Excerpt
from Failures of the Presidents: From the Whiskey Rebellion and War of 1812 to the Bay of Pigs and War in Iraq
by Thomas J. Craughwell and M. William Phelps
War in Iraq
George W. Bush
Accomplished? On May 1, President Bush triumphantly
proclaimed the end of combat operations, and he did it with a
theatrical flourish. Attired in a Navy flight suit, the former Air
National Guard trainee (Bush had actually cut short his flight
training to participate in a political campaign) landed ceremoniously
on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln off San
Diego. Bush emerged from the plane under a banner stretched across
the carrier's super structure. "Mission Accomplished" the
banner exulted. "We have difficult work to do in Iraq," the
president said. "Parts of that country remain dangerous...The
War on Terror continues." But, he went on, "In the battle
of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed."
But
a growing opposition thought otherwise. Rumsfeld had assured Bush
that the war could be fought on the cheap. Once the productive Iraqi
oil fields were up and running, they would more defray the costs of
the war and the occupation. (As of spring 2008, Iraqi oil production
was still below prewar output.) A streamlined military force
brandishing high-tech equipment would be all that was needed.
American forces could be reduced and hand off the job to Iraqis.
When Lieutenant General Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of
staff, told Congress that "something in the order of several
hundred thousand" military personnel would be needed, Rumsfeld
was outraged. The Army's top officer was hounded into retirement. The
Pentagon leadership pointedly refused to attend the customary
retirement ceremony.
And Americans were dying. Bremer and the
CPA, mostly made up of young and inexperienced recent college
graduates but with impeccable political credentials, holed up in the
heavily fortified and protected area of Baghdad, the Green
Zone.
Beyond, chaos and danger reigned. Snipers picked off
individual soldiers. Roads were sown with mines and improvised
explosive devices (IEDs), which were designed to blow up and destroy
the unprotected undercarriage of military vehicles when they passed
over. Personnel carriers were only lightly armored, another
money-saving policy. Besides, heavy armor was unnecessary, it was
thought, with Iraq conquered and the population friendly. Troops took
to fashioning their own armor from scrap metal or persuaded families
back home to provide it to them.
The Bombing of a Shrine.
When Baghdad fell, Saddam Hussein was nowhere to be found. As the
coalition rounded up other former government leaders on their "Most
Wanted" list, the supreme leader's whereabouts remained a
mystery. Then, seven months after his statue fell in December 2003, a
disheveled and filthy Hussein was discovered cowering in a tiny
subterranean dugout -- a "spider hole," his captors called
it -- near his birthplace of Tikrit. The all-powerful dictator who
once had thirty-seven palaces was living in a few cubic feet
underneath a mud hut. Bush immediately went on television to trumpet
his capture, "I say to the Iraqi people, 'You will not have to
live in fear of Saddam ever again.'" But elsewhere, there was
little to crow about.
Even the commander of U.S. ground
forces acknowledged that a "low-key, guerrilla-type war"
was underway. Suicide bombers blew themselves up in marketplaces,
city squares, offices, buses, and crowded streets, often taking as
many as 100 fellow Iraqis with them. In one horrifying instance, 140
Shiites enjoying a Shia festival were blown up. Terrorist explosives
reduced to rubble one of the most treasured shrines of Shia Islam,
the Golden Mosque of Samarra with its gleaming dome, setting off a
countrywide wave of violence between Sunnis and Shiites. Trying to
quell the rising insurgency that was morphing into a civil war. U.S.
troops fought pitched battles with Shiite militia in the teeming Sadr
City district of Baghdad. A month later, they were fighting Sunni
insurgents for the city of Falluja.
Misled by the Iraq
National Congress's belief that Iraqis were united by their hatred of
Hussein, American leaders had vastly underestimated the long standing
enmity between the rival Muslim factions. Meanwhile Bremer had
undertaken to exterminate root and branch all vestiges of Hussein
rule. He outlawed Hussein's Baath party and barred all members from
the government payroll, even low-level clerks and drivers who had
joined the party simply to protect their jobs. "DeBaathification"
eliminated much of the trained bureaucracy and brought normal
government function to a standstill so that even mailing a letter
became difficult.
