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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