Chalk it up as one last big win for Vice President Dick Cheney and his secretive -- OK, that's redundent when talking about a Cheney guy -- chief of staff, David Addington.
Remember when the president said in August 2007, "it should be a goal of the nation to shut down Guantanamo?" (Of course, he added, closing it is easier said than done.)
Never mind -- at least for now or anytime in the near future.
The State Department reportedly prepared memos on transferring the prisoners; so did the Pentagon. Bush considered none of them.
That's according to a report in today's New York Times, which said that after the Supreme Court ruling, Bush "adopted the view of his most hawkish advisors that closing Guantanamo would involve too many legal and political risks to be acceptable, now or any time soon."
Steven Lee Myers, writing in The Times, says that despite the president's stated desire to close Gitmo, and the pressure that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have applied to accomplishing that, they have "acquiesced to the arguments of more hawkish advisors, including Vice President Dick Cheney."
White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said of the Guantanamo decision: "It's very complex. It's complicated. It's difficult."
She said the admininistration was working to reduce the population at the prison -- and had brought it down from about 600 to 270.
"It's not as easy as snapping your fingers" and closing the prison, she said, adding, "unless you don't care."
That was a reference to the 7% of released detainees who, she said, have returned to the battlefield.
"It's slow work," Perino said at the daily White House news briefing this morning. "The president has made a decision to close Guantanamo Bay. That has not changed."
As for Cheney, his spokeswoman, Megan Mitchell, said by e-mail seconds after Perino spoke: "You heard from Dana in the briefing. I don't have anything to add beyond that."
Sometime soon, seven years after it invaded Afghanistan, the Bush administration is expected to settle on a new policy to stabilize that still-fragile country. As Gen. David McKiernan, the top commander there, said:
I think we are in a very tough fight -- a tough counter-insurgency fight. We're [at] a higher level of violence than we were this time last year. We are seeing a greater amount of insecurity in certain areas. The idea that it might get worse before it gets better is certainly a possibility.
McKiernan made news last week when he suggested that the now-famous "surge strategy" that Gen. David Petraeus fashioned for Iraq -- working with tribal leaders -- might not work in Afghanistan because of "a degree of complexity in the tribal system which is greater than what I found in Iraq years ago." Of the 400 major tribal networks in Afghanistan, he said, "a lot of that traditional tribal structure has broken down."
The fact is our aid that is given is extraordinarily ineffective for many years, and they've done nothing about it. So now they're talking about it, but there's nothing they can accomplish in the last days of the administration.
-- Johanna Neuman
Photo: Gen. David McKiernan meets with President Bush in the Oval Office to discuss the Afghanistan policy on Oct. 1. Credit: Alex Wong / Getty Images
If you were watching only the polls, Wall Street or Afghanistan over the last several months, you could be forgiven for thinking President Bush had been having a rough go of it, what with a job-approval rating rivaling that of Richard M. Nixon at his lowest, the tumbling Dow and the resurgent Taliban.
But you'd be wrong. It really hasn't been an entirely bad closing act for Bush. Indeed, he's on a roll. At least that's how the White House sees it.
Consider:
Last Monday, he suffered a legislative wipeout when the House rejected the $700-billion plan Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. hatched to deal with the credit crisis. By Friday, the president had signed an only slightly revised package into law. No other legislative issue carries greater importance for the president as his time in office wanes.
On Wednesday, he will sign a civilian nuclear agreement with India that won congressional approval last week. Apart from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it has been one of the most important -- and troublesome -- foreign policy issues on Bush's agenda for several years.
Remember the chant "drill, baby, drill" at the Republican National Convention last month? Congress heard it. After balking for years -- decades, really -- at relaxing rules against offshore exploration for oil and gas, it went along with the president's own initiative to ease government obstacles. The measure doesn't open up drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to be sure, but it is nonetheless one of Bush's top energy priorities.
Not bad for a lame-duck president and one of the least popular at that.
But wait, there may be more.
Speaking with reporters after a closed-door forum with small-business people at the Olmos Pharmacy in San Antonio, the president said he was looking forward to moving back to Texas, "but in the meantime, it looks like I'm going to have a lot of work to do, between today and when the new president takes office."
