Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedy.
—Ernest Benn (1875–1954), British publicist
WHAT FOLLOWS IS WRITTEN BY BOB ALONE BECAUSE CAL STRONGLY disagrees with the conclusions. The Iraq war is one issue on which the authors, despite their best common ground efforts, cannot agree. We do agree that a bipartisan consensus should be pursued by President Bush in consultation with Democrats and Republicans in Congress. The facts concerning the content of the Patriot Act and the campaign attacks described below are accurate.
The Patriot Act was submitted by the White House to Congress in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. The Patriot Act gave the executive branch broad powers to pursue terrorists at home and abroad. It suspended habeas corpus for terror suspects and refused to accept the rules of the Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners of war, to which the United States was a signatory, by creating a new category of enemies called “enemy combatants.” Most of these prisoners were held at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
In an extremely controversial move, other terror suspects were sent to Eastern European countries, where they were placed in secret (and perhaps illegal) prisons set up by the CIA. Still others were turned over to our Arab allies in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, where they were tortured for intelligence that was then handed to U.S. officials. Documents have since surfaced indicating that the United States was aware of the torture by its allies, which was widely reported by European and Mideast press outlets. The United States Supreme Court ruled that the confinement of prisoners without habeas corpus was unconstitutional. Congress rewrote the Patriot Act shortly before the 2006 election to comply with the court’s ruling.
The domestic provisions of the Patriot Act gave the FBI wide-ranging authority to create roving wiretaps of suspected targets and allowed the Bureau to search a person’s home without his or her knowledge and gain access to the records of potential terrorist targets, including records of books checked out at their local library. (The Inspector General of the FBI announced in March 2007 that up to 3,000 letters were issued improperly.) The Patriot Act was debated while workmen were still clearing debris from Ground Zero in New York. Few lawmakers challenged the bill’s provisions, because either they supported expanded government power, or they were too politically intimidated to put up a fight.
Democrats partnered with a few libertarians and conservative Republicans in Congress to successfully attach language to the bill mandating that the extended powers for federal agents in the Patriot Act be subjected to review and a new vote after five years. In addition, Democrats were able to strip a provision from the act that prevented the federal government from hiring workers at salaries below the prevailing union wage for regional jobs at the newly created Department of Homeland Security, which was also established by the Patriot Act.
One of those senators responsible for removing the prevailing wage issue from the bill was Georgia’s Democratic senator Max Cleland, a highly decorated, triple-amputee veteran of Vietnam. It was this effort to provide decent wages for workers that would cost him his Senate seat in the 2002 election.
Republicans, using familiar campaign tactics, would make masterful use of Cleland’s opposition to this one provision. Cleland was a beloved figure among Senate Democrats. Perpetually cheerful in spite of his ravaged body, he was always ready to help a fellow senator.
His Republican opponent in the election was Congressman Saxby Chambliss, who, like Vice President Cheney, had avoided Vietnam through a series of draft deferments. That didn’t stop Chambliss from running ads suggesting that Cleland opposed the Patriot Act, leaving a none-too-subtle suggestion that Cleland was soft on national security and the war on terror. Bush and Cheney picked up on this message while campaigning for Chambliss in Georgia. For Democrats, Max Cleland’s defeat was what Robert Bork’s defeat had been for Republicans fourteen years earlier.
George Bush used the same “weak on national security” message against other Democrats in the 2002 midterm elections. With these demagogic attacks, he all but severed ties with congressional Democrats, sending polarization to new heights. What infuriated Democrats was that a strong majority of them had supported both the war-on-terror resolution and the USA Patriot Act. Then the president, in the midst of his “weak on national security” attacks on Democrats, had the gall to accuse Democrats of politicizing the war on terror! The tactic worked for the Republicans. They actually gained seats in both the House and Senate in 2002.
In the spring of 2003, George Bush asked Congress for authority to take the country to war against Iraq. He cited three compelling reasons: Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that posed a severe security threat to the United States and its allies; Saddam Hussein had tried to buy enriched “yellow cake” uranium to restart Iraq’s nuclear weapons program; and, most ominously, intelligence proved that agents from Iraq had met with the al-Qaeda planners prior to 9/11 in Prague. It was a compelling case and it convinced a majority of Democrats in the House and Senate to vote for war authority. (It also persuaded me to write a column for the conservative newspaper the Washington Times in support of the war, a position I profoundly regret.)
Some of America’s allies, notably France and Germany, opposed a war with Iraq and attempted to derail a UN Security Council resolution supporting American action. Secretary of State Colin Powell, by far the most widely respected American on the world stage, was dispatched to the UN to make the case for action against Iraq. It was a masterful presentation that lasted three hours. Powell produced intelligence information, including photographs, that purported to show Iraqi mobile WMD labs.
