TodayBetter plan? There’s oodles of ‘em
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Oh no, he didn’t.
Coming hard on the heels of the negative response to his proposed escalation of the Iraq war, President Bush stepped up to the microphone for his Saturday radio address and said:
“But those who refuse to give this plan a chance to work have an obligation to offer an alternative that has a better chance for success. To oppose everything while proposing nothing is irresponsible.”
I seem to recall a minor parade of alternative proposals chewing up the news space over the past few months, starting with the Iraq Study Group and moving onward through the Congress and the media.
The fact that Bush ignored every single one of them does not mean that they did not exist.
I seem to have had an idea of my own that didn’t get much play beyond this space. It went like this:
Don’t go there.
Of course, that came in a column I filed in the first week of February 2003, far too late, as we now know, to have any effect on what happened about six weeks later.
Not that my idea was particularly original by that time. Lots of people were saying the same thing. Our neighbors at the U.S. Army War College debunked some of the false assumptions that led us into this war before it even started.
There also were dissenting views deep inside the Defense Department and our intelligence agencies — which is why the vice president made daily trips to the CIA in hopes of extracting any possible morsel of information that might justify the stupid, counterproductive war they’d all been jonesing to launch since the late 1990s.
The Project For a New American Century wrote to President Clinton in 1998 demanding an American invasion of Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein on the grounds he might acquire and use weapons of mass destruction. Among the people who signed this letter were Elliott Abrams, Richard L. Armitage, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Zalmay Khalilzad, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Robert B. Zoellick.
Every one of those people are either current or past employees of the Bush administration, and it’s hardly a coincidence.
Bush, for his part, was thinking about invading Iraq if he got elected back in 1999, strictly to burnish his credentials as a commander-in-chief, according to Mickey Herskowitz, one of the ghostwriters on Bush’s book, “A Charge to Keep.”
There has been no shortage of ideas to do the Iraq war a different way. Start with Gen. Eric Shinsecki, who testified to Congress in 2002 that the operation would take “several hundred thousand” troops, contradicting the administration’s “small light force” philosophy. Within days, the Defense Department “retired” him ahead of schedule.
Once Saddam was deposed, there was the question of what to do with the army and the bureaucracy. Instead of maintaining as much continuity as humanly possible, they disbanded the army and banished the majority of bureaucrats from their jobs on the grounds they were members of Saddam’s Baath party.
This had the effect of throwing half the population out of work, giving them more free time to develop hobbies, like insurgency.
Meanwhile, the Coalition Provisional Authority decided to privatize government-owned businesses in a bid to turn Iraq into some kind of free-market utopia. In service of this objective, they populated the CPA with recent college grads whose only qualification for rebuilding Iraq is that they were Republican.
Applications from non-GOPers who actually had experiences in such things as speaking Arabic or post-disaster reconstruction were discarded, according to the Washington Post. The Wall Street Journal ran the story of Jay Hallen, a 2001 political science grad who had no background in high finance but was tapped by the CPA to reopen the Iraq Stock Exchange.
Not that the folks who brought us this unintentional conspiracy to empty the treasury and destroy our reputation in the Middle East have used up all their bad ideas. Did anyone else notice that in the immediate wake of the president’s week-ago speech that reporters were asking questions about a possible invasion of Iran or Syria? Sen. Joe Biden did, specifically telling Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice that Congress would have something to say about any further invasions.
Meanwhile, the president went on “60 Minutes” Sunday to grump that, well, maybe he was wrong about WMD but so was everybody else. Well, Scott Ritter, who was on the inspection teams in 1998, knew there weren’t any. So did Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, who ran inspections right up until Bush ordered inspectors out of Iraq in 2003.
Anybody remember any of the creative insults that were lobbed at these guys by the administration and its friends at Fox News at the time?
And yet this president thinks he needs to see better ideas before anybody criticizes him. You’d dump a cell phone or cable TV provider that messed up your service as often, and as consistently, as this bunch has bungled Iraq.
Now that I think about it, that’s what the voters tried to do in November.
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Francis Volpe’s e-mail address is:
fvolpe@cumberlink.com.
