215.23 (Total debt increased just $574 billn)
09/30/2005 $7,932,709,661,723.50 (Total debt increased just $553 billn)
09/30/2004 $7,379,052,696,330.32

Quote:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/24/wo...gewanted=print
January 24, 2007
Iraq Parliament Finds a Quorum Hard to Come By
By DAMIEN CAVE

BAGHDAD, Jan. 23 — Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, the speaker of Parliament, read a roll call of the 275 elected members with a goal of shaming the no-shows.

Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister? Absent, living in Amman and London. Adnan Pachachi, the octogenarian statesman? Also gone, in Abu Dhabi.

Others who failed to appear Monday included Saleh Mutlak, a senior Sunni legislator; several Shiites and Kurds; and Ayad al-Samaraei, chairman of the finance committee, whose absence led Mr. Mashhadani to ask: “When will he be back? After we approve the budget?”

It was a joke barbed with outrage. Parliament in recent months has been at a standstill. Nearly every session since November has been adjourned because as few as 65 members made it to work, even as they and the absentees earned salaries and benefits worth about $120,000.

Part of the problem is security, but Iraqi officials also said they feared that members were losing confidence in the institution and in the country’s fragile democracy. As chaos has deepened, Parliament’s relevance has gradually receded.

Deals on important legislation, most recently the oil law, now take place largely out of public view, with Parliament — when it meets — rubber-stamping the final decisions. As a result, officials said, vital legislation involving the budget, provincial elections and amendments to the Constitution remain trapped in a legislative process that processes nearly nothing. American officials long hoped that Parliament could help foster dialogue between Iraq’s increasingly fractured ethnic and religious groups, but that has not happened, either.

Goaded by American leaders, frustrated and desperate to prove that Iraq can govern itself, senior Iraqi officials have clearly had enough. Mr. Mashhadani said Parliament would soon start fining members $400 for every missed session and replace the absentees if they fail to attend a minimum amount of the time.

Some of Iraq’s more seasoned leaders say attendance has been undermined by a widening sense of disillusionment about Parliament’s ability to improve Iraqis’ daily life. The country’s dominant issue, security, is almost exclusively the policy realm of the American military and the office of the prime minister.

Every bombing like the one on Monday, which killed 88 people at a downtown market, suggests to some that Parliament’s laws are irrelevant in the face of sprawling chaos and the government’s inability to stop it.

“People are totally disenchanted,” Mr. Pachachi said in a telephone interview from Abu Dhabi. “There has been no improvement in the security situation. The government seems to be incapable of doing anything despite all the promises.”

Though the Constitution grants Iraq’s only elected body wide powers to pass laws and investigate, sectarian divisions and the need for a twothirds majority in some cases have often led to deadlock. Sunni and Shiite power brokers have blocked efforts to scrutinize violence connected to their own sects.

“Parliament is the heart of the political process,” Mr. Mashhadani said in an interview at his office, offering more hope than reality. “It is the center of everything. If the heart is not working, it all fails.”

Monday’s attendance actually surpassed the 50 percent plus one needed to pass laws. It was the first quorum in months, caused in part by the return of 30 members loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, whose end to a two-month boycott created a public relations blitz that helped attract 189 members.

But the scene in the convention center auditorium where Parliament meets only underscored the rarity of the gathering. It seemed at times like a reunion. At one point Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who is head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and a Shiite rival of Mr. Sadr, arrived late — after being marked absent. He spent the first five minutes waving and nodding at colleagues, some of whom he apparently had not seen in months.

Parliamentary officials refused to provide attendance lists for every session, fearing retribution. They said all sects and regions had members who often did not come.

Each representative earns about $10,000 a month in salary and benefits, including money for guards. Yet on Monday, members from Baghdad neighborhoods to small towns in the hinterland — Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Christians and Turkmen — were all on the list of no-shows that Mr. Mashhadani read aloud.

The largest group of absentees consisted of unknown figures elected as part of the party lists that governed how most people voted in the December 2005 election. Party leaders in Baghdad said they had urged their members to attend but emphasized that for many, Parliament had become a hardship post.

Representatives who travel from afar stay at the Rashid Hotel in the Green Zone, across a road, two checkpoints and several pat-downs from the 1970s-era convention center. It is not luxurious. It is barely safe. The food is mediocre.

In short, many said, the job is not what members thought they had signed up for.

“Most of them were here for the game, for prestige, for the money,” said Muhammad al-Ahmedawi, a Shiite member of the Fadhila Party. “It’s upsetting and disappointing. We want the members to come, to pursue the interests of their constituents, especially in this sensitive time.”

<h3>host comments: Bush told us that our troops were sacrificing so this arrogance and selfishness could happen? </h3>

Mr. Ahmedawi said politicians who had larger shares of power before the elections seemed to view Parliament as a demotion best ignored. Mr. Allawi, for example, who did not return calls to his London aides requesting an interview, has been rallying support in Amman and London among exiles who have fled Iraq’s violence.

Of the 25 members of his bloc, only six attended the session on Monday.

Mr. Pachachi, who is in his mid-80s, said he left Iraq a few months ago because his wife needed open-heart surgery and he did not trust that she would be well cared for in one of Baghdad’s decrepit hospitals. He said he hoped to return in a few weeks, admitting that “one has to be there — you can’t be a member of the Parliament and live abroad.”

But he said the dangers involved with being a public figure in Iraq had made it much more difficult to participate in government. He has 40 guards to protect him when he comes to Iraq, he said, and the salary from Parliament pays for only 20.

“I have protection, and unfortunately the protection is not sufficient for anyone anymore,” he said. “The level of violence has become unmanageable.”

Other Iraqi politicians take a harder line. Adnan Dulaimi, a member of the largest Sunni bloc in Parliament, put it simply, “If there are some members who think there is no benefit to attending, then they should resign.”

