[lbo-talk] MN: Repugs beginning to worry Iraq will be bad for them

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Sat May 31 04:43:49 PDT 2003


[Yea for the Mercury News. The left edge of the mainstream press]

[A credibility crisis is like an avalanche. It is impossible to say what pebble will set it off. But once it goes, it'll be impossible to get back. And every lie that doesn't set it off is just more weight piling up. We shouldn't worry so much about how they get away with it. We should be thinking about how to best to capitalize when it collapses. Because in their hubristic self-intoxication, they are convinced that in lies they've discovered the philosopher's stone of politics. So they're just going to keep on piling up the weight.]

http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/5984212.htm

Posted on Sat, May. 31, 2003

Iraq repercussions trouble top advisers

RATIONALE FOR INVASION CHALLENGED

By John Walcott

Mercury News Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON - Some of President Bush's top advisers, who had hoped the

war in Iraq would be the turning point in the battle against terrorism

and the centerpiece of the president's re-election campaign, fear it

is instead becoming a political, diplomatic and military mess.

``The postwar period in Iraq is messy. We haven't found what we said

we'd find there and there are unpleasant questions about assumptions

we made and intelligence we had,'' said a senior national security

official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. ``If many more

months go by and our troops are still there, the Iraqis are still

fighting each other and us, and we still haven't found any WMD'' --

weapons of mass destruction -- ``there will be hell to pay.''

The situation in Iraq could rebound quickly, especially if U.S. forces

restore power, water, health care and other services; revive the

nation's battered oil industry; and unite feuding Kurds, Shiites,

Sunnis and tribes into some sort of civil authority.

But for now, U.S. troops in Iraq are the targets of anger and ambushes

instead of being greeted as liberators, as some Pentagon officials had

expected.

Eleven Americans died this week from enemy action and accidents, and

some of their civilian leaders now privately admit that the relatively

small force that quickly overwhelmed the Iraqi military is too small

to restore order in a nation the size of California.

Wasted month

The U.S. attempt to hand the country over to an Iraqi civilian

administration isn't faring much better, and Bush is expected to meet

with L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian in Iraq, in Qatar on

Wednesday to discuss overhauling the American administration in

Baghdad for the second time in a month. A top U.S. official Friday

said Bremer's predecessor, retired Army Gen. Jay Garner, had failed,

adding: ``We lost a month because of Garner.''

Critics in Congress and some within the government now suspect that a

third problem, potentially the most serious of all, helps to explain

the unexpected difficulties.

Much of the administration's public rationale for the war, and much of

its planning for the war and its aftermath, these critics say, appears

to have been based on fabricated or exaggerated intelligence that was

fed to civilian officials in the Pentagon by Iraqi exiles eager for

the United States to oust Saddam Hussein.

The exiles, intelligence officials said, told Pentagon officials,

among other things, that many Iraqi Shiites would welcome American

troops as liberators, that some key Iraqi generals would surrender

their units and that Saddam had sent a key operative to work with a

small Islamist group, Ansar al-Islam, that had ties to Al-Qaida.

Officials in the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State

Department all warned repeatedly that past experience with the exiles,

led by Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress, indicated that

their intelligence was unreliable at best.

But the intelligence information and Iraqi defectors supplied by the

Iraqi National Congress were taken seriously in two important places:

the New York Times and a special intelligence group set up by

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.

<our pal, Judith Miller -- the Claire Sterling of the 00s!>

The Iraqi National Congress, U.S. intelligence officials said,

bypassed skeptics in the CIA and DIA and fed the same information

about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to Al-Qaida to the

Times and the Pentagon, so Pentagon officials would confirm what the

nation's most influential newspaper was hearing and the newspaper

would confirm what the Pentagon was hearing.

An internal Times e-mail reported by the Washington Post said Chalabi

``has provided most of the front-page exclusives on WMD to our paper''

and added that a team of U.S. troops searching for chemical and

biological weapons in Iraq was ``using Chalabi's intel [intelligence]

and document network for its own WMD work.''

Doubts about the administration's assertions that Saddam had hidden

stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and established ties to

Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaida terrorist organization have been growing

almost daily since the war ended, as U.S. troops have failed to find

either the weapons or ties to terrorism.

The senior Marine general in Iraq said Friday that extensive searches

had failed to locate any chemical weapons.

``It was a surprise to me then -- it remains a surprise to me now --

that we have not uncovered weapons,'' Lt. Gen. James Conway, the

commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, told reporters at the

Pentagon in a video teleconference.

Intensive search

``Believe me, it's not for lack of trying. We've been to virtually

every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad,

but they're simply not there,'' Conway said.

Full: http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/5984212.htm



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