US Vice President Dick Cheney, the real architect of the Bush administration’s Iraq debacle, has been in Baghdad to see the disaster for himself. But even now, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, with hundreds of Iraqis being murdered every month and US troops dying at the rate of three a day, Cheney insists that his is the right strategy to defeat terror.
The extent to which this archneocon hawk has lost the plot was never so clear as when Cheney fielded a journalist’s question about the just-published memoirs of former CIA chief George Tenet. In them, Tenet said that the invasion of Iraq was a foregone conclusion very soon after the 9/11 attacks. No, replied Cheney. This was not true. “The fact of the matter is that this decision was weighed as heavily and given as careful consideration as any I’ve been involved in, and I’ve worked for four presidents”. So there we have it. After all that careful thinking and planning, we have a country tearing itself apart and the most powerful state on earth being humiliated daily by the terrorists the invasion was supposed to have destroyed.
If everything that the Bush administration has accomplished in the ruin of Iraq was the result of deep deliberations in the White House, then the world is a far more dangerous place than anyone feared. Every single error, from the almost total lack of postinvasion planning, the disbandment of Saddam’s army and police, the subsequent unchecked lawlessness and plundering, and the attempted payola for US firms with rebuilding contracts, smacks of ignorance and stupidity. To claim all this resulted from the most careful consideration is to admit that this is one of the most intellectually bankrupt presidencies ever.
Even worse is the fact that Cheney still tries to claim that the “plan” is working, albeit more slowly than expected. This is evidence of moral bankruptcy as well. Washington has brought chaos where there was order, insecurity where there was safety and despair where there was hope. The only achievements have been the constitutional and general election votes. But these were victories for the Iraqi people who defied the terrorists to cast their ballots. The democracy dividend promised by Washington has yet to materialize. The freedom Bush and Cheney have brought to Iraq is the freedom to live in fear and die in bomb blasts and at the hands of sectarian death squads.
If Cheney has an ounce of scruple left he will have seen during his Iraq visit that the US has nothing left to do in Iraq save leave. The hopefully short-term chaos after the Coalition pull out will be no worse than the continuing mayhem, as Bush tries his doomed military surge. What is patently clear is that the bigots of Al-Qaeda actually draw strength from the US occupation. Once the occupation is over there will be no further excuse for the terrorists’ presence and the Iraqis themselves can drive them out.
For Bush to hang on simply in the hope his luck might change is obscene.
