The Iraq War Comes to Washington
By Ahmad Faruqui, PhD
Dansville, CA

On Thursday, the US Congress passed an unprecedented $124 billion war spending bill that makes funding for the Iraq war conditional on a phased withdrawal of American forces, beginning on October 1, 2007 and concluding six months later.
President Bush, whose Republican Party lost its majority in both houses of Congress in last November’s elections, has let it be known that he would veto the bill. Since the Democrats are unlikely to muster a two-thirds majority to over-turn his veto, the bill would have to be redrafted by Congress at least once.
Nevertheless, in its current form, the bill is a very strong rebuke to the president’s Iraq policy, being diametrically opposed to his decision to mount a surge of American forces. The Democrats view it as reflecting the views of the American public.
Two weeks ago, the Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid of Nevada, took on the president’s failed war policy. He said that the US had lost the war and it was time to pull the troops out of a widening civil war.
Reid labeled Bush an isolated and incompetent war strategist. He said that Bush’s surge reminded him of the President Lyndon Johnson’s surge in Vietnam during the mid-sixties. Johnson’s surge simply led to higher American causalities and did not change the course of the war.
Reid’s statements set of a firestorm on the Republican side. The president dismissed the call for an American withdrawal as a decision that would embolden the enemy. He said he was not ready to pick a date for an American surrender.
Reid reminded Bush that he was president of the US, not its king, and therefore he had to listen to the voice of the people. Dick Cheney, the vice president, upped the ante by calling Reid a uninformed defeatist who did not understand the nature of the enemy. Reid shot back, calling Cheney the Bush administration’s “attack dog.”
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the former presidential candidate, jumped into the fray by calling Cheney the “American Idol of Outlandish Claims.” In response, Cheney lobbed back a few choice barbs but the only rejoinder that came his way was a terse comment that someone whose approval rating stood at a stark 9 percent did not deserve attention.
The Iraq War had crossed the borders of Iraq, leapt out of the Middle East, crossed the Atlantic Ocean and come to the American capital. Such sound and fury had not been observed in Washington for a very long time, perhaps not since the days when Congress was holding hearings on whether to impeach former president Bill Clinton for lying about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Against this backdrop, Foreign Policy magazine published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace ran a cover story on who had won the Iraq War. It contained pithy commentaries from several experts. The consensus was that the list of winners included Iran and Al Qaeda. There was little doubt among the experts that America had lost the war.
Armed with first-hand knowledge, a senior member of the Iraqi administration, Ali Allawi, has penned a 518-page book on “The occupation of Iraq.” The subtitle of the book suggests that the US won the war but lost the peace. While such phrasing is not entirely accurate, since Iraq has yet to see any peace since the removal of Saddam’s regime, the book makes the very valid point that the post-war period could have gone otherwise.
Allawi became defense, then finance minister in successive post-Saddam governments and is currently an advisor to the prime minister. He was one of those who supported the invasion. But in retrospect, he concludes that the entire process of planning for a post-war Iraq “was mired in ineptitude, poor organization and indifference.”
He faults Paul Bremer, the second American proconsul in Baghdad, for engaging in “blindly optimistic” group think. He says that Bremer refused to recognize the insurgency as a potent and lasting threat because he misread Iraq’s strategic culture and was ignorant of its troubled and tangled history. Allawi says the Americans naively believed that they could overnight convert it into a secular, liberal democracy. Instead, all they have achieved is their isolation in the fortified Green Zone.
A forthcoming book by the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, George Tenet, paints an equally disturbing picture of the decision to go to war. Tenet, who was forced into early retirement three years ago, blames Cheney for pressuring the agency into coming up with unsubstantiated evidence about Iraq’s military capabilities. A month prior to the US invasion, Colin Powell used this false evidence to argue before the UN Security Council that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Tenet also claims that he gave Condoleezza Rice, who was national security adviser at the time of the 9/11 attacks, a full briefing in July 2001 about the threat of a spectacular Al Qaeda attack on America. Rice, the current Secretary of State, has denied that any such briefing was held.
Tenet blames former Pentagon officials Paul Wolfowitz (the embattled president of the World Bank) and Douglas Feith for rejecting his belief that there was little evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. He also claims that the Agency warned the White House that Iraq could fall apart once the invasion was over, but that President Bush and his neo-conservative allies did not want to listen.
Tenet’s book represents a trend among Bush administration insiders to spin their reputations by putting the blame for the Iraq fiasco on others. Collectively, these books (including one penned by Paul Bremer) suggest that the Bush administration sold the war to the American public on the basis of lies and that its post-war planning was based on naiveté not seen in the international arena for decades.
David Halberstam, one of America’s renowned journalists, won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Vietnam War. In his 1972 book, “The Best and The Brightest,” he showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that successive US presidents had lied to the American people to justify the ill-begotten war.
In January, he expressed equally serious reservations about the Iraq War because “it went against history.” Halberstam cautioned that Americans would not be welcomed as liberators and that by invading Iraq “we were going to punch our way into the largest hornet’s nest in the world.” The car accident that took his life earlier this week also gave more visibility to his views.

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Editor: Akhtar M. Faruqui
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