It's pretty clear at this point that Bush is doing exactly what bin Laden wants. Bush is replacing "secular socialist" Ba'athist Iraq with chaos -- a power vacuum likely to resolve into a fundamentalist Islamicist regime. Bush thinks he's doing something else, or at least he says he's doing something else: bringing Democracy to Iraq. He isn't.

Consider the best parallel example of "nation building" under Bush / Cheney: Afghanistan. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Bush finally reversed his "coddle the Taliban" policies, followed up on the Clinton Administration warnings, and used the Clinton military to rout the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Several months later, how is the Bush Doctrine doing there? Not very well.

The Bush experience nation building in Afghanistan is eerily similar to Soviet failures. Foreign news services widely report the Taliban are resurgent. Even according to the Washington Post -- a strong supporter of Bush's foreign policies -- The US-backed Afghani government is impotent.

Chaos rules Afghanistan

The Washington Post reports:

Assassins with their turbans wrapped to hide their faces ambushed a convoy on a main street in the middle of an April afternoon, executing Rasul Beg, a mid-level local militia commander [in a] gunfight [that] lasted 20 hours, killed 13 people, including an 8-year-old boy, trapped international aid workers and left President Hamid Karzai's administration struggling to extend the rule of law to this provincial capital about 300 miles northwest of Kabul, the capital.

The Post quotes Enayatullah Enayat, the man Karzai relies on to govern Faryab province: "I'm in a bad situation. The warlords have men with guns and I don't. They might kill me."

How bad is it? According to the Post:

18 months after the fall of the Taliban and the installation of Karzai's interim administration [and]Despite military and financial support from the United States and its allies, the Afghan government has been unable to assert its authority over a country riven by ethnic, religious and cultural differences and shattered by decades of war.

The Post explains, the "central government appears powerless in Meymaneh, beset by its own factional disputes and broke because warlords refuse to send it revenue from taxes they collect."

The situation is getting worse, not better: "there are more gunmen today than there were a year ago in Faryab province [who do not belong to] the country's newly founded national army."

"Ordinary citizens are fed up, knowing that violence is likely to erupt again at any moment," reports the Post, as the Karzai government has failed to establish its legitimacy. Local officials routinely ignore Karzai who commands an enclave around Kabul at best:

"Karzai demanded that the two local commanders who had led the deadly battle of Meymaneh travel to the nation's capital to answer for their actions. They didn't go." See Karzai Powerless As Warlords Battle, by April Witt, the Washington Post, 18 May 2003: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4484-2003May17.html

Bush's efforts at nation building have failed in Afghanistan and promise no better success in Iraq. Experts remain unsurprised, as The Bush family hasn't had success picking winners in the Middle East. The Republican record in general hasn't been very good either.

Reagan/Bush/Cheney actions during the 1980s and 1990s

In the 1980s, the Republicans broke our laws and spent $billions of our dollars to build up Saddam Hussein. There is a picture of Donald Rumsfeld grinning at Saddam from this period. The Republicans claimed this was to reinforce Iraq as a bulwark against Iranian-backed Shiite extremism.

Later, Bush I said Saddam was a person they could work with, someone they would "bring into the family of nations." Never mind that Iraq actually attacked Iran rather than vice versa, and Reagan's people were helping Iran at the same time.

The Republicans sent Rumsfeld, Senator Bob Dole and other top representatives on good-will trips to woo Saddam. They continued helping Saddam after the Iran / Iraq War, right up until the invasion of Kuwait. Bush's Ambassador April Glaspie assured Saddam the US would not oppose Iraq in any intra-Arab dispute against Kuwait.

Even after the Persian Gulf War I, Bush I claimed we could not topple Saddam because that would create chaos, a power vacuum radical Islamicists might fill unless the US undertook a prohibitively costly open-ended commitment to occupy Iraq.

In short, US national security and the survival of oil-rich sheikdoms relied on Saddam's regime containing a wave of Shiite-sponsored Islamic Revolutions. Was there even a speck of substance to that Republican claim?

If so, then Bush's rush to war against Iraq has made us less safe according to Dick Cheney his own Vice President, Donald Rumsfeld his own Secretary of Defense, his father, and James A. Baker III his father's Secretary of State. That is, unless these top Republicans were all just lying about Saddam serving a purpose which justified coddling him, arming him, even encouraging him to "invade his neighbors" and helping him maintain his brutal reign by supplying him with poison gas and other weapons he used "against his own people."

For the past two decades, up until 1999 when Dick Cheney's Halliburton continued trading with Saddam through a subsidiary, top Republicans have been helping Saddam Hussein remain in power. Their excuse was that Iraq under Saddam counterbalanced extreme Islamicists. Unless US national security really depended on Saddam, Bush I, Cheney, Baker, Rumsfeld and other top Republicans were lying.

