Iraq, then the world, Bush hoped
By Peter Hartcher
April 17, 2004
This week George Bush came closer to telling the truth about the invasion of Iraq than at any time in his presidency.
It is extraordinary that, a year after invading a foreign country unprovoked, the US leader had still not answered straightforwardly the big question overhanging the whole enterprise - why?
The US soldiers in occupied Iraq have been killed at an average of 1.6 a day since the President's announcement of the end of major hostilities. That's 550 dead over 350 days. Including the other coalition forces, it's 620 dead soldiers, or 1.8 killed daily. That's 360 per cent more killed in the occupation than in the invasion.
How many more will die in the occupation? One of the most credible US experts, Tony Cordesman, of the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and Security Studies, estimates that it will take roughly another year of US military occupation to stabilise the country, at the loss of another 500 American lives at the current rate of attrition.
This attrition of American lives has run in parallel to the attrition of Bush's various justifications for war. The effect of both has been to deal Bush a serious challenge in US public opinion. His status as a wartime President had been his greatest political strength. It has gradually become his greatest political vulnerability.
The Pentagon bans the media from photographing the scenes where the remains of US soldiers are returned home in body bags from Iraq. Not content to blot out the reality of body bags, the Pentagon also has renamed them. Body bags are now officially "transfer tubes". But the explosion of visible violence this month in Iraq has proved impossible to airbrush out of the public view.
The latest Gallup polling showed 64 per cent of Americans believed things were "going badly" for the US in Iraq on April 8, the most negative reading since the invasion was launched. And this is hurting Bush's re-election prospects. The contest for the presidential election on November 2 is as close as it could possibly be. "If it had been held in December or early January, Bush would have been re-elected," points out Charlie Cook, publisher of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
"Had it been late January or in February, he would have lost. In March he would have won, and if the balloting took place today, it would be close, but I believe the President would come up a bit short. No telling how many times this lead is likely to change hands before November 2."
Bush and another political leader, Osama bin Laden, sensed the American President's moment of vulnerability this week, and both acted on it. Bush emerged for only the third prime-time televised press conference of his presidency, to recover public support for his Iraq project.
And bin Laden offered a supposed "truce" to halt planned terrorist attacks in any European nation that withdraws its forces from Iraq, to isolate the US in its Iraq project. Bin Laden's offer, which he said is good for three months, has a clear tactical intent.
As the Bush Administration approaches the June 30 handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi government of some kind, it has been exploring two new international initiatives for the running of Iraq. One is a fresh UN mandate. The other is the possibility of putting the military occupation under the command of its European alliance, NATO. Both require European support.
Bin Laden hopes that his offer of a "truce" will undermine that support, paralyse the UN and NATO, and frustrate Bush. Bin Laden's ploy alone will not, but it can help sow doubt and fear for the next three months. And they are the staples of his trade.
So what is the true reason for Bush's war on Iraq?
The simplest to dispose of is the argument that it had something to do with September 11. We don't need to listen to the rantings of Bush's political enemies. We know from four published sources from within the Bush Administration itself that the President was planning to move on Baghdad from his earliest days in office.
The four? The first exhibit is the book by a former Bush speechwriter, David Frum, The Right Man, a glowing portrayal of the President. Frum relates a conversation in the Oval Office in February 2001, where he took notes, when Bush told his staff privately of his "determination to dig Saddam Hussein out of power in Iraq". That was the month after his inauguration and seven months before the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
The second exhibit is the quasi-official history of the post-September 11 White House by journalist Bob Woodward. The White House gave Woodward access to official minutes of the meetings of the National Security Council. His book, Bush at War, tells us that the CIA immediately identified al-Qaeda as the culprit in the terrorist attacks on the US.
But the next day, when Bush convened the NSC to craft strategy, Rumsfeld raised the unrelated question of Iraq. Woodward quotes Rumsfeld asking, "Why shouldn't we go against Iraq, not just al-Qaeda?"
"Before the attacks," Woodward writes, "the Pentagon had been working for months on developing a military option for Iraq."
Third is the new book based on the notes and papers of Bush's first treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill. The Price of Loyalty describes the first meeting of Bush's National Security Council. The President tasked its members with preparing military options for removing Saddam. Says O'Neill, who was at the meeting, "getting Hussein was now the Administration's focus, that much was already clear". The Bush Administration was 10 days old.
Fourth is the new book by Bush's former top counter-terrorism official, Dick Clarke, who co-ordinated the White House crisis response to the September 11 attacks. The next day Bush grabbed him and some other aides and told them "See if Saddam did this."
Clarke replied: "But, Mr President, al-Qaeda did this."
Bush: "I know, I know, but ... see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred."
September 11 and the so-called war on terrorism was not the reason for the invasion of Iraq. It was a political marketing opportunity. And as the occupation continues yet the risk of terrorist attack does not abate, it has dawned on an increasing number of Americans that there was never any real connection.
So if Iraq was not about al-Qaeda, and it was not about terrorism, what was it about? The danger of weapons of mass destruction has been so discredited as to be a comic motif. A single line, from the CIA head, George Tenet, on February 5, will suffice. Speaking of the US intelligence community's analysis of the danger of Saddam's WMD, Tenet said: "They never said there was an 'imminent' threat."
Now, by process of attrition, Bush's real motive has been laid bare. Early in the march on Baghdad, he was reluctant to speak of it. But neither was it a secret. It was hiding in plain view. He spoke of it five times in one form or another in his press conference this week: "We're changing the world."
Since the end of the Cold War, a group of Republican ideologues has been developing a theory of and practice of hegemony. Labelled the neo-conservatives, or neo-cons for short, these people are the bearers of the doctrine of American exceptionalism, much as the author Herman Melville formulated it in 1850: "We are the peculiar chosen people - the Israel of our time. We bear the ark of the liberties of the world."
As soon as Bush was elected, he tasked the Pentagon with the work of rewriting the National Security Strategy, which a professor of military history at Yale University, John Lewis Gaddis, describes as perhaps "the most important reformulation of US grand strategy in over half a century".
The two key concepts it enshrines are pre-emption, and hegemony. The US will pre-empt threats to preserve hegemony. And hegemony is a nice way of saying preponderant and unchallengeable global domination. Iraq was destined to be the test bed for the new doctrine as the Bush Administration set out to recast the world in its own interests. Iraq was the ideal starting point for reasons that include its implications for oil supply and for the security of Israel. But they are details in the grand vision.
Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, observes that this is a period of great danger for the US, but also "of enormous opportunity ... a period akin to 1945 to 1947, when American leadership expanded the number of free and democratic states - Japan and Germany among the great powers - to create a new balance of power that favoured freedom".
September 11 was the perfect political opportunity to win political support for the new doctrine. As the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, quickly grasped, that day created "the kind of opportunities that World War II offered, to refashion the world".
It is an idealistic vision, the opposite of realism, and a powerful one. But because it refuses to submit to existing realities of world affairs, it is also a disruptive one. Because it seeks profoundly to change the status quo, it is a revolutionary doctrine.
Bush this week vowed to pursue his vision "to change the world." As he said: "It's important for those soldiers to know America stands with them, and we weep when they die." There will be much more weeping as Bush pursues his conception of America's manifest destiny.