Another Bremer edict disbanded the Iraqi
army. Four hundred thousand angry trained soldiers were suddenly
turned onto the streets with no jobs or income, to demonstrate or
bitterly join the insurgency-where, at least, they would be fed.
The
army was the only organization that could bring any kind of order to
the country and perhaps stop the widespread looting, Bremer's
predecessor, an appalled General Garner noted. "You can get rid
of an army in a day, Jerry," he told Bremer. "It takes
years to build one." (Bremer was to claim afterward that he
didn't disband the army; it had simply "dissolved." And he
said he took his action only after consulting the Pentagon.)
Despite these setbacks and growing antiwar sentiment, Bush
was elected for a second term in 2004 and promised to prosecute the
war until "victory." After the election, Powell went to the
White House and submitted his resignation. He had, he insisted,
always intended to serve only one term. Bush made no effort to keep
him.
"We had a good and fulsome discussion," Powell
said in a press briefing afterward. "We came to the mutual
agreement that it would be appropriate for me to leave at this time."
Washington interpreted that as diplomatic double speak for "We
aired our disagreements in loud and angry voices."
Where
are those WMDS? The bits of broken crockery that the "Pottery
Barn Rule" had predicted continued to accumulate. David Kay,
named to head a diligent search to find those hidden weapons of mass
destruction, failed to turn up a single specimen after two years of
looking. Nor could he uncover any evidence of any advanced plans to
develop them. The best he could document were a few vials of anthrax
powder kept in scientists' home refrigerators as souvenirs after the
first Gulf War.
The aluminum tubes said to be designed for
enriching and weaponizing uranium were actually for use in
unforbidden short-range missiles. The deal to buy yellow-cake uranium
from the African nation of Niger, mentioned by Bush in his State of
the Union address, was a hoax. No evidence could be found of supposed
meetings in Prague between Al Qaeda operatives and Iraqi diplomats.
Then came the revelation--with graphic, almost
stomach-turning photos--that American soldiers had mistreated and
tortured prisoners in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. The
Congressional cry to take the troops out grew to a roar. Democratic
candidates swept the House and Senate in the 2006 elections. With
Bush's popularity sinking to the low 20s in the polls, other
Republicans stumbled over each other in haste to distance themselves
from the president. Rumsfeld was finally fired, and the Iraq Study
Group, an elite panel of Washington wisemen co-chaired by former
Secretary of State James Baker, normally a Bush acolyte, deemed the
Iraq situation "grave and deteriorating."
Instead of
withdrawing troops, however, a defiant Bush increased them. The
"surge" of 30,000 reinforcements announced in 2007 was
supposedly to allow the shaky, Shiite-controlled Iraqi government
time and cover to solve contentious issues--such as sharing oil
revenue and regional autonomy--and to train a viable army.
"As
they stand up, we will stand down," Bush repeated, almost like a
mantra. In the new army's first test of standing up, Prime Minister
Nouri Kamal al-Maliki ordered an attack on Shiite militias in the
port city of Basra. More than 1,000 recruits deserted or fled the
battlefield and had to be rescued by U.S. troops and airpower, with a
ceasefire brokered by Iran.
Meanwhile, the country that Bush
still insisted was the front fine in the "war on terror"
lay in shambles, along with the lives of twenty-five million
citizens. Except for the Kurdish-held north and the "Green Zone"
headquarters of the coalition, no part of the embattled nation could
be considered secure. (Later, in the spring of 2008, incessant rocket
attacks shattered the supposed safety of the Green Zone.) Cities
cleared of resistance by coalition offensives frequently fen back
into chaos when the troops moved on. Historic Baghdad, the fabled
city of flying carpets and Arabian Nights, was a nightmare of suicide
bombing, IEDS, and ruins, with one million impoverished residents in
'Sadr City,' a Shiite enclave and a law unto itself.
More
than one and a half million Iraqis, by official estimate, had fled,
most of them huddled in squalid quarters in the unwelcoming cities of
neighboring Jordan and Syria. Another estimated two million were
displaced within the country, fleeing wrecked homes to crowd in with
relatives or live in makeshift tent villages. Much of the educated
population of what had once been the most developed country in the
Middle East had decamped, including 12,000 of the country's 34,000
physicians. Living conditions for those remaining were abysmal. Whole
neighborhoods were without adequate sewage or water.
