03.01.07 6:00 AM CST
• Politics
• Jamie Malanowski
Sometimes a company will look around and realize that "Good Old Bill" has become a liability, but for whatever reason—too ironclad a contract, too big a parachute, too much history—"Good Old Bill" just can’t be fired. Often when that happens, Bill gets discretely shouldered to the sidelines, and is left there while the rest of the company moves ahead. These days one feels that is exactly what is happening to George W. Bush.
Just look at the headlines. Last week, even as Bush was desperately pushing ahead with its plan to deploy an additional 21,000 American troops in Iraq, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush’s strongest ally, said Britain would remove 3,000 of the 7,100 troops it has in Iraq by the end of 2007.
On Monday, groups of people impatient with the White House’s failure to address global warming, started making policy themselves. A private investment group bid $45 billion for TXU, a gigantic Texas utility company, and pledged to turn the company green. The investors said that if their bid was accepted, they would cancel plans to build eight of the 11 new coal-fueled power plants that are on the drawing board, and to make significant investments in wind power and other alternative sources of energy.
At the same time, the governors of five Western states took steps themselves, and reached an agreement to come up with a regional target for reducing greenhouse gases within the next six months.
Yesterday, Bush began to ignore himself. You’ll recall that in December, the Iraq Study Group said that the US should sit down with Iraq’s neighbors, including Iran and Syria, to try and work out a regional solution to the civil war in Iraq. Bush never liked the idea. On January 11, Secretary of State Rice said "engagement with Syria and Iran" was "not diplomacy [but] extortion." On February 8, she told the Senate "talking with Syria now about Iraq would have downsides for us." Just last Sunday, she said that the US would meet with Iran only if it suspended its nuclear enrichment and reprocessing activities.
But yesterday—you guessed it—she told the Senate that the US had happily accepted an Iraqi invitation to a regional peace conference.
The allies are leaving us, the governors are making environmental policy, business is forging ahead, and the next step in our Iraq policy is to follow the recommendations of a group Bush had desperately wanted to ignore. This is what it looks like when a presidency is dead two years too soon.
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