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Worse than a Loser
// The price of the question
It was already clear that George W. Bush's successor would not be a Republican. But the disclosure of secret information about CIA officer Valerie Plame, which everyone suspects was approved by Bush personally, makes it doubly certain.
Bush centered his strategy around the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq. His reasoning was simple. The war on terrorism could be waged eternally, and he could use it to win one campaign after another.
But Congressional elections last November showed that his reasoning was erroneous. The president and the members of his party lost badly in the elections, and are now saddled with a hostile Congress, whose majority is demanding basic changes in Iraq strategy. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of Americans agree with the Congress, as is seen in Bush's plummeting approval rating.
But the failure of Bush's Iraq strategy does not guarantee the Democratic candidate victory in the next presidential elections, and all the more so since the current president won't go without a fight. At the end of last year, Bush made it clear that he intends to go out with a bang when he chose the most risky course possible, not withdrawing American troops from Iraq and trying to wage the war to a victorious end.
Bush still has one alternative, which they hint at from time to time in Washington, saying that resistance to the Americans in Iraq is being supported by neighboring Iran and full success in Iraq will be impossible as long as the current regime is in place in Tehran. A new war on international terrorism and its accomplices could very well rally the American nation around its current leader. That would give Bush a chance to have a Republican successor in 2008.
Plamegate will settle that. Now Bush is not just the president who did not win (to put it mildly) the war in Iraq, he is the president who deceived the nation, lied to the people. For America, that is a big difference.
Bush has probably not forgotten that he defeated his Democratic opponent in 2000 in the wake of Monicagate, in the course of which his predecessor Bill Clinton long lied to the American people about the nature of his relationship with intern Lewinsky. Or that in 1974 Republican Richard Nixon was forced out of the White House before the end of his term after being caught in a lie during the affair of the bugging of the Democratic headquarters, that is, the suffix-inspiring Watergate scandal.
Watergate, Monicagate and Plamegate are worse sins for America than the failure of the military strategy of the latest resident of the White House.
Gennady Sysoev
All the Article in Russian as of Jan. 17, 2007
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