A MUST READ: Why John Murtha is right about Iraq
The Bush administration is so accustomed to torturing the truth, it can’t face the facts. Murtha’s outburst on Iraq has shown it is time to stop deluding ourselves.
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
Updated: 9:12 p.m. ET Nov. 18, 2005
Nov. 18, 2005 - Over a glass of Champagne and under the eyes of raging priests on a vast Old Testament tapestry, I caught up with Paul Wolfowitz in Paris earlier this week. The current World Bank president and former U.S. deputy secretary of Defense, who is seen by many as the architect of the Iraq invasion, was talking mainly about bird flu and development issues in Africa. The cost of fighting the avian-borne pandemic, he said, might be as much as $1.5 billion. He made that sound like an awful lot of money, and probably it is when he’s scrounging for funds from international donors. But since $1.5 billion is about what the United States spends each week in Iraq, I asked Wolfowitz if he didn’t feel a few regrets about that venture.
Wolfowitz has a very pleasant way about him, professorial and quietly passionate. Regrets? No. “It’s extremely important to win the fight in Iraq,” he said. At the cocktail party after the conference in the ornate reception room of a grand palais, I buttonholed Wolfowitz again. We all wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein, I said, but when it became obvious in 2002 that we didn’t have a decent plan for occupying Iraq, shouldn’t we have thought again? “I think there shouldn’t have been an occupation,” said Wolfowitz. He thought we should have trained more Iraqis to take over. He didn’t elaborate—he was running out the door—but Wolfowitz always thought that Ahmad Chalabi should run post-invasion Iraq.
So the big mistake in Mesopotamia, it would seem, was not following the grand plans of the best and the brightest who took us to war there in 2003. Others failed, not they. And maybe the armchair war-lovers of the Bush administration really believe this. Ideologues see the world through different lenses than ordinary people. From their perches in government or academe, they like to imagine themselves riding the waves of great historical forces. Faced with criticism, they point fingers at their enemies like Old Testament prophets and call down the wrath of heaven.
But there’s no reason the rest of us should delude ourselves, which is one reason, I suspect, that Democratic Congressman John Murtha, a retired Marine colonel and long-time friend of the U.S. military on the Hill, spoke yesterday with such unfettered outrage. In some of the sound bites heard on the news, he seemed to be out of control. He was not and is not. His full statement, which I’ve posted on The Shadowland Journal is as well reasoned as it is passionate. The war in Iraq, he said, “is a flawed policy wrapped in an illusion.” Unlike Wolfowitz, who once went before Congress without even bothering to check how many Americans had died at his instigation, Murtha makes frequent visits to Bethesda and Walter Reed hospitals to talk to the maimed survivors of this conflict. Says the congressman: “What demoralizes them is going to war with not enough troops and equipment to make the transition to peace; the devastation caused by IEDs; being deployed to Iraq when their homes have been ravaged by hurricanes; being on their second or third deployment and leaving their families behind without a network of support.”
Murtha makes a point that ought to be obvious, but that this administration constantly struggles to obscure: “Our military captured Saddam Hussein, and captured or killed his closest associates. But the war continues to intensify. Deaths and injuries are growing, with over 2,079 confirmed American deaths. Over 15,500 have been seriously injured and it is estimated that over 50,000 will suffer from battle fatigue. There have been reports of at least 30,000 Iraqi civilian deaths.” Meanwhile “our reconstruction efforts have been crippled by the security situation. Only $9 billion of the $18 billion appropriated for reconstruction has been spent. Unemployment remains at about 60 percent. Clean water is scarce. Only $500 million of the $2.2 billion appropriated for water projects have been spent. And most importantly, insurgent incidents have increased from about 150 per week to over 700 in the last year.”
Murtha’s argument that only a withdrawal of American forces can improve the situation was greeted by troops I know on the ground, and also by the White House, with genuine consternation. There is a plan, they say. In President George W. Bush’s phrase, “as Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down.” And the military keeps compiling metrics to show something like that is happening. But it’s not enough, and Murtha puts his finger on the essential problem: as long as the Americans are there to bear the burden of the fighting, the Iraqis who are supposed to stand up don’t really see any need. As Murtha put it in mil-speak: “I believe with a U.S. troop redeployment, the Iraq security forces will be incentivized to take control.”
In fact, standing down is not about pulling out. So topsy-turvy is the policy at this point that we’re not going to imagine leaving until the Iraqi government demands that we go—and you can be sure the Iraqis who are now taking power will do just that. When? As soon as they and their Iranian allies have consolidated their hold on the southern three fourths of the country and its oil.
