Bush misses opportunity to
come clean on Iraq
By Ehsan Ahrari
Even though the US presidential election is several months away, the Bush administration is on the defensive. President George W Bush is slipping in the opinion polls. Democratic presidential candidates are daily attacking him on Iraq, while American soldiers are still dying in that country. As an important tactical defensive maneuver, the White House decided that Bush should appear on NBC's Meet the Press with Tim Russert on Sunday. This is a program known for its tough, no-nonsense approach. Consequently, there was a certain amount of risk for Bush to allow himself to be questioned for an hour on a one-on-one basis.
The White House took no chances. Bush spent time rehearsing for the interview, which was arranged to take place in the Oval Office, exploiting the esteem of presidential power. Consequently, it was a well-rehearsed show, with Bush sitting in his office looking very presidential. However, his performance, though it was free of gaffes, is not likely to silent his critics, nor is it likely to create noticeable positive effects on his popularity. At least for now, Iraq remains an important issue in the upcoming presidential election, and Bush is getting nervous.
There is no denying that Bush wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, a job that his father decided not to do in 1991. He finally accomplished that goal last March. But the problem was that Bush chose as the chief public rationale for invading Iraq the presence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In the lead-up to the invasion, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the president himself not only made numerous statements that Saddam was in possession of WMD, they did so in an ominous tone. The absence of WMD in Iraq now creates an impression that the toppling of the Iraqi dictator was based on lies, at worst, or at best on fiction. Now no one is willing to own up to his or her mistakes.
Bush's favorite line during the Meet the Press interview was that he is a "war president" and the American voters should keep in mind his use of US power in the world. He repeated that phrase about 30 times during the course of the interview. That is one reason the interview was taped in the Oval Office. Implicit in that reminder was the message that the United States is still at war. More to the point, his message conveyed an inherent plea not to judge him too harshly on the lack of WMD in Iraq. But the absence of WMD will haunt President Bush, his advisers, and even those in Congress who supported his decision to invade Iraq.
The US legislators abdicated their responsibilities in the management of America's foreign policy in the pre-invasion days for fear of losing their chances of re-election. In the era post-September 11, 2001, questioning the Bush administration's policy measures against enemies of the United States quickly triggered questions on one's patriotism. As well, because of the nature of Saddam's dictatorship, few critics within the United States had the fortitude to say, "Yes, but we supported him in the past, we played a role in providing him with chemical-weapons-related know-how. Why all of a sudden have his aspirations to acquire WMD - a fact that we had long known - become a reason for taking imminent military actions in 2003?" It is hard to believe now, but in the pre-invasion days, the US government became an ardent practitioner of "group think", a phenomenon described as "an undesirable condition in which all members of a group (eg a project team) begin to think alike or pretend to think alike. No members are then willing to raise objections or concerns about a project even though they are legitimate and based on hard data."
Now everyone is attempting to wriggle out of his or her original rationale for invading Iraq. To start with, Bush has made an art out of using different phrases to rationalize the toppling of Saddam: he had WMD programs; he had intentions to develop WMD; the Iraqi people and indeed the world are better off today as the dictator awaits his fate in an Iraqi dungeon, etc, etc. In the Russert interview, he kept reminding his audience how bad Saddam really was.
Cheney and Rumsfeld say they continue to believe that WMD are hidden somewhere and are likely to be found. Powell, the most believable member of Bush's cabinet, lost much of his credibility when he delivered his February 2003 speech at the United Nations to try and prove that Saddam was maintaining a program of WMD. Almost a year after that speech, Powell was asked whether he would have recommended an invasion knowing Iraq had no prohibited weapons. He replied: "I don't know, because it was the stockpile that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world." He went on to add that the "absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus; it changes the answer you get". Then he had a change of heart and stated last Wednesday that even if Iraq had no stockpiles of dangerous weapons, Bush made the right decision to go to war to remove Saddam.
Another major topic of controversy is the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Dr David Kay, former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, stirred the pot on this issue by calling for a thorough inquiry into the alleged failure of intelligence on the presence of WMD. To a certain extent there were indeed intelligence failures, but the CIA never stated that the threat of the use of WMD from Saddam was imminent. That was also a major point of CIA director George Tenet's highly publicized speech last Thursday.
However, the fiction related to Saddam's imminent use of nuclear weapons was relayed by British intelligence. Prime Minister Tony Blair said in the foreword of his intelligence report that Saddam's military planning allowed for some of his WMD "to be ready within 45 minutes of an order to use them". Since it served his own objective of regime change, Bush often reiterated this to create an artificial urgency for invading Iraq.
Now another expensive commission is about to be established to look into the alleged intelligence failure. But, as in the pre-Iraq invasion days, everyone is still missing an important point. President Bush wanted to invade Iraq - regime change in Iraq had been the goal of those who are now his top advisers since 1998, and Congress actually voted along those lines in the same year when it passed the Iraq Liberation Act. So from that perspective, there was nothing questionable about Bush's decision to go to war. It is only because top US officials so consistently rationalized the effort to topple Saddam with the purported presence of WMD in Iraq that Bush now finds himself in a tight corner.
President Bush likes to tell his listeners that he never backs down from making tough decisions. He may not know it, but he is currently facing such a decision in the form of a confession about Iraq. He needs to make a clean break with that prewar WMD-related fiction. The American people will not hold it against him. To the contrary, Americans love a straight-talking president, no matter how controversial his decision may be. He should say, "It was I who decided that the Iraqi dictator must be toppled. I stand by my decision." That admission alone will not result in his defeat in the upcoming presidential election. His Meet the Press interview could have been an occasion to make that bold statement.
Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an Alexandria, Virginia, US-based independent strategic analyst.
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