Bush May Be Lucky There’s No Federal Law to Allow Recall

It’s a mind-boggling thought, I suppose, but what if we ran the United States the way we run California?

My guess is that President George W. Bush would be four weeks away from a recall election, and we’d have several thousand replacements to choose from.

I thought about this while watching Gov. Gray Davis in last week’s debate. He was trying to explain how California ended up with the $38-billion budget shortfall that led to the recall campaign against him -- a gap that was later closed.

If Davis was irresponsible, what can be said about Bush and a projected $500-billion federal deficit? That’s not figuring in tens of billions of dollars the administration is now asking from taxpayers to rebuild Iraq after a war that has cost thousands of lives.

If you could apply California-style democracy, something tells me you could easily get 12% of the people who voted in the last national election to sign a petition to recall the president.

I haven’t been writing lately about Iraq and its cost because I’ve been neck-deep in recall. But when I went back and reviewed the 10,000 questions I raised about trying to establish a democracy in a country with no history of one, I was struck by a quote from USC professor Richard Dekmejian.

“Everything I know about Iraq ... tells me there will be near-term and long-term crisis after Saddam is defeated.”

Well, he was right on the near-term part. As for the long term, we’ll have to wait and see.

But as the body count grows each day, it becomes more obvious the Bush administration -- which had the lapdog support of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress -- had no idea what it was getting into.

U.S. officials insulted, condemned and alienated nations that had serious reservations about the war, and now those officials are begging those same countries to help clean up the mess we created.

Americans were told that Iraqi oil would pay for the rebuilding of the nation, but now working stiffs are being asked to dig into their pockets for years to come, even as the U.S. economy slumps and students in Los Angeles wait without end for more books and new schools.

We were told we had no choice but to wage war because Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorists threatened the entire world, and because this was the best way to stabilize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and you know how that’s turned out so far.

I don’t know what’s worse, the deception or the arrogance.

“In their ideological compulsion to intervene,” Dekmejian said last week of the empire-building architects of war, “the administration thought Iraq would establish a client state with a pro-American government. That didn’t occur, and it couldn’t have occurred, and now they’re proposing to spend an additional $60 billion.”

Now U.S. officials seem flummoxed on a daily basis.

None of those geniuses seems to have any idea how many troops we need to quell the violence. Or how long they’ll have to stay. Or how we’ll pay the bill.

Dekmejian is surprised there hasn’t been even more chaos so far, despite the recent bombing of a mosque and the U.N. offices in Baghdad, which together cost more than 100 lives. But it’s likely to get uglier, he said, as anti-American sentiment boils over and ethnic Iraqi factions turn on each other, with American soldiers and Iraqi citizens caught in the line of fire.

In a way, we’ve done a favor for the fanatics who hate the United States. Instead of having to cross oceans to harm us, we gave them a shooting gallery in Iraq, with American soldiers wearing targets on their backs.

“Did you hear that we’re cutting their hazard pay while they’re over there?” asked Jane Bright, a San Fernando Valley woman whose son, Army Sgt. Evan Ashcraft, was killed in Iraq last month.

I met Bright at the home of her son’s widow the day after he was killed.

“It’s actually harder to deal with it now,” she told me Friday, a month after his death. “After you get over the initial shock and disbelief, there are constant reminders of him. And Evan knew so many people, there were 400 people at his funeral. I couldn’t believe it. The procession to Oakwood Cemetery in Chatsworth was two miles long.”

Bright has joined a group called Military Families Speak Out, whose members have launched a “Bring Them Home Now!” campaign and will address Congress this Tuesday.

Bright was always opposed to the war on several grounds, but supportive of soldiers and respectful of her son’s belief that he was doing the right thing for himself, America and the world.

Now her doubts, anger and grief have won out, and she is raging against the lack of planning by U.S. officials and the continued vulnerability of American soldiers.

“It’s too late for my son,” she wrote in a letter to be read to Congress, “but it’s not too late for the many tens of thousands still in Iraq. Bring them home now!”

She signed it: Jane Bright, mother of Sgt. Evan Ashcraft. Deceased.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Steve Lopez can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.