In July
2007, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker told Congress that most Iraqi
cities had electricity only one to two hours a day. On the fifth
anniversary of the war, the nation's electric grid was still
producing less than 5,000 daily megawatts of power, less than when
the war started. Iraqis faced a scorching summer when 11,000
megawatts would be the daily minimum. In oil-rich Iraq, oil to power
generating plants was in short supply. The bulk of it was being
shipped abroad, the Iraqi government's only source of revenue. And an
estimated 35 percent of the population was unemployed.
The
repeatedly fought-over city of Falluja, west of Baghdad, was a
classic example of the war's devastation. Once a thriving city of
450,000, its surviving population was estimated in 2007 at fewer than
50,000. Eighty percent of the buildings had been damaged in the
fighting; half of them were completely destroyed. Half of the homes
were gone. Those that remained were largely without water,
electricity, or sewage. There were no operating schools. Buildings
had been stripped by looters, including floor tiles and window
frames. Once Falluja had been known as "the city of mosques,"
with more than 200 glittering temples of worship. Only 60 remained
intact.
The estimates of "collateral damage"-the
Pentagon euphemism for civilian and noncombatant casualties-varied
wildly. In 2007, the Iraqi Ministry of Health gave a low figure of
151,000 Iraqis killed from war-related causes between February 2003
and June 2006. A survey published in the British medical journal
Lancet estimated 600,000 "excess" deaths-those above
the normal attrition of population-for the period 2003-2006. An
Opinion Research Bureau report estimated the war had caused 946,000
to 1,033,000 violent deaths. In one survey, researchers asked
individual Iraqis if they had a civilian relative or friend who had
been a war casualty. Eighty percent of those interviewed said yes.
One unlamented casualty was Hussein. After a tumultuous trial
marked by raucous shouting at the judges of the special tribunal, the
onetime strong man was unceremoniously hanged for 'crimes against
humanity' on December 30, 2006. Reactions predictably ranged from
cheering to anger. And yet the fighting went on. And on.
In
December 2005, Bush at last admitted that some intelligence on which
the war had been fought was "wrong." But so what? Bush
insisted that the war was worthwhile and the decision to bring down
Hussein was "the right thing to do." He would have made the
same decision even if he had known more. Powell, the obedient
soldier, kept silent while writing his memoirs and giving
motivational speeches. But in 2007, he finally apologized for the
United Nations speech. "The intelligence I was given turned out
to be inaccurate," he told Barbara Walters. "That will
always remain a blot on my record."
The
Historic Record. In 1971, Henry Kissinger asked Chinese
foreign minister Zhou En-lai the historical impact of the French
Revolution of 1789. "Too soon to tell," En-lai responded.
In the lame duck months of Bush's presidency, in the midst of
an election campaign, and with his popularity ratings cratering, by
En-lai's reckoning, it is at least 200 years too soon to assess
Bush's impact on history, and especially the Iraq invasion.
But
writers, historians, politicians, office-seekers, and the world are
trying already to size up the eight Bush years. Some contend that
Bush is simply "an amiable dunce" (as Clark Clifford dubbed
Ronald Reagan), readily manipulated by Vice President Cheney, former
Secretary Rumsfeld, and his political Svengali Karl Rove. They say
Bush is a president out of the loop, whose priorities were cutting
brush on his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and getting a good night's
sleep. Many Europeans share that view and believe Bush has destroyed
the world's trust in the United States--trust that will take decades
to rebuild. Others regard the Bush administration as visionary-the
first to recognize an impending "clash of civilizations,"
and begin to prepare America for it. And meanwhile, to fight a
preemptive war before the terrorist enemy got stronger.
How will
the decision to invade Iraq be judged 50, 100, 200 years from now?
How will Bush's record be written in the twenty-third century? Where
is Zhou En-lai when we need him?
by Thomas J. Craughwell with M. William Phelps
Published by Publisher; September 2008;$19.95US/$21.95CAN; 978-1-59233-299-1
Copyright © 2008 Author