Party time is over, grim Democrats signal to Bush

There is a marked reluctance by anyone currently in office in Washington to admit mistakes, writes Conor O'Clery

There is a marked reluctance by anyone currently in office in Washington to admit mistakes, writes Conor O'Clery

There was a telling moment during a post-inauguration discussion on MSNBC among four pro-Bush commentators, hosted by presenter Joe Scarborough. Pat Buchanan, a conservative who doesn't support the Iraq war, was all but shouted down by the other three when he suggested that al-Qaeda "attacked us because we were over there". "So it was America's fault?" mocked Scarborough.

When Buchanan, a former Republican presidential candidate, went on to argue that the elections in Iraq would mean a power grab by the Shias, the host retorted: "You know what, that's called democracy."

The view that America has been wronged because people hate its freedoms, and that it is pursuing a just cause in Iraq, is popular among supporters of the US administration. It may account for the sense of hubris in the air as George Bush begins his second term, akin to that some veteran commentators say they found when Richard Nixon was inaugurated for the second time.

READ MORE

There is a marked reluctance by anyone in office in Washington to admit mistakes. When Don Imus of NBC asked Dick Cheney if he would identify mistakes made in the Iraq war, the Vice-President did not touch on the failure to provide enough troops - which outspoken Republicans like Sen John McCain have criticised - or the failure to stop widespread looting in Baghdad, or the scandal at Abu Ghraib.

No, it was Saddam Hussein's fault that things had gone bad. He had brutalised the people so much they were unable to take over running the country as quickly as they thought, Mr Cheney said. "I would chalk that one up as a miscalculation."

Conservatives like Mr Buchanan were also critical of the commitment in the inauguration address, in which the words "free", "freedom" and "liberty" were used 49 times, to promote democracy around the world.

Should they go after President Mugabe in Zimbabwe which is not threatening America, he asked? Most Republicans, however, and some Democrats are prepared to see Mr Bush's rhetoric this week as identifying a generational challenge, and a setting of long-term goals to ensure America's security.

Neo-conservative commentators like Charles Krauthammer also maintain that the administration's democratic crusade is going better than most admit. Commenting on the speech yesterday, he pointed to democratic revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, elections in Malaysia and Indonesia where the more extreme Islamic parties were defeated, the election of a president in Afghanistan and recent polling in the Palestinian territories.

The bad news in the long term, he said, came from the stirrings of an anti-American alliance involving Russia and China. In this he touched on the foreign policy inconsistency which the sharpest critics of Mr Bush term hypocrisy.

Russia and China are like the elephants in the room that no one talks about. There is practically no issue made in Washington about China's imprisonment of pro-democracy advocates; Beijing is, of course, a critical ally of the US in curtailing North Korea's nuclear plans.

There is a marked silence about countries ranked by the US State Department as some of the world's worst abusers of human rights, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, all of which are US allies in the war on terrorism.

As the Washington Post pointed out yesterday, Uzbekistan has been accused of the political assassination of its citizens but receives high-level visits from US officials like Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell, and Mr Bush has hailed Egypt, a recipient of $2 billion in US aid, as the country to show the way to democracy in the Arab world (when the US shipped an Australian citizen there he later claimed he was tortured for six months).

President Musharraf of Pakistan has not given up his role as head of the military despite promises. The US is largely silent, too, about human rights abuses committed by Israeli armed forces in the Occupied Territories. And what will be said when Mr Bush meets his good friend, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, next month, asked the former Clinton national security adviser, Sandy Berger, referring to repression in Chechnya and the stifling of internal dissent.

Critics of the contradictions between noble goals and Realpolitik include Republican Sen Lincoln Chafee. During confirmation hearings this week the Rhode Island senator asked the incoming Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, why Washington looked the other way when it came to these countries. Ms Rice had not included any of them in her list of half a dozen "outposts of tyranny".

Ms Rice was also somewhat truculent in her responses to tough questioning from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on future US foreign policy. When Democrat Sen Barbara Boxer of California asked her about misleading pre-war information she promoted on weapons of mass destruction, the former national security adviser bristled about her integrity being impugned.

The White House fully expected the Senate to endorse Rice on Thursday this week, but the minority Democrats exercised their right to have a debate on both nominations in the full Senate, and confirmations have been postponed until next week. Bush chief of staff Andrew Card called it "petty politics", which does not bode well for bipartisanship in the next four years.

Even as Republicans and Democrats together celebrated the peaceful transfer of power on Thursday, thoughts were turning to future partisan battles ahead. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, ailing from a type of throat cancer that is usually fatal within a year, was given a standing ovation when he braved the cold to administer the oath of office to Mr Bush with the help of a tracheotomy tube in his throat.

But one could be sure that legislators present were thinking about the vacancy that will arise soon in the nine-member Supreme Court and the bitter battles ahead in confirmation hearings.

One of the President's first actions after being re-elected was to resubmit to the Senate a list of judges for lower courts who had failed to get confirmed in his first term because of filibustering by Democrats who thought them too conservative.

In his remaining four years in office, therefore, Mr Bush is likely to nominate conservative replacements to the ageing Supreme Court who could tip the balance against the Roe v Wade decision of 1973 that legalised abortion, something that the evangelical supporters of the President fervently hope for and Democrats will fight tooth and nail.

The justices are not expected to re-examine the issue soon, but a New York Times/CBS poll yesterday showed 43 per cent of Americans expect abortion to be banned before Mr Bush leaves office.

Other partisan fights are threatened over the President's ambitious domestic agenda which will be spelled out more fully in his State of the Union address. At the inaugural luncheon on Capitol Hill on Thursday, Karl Rove, Mr Bush's political adviser, dined at the same table as Edward Kennedy.

The liberal Massachusetts senator remarked afterwards that they "talked it all over - we have it all worked out". They haven't, of course. The main Bush priorities, the semi-privatisation of social security (pensions) and the capping of medical liability awards, will be bitterly fought by Democrats and by a few Republicans.

Mr Bush's first term was noted for his take-it-or-leave-it attitude on policies such as his sweeping tax cuts. In interviews this week he spoke of setting a new tone, and promised to work more successfully with Democrats in Congress, but to his critics the administration continues to be driven by ideology. Despite the increased majority Republicans enjoy in both chambers of Congress, House majority leader Tom DeLay admits "the next four years will not be easy".

History, too, shows that second terms are troublesome for presidents. Not one of the 15 previous American presidents to be re-elected have had a better second term. Within a year or so a second-term president is usually seen as a lame duck.

So the fight for Mr Bush's policies will be now, and will take on a sharp edge in the coming months. The leading Democrat in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, showed no sign amid the inaugural celebrations of trying to meet the President half way. The California congresswoman told fellow party members in an e-mail: "Tell President Bush that party time is over."