Bush's Scorched-Earth Strategy

After a terrible week for his campaign, Bush has one agenda between now and Election Day: attack Kerry

The rationale for war in Iraq has collapsed, so President George W. Bush has declared another war, this one on John Kerry. Bush's blistering attack on Kerry as weak and wavering on war and the worst kind of tax-and-spend liberal foreshadows the next four weeks. Get ready for a scorched-earth campaign from the Bushies... The dirty little secret is that Bush, if elected, is more likely to pull out of Iraq once elections are held in January.

Senior Republicans on Capitol Hill know that Iraq is a mess. A few brave senators like John McCain, Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar have spoken out, but most are staying silent in solidarity with their party. They’ll tell the truth after the election. The incompetence, hubris and arrogance of this administration has cost American lives and treasure, and left whoever is president over the next four years a situation that will be almost impossible to correct. "If we could hear the inner deliberations of this administration, it would scare us," says a former Republican operative, who knows how the Bushies play the game. "They know they've been caught. Their strategy is to throw up enough monkey dust to get through the next four weeks."

This is the moment of truth for American foreign policy. Will Bush's bald-faced lies carry the day? Can Cheney con the American public into four more years? The Duelfer report this week "shows Bush jumped the gun," says Allen Holmes, a policy analyst who served under Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bush I in the State Department, and under President Bill Clinton in the Defense Department. "A lot of people told [Bush] we didn't need to go to war. He wasn't listening. He created a battlefield in Iraq. The jihadists love it, particularly when innocent women and children are killed. It's a recruiting tool." Holmes never found the case for going to war in Iraq a compelling one. He thinks Bush wanted to finish the job his father started, which he finds ironic because "in dad's book, he says the reason he didn't go to Baghdad is he didn't want to own the chaos we're involved in today."
More.