Editorial: Cheney on Iraq/Through a lens of unreality
October 7, 2004 ED1007
Vice President Dick Cheney and Sen. John Edwards each arguably did what he set out to do in Tuesday night's debate: Cheney was the taciturn, almost dismissive, man of experience who'd do it all over again the same way; Edwards was the feisty new face taking on the Bush administration's record and urging a "fresh start." What especially stood out, given several strains of news this week, was Cheney's insistence that the administration had done "exactly the right thing" on Iraq.
It's one thing to be resolute and consistent. It's another to ignore evidence that the administration's strategy on Iraq -- from conception to persuasion to occupation -- was deeply flawed and demonstrably dishonest.
On conception and persuasion: Two days before the debate, the New York Times chronicled the administration's misleading and mistaken case for invading Iraq on the basis of a supposed nuclear weapons threat. And now the chief U.S. arms inspector's final report, delivered to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday, has concluded that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Indeed, the inspector found that Saddam didn't vigorously pursue banned weapons programs after inspectors left in 1998. Yet in August of 2002 Cheney was stating flatly, and despite intelligence disputes at the time, that "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us."
Also on Monday, a Knight-Ridder story on a new CIA assessment reported that the agency could find no conclusive evidence that Iraq harbored Abu Musab al Zarqawi, a terrorist whom Cheney and Bush have emphasized in trying to connect Saddam to Al-Qaida. This followed the 9/11 commission's conclusion that there was no collaborative relationship between the two. Yet despite his flat denial during the debate, Cheney and the president have frequently implied that such ties existed.
On the occupation: L. Paul Bremer III, America's top administrator in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam's government, said in a speech Monday in West Virginia, "We never had enough troops on the ground" to stop the initial looting or the chaos and insurrection that developed. Earlier he'd said, "The single most important change -- the one thing that would have improved the situation -- would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout the occupation."
And in Iraq itself, Prime Minister Ayad Allawi in a speech on Tuesday painted a much more worrisome picture of the insurgency than he did while in the United States.
Reality is clashing with rhetoric for the Bush administration this week, and the vice president said nothing Tuesday night to suggest that he understands the difference.
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