Anatomy
Of A Quack-Mire
By
Jim Lobe
Inter Press
Service
12 July, 2003
How could such smart people get so much wrong?
I really do believe
we will be greeted as liberators, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney
declared on television just as U.S. troops were massing along the border
between Kuwait and Iraq on the eve of Washington's march to Baghdad.
Wildly off the mark,
declared Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, when asked by senators
just before the war whether he agreed with then-Army Chief of Staff
Eric Shinseki's estimate that more than 200,000 troops would be needed
as an occupation force after the war.
I believe it is definitely
more likely than not that some degree of common knowledge between (al
Qaeda and Iraq) was involved in the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New
York and the Pentagon, former Central Intelligence Agency chief and
Defense Policy Board member James Woolsey testified before a federal
court just before the war.
We know where they
are, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld assured television viewers
about the location of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
at the end of March, two weeks into the war. They are in the area
around Tikrit and Baghdad, and east, west, south and north somewhat.
The British government
has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities
of uranium from Africa, declared President George W. Bush in his
late-January State of the Union address.
We know he's out trying
once again to produce nuclear weapons and we know that he has a longstanding
relationship with various terrorist groups, including the al-Qaeda organization,
asserted Cheney on the war's eve.
Now, three months after U.S.
troops consolidated control over Iraq, not only has the White House
admitted that neither it nor the British ever had solid--as opposed
to obviously forged--evidence that Hussein was trying to buy uranium
in Africa; no WMD have been discovered; the notion of ties between Iraq
and al Qaeda has been officially dismissed by a special U.N. panel;
and public sentiment in Iraq--at least as registered by even the compliant
U.S. press--appears ever more doubtful about its liberation,
to say the least.
That last observation is
bolstered by the fact the administration is engaged in a major debate
over whether significantly more troops than the 145,000 U.S. troops
in Iraq now are needed to secure the country. Washington has asked no
less than 70 countries to contribute troops or police--at mostly U.S.
taxpayers' expense--to an occupation that is increasingly open-ended.
Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers,
including growing numbers of Republicans, have become distinctly uneasy
about the situation in Iraq, as the gap between the confident predictions
made at the start of the war by top U.S. officials and the grim reality
of the actual situation--in which U.S. allied and soldiers are facing
an average of 13 violent attacks each day--appears to be moving toward
guerrilla warfare.
The problem here is
that Americans are unsure about the future of our involvement in Iraq,
Republican Sen. John McCain, an Iraq hawk before the war, gently told
an increasingly defensive Rumsfeld at a hearing Wednesday as Democrats
called openly for the administration to swallow its pride and ask NATO,
if not the U.N., to take over. So what you need to do, in my view,
is give...a concrete plan as much as you can.
The 'Q' word--for quagmire--not
to mention the 'V' word, for Vietnam--is back in mainstream discourse
as each day appears to bring the killing of at least one more U.S. or
British soldier, and U.S. troops and officers in Iraq tell television
cameras that they are stretched far too thinly to impose order on a
country the size of California with a population that grows less and
less appreciative of their presence, and appears to be harboring people
who actually want them dead.
The Army is getting
bogged down in a morale-numbing 4th Generation War in Iraq that is now
taking on some appearances of the Palestinian Intifada, according
to a comment late last month on an all-military website, while even
some conventional media have suggested that Iraq could turn into a U.S.
Chechnya.
Some frustrated troops
stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress
to request their units be repatriated, the Christian Science Monitor
reported this week. The Monitor quoted from one letter by an Army soldier:
Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane
ticket home. An officer from the same Division: Make no
mistake, the level of morale for most soldiers that I've seen has hit
rock bottom.
U.S. Middle East experts,
particularly former diplomats and intelligence officers and academic
analysts, had long warned that defeating Iraq militarily would be the
easy part. The key question was, what about the morning after? These
were the same specialists who also questioned the administration's assertions
about Iraq's links to al Qaeda, its reconstitution of a nuclear program,
and the more extravagant claims about the quantity of chemical and biological
weapons it had at its disposal.
