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Published on Friday, July 11, 2003 by Inter Press Service
by Jim Lobe
How could such smart people get so much wrong?
"I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators," U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney declared on television just as U.S. troops were massing along the border between Kuwait and Iraq on the eve of Washington's march to Baghdad.
"Wildly off the mark," declared Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, when asked by senators just before the war whether he agreed with then-Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki's estimate that more than 200,000 troops would be needed as an occupation force after the war.
"I believe it is definitely more likely than not that some degree of common knowledge between (al Qaeda and Iraq) was involved" in the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, former Central Intelligence Agency chief and Defense Policy Board member James Woolsey testified before a federal court just before the war.
"We know where they are," Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld assured television viewers about the location of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) at the end of March, two weeks into the war. "They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad, and east, west, south and north somewhat."
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," declared President George W. Bush in his late-January State of the Union address.
"We know he's out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons and we know that he has a longstanding relationship with various terrorist groups, including the al-Qaeda organization," asserted Cheney on the war's eve.
Now, three months after U.S. troops consolidated control over Iraq, not only has the White House admitted that neither it nor the British ever had solid--as opposed to obviously forged--evidence that Hussein was trying to buy uranium in Africa; no WMD have been discovered; the notion of ties between Iraq and al Qaeda has been officially dismissed by a special U.N. panel; and public sentiment in Iraq--at least as registered by even the compliant U.S. press--appears ever more doubtful about its "liberation," to say the least.
That last observation is bolstered by the fact the administration is engaged in a major debate over whether significantly more troops than the 145,000 U.S. troops in Iraq now are needed to secure the country. Washington has asked no less than 70 countries to contribute troops or police--at mostly U.S. taxpayers' expense--to an occupation that is increasingly open-ended.
Meanwhile, U.S. lawmakers, including growing numbers of Republicans, have become distinctly uneasy about the situation in Iraq, as the gap between the confident predictions made at the start of the war by top U.S. officials and the grim reality of the actual situation--in which U.S. allied and soldiers are facing an average of 13 violent attacks each day--appears to be moving toward guerrilla warfare.
"The problem here is that Americans are unsure about the future of our involvement in Iraq," Republican Sen. John McCain, an Iraq hawk before the war, gently told an increasingly defensive Rumsfeld at a hearing Wednesday as Democrats called openly for the administration to swallow its pride and ask NATO, if not the U.N., to take over. "So what you need to do, in my view, is give...a concrete plan as much as you can."
The 'Q' word--for quagmire--not to mention the 'V' word, for Vietnam--is back in mainstream discourse as each day appears to bring the killing of at least one more U.S. or British soldier, and U.S. troops and officers in Iraq tell television cameras that they are stretched far too thinly to impose order on a country the size of California with a population that grows less and less appreciative of their presence, and appears to be harboring people who actually want them dead.
"The Army is getting bogged down in a morale-numbing 4th Generation War in Iraq that is now taking on some appearances of the Palestinian Intifada," according to a comment late last month on an all-military website, while even some conventional media have suggested that Iraq could turn into a U.S. Chechnya.
"Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated," the Christian Science Monitor reported this week. The Monitor quoted
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