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DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
Bush's faith run over by history
By Mark Danner
shortly be destroyed by a radical de-Baathification ordered by the American
proconsul that Bush almost certainly never approved. The Iraqi army that he
decides in early March will be retained and used for reconstruction will
instead be peremptorily dissolved, to catastrophic effect.
If these radical departures from Bush's chosen plan have dampened his optimism
and faith - or indeed have even led him to try to discover what happened -
there is no evidence of it. When Bush's latest biographer, Robert Draper, asked
him why the Iraqi army had not been kept intact, as Bush had decided it should
be, he replied, "Yeah, I can't remember. I'm sure I said, ‘This is the policy,
what happened?'"3
"This is the policy, what happened?" As a subtitle for a history of the Iraq
war, one could certainly do worse. Prime Minister Aznar is gone now, having
been fatally weakened by his support for the Iraq war and the failure to obtain
United Nations support for it; almost exactly a year after the war began,
jihadists targeted the Madrid train station, killing nearly 200 Spaniards and
sending the prime minister to electoral defeat. Tony Blair, the star of the
Downing Street Memo, is gone as well, his popularity having never recovered
from his staunch support of the war. George W Bush, on the other hand, nearly
five years after he launched the war, remains confident of victory, just as he
was confident he would win that second UN resolution.
There is no sign that his confidence is any more firmly rooted in reality now
than it was then. Instead of reality we have faith - in himself, in the deity,
in "the unstoppable power of human freedom". He stands as lead actor in his own
narrative of history, a story that grows steadily paler and more contested,
animated solely by the authority of official power. George W Bush remains, we
are told, "at peace with himself".
Notes
1. Dearlove's consultations had taken place on July 20, 2002, in Washington and
at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and he reported to a meeting of the
British "war cabinet" at 10 Downing Street three days later. See Mark Danner,
The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried
History (New York Review Books, 2006), pp 6-7 and pp 88-89.
2. And not just for George W Bush. The mystique of leadership - of faith over
facts - pulled others along in its wake. Condoleezza Rice, for example, makes a
curious appearance in the discussion, assuring Bush and the Spanish prime
minister that she has "the impression" that Hans Blix, whose report is due the
following week, "will now be more negative than before about the Iraqis'
intentions". In fact, quite the opposite: Blix will tell the Security Council
that "the key remaining disarmament tasks" can be achieved not in "years, nor
weeks, but months". Here is what Blix told the Security Council on March 7,
2003: How much time would it take to resolve the key remaining
disarmament tasks? While cooperation can and is to be immediate, disarmament
and at any rate the verification of it cannot be instant. Even with a proactive
Iraqi attitude, induced by continued outside pressure, it would still take some
time to verify sites and items, analyse documents, interview relevant persons,
and draw conclusions. It would not take years, nor weeks, but months. Neither
governments nor inspectors would want disarmament inspection to go on forever.
However, it must be remembered that in accordance with the governing
resolutions, a sustained inspection and monitoring system is to remain in place
after verified disarmament to give confidence and to strike an alarm, if signs
were seen of the revival of any proscribed weapons programs. Blix's
conclusions were not only not "more negative than before about the Iraqis'
intentions"; he suggests that inspections of all the suspect sites could be
completed in a matter of months. Bush, needless to say, is not willing to wait
months, or even weeks, for the additional inspections to be completed. What
would have happened if he had been? On the one hand, the administration's
willingness to delay might have secured a deal whereby additional countries
would have supported "all means necessary" to deal with Saddam. On the other,
the inspectors, given more time, would have discovered no weapons, likely
leading the administration to argue that the inspections themselves were
useless - not that the weapons didn't exist. But the momentum for war would
have been blunted.
3. According to the New York Times account of this exchange: Mr Bush
acknowledged one major failing of the early occupation of Iraq when he said of
disbanding the Saddam Hussein-era military, "The policy was to keep the army
intact; didn't happen."
But when Mr Draper pointed out that Mr Bush's former Iraq administrator, L Paul
Bremer III, had gone ahead and forced the army's dissolution and then asked Mr
Bush how he reacted to that, Mr Bush said, ‘Yeah, I can't remember, I'm sure I
said, "This is the policy, what happened?" But, he added, "Again, Hadley's got
notes on all of this stuff," referring to Stephen J Hadley, his national
security adviser.
See Jim Rutenberg, "In Book, Bush Peeks Ahead to His Legacy," The New York
Times, September 2, 2007, and Robert Draper, Dead Certain: The Presidency of
George W Bush (Free Press, 2007), p 211.
Mark Danner, who has written about foreign affairs and politics for two
decades, is the author of The Secret Way to War, Torture and Truth, and
The Massacre at El Mozote, among other books. He is Professor of Journalism at
the University of California at Berkeley and the James Clarke Chace Professor
of Foreign Affairs, Politics, and the Humanities at Bard College. His writing
on Iraq and other subjects appears regularly in the New York Review of Books.
His work is archived at MarkDanner.com.
(This article appears in the November 8, 2007 issue of the
New York Review of Books. Copyright 2007,
Mark Danner)
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