If all these men were manipulating US foreign policy to enrich themselves and their business associates at $billions in taxpayers' expense and -- worst of all undermining our national security -- they should be indicted immediately, charged with serious criminal violations. But what if they weren't just lying?

The only other possible alternative is that Saddam's secular socialist Iraq actually did shield the precariously balanced oil sheikdoms from the Islamic tide. In that case, Bush II's war replaced that shield with nothing -- at best. At worst, Bush II made Osama's dreams come true by unleashing and reinvigorating the tide of anti-west, pro-terrorist radical Islam.

If you trust the Republicans, we needed Saddam in Iraq to prevent a wave of radical Islam. We could work with him and the Taliban to secure pipelines and other business arrangements in the US national interest. If you don't take the Republicans at their word, they've cashed in on turmoil in the region to aggrandize themselves and their business associates. In any case, Republicans led by two generations of Bushes are inept, corrupt or both. In any case, they've failed to make us more secure. If anything they've only made us less safe.

Can we trust the Republicans, specifically the Bushes?

Here's their record: Bush I and Bush II at the very least turned a blind eye to Saudi policies which exported radical dissidents. Both Bushes enabled and assisted the Saudi policies which allowed these malcontents and radicals to spread across the globe, even setting up their operations in Northern Virginia.

Saudi policies empowered terrorists and provided the backbone and brain of al-Queda. Reliable reports indicate that Bush I and Bush II wittingly or (as I believe) witlessly left us wide open to attack on 9/11. This is criminal recklessness even if the "conspiracy theory" charges of actually aiding and abetting the terrorists are as untrue as they are distressing. See Greg Palast reports on 9/11: http://www.gregpalast.com/.

Even if Bush II may have achieved some worthwhile short-term objectives by attacking Afghanistan, his utter failure to follow through squandered any accomplishments, and left us less safe over the long run. Even worse, Bush's subsequent rush to attack Iraq alienated our allies and did nothing to undermine or intimidate Al Qaeda. In fact, Bush's Iraqi failures opened the door for a pro-Bin Laden / Al Qaeda Shiite regime in Iraq.

Such a regime may join with Iran and the Taliban to "export" Islamic revolution to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar and other states, perhaps even Pakistan and majority Muslim former Soviet "republics." Such a regime would likely aid or sponsor Al Qaeda attacks on the United States, something Saddam's Iraq never did. How can Bush prevent this from happening? His administration offers no solutions. Their policy by photo-op -- declare victory and walk away from the mess -- is no answer. Nixon's similar approach to Vietnam demonstrates Bush's folly.

We're not in any way safer, and in many respects we're less safe. Bush squandered money needed to shore up homeland security to attack Iraq. Meanwhile, Bush's rash decisions and rush to war stirred up more anti-American sentiment, shattered the post-9/11 alliance against terrorism, crippled US international standing, and created more martyrs -- past and future. Thanks to Bush, 100s or 1000s or maybe even 10,000s are now willing to die to kill Americans. We've seen this already with the Riyadh bombings.

In the 1990s, Republicans assured us they left Saddam in power by design; this was not a failure to win a complete victory. Unless the last generation of Bush officials are mercenaries and traitors who sold out US interests to the highest bidder, then an unstable or Shiite-dominated Iraq is a clear and present danger to the US and US regional allies. A worse threat than Saddam.

Recently, Republicans repudiated their previous policies and claimed US security required regime change in Iraq. Their policy contained an inherent promise that the new regime would be less threatening than Saddam. So far, Bush II has failed to deliver on this promise. So far, he has an incomplete "victory" in Afghanistan which let anti-American, pro-terrorist forces regroup, reform and regain their strongholds. Add to that a "victory" in Iraq which only increased the risks to US security.

With these increasing threats, what is Bush doing?

The administration keeps trying to slash veterans' benefits by $billions to pay for huge tax cuts for the wealthiest elite. Bush and his union-busting allies are using "homeland security" legislation to punish the qualified civilians we rely on to keep us safe.

Undercutting those we need to keep us safe. Needlessly increasing the power of terrorists and the risks they will attack, squandering time and resources, and alienating allies we need. The most ardent Bush supporter cannot show how any of this makes any US citizen any safer.

When a Democrat debates Bush in 2004 -- if Bush even has the courage to debate -- the central question should be: "Do you feel safer today than you did four years ago?" Any honest person must say, because of two generations of failed Bush policies, the answer is emphatically no.

Also see: http://www.mikehersh.com/Remember_the_Maine.shtml

http://www.mikehersh.com/Republicans_Cant_Keep_Us_Safe.shtml