Members of the Iraq Survey Group charged with finding Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction quit their search six months ago because they were faced with other very real weapons that threatened their own destruction. This emerged Wednesday in US news reports following which the White House finally admitted that the WMD were not there.
Indeed, neither the WMD nor the devastating insurgency were present in Iraq when coalition troops checked their chemical and biological protective clothing on March 19, 2003, hours before the invasion. WMD, key to Washington’s planning, was a lie. That is why President George Bush, who issued dire warnings about Iraq’s WMD capability prior to the US-led invasion, argues even now that the war was “absolutely” worth fighting.
The post-invasion insurgency, however, was not even considered by Washington’s desktop strategists. Therein lies the fatal misjudgment of Bush. Obsessed with the destruction of a threat that was not there, he played midwife to a worse threat that seems all set to plunge Iraq into chaos and violence and deliver the United States its greatest humiliation since Vietnam.
Nothing sums up the vacuousness of US policy toward Iraq more than the hundreds of millions of dollars that have been wasted, sending weapons experts the length and breadth of the country on one wild goose chase after another. It is becoming ever clearer that there has been a consistent disconnect between Washington and its commanders and administrators on the ground in Iraq. In May 2003, when the Americans were already struggling to work out what to do next, Gen. Jay Garner was replaced by Paul Bremer as US administrator. Bremer came in as Washington’s man but was soon echoing his predecessor’s demands for more troops and more focus in US policy. Neither materialized in sufficient quantity. Now retired Gen. Gary Luck has been sent in to conduct a security review in advance of the elections.
The dispatch of this senior officer says much about the confidence Washington places in its top brass already in the country. It also suggests the rising surge of panic in the White House as Bush’s place in history looks more and more like being a Vietnam-style swamp. Indeed the arrival of Luck in Iraq is very similar to the start of the high-level military missions to Vietnam, which in the end concerned themselves exclusively with equipping the South Vietnamese Army just well enough to fight off the enemy, while US forces and civilians rapidly disengaged and hurried home.
Vietnam showed how aggressive US administrations could dig themselves and their allies ever deeper into a hole. Now America’s friends in this region want to believe that the Bush White House has the imagination and flexibility to recast its failing Iraqi policy. They want to believe that someone in Washington knows what the US is doing in the Middle East, that someone understands how a deadly insurrection has been conjured out of defeat and how Iraq has been turned into a shooting gallery for the international terrorists whom the invasion was supposed to defeat.
