WASHINGTON - It was just last Thursday that US President George W Bush was
reassuring nervous Republican lawmakers that the transition to Iraqi
sovereignty was really going very well and that the Iraqis were ready to "take
the training wheels off" their bicycle to US-guided democracy.
But the Republicans did not seem much reassured by Bush's remarks, particularly
when the commander-in-chief, who rarely goes
to Capitol Hill, quickly left the caucus room without taking a single question.
Bush also is considered unlikely to take questions on Monday when he is
scheduled to deliver a major policy address on US plans for Iraq at the Army
War College, the first of a series of speeches designed primarily to dispel the
palpably growing notion that it's not so much "the training wheels" that are
coming off as it is the wheels that run US policy, whatever that is at the
moment.
"I am very hopeful that the president and his administration will articulate
precisely what is going to happen as much as they can, day by day, as opposed
to a generalization," noted the ever-polite Senate Foreign Relations Committee
chairman Richard Lugar over the weekend, suggesting, perhaps a little too
bluntly for his usual manner, that "generalizations" are all that have been
forthcoming to date.
The auguries, however, are not good. Consider just a few events of the past
week:
It began with the assassination of the then-serving president of the Iraqi
Governing Council while his car was lined up to enter the Coalition Provisional
Authority's (CPA) "Green Zone". More than one Iraqi noted that Washington's
inability to protect the highest-ranking Iraqi official raised questions as to
its ability to protect the yet-to-be-determined government to which the CPA is
supposed to hand over some form of sovereignty as of July 1.
By mid-week, more photos and some videos of prisoner abuse - although the word
"torture" is beginning to catch on a little in the media here - were disclosed
to the public eye, as were reports that the Pentagon is investigating many more
deaths of detainees in custody - both in Iraq and Afghanistan - than it had let
on previously.
Then there was the testimony before Congress of the top military brass in Iraq
who, in fact, only seemed slightly less confused about who was in charge at Abu
Ghraib prison and what interrogation methods were approved than their superiors
at the Pentagon the week before.
Meanwhile, new reports suggest that the Judge Adjutant General Corps - the
military's lawyers - have been warning everyone who would listen for most of
the past two years that the Pentagon's civilian political appointees, Bush's
attorney general, and the White House itself have quietly been tearing up the
Geneva Conventions.
Then on Thursday, just a few hours before Bush's non-interactive pep rally with
his fellow Republicans, joint US-Iraqi forces carried out raids on the home and
offices of the Pentagon's erstwhile favorite, Iraqi National Congress (INC)
chief Ahmed Chalabi, apparently in search of some files and INC loyalists
relating to kidnapping, extortion, bribery and other rather questionable
dealings which, if true, suggest that Chalabi may not be the "Iraqi George
Washington" that his neo-conservative fans back in Washington have been
promoting him as all these years.
On Saturday, the news got worse for Chalabi's neo-con champions when Knut
Royce, a seasoned journalist at Newsday, reported that the Defense Intelligence
Agency had concluded, after a review of thousands of intelligence documents,
that the INC's Information Collection Program (ICP), which until last week had
received millions of dollars in US taxpayer funding in the last decade, has
essentially been an Iranian disinformation operation designed to get the US to
oust Saddam Hussein and that the ICP's chief, currently on the lam in Tehran,
was an Iranian agent.
Ouch!!!
On Sunday, however, the situation did appreciably improve. It began with an
unusually frank and clear-eyed appraisal of the situation in the Outlook
section of the Washington Post by associate editor and senior correspondent
Robert Kaiser titled "A Foreign Policy, Falling Apart" and whose basic message
- exceedingly rare for what is essentially a court newspaper - was that the
emperor has no clothes.
Comparing recent events in Iraq to Vietnam's 1968 Tet offensive which
"humiliated an ignorant, over-confident America and destroyed political support
for the war in the United States", Kaiser noted that the administration still
shows no readiness "to confront what threatens to be a terminal crisis for
George W Bush".
Kaiser's article quoted at length the four-star former chief of the US Central
Command, General Anthony Zinni, who, as it happened, was the subject of the
feature story on the most widely-watched US public-affairs program, CBS's 60
Minutes on Sunday night. Zinni, who also has compared the Iraq invasion
to Vietnam (particularly the government's "lying" to US soldiers and public
about the war), did not pull many punches. Washington's Iraq invasion, he said,
was "the wrong war at the wrong time with the wrong strategy".
He accused the Pentagon leadership of "true dereliction" in planning for the
war and its aftermath and suggested that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -
as well as administration neo-conservatives who supported the war - should
resign or be fired. In the latter connection, he named Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary Douglas Feith, National Security staffer
Elliott Abrams and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis
"Scooter" Libby as the "architects" of the policy. "I'd definitely resign if I
were them. I certainly would expect them to be gone," he said. (He also named
as an architect former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, but he
resigned from the board earlier this year.)
"And to think that we are going to 'stay the course'," Zinni told 60 Minutes,
which noted that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had declined invitations to give a
response. "The course is headed over Niagara Falls." (Note to Bush
speechwriter: "Stay the course" may not be the best line to use on Monday at
the Army War College.)
Zinni has amplified his remarks in a new book, Battle Ready, which was
co-written by best-selling author Tom Clancy, who was thought to be a big
supporter of Bush. It should be at bookstores this week and is probably headed
to the top of the non-fiction lists, which are increasingly dominated these
days by books that, with the rather ambiguous exception of Bob Woodward's Plan
of Attack, do not reflect well on the president and his administration.
Whether Bush knew in advance about Zinni's appearance on television or Clancy's
collaboration or any of the other bad news that has surfaced in the past few
days is unknown.
On Saturday afternoon, however, the president was reported to have suffered
cuts and bruises after taking a tumble while riding around his ranch on - of
all things - his mountain bike. The incident, while unlikely to reach quite the
iconic status of his father's bout with the flu on Japanese premier Kiichi
Miyazawa's lap 12 years ago or with Jimmy Carter's encounter with a killer
rabbit 12 years before that, may nonetheless contain lessons: training-wheel
metaphors can be taken in more than one way.
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