From Baghdad to Tehran: On the Road to Gambler’s Ruin

[Roy Eidelson]

Immediately after the 9/11 attacks of 2001, President Bush sat down to play poker with the biggest stack of chips at the table, the odds-on favorite to win one of the highest-stakes games ever played. This huge initial chip advantage was built from a unified and supportive citizenry at home, a mainstream media that rarely questioned his judgment or intentions, an international community prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, and a military machine bigger than the next couple dozen countries combined. But since those early heady days, Bush and his close advisers and neocon allies have made one horrendous decision after another. The great tragedy, of course, is that the president has not been playing with his own chips. Rather, in this game his poor play has cost the lives of our courageous soldiers and many Iraqi civilians, our country's stature in the world, and our national resources much needed for other purposes, domestic and international.

Realizing how poorly they've been playing, many gamblers would recognize that they don't belong at the table--or conclude that they had entered the wrong game. Not so with the president. Rather, all signs suggest that this stubborn poker player will never learn any constructive lessons from his abysmal performance. There are at least five reasons why this is so. First, although a relative novice at the game, he has refused to prepare adequately, hasn't mastered the probabilities of various outcomes, and seemingly hasn't even tried to understand his opponents and their style of play. Second, he has cultivated and embraced an Old West saloon mentality where a loaded six-shooter and a quick draw can suddenly turn losing hands into winners. Third, he has a personal history of being bailed out whenever he has come up short in the past, whether through family connections or the highest reaches of our judicial system. Fourth, he has convinced himself that God is personally by his side, presumably carrying an unlimited supply of aces. And fifth, he is now deeply concerned about his legacy, and likely suspects that only a miraculously successful reshaping of Iraq and the Middle East can save him from being a frequent answer in "worst president ever" debates in the decades ahead.

My list is undoubtedly incomplete, but it is daunting. It suggests that President Bush will ultimately be driven to go "all in" regardless of any wiser counsel he might receive. And at the very least, "all in" means continuing to play the losing Iraq hands as he has done thus far--or perhaps with even greater recklessness and abandon. More frightening still, "all in" may mean saving his very last stack of chips for Iran. The key question today is whether Congress, acting on behalf of the American people, can muster the fortitude to pull him away from the table before it is (again) too late.

As an addendum, I've put together a short YouTube video entitled Resisting the Drums of War that describes the Bush administration’s warmongering appeals and how to counter them. It's available for viewing here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81UKnb5zJbM.