Although the UN failed to vote for a specific war resolution, President Bush believed he had the authority under previous UN resolutions with which Iraq had failed to comply. Bush attempted to build a “Coalition of the Willing.” The first to sign up was America’s strongest ally, Great Britain. It was quickly joined by Canada, Italy, Spain, Poland, and various former republics (now countries) of the Soviet Union. Japan, South Korea, and Australia also joined the coalition, along with smaller countries from Latin America. With the exception of Britain, these other countries had minimal combat operations in Iraq. The main force consisted of the United States and Britain.
A year earlier, the United States had led a larger coalition against the Taliban in Afghanistan. After forcing the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan in 1989, the Taliban had taken control of the Afghan government and provided shelter to al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, who claimed responsibility for 9/11. The United States and its allies, working in coordination with anti-Taliban forces called the Northern Alliance, routed the Taliban, established a new government, held national elections, and came close to capturing bin Laden.
The Afghan war was a success and had the strong backing of the American public. President Bush was riding a well-deserved wave of popular support when he asked for authority for war against Iraq. Neither Congress nor the public had reason to doubt the intelligence the president presented as the rationale for war. As he pointed out at the time, Congress had access to the same intelligence. Presumably they had reviewed it and also reached the conclusion that war was necessary. It would take almost two years for the intelligence to be discredited.
The invasion of Iraq began in March 2003. Initially, the war went well. The British force defeated the Iraqis in the south of Iraq to secure the country’s vast southern oil fields, while the Americans went north to take Baghdad. Iraq fell quickly; Saddam Hussein fled, and his two notorious sons were killed in a firefight with American forces. The Iraqi military put up little resistance and most fled to the countryside.
Signs of trouble soon emerged. Vice President Cheney had predicted, prior to the war, that the American military would be treated like liberators by the Iraqi people. Instead, they were greeted by insurgent gunfire. The American force was relatively small—about 130,000 troops. The number had caused serious disagreement among officers at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and his civilian deputies. Rumsfeld favored a smaller force that could win with speed and just as quickly leave once the country was secured.
The problem was that the country had not been secured. It remains unsecured at this writing, over four years after the initial invasion. U.S. war dead in Iraq would pass the three-thousand mark on New Year’s Eve 2006. Two days before, on December 29, Saddam Hussein was hanged after having been convicted of mass murder by Iraqi courts. It became apparent that there were sufficient troops to drive Hussein’s government out of power and immobilize his military, but not enough to secure the peace.
It took a long time for this reality to settle in. After Baghdad fell, President Bush copiloted a jet fighter to a landing on the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln. The president declared that major combat in Iraq was over. A huge banner appeared behind him with the words mission accomplished.
Despite a string of bad news from Iraq, President Bush went into his reelection campaign in 2004 with a solid advantage on national security issues over his opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. Voters were not happy with the Iraq war, but they still believed it was part of the war on terror. Memories of 9/11 were fresh in American minds, and voters remained sufficiently traumatized by those memories to reelect George W. Bush. The president and the Republicans once again hauled out their favorite theme: “The Democrats are weak on national security.” Once again, voters took the bait.
By 2005, events had turned against the Republicans. Despite brief periods of hope after the capture of Saddam Hussein and successful national elections, news from Iraq worsened by the day. Over 3,390 American soldiers had been killed by the middle of May 2007 and over 25,000 injured. More than 70,000 Iraqi civilians were dead. The insurgency grew in strength as the new Iraqi army being trained by the United States was not yet prepared for independent combat.
In the words of President Bush, “When it [the new Iraq army] stands up, we will stand down.” The Iraqi army isn’t close to standing up. The new Iraqi government was unable to control sectarian violence as the country descended into civil war between Shiites and Sunnis.
Back home, Republicans faced a series of scandals involving a lobbyist named Jack Abramoff. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was indicted for money laundering in Texas, albeit by a partisan district attorney. George Bush’s poll ratings were terrible, but not as terrible as the ratings for the Republican Congress. Democratic contributors smelled blood in the coming midterm elections and poured millions into individual campaigns and party committees.
The ever-optimistic president pulled out the national security card again, and his attacks became more shrill and acerbic. He accused Democrats of “cutting and running,” of “waving the white flag of surrender,” and, most egregious of all, he suggested, “If Democrats win, the terrorists win.” Once again, Bush accused Democrats of politicizing the war! This time, voters weren’t listening. Republican candidates fled from Bush, repeatedly refusing to appear with the president.
Voters had concluded that Bush and his administration had mismanaged the war. They also believed the war in Iraq was separate from the war on terror. Exit polls in the 2006 election indicated that voters thought the Bush administration had lied about the intelligence used as the rationale for invading Iraq. It may take time to prove who lied, or if anyone deliberately misled the public. One thing is clear: the selling of the Iraq war will go down as one of history’s great con jobs.