Mr. Mashhadani seems to be shaping a slightly softer approach that mixes persuasion with punishment. Like Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, he has met repeatedly with party leaders, pushing them to ensure the attendance of their members.

During an interview in his office, lined with baroque cushioned chairs with gold trim, he also acknowledged that more money should be set aside for members’ security, but only if members show up to pass a budget.

He said the shaming of the absentees at the public session, a first, was the first step. He said the fines and threat of replacement would also help.

There is, of course, only one problem. For the proposals to be put in place, a majority of members in Parliament have to be present to pass them.

Quote:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=6586404

Begins on page 12 in .pdf version:
http://www.usip.org/isg/iraq_study_g...oup_report.pdf

.......Currently, the U.S. military rarely engages in large-scale combat operations. Instead,counterinsurgency efforts focus on a strategy of “clear, hold, and build”—“clearing” areas of -insurgents and death squads, “holding” those areas with Iraqi security forces, and “building” areas with quick-impact reconstruction projects.
Nearly every U.S. Army and Marine combat unit, and several National Guard and Reserve units, have been to Iraq at least once. Many are on their second or even third rotations; rotations are typically one year for Army units, seven months for Marine units. Regular rotations, in and out of Iraq or within the country, complicate brigade and battalion efforts to get to know the
local scene, earn the trust of the population, and build a sense of cooperation.

Many military units are under significant strain. Because the harsh conditions in Iraq are wearing out equipment more quickly than anticipated, many units do not have fully functional equipment for training when they redeploy to the United States. An extraordinary amount of sacrifice has been asked of our men and women in uniform, and of their families. The American military has little reserve force to call on if it needs ground forces to respond to other crises around the world.

A primary mission of U.S. military strategy in Iraq is the training of competent Iraqi security forces. By the end of 2006, the Multi-National Security Transition Command–Iraq under American leadership is expected to have trained and equipped a target number of approximately 326,000 Iraqi security services. That figure includes 138,000 members of the Iraqi Army and 188,000 Iraqi police. Iraqis have operational control over roughly one-third of Iraqi security forces; the U.S. has operational control over most of the rest. No U.S. forces are under Iraqi command.......

--- "The Iraqi Army is making fitful progress toward becoming a reliable and disciplined fighting force loyal to the national government. By the end of 2006, the Iraqi Army is expected to comprise 118 battalions formed into 36 brigades under the command of 10 divisions. Although the army is one of the more professional Iraqi institutions, its performance has been uneven. The training numbers are impressive, but they represent only part of the story. Significant questions remain about the ethnic composition and loyalties of some Iraqi units specifically, whether they will carry out missions on behalf of national goals instead of a sectarian agenda. Of Iraq's 10 planned divisions, those that are even-numbered are made up of Iraqis who signed up to serve in a specific area, and they have been reluctant to redeploy to other areas of the country. As a result, elements of the Army have refused to carry out missions.

"The Iraqi Army is also confronted by several other significant challenges: Units lack leadership. They lack the ability to work together and perform at higher levels of organization the brigade and division level. Leadership training and the experience of leadership are the essential elements to improve performance. Units lack equipment. They cannot carry out their missions without adequate equipment. Congress has been generous in funding requests for U.S. troops, but it has resisted fully funding Iraqi forces. The entire appropriation for Iraqi defense forces for FY 2006, $3 billion, is less than the United States currently spends in Iraq every two weeks.

"Units lack personnel. Soldiers are on leave one week a month so that they can visit their families and take them their pay. Soldiers are paid in cash because there is no banking system. Soldiers are given leave liberally and face no penalties for absence without leave. Unit readiness rates are low, often at 50 percent or less."

--- "The state of the Iraqi police is substantially worse than that of the Iraqi Army. The Iraqi Police Service currently numbers roughly 135,000 and is responsible for local policing. It has neither the training nor legal authority to conduct criminal investigations, nor the firepower to take on organized crime, insurgents, or militias. The Iraqi National Police numbers roughly 25,000 and its officers have been trained in counterinsurgency operations, not police work. The Border Enforcement Department numbers roughly 28,000. Iraqi police cannot control crime, and they routinely engage in sectarian violence, including the unnecessary detention, torture, and targeted execution of Sunni Arab civilians. The police are organized under the Ministry of the Interior, which is confronted by corruption and militia infiltration and lacks control over police in the provinces.

--- "The Facilities Protection Service poses additional problems. Each Iraqi ministry has an armed unit, ostensibly to guard the ministry's infrastructure. All together, these units total roughly 145,000 uniformed Iraqis under arms. However, these units have questionable loyalties and capabilities. In the ministries of Health, Agriculture, and Transportation controlled by Moqtada al-Sadr, the Facilities Protection Service is a source of funding and jobs for the Mahdi Army. One senior U.S. official described the Facilities Protection Service as 'incompetent, dysfunctional, or subversive.' Several Iraqis simply referred to them as militias."....

Bush handpicked the chairman Jim Baker, a loyal family friend to chair the commission that wrote the preceding ISG report excerpts. The goal of training an Iraqi security force "to stand up", so our troops can "stand down", seems doomed due to a refusal of Iraqi counterparts to American troops to make a similar commitment to the one that American troops have consistently obeyed orders to make. The effect on our troops, on their equipment, and on the overall readiness is of grave concern.

The concept of a democratically elected government with a representative legislature seems equally shattered, at this time, and we see Mr. Bush reduced to making his featured statement of accomplishment....an intentionally misleading impression that he is reigning in the ballooning annual increase in federal debt, that his policies brought from near zero, to $574 billion annually, in just six years.

If this does not look like a failed presidency to you....tell us why it isn't. Please do not simply vote in the thread poll without posting justification.