<font color=blue>You and your kind are in such trouble for your unpatriotic behavior. You will pay the price for your folly, starting first with your leaders. <font color=black>
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Published on Saturday, August 30, 2003 by the Boulder Daily Camera
So Far, U.S. Has Losing Hand in Iraq
by Jay Bookman
ATLANTA — Foreign policy is often thought of as a chess game, a sophisticated battle of wits played by elegant people in well-tailored suits and Italian shoes.
That's not quite right. The better metaphor is high-stakes poker, the kind played by fat guys smoking bad cigars. It's about bluffing, and gambling, and never knowing what card will come up next. Foreign policy demands the same skill set as Seven-Card Stud or Texas Hold 'Em — in the end, the player who can best assess and manage risk is going to win.
And that's why our invasion of Iraq has gone so awry. We let emotions such as fear, pride and wishful thinking cloud our analysis of the situation, and now we're paying the price.
For example, in the months leading up to war, we were warned repeatedly that the risk of the United States being attacked with Iraqi-made weapons of mass destruction — chemical, biological and nuclear — was so high that we had no choice but pre-emptive war.
Even now, just a few months later, it is difficult to fully recreate the climate of fear that President Bush and others created with their dark warnings that mushroom clouds might soon appear over U.S. cities, or that Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles might penetrate our borders to spread anthrax, smallpox or other agents of the Apocalypse.
We now know those fears to be false. No stockpiles of biological or chemical weapons have been found or are likely to be found. Nor is there any evidence that Saddam Hussein had renewed his effort to build a nuclear weapon.
For months now, former U.N. weapons inspector David Kay and a military team of roughly 1,400 people have been interviewing captured Iraqis and sifting through documents. In a few weeks, they will probably report that while no weapons have been found, Saddam did retain the intent and ability to someday reconstitute WMD programs if given the chance.
However, that is a far cry from the alleged imminent threat that drove us into invasion. Kay himself, asked by Chris Matthews back in April what discoveries would justify our invasion, set the standard clearly:
"I think to most reasonable people, if you find biological weapons, anthrax, certainly if you found smallpox work, that should do it. In the chemical area, any nerve agent, VX particularly, ought to be of concern to everyone in the world."
We will not find those things; Kay's standard will not be met. Whether by design or mistake, our leaders inflated a low-level risk into a high-level risk, and as a result we misplayed our hand.
But that wasn't the biggest mistake. Because our leaders also fooled themselves into believing that U.S. forces would be welcomed like heroes by a grateful Iraqi people, they made no provision in case things went differently. Back in March, in fact, Tim Russert posed a question to Vice President Dick Cheney that has proved almost visionary.
"If your analysis is not correct, and we're not treated as liberators but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly and bloody battle with significant American casualties?" Russert asked.
<font color=red>"Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators," Cheney said. "I've talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House. The president and I have met with them, various groups and individuals, people who have devoted their lives from the outside to trying to change things inside Iraq ... The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that." <font color=black>
In poker terms, we misread the table. We threw all of our money into a hand that we mistakenly thought would be a low-risk, easy winner, and that's the biggest mistake you can make. In fact, we've got so much invested in the pot now that we can't afford to fold 'em and walk away. We've got to play it out to the last bitter card and hope we get lucky.
Sometimes that works. More often it doesn't.
Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Copyright 2003, The Daily Camera
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