The public was told that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He did not. They were told by Vice President Cheney on Meet the Press in the spring of 2003 that Iraqi intelligence officials had met with al-Qaeda in Prague prior to the 9/11 attacks. The meetings never took place. Bush himself suggested that Saddam had a robust nuclear weapons program. He did not. Despite pleas from the military for more troops for the war, Rumsfeld refused to send them. Postwar planning was chaotic and led to Iraq dissolving into civil war. As you read this, more soldiers have now died in Iraq than civilians in all three attacks on 9/11.
President Bush desperately tried to keep up the illusion that Iraq was central to the war on terror. In some respects, he was right. Most experts believe Iraq was not a haven for terrorists before we invaded, but it is today. Democrats turned the war issue against the Republicans in the 2006 campaign. It turned out not to be necessary since the public, in its wisdom, had turned against the Iraq war before most Democrats had the courage to do so. Nevertheless, Democrats were the beneficiary of the public’s wrath over Iraq and the polarization of Washington politics, and they took control in both the Senate and the House in 2006.
WHAT FOLLOWS IS CAL’S VIEW OF IRAQ.
No less an authority than Osama bin Laden has said that Iraq is the central front in what he considers a world war. Should he not be taken at his word?
Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction. He used them against the Kurds and was charged with mass murder by the elected government that replaced his dictatorship. Saddam had plenty of time to hide or transport his WMDs out of Iraq before U.S. troops invaded. A top Iraqi air-force official, General George Sada, made that charge in a book he wrote titled Saddam’s Secrets: How an Iraqi General Defied and Survived Saddam Hussein.
Most of our allies had access to the same intelligence President Bush saw regarding Saddam’s weapons—the ones he had and the ones he was developing. (Remember “Chemical Ali,” a female scientist in charge of his biological and chemical weapons manufacturing unit?)
If it were only this simple: accurate and real-time intelligence, proper oversight by Congress, and a president who had the impeccable foresight of a biblical prophet.
I recall British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s insightful remarks in the late 1970s. Thatcher said we in the West make a mistake when we “transpose our morality on those who do not share it.”
This is the serious flaw in Western thinking: that what the United States and what remains of its Western allies do, or don’t do, affects what our enemies do, or don’t do. Rarely, if at all, in world history has the behavior of radical Muslim fanatics been determined—or their objectives deterred—by Western actions, unless those “actions” are, in fact, inactions, or ineffective actions.
That’s because this is a religious war, no matter how many times President Bush, the State Department, and then–British prime minister Tony Blair have denied it. The prize is world domination. The radicals say it and they prove it by blowing themselves up and killing others, which their doctrines teach is their only guarantee of entering heaven. How do Western militaries fight and Western diplomats negotiate with such fanaticism? How do we sit at a table with people who believe their God wants us dead? Do we say, “Okay, we’ll give you this sliver of land; now will you please not kill us?” They reply, “We’ll take your sliver of land and we will continue killing you until you give us all of the land, which belongs to us anyway.”
Apologists say the fanatics are a minority of the world’s more than 1 billion Muslims, possibly “only 10 percent.” Ten percent of one billion is one hundred million, which is enough to destabilize any government and to seriously impair any economy. And how do we know there are “only” 10 percent of them? As they infiltrate and attempt to dominate France, England, the Netherlands, and Germany, and already dominate the Arab world and Indonesia—as well as making inroads in some African countries—there are no “moderate” Muslims rising up to turn them in or to obstruct their “jihad.” Few, if any, authoritative Muslim clerics speak publicly about the “heresies” of the radicals. Is it because they fear being killed, or because they quietly agree with their objectives? Either way, the killing continues. If the radicals do not represent “authentic” Islam, why, then, doesn’t “authentic” Islam do something about them? Authentic Christians and Jews seek to isolate those who speak wrongly in their names.
This is a war that was destined to come. Can those who claim that terrorism is the result of the United States invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein answer the question of who, or what, was responsible for terrorism before the United States entered Iraq this time, or the time before? The fact is, modern terrorism has been occurring in the Middle East since Israel’s restoration in 1948. Before that, Muslims and Arabs killed one another and supported Adolf Hitler in his “final solution” to exterminate the Jewish people. Every peace offer by Israel has been rejected. Every concession has gone unrewarded. Every peace agreement has been violated, not by Israel, but by her enemies. Every one. Still, the State Department in Republican and Democratic administrations pressures Israel and claims the “key” to peace and stability in the Middle East is solving the Israel/ Palestine problem. By this is meant a Palestinian state, which will surely be used to wipe Israel from the map and eliminate the Jewish people from the region. That is their pledge in sermons from mosques, in newspaper editorials, in editorial cartoons, on state-controlled television, and in their behavior. This is no secret. They have made their plans abundantly clear to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.
