Reckless Executive
David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation, is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers).
It’s the incompetence, stupid. That should be the battle cry of the forces of anti-Bushism. Sure, the war was a boneheaded policy move and predicated on false claims. But worse, its backers have repeatedly botched the job. They have taken lemons and made not lemonade but nuclear waste. And it’s not only the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. That controversy is important; the Pentagon messed up and handed the United States a PR disaster that may yield awful battlefield consequences: intensified opposition to U.S. forces in Iraq, eye-for-an-eye treatment of American POWs, and easier recruiting for Iraqi insurrectionists and Islamic terrorists. But it also revealed"once more"that the Bush administration and Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon were wholly unprepared for the post-invasion phase of the war, and unwilling or unable (or both) to consider and respond to others' concerns. For a year, the International Red Cross warned the Pentagon about abuse within its prisons and detention facilities in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib; the Pentagon did little.
But the mind-boggling mistakes didn’t start with Abu Ghraib. The Bush gang has bungled so many aspects of the Iraq occupation that its actions border on criminal recklessness. The most stunning revelation of Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack is not that Bush ordered the Pentagon to begin planning an invasion of Iraq in November 2001; it is what is absent from the book: any indication that Bush and his lieutenants engaged in high-level planning concerning what to do after the invasion. Bush repeatedly whistled General Tommy Franks into his office to go over the details of the war plans. He did not display interest in the hard work that would come afterward: how to reconstruct Iraq, how to build a democracy, how to provide security and basic services, how to deal with the competing political forces that could be expected to emerge; how to handle the remains of the military; how far to de-Baathify; how to bring other nations in the region and elsewhere into the process; how to conduct a transparent, fair and effective bidding process, how to budget for the war. That is, how to do the job correctly. If anyone else began such a complex and unprecedented project without mulling over the obvious pitfalls and complications, he or she would be out of work.
Planning Deficits
Experts at the State Department did concoct some plans for the transition. But Rumsfeld’s Pentagon was not interested in the musings of those pansies at Foggy Bottom. And Bush never put pressure on Rummy to craft alternatives. Remember the early days of the post-invasion period when Jay Garner, the first U.S. proconsul in Iraq, was ad hoc-ing his way through every knotty issue? Bush, Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz"no one in the group ever bothered to look before crossing the Rubicon. Right before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Rumsfeld observed, "If you had said to me a year ago, 'Describe the situation you'll be in today one year later,' I don't know many people who would have described it"I would not have"described it in the way it happens to be today." But he was dead wrong. Before the war, many experts warned that the political transition would be tremendously difficult and troublesome, if not impossible, and that instability and security challenges would keep U.S. troops occupied"and dying"in Iraq for a year or more. (Shortly before the invasion, I asked one active-duty admiral how long U.S. forces would have to stay in Iraq. "Two words," he said. "South Korea.") There were plenty of pessimists back then hawking the worst scenarios. Rumsfeld and the others chose to pay such naysayers no heed.
But the incompetents of the Bush administration are guilty of more than arrogance and hubris. Let’s run through a partial list of screw-ups. In the first weeks of the invasion and occupation, the administration failed to conduct an effective search for the supposed weapons of mass destruction that were the main justification for the war. Weeks went by before U.S. troops even attempted to secure Iraq’s nuclear facilities and before the Pentagon had in place a search effort for the WMDs. (Not rushing to the nuclear sites was especially dumb, for nuclear materials might now be long gone and in who-knows-whose hands. At least fumbling the WMD hunt may have been a cost-free error, since the evidence to date is that Iraq did not possess any significant WMDs in the years prior to the war.) Then there was Ahmed Chalabi. The Pentagon and the White House too eagerly bought the weapons-are-there reports peddled by this exile leader and his Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi has said his gang was "heroes in error." That’s a polite way of saying "fabricators." In intelligence circles, exiles are always regarded as suspect sources of information. But the Bush gang disregarded this basic rule.