But their views were systematically
ignored, even in Congress where most Democrats, eager not to be seen
as soft on Saddam post-9/11, were reluctant to be seen as
calling into question the words of a popular president.
Just as evidence--such as
the CIA's conclusion that the British reports about Iraqi
uranium purposes were forged--was diverted or deep-sixed before it could
affect policy-making, so it is clear that those who actually knew something
about the Middle East were excluded from policy-making circles.
It is fairly incredible
that the civilians in the Pentagon inhaled their own propaganda about
the welcome that U.S. forces would receive from the Iraqis, said
retired ambassador Chas Freeman, president of the Middle East Policy
Council, a group of former U.S. officials and analysts who specialize
in the region. No one who knew anything about the region ever
bought the notion that U.S. troops would be welcomed as liberators,
but no one who knew anything about the region was invited to take part
in policy discussions.
The result, however, is that
the ideologues, particularly those clustered around Cheney and Rumsfeld,
simply reinforced each other's assumptions and attacked everyone, including
the real experts, who disagreed with them.
The professionals were seen
by the hawks as apologists for Arab dictators, Israel-haters, Saudi-lovers,
shills for Big Oil, intellectually incurious, and slaves to traditional
thinking. As Rumsfeld once complained about U.S. intelligence, We
tend to hear what we expect to hear, whether it's bad or good. Human
nature is that way. Unless something is jarring, you tend to stay on
your track and get it reinforced rather than recalibrated.
So certain was Rumsfeld that
the professionals were wrong, that he set up his own shop to recalibrate
the intelligence, staffing it with people hand-picked by and ideologically
compatible with Wolfowitz. At the same time, Cheney and his deputy,
I. Scooter Libby, made frequent visits to CIA headquarters in what was
taken as an effort to intimidate the analysts (and presumably CIA director
George Tenet). It never occurred to the hawks, of course, that they
might be as susceptible to human nature's failings as the professionals.
When the professionals argued
in the administration's inner councils that U.S. troops would face as
much apprehension and hostility as gratitude from key sectors of the
Iraqi population, the hawks replied that they underestimated the attraction
and political skills of a man like Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Pentagon-backed
Iraqi National Congress (INC), who told them of his far-reaching secret
network of informants and supporters inside Iraq.
Indeed, it was defectors
who were recruited by the INC who provided the information
that made the ideologues so confident about the existence of WMD, the
ties between Baghdad and al Qaeda, and the rapturous greeting U.S. soldiers
would get in Baghdad and on the way there.
Why was the Pentagon
so unprepared for the Day After? asked Trudy Rubin, foreign affairs
analyst for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Back in November,
she wrote last week, Wolfowitz told me he believed that the London-based
Iraqi opposition (headed by Ahmed Chalabi) would return to Baghdad and
assume the reins of power, just as Gen. Charles de Gaulle and the Free
French returned triumphantly to postwar France.
The hawks thus saw westernized
Chalabi, who had not been in Baghdad since he was a teenager, as the
man of destiny whom U.S. military forces had merely to install in the
capital. The professionals, who had worked with him in the early 1990s,
on the other hand, saw him as a confidence man.
What he did was pander
to the dreams of a group of powerful men, centered in the Pentagon,
the Defense Policy Board, the vice president's office, and various think
tanks scattered around Washington, according to Thomas Engelhardt,
a New York writer who produces a daily web log on the war.
The thing that needs
to be grasped here is that since 1991 these men have been dreaming up
a storm about reconfiguring the Middle East, while scaling the heavens
(via various Star Wars programs for the militarization of space), and
so nailing down an American earth for eternity. Their dreams were utopian
and so, by definition, unrealizable. Theirs were lava dreams, and they
were dreamt, like all such burning dreams, without much reference to
the world out there. They were perfect pickings for a Chalabi.
Of course, the fact that
Chalabi is now scarcely mentioned as a possible political force in Iraq
is barely acknowledged by the hawks who still insist, albeit with less
conviction, that things are going their way and that there is no reason
to panic.
Copyright 2003 Inter Press
Service