WASHINGTON, April 30 (UPI) -- There has always been a dubious reading of history in the Bush administration, sort of like a History Channel documentary with lots of images and some quick analysis.
President George W. Bush Thursday will step to the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln to announce the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq as the giant aircraft carrier sails toward its home port of San Diego.
The plan has the ring of the public relations department. The Abraham Lincoln's aircraft opened hostilities against Iraq and somebody remembered the unconditional Japanese surrender that ended World War II was signed on the decks of the Battleship Missouri that had led the long march to Tokyo.
From the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 on, World War II has been like a rhetorical attic trunk for Bush he has rummaged through to find words like "liberate" and "allies" and comparisons of Saddam Hussein to Adolph Hitler. Those against Bush's war, said his Texas ally Rep. Tom Delay were "appeasers" a word without much meaning since Munich in 1938.
In this trunk, the president also found the concept of military tribunals that has resulted in some 600 men being held incommunicado in Guantanamo Bay Cuba and the idea of a whole nation mobilized in defense, which led to the cumbersome Department of Homeland Security and more body searches of private citizens than at any time in the country's history.
From the moment of those horrendous attacks and Bush's determination to make terrorism his highest priority, the president has faced a terrible problem of closure. When is it over? When can he say his administration has secured the nation? When can he say the terrorists have been defeated? When can he declare victory and go home?
Keeping a nation of 281 million people at a fever pitch and on a war footing is both largely impossible and destructive to the society.
But closure on the terrorist front has eluded Bush.
Despite scores of arrests, Osama bin Laden has never been found and though the destruction of the Taliban was public and televised, Afghanistan has suffered continuing unrest and is now being ignored by Bush administration publicists.
Iraq emerged a year ago January as a target in part because it was a defined goal. If Bush could remove Saddam Hussein and neutralize his weapons of mass destruction, it would be an achievement, and a tangible one.
There was, even then, when he first mentioned Iraq only a dubious connection between Saddam and the terrorists that attacked the United States. Now weeks after U.S. forces entered Baghdad nothing has been found that would establish anything stronger.
The weapons of mass destruction too have remained elusive and even if they are now discovered, it would be unlikely they were ready for combat action. Saddam did not use them and, in fact, put up very little defense at all.
U.S. forces swept through the 24 million-person nation swiftly and destroyed any formal defense the Iraqis made. This will allow Bush to make a carefully crafted announcement Thursday evening that "major combat operations" are over in Iraq.
If he declared victory, the White House lawyers apparently ascertained, the United States would become responsible for the people as an occupying power, so Bush will skirt such a direct claim.
Another artifact from the World War II memorabilia was the plan to have U.S. officials lead an interim government in Iraq. It worked for Gen. Douglas MacArthur in the occupation of Japan, they reasoned. Japan on the other hand, though defeated, was an ordered and homogenous nation with a strong civil structure. Iraq is not a nation at all, but a collection of the tribes brought together in the last century by the British.
The U.S. armed forces have won for Bush an accomplishment as he enters an election year. They removed Saddam Hussein! The planners of this war, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and activist Richard Perle have gloated in victory, challenging the opposition to the conflict as discredited.
But Bush has to be more circumspect. History may not see the conclusion of this conflict the way Rumsfeld does as he takes his victory jog around the Middle East. History is unlikely to remember Rumsfeld at all. Only two secretaries of war or defense in the 20th century have made a mark. James Forrestal by committing suicide by jumping from the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda Maryland and Robert McNamara by pursuing the Vietnam War.
Bush already has his page in history for his leadership after Sept. 11, but the Iraq chapter returns are not in yet. Bush will announce Thursday that the reconstruction phase has begun in Iraq. There are still strong snatches of chaos and violence in the country that suggest many of the assumptions of the U.S. conquerors about reconstruction are questionable.
The war too has left U.S. foreign policy in shambles. After Sept. 11 brought the U.S. historic cooperation from Russia, China and Western Europe and even in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Iraq invasion without United Nations sanctions has left much of the world angry and frightened. Though some architects of the high tech attack on Iraq suggest that multilateral peace initiatives are history and that the United States can create a world peace through raw power, Bush is not likely to want history to remember him as the president who tried to create an American empire.
The president has spent almost every speech and address justifying his decision to go to war. The looting, the shooting of civilians, deaths of women and children and the theft of antiquities has marred the victory.
It will not be in weeks of the short war that history will measure Bush, but in the coming years in the Middle East. Did the second Gulf War end a spiral of violence in the region or did it breed new violence? Will Bush be remembered as a president who stood up to world terrorism or a president who ended the United Nation's ability to peacefully settle conflict and the United States' ability to be an honest broker of world peace?
