[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