USA: Polls: Bush popularity up strong rise, despite wire-taps, due to Iraq vote & US economy

The world-historical event constituted by Iraq's successful establishment of its democratic institutions last week, with the election of the first national Parliament directly under the Constitution drafted by the previous interim Parliament, rightly accrues to the author of the policy of overthrowing the Baathist regime and fostering an indigenous true democracy in Iraq. This Iraqi vote is the result, in significant part, of the Bush Doctrine in its second application, the first being Afghanistan. (See: America Unbound, the Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy by Daalders & Lindsey.)

Now, we learn of the partial Sunni shift toward support of the American presence in the country, for the time being. Sunnis ready to cooperate with US by Paul Martin, Washington Times, Dec18,2k5:

Key Sunni Muslim leaders in Iraq's violent Anbar province have concluded that their interests lie in cooperating with the United States, and they are seeking to extend a temporary truce honored by most insurgent groups for last week's elections.
But at the same time, they are demanding specific steps by the U.S. military, including a reduction in military raids and an increase in development projects for their vast desert province that stretches from the edge of Baghdad to the Syrian and Jordanian borders.

A shift that apparently includes release of some captured hi-level Sunnis from the old Baathist regime.

The purple-thumb vote is also a break-thru that has altered American military policy definitively, on the occasion where Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld announced that the forces had faced the reality of two recent phenom:

1.) the demand of US citizenry and media for involvement of the military in re-building the hurricance-ravaged communities of the US Gulf states, notably the metaphoric city of New Orleans, which amounts to enlistment of the US military in nation-building at home, under the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), of course;

while 2.) nation-(re-)building has been incipient in what American forces have been doing in Afghanistan and Iraq for some time now, but for which our forces have been severely criticized as not doing enuff. The problem for the military brass and their thinkers has been that, as large as has been the engagement in nation-building in both foreign countries during and following hostilities, such nation-building had been against stated policy as approved by previous interactions, not just with the Presidency, but with Congress. The tide has shifted, and the circumstances demand in the two recent cases, that the US forces instead always be trained and ready to swing into aggressive nation-building, even during hostilities. Rumsfeld, after surveying and consulting his generals and their advisors, has revised the official policy in this important direction. With it, a number of arch-conservatives have been left in the lurch, and Bush's incremental work toward a more "Compassionate Conservatism" has had an impact on military policy and the use of American armed forces.

Further, another area where miitary policy has been altered has to do with the Marines. The Marine Corps has added a fierce training in Mixed Martial Arts to their regimen, one that not every Marine can handle, but the program is so powerfully productive that the Navy and other forces have sent their own to the Marines to be trained, and Marines finishing the program have initiated ad hoc Matial Arts training in their units thru-out the Corps. This drastically increases the hand-to-hand combat capablities when rifles and greater armaments are ineffective or not at hand. The move retires another criticism often made of American military capablity on the ground.

Bush has turned out to be a Warrior President, and also a Builder President when we add to the military-policy redefinition under his purview, the present campaign to rebuild in the severely-struck Hurricane zones of the USA, and the general health of the economy with hi-er levels of employment - despite all the trade-offs.

These outstanding advances don't make the Bush Administration flawless. I for one must register my deep discontent with the failure of the Administration to go up against the gas/oil madness, to replace these killer fuels with a whole new turn of auto, truck, bus, and plane manufacture by means of state-of-the-art engineering that is integrated with planning for and reliance upon alternative fuels. At this point, this approach, the refWrite approach, targets only vehicle retooling and refuelling. It means the state in this critical time should give orders to the vehicle manufacturers, citing the desire of the US military for changing over its enitre fleet of every kind, and fuel producers. We are tied to oil-producing states too closely, and the must be phased down drastically, But more important: The smog in the cities and the pollution generally of American air, making it unbreathable and sickness-inducing, far outruns the non-vehicular industrial input to the problem. The center of the main problem is the American car owner.

Indeed, Conservatism is in large part gerry-rigged to exhale its own ideological smog of arguments and justifications for the terrible state of American air, buttressing an obsolesced technology of gas and oil that's killing us softly (in the background all too often and nowadays all too well hidden is the Randian atheist theory of industrialism, which promises a new invention that will integrate industrial/vehicular pollution into a glorious - cawff!- new - cawff! cawff! spit! - way of life. If only the President's low popularity numbers were about something as obvious as the national sickness-inducing car culture which needs to undergo a revolutionary transformation, even this untended disaster mite be cleared up with all deliberate speed. - Owlb