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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
A Reaganite Republican says Bush should apologize for his grievous failures on Iraq.
Aug 1, 2005 | In the wake of the London bombings, President Bush continues his attempts to rally public support for his policies in Iraq. Instead, he should apologize to Americans for those policies.
Republicans have been demanding a lot of apologies from Democrats recently. On "Meet the Press" on July 17, Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman said Democrats should apologize to Karl Rove for their "smear campaign" against him. Republicans also pushed Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., to recant his ill-considered comparison of Guantánamo jailers to Nazis. And the GOP demanded that Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean repent of his virulent attacks on Republicans. But it is the Republican president who has the most to apologize for.
Not that the Democrats don't have anything to apologize for. I started my career in Washington working for Ronald Reagan and would happily do the same again. But for reasons that I offered in a column in Salon last fall (which subsequently was featured in a "Doonesbury" cartoon), the current president is no conservative, at least as that philosophy has traditionally been understood. His grievous failures dramatically overshadow those of his political adversaries.
President Bush took the United States into war based on a falsehood. His appointees talked about mushroom clouds, Iraq's stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and unmanned aerial vehicles that could hit America.
Vice President Cheney claimed that Saddam Hussein was involved in Sept. 11. Various administration officials, from the president on down, declared that the Saddam regime was a "threat," a "significant threat," the "most dangerous threat of our time," a "threat to the region and the world," a "threat to the security of free nations," a "serious threat to our country, to our friends and to our allies," a "unique and urgent threat" and a "serious and mounting threat."
None of these claims was true. Bush and his appointees had ample reason for doubt. Indeed, as John B. Judis and Spencer Ackerman of the New Republic pointed out, "Unbeknownst to the public, the administration faced equally serious opposition within its own intelligence agencies." The CIA, the State Department's intelligence bureau, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Energy, the Air Force and the International Atomic Energy Agency all disputed particular administration claims.
If the president's insistence on believing what he wanted to believe had only cost America $200 billion, it would be bad enough. But more than 1,750 servicemen and women have been killed, nearly 14,000 have been wounded (many of them maimed), and Iraq, as even President Bush admits, has become a vortex of international terrorism. The president should apologize.
The failings of U.S. intelligence -- the assumption that Iraq possessed a wide variety of threatening weapons when it in fact had none -- were manifold. The Senate Intelligence Committee report noted that "most of the major key judgments" in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate were "either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting."
Yet the president didn't address this issue until the 9/11 commission prepared to announce its findings as the 2004 election approached. And he has yet to hold anyone accountable for anything, other than in the few cases in which people told him what he didn't want to hear.
Once the truth came out, the president could have taken responsibility and acknowledged that he'd been wrong. Instead, in his 2004 State of the Union speech, Bush devoted just two sentences to WMD, noting the presence of "dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities." The administration mantra became: "Never mind the WMD, Saddam was a bad guy."
The administration's loss of domestic credibility and America's loss of international credibility have been huge. The president should apologize.
Although the administration evidently made its decision to go to war months before it actually invaded Iraq, it failed to prepare for the inevitable consequences of loosing the dogs of war. Most incredibly, it failed to contemplate the possibility of sustained opposition -- the sort of resistance routinely engendered by foreign occupations -- with officials from the vice president on down dismissing the prospects of a violent insurgency. The administration deployed inadequate forces to suppress violent criminals and insurgents alike, neglected to secure sensitive sites after Saddam was overthrown, and provided too little body armor and too few armored vehicles to protect U.S. forces. Even now, two years later, the latter problem continues. The Boston Globe recently reported that Marines in western Iraq lack not only armored vehicles but also heavy machine guns and communications equipment.
