Bush and Barney's path to
Waterloo By Ehsan Ahrari
The Vietnam War and the ongoing Iraq war
will go down in the history of the United States
as events of great significance affecting
America's resolve to get embroiled in foreign
conflicts. After Vietnam, the US vowed not to get
involved in foreign wars until there was plenty of
domestic support for such an involvement.
Not only was the Iraq war a war of choice,
it has become a kind of make-believe war
comprising fictitious rationales. The United
States lost Vietnam because
the will of the American people to remain engaged
in that unjust war fizzled out. The lone
superpower appears to be heading toward a similar
defeat in Iraq, but the effects of denial are
driving that war, despite its low popularity among
American people.
That is the essence of
Bob Woodward's new book, State of Denial.
[1] The bottom-line conclusion of this book, as
can be ascertained from published excerpts, is
that the administration of President George W Bush
is not telling the truth to the American people
about this war. But that is also a well-known
truth by now.
What has caught the current
government by storm is that Woodward bases his
views on interviews with a number of major
officials from the administration of the current
president's father and even some of the closest
advisers and confidants of president George H W
Bush. What also is causing a brouhaha is the fact
that Woodward's current book is being issued at a
time when there are very few people left in the
United States who believe the Iraq war can be won.
But those whose decisions about this war
really matter - Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney,
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld - remain as convinced
as ever that the US will win this war.
The
entire adventure of the Bush administration in
Iraq was based on a series of denials, one after
another. Before invading Iraq, the administration
denied United Nations inspectors ample time to
search weapons sites in Iraq thoroughly to compile
conclusive evidence whether president Saddam
Hussein really had continued his programs for
weapons of mass destruction.
Then, the
administration believed that American invaders
would be welcomed by the Iraqis with open arms,
and that the post-invasion governance of Iraq
would be a cakewalk. When the State Department
presented arguments to the contrary, the
Department of Defense, Cheney and his cohorts
inside and outside of the administration indulged
in another series of denials.
Cheney,
Rumsfeld and the latter's then-deputy, Paul
Wolfowitz, relied on Iraqi expatriates - most of
them with very little first-hand knowledge of
their country but a lot of ambition about
replacing Saddam's tyranny with a kleptocracy of
their own - to provide the proofs needed to get
the United States to invade Iraq. These "proofs"
were not regarded as credible by the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) or the Department of
State.
Another example of this state of
denial was the dissolution of the Iraqi army and
the Ba'ath Party, despite recommendations to the
contrary. The occupying authority in Iraq was so
inebriated with military success that it came to
the conclusion that there was no fight left among
the Iraqis, and that there was no need to rely on
the services of a "pro-Saddam" army and the
civilian Ba'athist bureaucrats.
Iraq's
governance was assigned to those who had no
knowledge either of Iraq or of Arab culture. The
hubris stemming from the military victory also
resulted in a frame of mind among the US civilian
administrators that only they could define the
kind of government the Iraqis should have. Only no
one was willing to show their contempt through
blatant statements.
But the very audacity
of thinking that the security of Iraq could be
easily carried out by the US forces virtually
alone - when the security apparatus of Iraq during
the Saddam era was dissolved with the stroke of
the pen by Paul Bremer - was evidence of that
disdain.
When the insurgency started to
grow in Iraq, Rumsfeld led the pack of critics who
dismissed that development as a limited challenge
and depicted the insurgents as a small group of
"dead-enders". At first, the US government's line
was that once Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay, were
captured or killed the insurgency would melt away.
When that did not happen, the line of
explanation quickly shifted. The next line was
that the insurgency would be dealt a severe blow
once Saddam was captured. But that also turned out
to be nothing but another example of make-believe.
Bush invaded Iraq by buying lock, stock
and barrel the fictitious argument that Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that
the Iraqi dictator had ties with al-Qaeda. Then he
switched to believing that he could install
secular democracy in Iraq and use that as a
"beacon" to pull the rest of the Middle East out
of the darkness of autocratic rule.
The
Vietnam War became the late president Lyndon
Johnson's war - his malignant obsession that could
only be ended by removing him from power.
Johnson's decision not to run for re-election in
1968 turned out to be a major step toward the
undoing of that obsession.
The Iraq war
has become a malignant obsession of George W Bush.
Unfortunately for the American people, however, he
will stay in office until 2008. He has already
mentioned to his close associates that he will not
withdraw from Iraq even if only his wife Laura and
his dog Barney remain on his side.
That is
a very powerful manifestation of resolve. The
potential loss of both legislative chambers to the
Democrats in next month's elections would not
affect the presidency. Evidently nothing, no
evidence, no statistical data, will change his
mind.
In the final analysis, a
Democratic-controlled Congress would have to pass
binding resolutions for withdrawal, or it would
have to try to alter Bush's resolve by refusing to
pass appropriations for the continued stay of US
troops in Iraq.
However, such a
development is likely to divide the US from
within. It seems that the United States is heading
toward its own version of "sectarian" conflict:
the Republican versus the Democrats, and the
conservatives versus the liberals.
Now we
are told that Henry Kissinger, the chief architect
of the Vietnam negotiations during the
administration of the late president Richard
Nixon, is advising Bush on Iraq. Kissinger's
conclusion - which may at best be a partially
correct rehashing of history - is that the US lost
the war in Vietnam because it lost the political
will to continue the fight and win.
He is
reportedly advising Bush not to give up. He is
quoted as telling Bush that the US cannot afford
to lose in Iraq and that "victory over the
insurgency" is the only meaningful way out. In
other words, Kissinger is still fighting the
Vietnam War.
He is providing Bush the kind
of wrong-headed advice that is setting the United
States on the course to disaster. The only
meaningful way out of Iraq is the emergence of a
credible Iraqi security force. That reality will
not develop any time soon, especially with the
continued terrorist attacks on those forces, and
the confusing double role of a portion of those
forces also to act as Shi'ite or Sunni militias.
Even General John Abizaid, Bush's top
commander in the Middle East, is reported to have
developed gross misgivings about America's
prospects of victory in Iraq. As Woodward's book
has created a major news event of its own, the
Bush administration has decided to intensify its
state of denial.
Bush was already
attacking the Democrats as "the party of cut and
run". The desperation to win the November election
has made things even worse. The government seems
to be in a state of siege. There are increasing
calls for Rumsfeld's resignation. But Bush will
hear none of it. The Department of Defense is
reportedly divided from within and suffering from
shaky morale.
Most of the top defense
officials have a clear memory of how Vietnam was
"lost" when the support for that war disappeared
from the US domestic arena. A number of those
officials are reading the evolution of similar
trends inside the US today regarding Iraq. Even by
assigning the best possible intention to the
decision of George W Bush to invade Iraq, the fact
of the matter is that Iraq will become his
Waterloo.
If the United States does not
find an honorable way out, it seems that it is
steadily edging toward another humiliating exit,
a la Vietnam, notwithstanding the Bush
administration's endless denial that Iraq is not
Vietnam.
Note 1. State
of Denial by Bob Woodward. Simon &
Schuster Adult Publishing Group, September 2006.
ISBN: 0743272234. Price US$21, 560 pages.
Ehsan Ahrari is the CEO of
Strategic Paradigms, an Alexandria, Virginia-based
defense consultancy. He can be reached at
eahrari@cox.net or
stratparadigms@yahoo.com. His columns appear
regularly in Asia Times Online. His website:
www.ehsanahrari.com.
(Copyright 2006
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and republishing
.)
