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| Volume X, Fall 2003, Number 3 |
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| Editor's Note |
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Shocked, if not awed, the Bush administration is now taking body blows from critics and erstwhile friends on its war tactics and strategy in Iraq. Despite official happy talk during the week of July 24 about the killing of Saddam Hussein's two sons (along with other Iraqis barely mentioned), there was a front-page report in The Washington Post on July 26 that former Secretary of State James Baker had been asked to go help rescue the administration from the Mesopotamian quicksand (he was apparently on vacation and incommunicado; the story and the apparent threat to Pentagon policy ascendancy promptly vanished). Far more damaging, Bush officials stand revealed as having acted in bad faith from the very beginning of their long public-relations march toward Baghdad. Ideology and hubris trumped facts, logic and the national interest.
Vice-president Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice -- and, of course, their "boss," President George W. Bush -- are becoming twenty-first-century icons for the arrogance of power. Underlings responsible in the first instance for the apparent debacle in the Middle East have been outed by intrepid reporters and analysts such as Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder (July 14) and Peter Slevin and Dana Priest of The Washington Post (July 24). They verified the prescient piece in Mother Jones by Robert Dreyfuss just before the war began in March. A handful of Pentagon civilians fed the vice-president's office and NSC some manipulated intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda connections to help them scare the American public into supporting their war. They were enthusiastically supported by neocon think tanks and publications that tirelessly amplified their case inside the Beltway.
So President Bush (a collective noun meant to include the White House staff, NSC and vice-president's office) either lied in the State of the Union claim that Saddam Hussein's regime had tried to buy uranium from an African country (Niger, apparently) or foolishly repeated the lies of Pentagon advisers hellbent on war. WMDs were the keystone of the case against Iraq. But they turned out to be as fictitious as the connection between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. The last administration lied about sexual peccadillos; this one lied about a foreign threat and the need to go to war. Few can doubt which is worse. The families of our young martyrs to the cause of empire must surely be in no doubt. No one died, was raped, went to war or got stuck with a bill for billions as a result of the escapades of a president and an intern in the Oval Office.
It is very hard to gloss over this level of disregard for the lives of ordinary Americans. Of course, some defenders of the war say -- with the elegant, eloquent Tony Blair -- that ending the Baath regime justifies whatever means were used to do it. Such self-serving excuses used to be roundly condemned when resorted to by communist and fascist empire builders. The irony eludes Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense, who just came back from a tour of Saddam's killing fields in search of still more evidence that the Iraqi dictator was indeed evil. No one would argue otherwise. But that's all there is; no WMD or al-Qaeda connection, not much remaining credibility for U.S. intelligence.
Putting aside questions of the morality and wisdom of the war itself, securing the peace in Iraq is proving as difficult as a vast horde of policy analysts around the world warned it would be. As predicted, a guerrilla campaign -- CENTCOM commander John Abizaid's term -- is being waged in the Sunni middle of the country, and significant resistance seems likely to go on as long as the occupation does (the Shiites may be playing rope-a-dope for now, letting the Sunnis "punch themselves out," according to Ken Katzman in our symposium, p. 1). No one thinks the war is over, despite the Bush attempt to stamp "mission accomplished" on the file. American soldiers are being killed and injured on a daily basis. General Eric Shinseki, now retired from the U.S. Army, warned about the probable requirements of occupation before the war and was shunned by Secretary Rumsfeld and ridiculed by Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz for his trouble.
Ideology trumped professional war-fighting experience and common sense because Pentagon civilians had their master plan. According to an article by Barbara Slavin in USA Today (July 21), Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith admitted flat-out that the military had to maintain its flexibility and therefore could not commit adequate troops to the Iraq effort. Apparently, we had to be ready to carry out other "preventative" wars, should the opportunity present itself. Mr. Feith was not alluding to the hellhole of Liberia but to Middle Eastern states reluctant to go along with the U.S. imperial program, particularly Syria and Iran. President Bush has harshly criticized both countries for refusing to crush Lebanese Hezbollah, one of Israel's primary enemies (see Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, August 3). Never mind that Syria has done much to assist Washington in the hunt for al-Qaeda operatives. More will be required to win the region's hearts and minds and to stifle resistance to peace as we define it. All this and democracy too (see Hemmer, Salhani, Greenwood and Moore/Shrank inside).
The current barrage of criticism from the media will be hard to stem; reporters are hopping mad about having been duped. The official version of why the Iraq war was necessary has been thoroughly discredited. The people gave their trust to leaders who now seem unworthy of it, despite all the blather about character and straight talk. Why didn't the loyal opposition and the media question the president's misguided war policy? They seem to have been missing in action; or, more likely, AWOL. The neocons lied, and Democrats in Congress abdicated responsibility in letting them have complete charge of the Middle East portfolio following September 11, 2001. The media inhaled the neocon propaganda. The administration's credibility gap is growing, but what credibility does its loyal opposition have? Our national leadership, its opposition and our media have all been discredited.
It is only a matter of time before the empire plan will have to be scaled back. Despite our relative wealth, we will not be able to come up with the resources to manage such an overseas adventure. That would require our political leaders to look the American people in the eye and tell them the truth about what sacrifices have to be made: higher deficits, higher taxes and higher casualties from terrorists both abroad and at home. We are not scared enough for that, even considering the trauma of 9/11. Iraq did not threaten us with global thermonuclear war, after all. That would be North Korea, a country the Bush people are rightly reluctant to attack. Pyongyang, unlike Baghdad, has real, not imaginary, means with which to retaliate.
Anne Joyce
August 1, 2003
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