There’s no mystery here. The mullahs in Tehran who harbored, trained and funded what are now the most powerful Shiite political parties in Iraq have always seen American soldiers as useful idiots in this fight. Americans are welcome to die in Iraq as long as their mission is to eliminate Iran’s old enemy Saddam Hussein and wipe out his supporters. The Iranians originally thought they would have to force the Americans out when that job was done. But the chaos of the occupation and the trend toward Iraqi democracy now make the mullahs’ job even easier. All they have to do is get their clients and friends in Baghdad to demand an American departure. Ahmad Chalabi, always close to Tehran, might do that himself if he actually manages to become prime minister. In Washington this week, he suggested the deadline the administration was unwilling to name: the end of 2006.
The Bush administration no longer sets the agenda in Iraq, in fact, and hasn’t for at least two years. The watershed came in November 2003 when there was a dramatic spike in U.S. casualties and Washington suddenly scrambled together a policy for transferring sovereignty back to Iraqis instead of pocketing it indefinitely for the Pentagon and the oil companies, as originally intended. The American invasion, which was supposed to be proactive, has led to an occupation that is entirely reactive, and it’s clear—or ought to be—that the castles in the air constructed by Wolfowitz and his friends have been blown away by facts on the ground.
President Bush showed hopeful signs of pragmatism earlier this year, but no longer. His speeches over the last week, with Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld singing backup, attack critics for rewriting the history that they have tried to invent. What’s the bottom line of what Bush is saying now? That we are now in Iraq and have to stay the course because … the terrorists want us there. As the White House transcript puts it, “Our goal is to defeat the terrorists and their allies at the heart of their power, so we will defeat the enemy in Iraq.” But—the terrorists we’re fighting now didn’t have any power in Iraq until our invasion. Ideologues like to fight ideologues, so they tend to miss details like that.
For any of us who lived through the cold war, Bush’s attempts to equate the scattershot writings of Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, with the challenges posed by Marxism-Leninism and the Soviet empire are just mind-boggling. In his Veteran’s Day address to troops at Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania (Murtha’s home state), Bush started four paragraphs with the phrase “like the ideology of communism.” He longs transparently for the challenge of an Evil Empire, like the one his idol Ronald Reagan confronted, whether or not it exists.
This is nuts, but alas, not that unusual in the annals of American policy. Once again, President Bush’s lethally misguided good intentions are reminiscent of Alden Pyle in Graham Greene’s novel “The Quiet American,” about the early days of U.S. involvement in Vietnam: “He was absorbed already in the dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was determined—I learnt that very soon—to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world. … When he saw a dead body he couldn’t even see the wounds. A Red menace, a soldier of democracy.”
Such naiveté is bad enough. But the transparent envy that America’s right-wing ideologues conceive for the tactics of their enemies, the enormous temptation to fight them by using their methods, is much worse. They subscribe to some higher truth than ascertainable facts, divining the intentions of their evil adversaries and turning them into the stuff of paranoid fantasy. My colleague Fareed Zakaria pointed out in the summer of 2003 the way Wolfowitz and his ideological allies made a habit of vastly overestimating the Soviet threat to the United States, beginning in the 1970s. Then they overestimated the Chinese menace in the 1980s. And in the 1990s they turned their hyperbolic lens on Saddam. “Threat assessments must be based not simply on the intentions of an adversary, but on his capabilities as well,” Fareed wrote. It would have helped if they’d considered the strain on American capabilities as well.
Once we had plunged into the Iraq conflict and discovered how out of our depth we were, instead of acknowledging that truth, the administration decided to wring a more satisfactory picture from thousands of prisoners. In some cases—too many cases—this meant brutalizing them to the point of outright torture. As M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan Marks pointed out this week in an essay published by the International Herald Tribune, the interrogation practices used at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib were derived from old Red Army methods. “The Pentagon cannot point to any intelligence gains resulting from the techniques that have so tarnished America’s image,” wrote Bloche and Marks. “That’s because they were designed by Communist interrogators to control a prisoner’s will rather than to extract useful intelligence.”
As Sen. John McCain points out in this week’s NEWSWEEK, torture diminishes the very ideas that make America great—and different—from its enemies. At a practical level, Representative Murtha notes that “since the revelations of Abu Ghraib, American casualties have doubled.”
Wolfowitz was right about one thing, I thought, as I saw him hand off his glass of bubbly and head for the door. There shouldn’t have been any occupation, and certainly not the one he left us.
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