There is something else: had the United States not enforced sixteen UN resolutions requiring Saddam Hussein to demonstrate that he was not a threat to international peace and security, he and his sons would have continued to oppress, murder, rape, and torture the Iraqi people. And the war would have come elsewhere. Liberal Democrats like to say that the real war on terrorism should have been in Afghanistan, which the Taliban used as a training and ideological base for the fanatics who hijacked airplanes and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, and would have hit the Capitol or the White House had not those brave passengers retaken United flight 93 and crashed it into a Pennsylvania field in this war’s first counterattack.
Islamofascism, as President Bush correctly labeled this movement, is confined to no borders and follows no rules. There are no elected officials to whom one can speak. There are no capitals to which one might travel for summit meetings. This is a spiritual war that is different from any we have ever fought. The old rules and ways of warfare do not apply. If we seek to fight this war with the same tactics we have used in previous wars, we will lose. That’s why it is ludicrous to be concerned about “torture” and human rights with people who practice one and ignore the other. The most often heard criticism is “we can’t behave like them.” I agree. We must be worse than them and so humiliate, decapitate, and eradicate them that those who remain will not think of trying anything like this for centuries to come. The United States was once feared and respected. A major reason the world is in such turmoil with so many simultaneous threats is that we have not done enough recently to instill fear in those who would harm us.
If our good behavior made our enemies behave like us, I would say let’s be better than we are. But it doesn’t and so the only way to win—if winning is our goal (anything less is defeat)—is to outdo them. Does that offend? It offends me more to have these people jerk our chain. It offends me more to wait for the next attack, preceded by an ultimatum issued by hundreds of people who illegally entered our country, or who may have been born here and were radicalized in Wahaabi schools subsidized by the Saudi Arabian government, our “ally” in the war on terror. The only reason we pay any attention to them is that they sit on massive amounts of oil that we want. If our politicians were serious about energy independence, and we weren’t drunk on oil, we might be able to liberate ourselves from their clutches.
The Islamofascists see no “innocents” in this war. They tell us that all Americans are combatants because a majority voted for President Bush. Therefore, even civilians can be targets. Does anyone believe the terrorists won’t use a nuclear weapon on American cities if they can get their hands on one? Iran is rapidly pursuing a nuclear weapon. Does anyone think they won’t use it, or at least threaten to use it, on Israel and, if they get the long-range missiles, on us? Maybe they’ll partner with North Korea, which has been developing nuclear material and long-range missiles. If terrorists can smuggle nuclear (or chemical, or biological) weapons into our cities, who doubts they would threaten us with mass murder if we don’t bow to their demands? Could any president tolerate millions of casualties?
Faced with such a threat, President Bush’s “doctrine” of getting them before they get us is the right approach. I only wish he had pursued it with the same resolve he displayed immediately after 9/11.
We may like our “peace” songs and we may like to view ourselves as more civil and humane than others, but any war in which the good side (that’s us, which many have forgotten) plays with one hand tied behind its back and a ball and chain on its leg, while the other side has no restrictions and can fight and kill by whatever means it chooses, is bound to result in the bad guys winning.
These are not pretty choices, but we didn’t create them. Our enemies did. When political opponents once engaged in duels to defend their honor, one person got to choose the venue for the duel and the other the weapon. If the person who had his weapon chosen for him was not experienced in its use, he had two options: take a crash course, or die.
The United States didn’t choose this war, nor did it choose the weapon of suicide and insurgency following three free elections in Iraq. Pulling our punches won’t win this war. Throwing at them with all the power we have, will.
CAL AND BOB ARE NOW BACK ON THE SAME PAGE.
Shortly after the 2006 election, George Bush invited the new Speaker of the House, Representative Nancy Pelosi, to lunch at the White House. Pelosi was the first woman to be elected Speaker, which put her third in line to become president. After their meeting, the president emphasized the need to seek common ground for the good of the country. Bush used these two words at least half a dozen times that day. Pelosi agreed wholeheartedly.
The political world had not heard such talk between a Democrat and a Republican in decades. Polarization appeared to be lessening. They both appeared to be sincere, not only because seeking common ground was a higher calling, but because it had become a political necessity. The public was tired of the bickering, and politicians sometimes respond to public concerns, at least until they stop paying attention. If George Bush hopes to salvage his legacy after Iraq, he’ll need Democrats to help him by finding an honorable (and successful) end to the Iraq war and forward movement on at least a few domestic issues.
The Democrats understand that their performance as the majority in Congress will determine whether the public is willing to put a Democrat in the White House in 2008. Watching Bush and Pelosi that beautiful fall day brought back memories of how American politics sometimes used to be when bipartisanship was not a synonym for wishy-washiness, consensus made for good politics, and polarization was seen as bad manners.