As Dan Eggen, writing in the Washington Post, noted today, White House officials see such victories as underscoring "a year in which Bush has repeatedly pushed through major legislation on Capitol Hill regardless of troubles in the polls or the overwhelming focus on the presidential race."
For the White House transcript of the president's remarks to reporters this morning, click on "Read full story" ...
One of the key rules of politics so effectively exploited by Karl Rove is this: Neutralize your weakness by making it your strength.
How else to explain Gov. Sarah Palin's readiness in the vice presidential debate with Sen. Joe Biden to trash life as it has been known in George W. Bush's Washington over the last eight years?
Keep in mind: President Bush's approval rating has fallen to 22% in the latest CBS News poll. (That's one point below Richard M. Nixon's lowest rating -- the modern-day standard for trashing a president).
The situation in Afghanistan apparently depends on where one sits.
Here are three recent statements about the war:
-- "It is showing 'progress' but is facing some "difficulties."
-- "The going may be tougher before it gets easier."
-- "We are in a tough counterinsurgency fight, we are in a higher level of violence this year than we were this time last year."
The first is the assessment of President Bush. The second that of Gen. David H. Petraeus, who is about to take over as head of Central Command. The third comes from Gen. David D. McKiernan, who the Senate confirmed today as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.
The president chose to highlight "the fact that millions of young girls go to school that didn't have a chance to go to school before in Afghanistan.'
"That's incredible progress," he said, adding that healthcare needs are being met for the first time, and roads are being built to help farmers take goods to market.
He did add, however: "There's difficulties, of course, because killers can't stand this progress."
Petraeus had a slightly different take he presented during an interview with the New York Times, reflecting on his efforts to gather information about that far corner of his new realm. "Obviously the trends in Afghanistan have been in the wrong direction, and I think everyone is rightly concerned about them ... wresting control of certain areas from the Taliban will be very difficult." he said.
McKiernan spoke with reporters at the Pentagon. "In the east and south we are seeing a greater amount of insecurity in certain areas. So I wouldn't say things are all on the right track," he said.
During his photo op with Bush a little while later, McKiernan remained silent, our Times colleague Julian Barnes reports.
The question of the day was properly blunt: Do we have a leadership crisis in America?
No surprise at the results, given the turmoil in the economy, the downward trend in Afghanistan, and a president whose job approval ratings, at 26% in the new ABC News poll, were lower than any president save Richard M. Nixon and Harry S. Truman.
Still, some of the comments in the survey by Politico.com's Arena page were particularly interesting, from both sides of the political spectrum.
David Marin, Republican strategist:
It’s a crisis that includes a profound lack of imagination, initiative, courage, credibility and authority. But don’t blame elected leaders only. Blame also belongs with the media and voters who don’t reward these things, and more often than not actually punish them.
Former Republican Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa:
From the arts, sciences and every field of academia to business, agriculture, and non-governmental organizations, America has never had greater leadership. Society’s singular leadership exception today is politics where the existence of wondrous institutional arrangements has papered over frail abilities of electoral actors.
Robert B. Reich, the secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration:
The financial crisis couldn't have come at a worse time. The President is worse than a lame duck; he's fundamentally disabled.
Will Durst (identified as "Official Arena Comedian"):
Thomas Jefferson said America gets the leaders it deserves, which leads me to believe that we must have been a very naughty nation recently.
For the full collection, check out the Arena page at Politico.com.
The setting was familiar--the rostrum backed by the massive green marble. So, too, the message.
President Bush was speaking to the U.N. General Assembly, giving his valedictory address. And in tenor and content, it could have been the introductory speech he delivered in a meeting delayed as New York, and the world, recovered from the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
Delivering a message of preemption, Bush told the U.N. today:
But, if one sentence in his address--delivered with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran looking on--summarized Bush's message after eight years of occasionally rocky relations with the world body, it was this:
The United Nations and other multilateral organizations are needed more urgently than ever.
Was this the same President Bush, then, who made it clear in his 2002 address that the United States was headed toward a showdown with Saddam Hussein. And that while Washington would appreciate U.N. support, the mission would go forward regardless?
