Mismanaged
President Bush mocks Sen. John Kerry by chanting an earlier Kerry remark that Iraq “is the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He might want to find a new line. News stories breaking this week indicate that Kerry isn’t wrong when he admonished Bush that “you can be certain and wrong.”
The chief U.S. weapons hunter Charles Duelfer concluded that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, had not made any weapons of mass destruction since the Gulf War of 1991, and did not have the capabilities of making weapons of mass destruction.
Did he want WMD? Probably. But you don’t invade a nation simply because a despot, demonic or otherwise, wishes to have WMD and pretends that he does. What Duelfer has said isn’t any different than what the U.N. inspector said prior to the invasion. It runs contrary, though, to long-held beliefs by the U.S. intelligence community that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was on its way to make nuclear weapons. The intelligence – much of it gathered pre Sept. 11 – was wrong.
The president believed it in 2001 and he trusted it in 2002 when he used WMD as the sole reason for launching a preemptive strike on Iraq. He needn’t wait for history to prove him wrong. Current affairs are already doing it.
Yet, Bush admits now that he believed faulty information, but he won’t back away from his urgency in bombing Baghdad. He has crafted a new excuse: Saddam was abusing the U.N.’s oil-for-food program. Regardless of Bush’s justifications for bringing American forces to Iraq, this week it also became clearer that his administration lacked a plan for once they arrived.
Paul Bremer, the former top U.S. official in Iraq, now says that we didn’t have enough troops on the ground and that a strategic error was made in not stopping the looting following the fall of Saddam.
“We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness,” Bremer said, while speaking before an insurance group this week. Bremer claims he asked for more. Who’s to know for sure? Bush continues to claim that the generals get the support that they ask for. But the generals also saw one of their own retired prematurely when he advised pre-invasion that more ground troops than planned would be needed.
More and more it appears that the president was certainly wrong. Until he acknowledges the mistakes, it is difficult to muster confidence that he isn’t continuing to mismange this war.