[Does anyone subscribe to the Atlantic? Fallows wrote a long cover story on Iraq that isn't available to non-subscribers, and my impression from the summary is that he thinks the solution is more troops and a bigger commitment. But everything shorter that I've seen from him lately seems to be saying virtually opposite -- sayi How is it a disaster, let us count the ways.
[So I was wondering if the summary to the Atlantic feature article was accurate or not. It is a view you'd expect from him and that magazine. But still, the stuff below, and the stuff excerpted this weekend in the NYT Week in Review <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/weekinreview/13read.html> sure make it seem like it would take a yeoman ideological effort to want to stay the courses.]
[Also the last line is appropos Doug's refernence to Rob Corddrey's shtick on how misleading us out of Iraq the same way they mislead us in is the only course the adminstration would consider honorable.]
Mon Nov 14, 12:11 PM ET
huffingtonpost
What Bush Isn't Addressing on Iraq
James Fallows
It would be nice if, even once, the Bush administration addressed the
strongest version of the case against its Iraq-and-terrorism policy,
rather than relying on bromides ("fight them there, so we don't have
to fight them here") and knocking down straw men ("some say Iraqis
don't deserve freedom...").
It probably won't happen. On available evidence, the President himself
has not grasped the essential criticism of moving against Iraq when he
did: that a war in Iraq undercut the broader and longer term war
against Islamic terrorism. Not in one speech, not in one interview or
off-hand remark, not in one insider account of White House
deliberation has there been the slightest indication that President
Bush recognizes this concept sufficiently to offer a rebuttal to it.
Someone who does recognize that distinction is Donald Rumsfeld, who
raised exactly this concern in the famous leaked memo of two years ago
warning that the United States might be creating terrorists even
faster than it was killing them. But Rumsfeld has locked himself into
permanent wise-guy mode, and it is hard to imagine him sitting still
for a question long enough to answer it seriously.
Paul Wolfowitz's answer would also be fascinating to hear -- but he is
off to other projects now. It offends the rules of karma that
Wolfowitz should have received Robert McNamara-style job of
absolution, tending to poor nations at the World Bank, without
undergoing obvious McNamara-style torments about the effects of his
grand vision to liberate a particular poor nation with U.S. troops.
Colin Powell has also made a sweet karmic deal: he can be known as the
most principled internal dissenter, without the muss and fuss of
public dissent. And in a different way, Condi Rice has an attractive
situation: she resolutely (and without nuance) defends the policy,
without usually being blamed for it.
As for an answer from Dick Cheney, dream on.
So when the President decided on Friday to "respond to the critics" of
his Iraq policy, naturally he did nothing of the kind. For the record,
here are the three biggest, most obvious points not even addressed in
his speech:
1) Everybody was not, in fact, working from the same misleading
information. The administration's line about WMD these days is: OK, we
might have been wrong -- but everybody was wrong, and everybody came
to the same conclusion we did. The foreigners came to that conclusion
through their intelligence services, and the Democrats (especially
that weaselly Kerry and ambitious Hillary) did it when they voted for
the war resolution.
But at the time, Administration officials were most emphasically NOT
saying "hey, we're all operating in the dark here." The implied
message of every briefing for reporters, every speech to the public,
and every background session with legislators, was: If you knew what
we knew, then you'd be as alarmed as we are. That was the message of
Dick Cheney's statement that "there can be no doubt" that Iraq "now"
had weapons of mass destruction, of Condi Rice's warning about the
mushroom cloud, and of Colin Powell's presentation to the UN. The
argument over Iraq's capabilities was by definition one sided, because
the Administration's presumed insider knowledge trumped what anyone
else could say. To pretend this was just a big widely-shared confusion
is dishonest and wrong.
2) To say that Saddam Hussein might have been a threat is not to say
that we had to invade when we did.
The Administration had two responses when asked in 2003 "what's the
rush?" about beginning the invasion. One was logistical: the troops
were in place, they couldn't wait forever, soon it would be hot (as if
they would not be in Iraq thorugh many summers!). This obviously is a
"Guns of August" style of reasoning: the trains are moving toward the
front, so we might as well start World War I.
The other response was: we've waited 12 years, why wait any more? The
answer to that was, first, that Iraq was now crawling with weapons
inspectors, who at a minimum would make it hard for Saddam to cook up
any surprise plans -- and, second, that beginning a war could touch
off a lot of messy complications left out of the optimistic war
scenarios.
This is the crucial point: Every aspect about managing occupied Iraq
could have turned out better with more time. There would be more
chance to line up Arabic-speaking or Islamic allies; more time to get
adequate U.S. troops on the scene; more chance to think about
protecting the power system, the hospitals, and other aspects of the
public infrastructure; more time in general to ask "what if..."
3) As for managing Iraq after the fall of Baghdad, there is no shared
blame at all. The Bush Administration owns every aspect of this
disastrously bungled situation.
The failure to stop the looting; the deliberately low-ball on the
number of occupying troops; the rash decision to disband the Iraqi
army; the inattention to how quickly American "liberators" would
become "occupiers"; the lassitude about recruiting or training enough
Arabic speakers or getting serious about developing an Iraqi force --
on these and a dozen other familiar points, the Administration cannot
possibly say, "Hey, everybody was wrong." These were the decisions of
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, in many cases bulldozing or ignoring
contrary views from within the military and other parts of the
government. Or, I guess the reality is: the Administration could
"possibly" say this. They just couldn't say it honestly.
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