For eight years, Stephen J. Hadley has observed President Bush up close.
As the president's national security advisor throughout the second term, and on many occasions before that as the deputy national security advisor, Hadley has traveled the world with the president, has cleared brush with him in Crawford, and briefed him daily on developments around the world.
He was there for discussions leading up to the surge in Iraq. Afghanistan? 9/11? North Korea? Iran? Hugo Chavez? Human rights and the Beijing Olympics? Russia? Georgia? All were in his portfolio.
If the word "crisis" was attached to it -- save, perhaps, for the stock market and Katrina -- it is only a slight exaggeration to say there's a good chance the debate went through Hadley's office at the northwest corner of the White House West Wing.
The vantage point for tracking the president could hardly be better.
Bush, Hadley said today, is "remarkably unaffected by eight years as president in terms of who he is, what he stands for, what he thinks of himself."
He spoke with a small group of reporters in the Roosevelt Room, across a small corridor from the Oval Office.
He was responding to a question about whether in its second term the administration had adopted a more pragmatic and less ideological approach to both foreign policy and economic matters, compared with the first term.
"Situations change," Hadley said, referring specifically to the Middle East, which he said was "a very different place" these days compared with 2001. Therefore, he said, the way the administration approaches it has naturally undergone change.
Of course no presidential aide wants to say the boss has eased back on his core principles. Nor would one want to say that the boss had not grown and adapted over eight years.
Hadley put it this way: "We've tried to be flexible. We've tried to learn."
-- James Gerstenzang
Photo: Stephen J. Hadley, left rear next to Vice President Dick Cheney, in the White House Roosevelt Room, 2006. Credit: Eric Draper / The White House
With barely seven weeks to go until election day, and four months left in office, the Bush administration has launched a three-phase plan intended "to strike at Osama bin Laden and top Al Qaeda leadership," NPR is reporting tonight.
President Bush has approved a plan that has brought a "surge" of CIA personnel from around the world into the fight along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, in an 11th-hour effort "to hammer Al Qaeda before the November election," the radio network says, quoting "two government officials."
Throughout the week, news organizations have been reporting on different elements of the stepped-up campaign.
The Los Angeles Times reported today that the United States was deploying Predator aircraft equipped with sophisticated new surveillance systems as part of its escalating offensive against extremist targets in Pakistan.
The effort along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border raises this question: Why wasn't it started earlier?
And, as important, what does the election — and Bush's nearing departure from the White House — have to do with the timing?
Update at 11 a.m. PDT Sept. 15: Since posting the article, NPR has removed the reference to a strike being conducted before election day. Instead, it says: "The plan represents an 11th-hour effort to hammer Al Qaeda until the Bush administration leaves office, two government officials told NPR."
President Bush's announcement this morning that he will be withdrawing 8,000 troops from Iraq highlights the dilemma he is causing Barack Obama and the Democratic presidential campaign.
It was almost predictable.
The more he does to take the Iraq war off the front page -- and remember, it was the war, more than anything else, that propelled Obama's rise through the Democratic presidential field -- the more the president does to clear the playing field for John McCain and the Republican campaign to dictate the elements of the political debate.
While neither the Iraq war nor the war in Afghanistan appears to be emerging "as a defining issue of contention between the candidates," the BBC notes, the announcement of troop withdrawals from Iraq helps McCain argue that he was correct in advocating a "surge" of troops when the president opted for that course in January 2007.
And, Adam Brookes of BBC News in Washington writes, Bush's announcement that some 4,000 soldiers and Marines will be headed for Afghanistan is unlikely to have more than a "limited direct impact on the race," because Obama has been arguing that "Iraq distracted the US from the more pressing business of Afghanistan."
So, even as he keeps a distance from the political battlefield, the president's battlefield maneuvers nonetheless touch the politics back home.
James Gerstenzang and Johanna Neuman are reporters in The Times' Washington bureau. Between the two of them, they have covered the White House, diplomacy, military affairs, the environment, international economics, trade and Congress. They have both spent time in Crawford, Texas.