At the same time, it failed to conduct basic intelligence assessments of conditions in Iraq. Last fall, when it was becoming evident that reconstruction would not be a cakewalk, Rice ‘fessed up to one mistake. She said the administration had not realized that Saddam Hussein had been so awful and had allowed the Iraqi infrastructure deteriorate so much. Hello? Determining the state of the Iraqi infrastructure would have been a cakewalk. With satellite imagery and interviews with traveling Iraqis, diplomats and visitors to Iraq, any CIA intern could have determined the status of the electricity, water and health systems. It would have been easy for Rice to obtain an accurate picture of life in Iraq, which just might have been useful in terms of planning a reconstruction.
Too Many Oversights
There’s more"too much more. Rice received memos noting that there was no solid basis for the claim that Iraq had been shopping for uranium in Niger. Yet"oops"that assertion became part of Bush’s State of the Union address. Last year, the White House admitted that neither Bush nor Rice had read the entire National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq that had been produced in October 2002. This document wrongly noted that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, but it presented a much more nuanced and less-frightening depiction of the WMD situation in Iraq than did Bush in his public statements, and it noted there was disagreement among the intelligence analysts as to the extent of the WMD threat. Shouldn’t the commander in chief and his national security adviser have read the main intelligence report on the publicly stated reason for the war? It was only 92 pages long. But it’s not surprising Bush didn’t do so. He has said he doesn’t even read newspapers.
The (selective) list goes on. The Pentagon at one point considered placing former CIA chief James Woolsey"one of the most vocal cheerleaders for the war"in charge of the post-invasion Iraqi ministry of information. Now how would giving an ex-CIA director the helm of this ministry have played in Iraq and throughout the Arab world? Another sign that these guys don’t know how to run an occupation came a few weeks ago when the occupation authority in Baghdad released a new Iraqi flag. It had two stripes on it that were the same powder blue of the Israeli flag.
The Bush administration’s incompetence, sadly, is not limited to the Iraq war. How about that anthrax investigation? Imagine how Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing gasbags would be screaming if the Clinton Justice Department had gone so long without cracking such a case. There’s also a strong argument that the Pentagon erred big time when it tried to capture bin Laden in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan after the initial war there was over. And don’t forget the infamous President’s Daily Brief of Aug. 6, 2001. It reminded Bush that Osama bin Laden was aiming to strike within the United States and reported that the FBI had 70 domestic investigations under way against Al Qaeda subjects in the United States. The 70 figure was an exaggeration, but, still, Bush apparently did not react to this unusual news"70 investigations?!"other than by saying, good, I’ll leave it to the bureau. He did not get involved, he did not demand more information, he did not place any pressure on the FBI and the CIA. And while it may not technically have been an act of incompetence, his administration placed ballistic missile defense (as expensive and unproven as it was) far ahead of counterterrorism in terms of priorities. That was a sign of lousy judgment"particularly since intelligence estimates had concluded that terrorists in possession of WMDs posed more of a threat than a missile from a rogue state.
A Restless Right
The Bush crowd has amassed a record of failures almost as bad as Bush did when he was an oilman. And some natives on the right are getting restless. Columnist George Will wrote last week, "This administration cannot be trusted to govern if it cannot be counted on to think." And neocon Robert Kagan groused, "All but the most blindly devoted Bush supporters can see that Bush administration officials have no clue about what to do in Iraq tomorrow, much less a month from now." He and fellow neocon William Kristol were pushing for Rumsfeld’s firing before the Abu Ghraib scandal hit, holding Rumsfeld responsible for ruining their war.
The Bush folks strike a pose of confidence and competence, and they entered office pretending to be the grown-ups. But they do not know what they are doing, and they are not doing it well. John Kerry has attacked them for waging a reckless, arrogant and counterproductive foreign policy, but other Democrats"not necessarily the usual suspects of Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd"need to be as vociferous and blunt as the Will-Kagan chorus. Bush and his band are careless and lousy drivers. These people do not deserve the keys to the car.
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Published: May 11 2004
