A rchive Date
[ 20-07-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/2001470
Bush and problems of a flawed victory
By CRAGG HINES
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle
July 18, 2003, 9:49PM
It's not too far-fetched to imagine the following scene: President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair settle in for their tete-a-tete last week, turn to each other and declare simultaneously, "Another fine mess you got me into ... ."
You'll have to figure out which leader is Laurel and which is Hardy. I've got my own problem.
I could turn to Bush and exclaim: "Fine mess you got me into, too." And the same can be said by a number of people who are not usually well disposed toward Bush's foreign policy but supported, for various reasons, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. I'm not running for re-election, but I do face a couple of editors and a slice of readers who continue to view my support of the invasion of Iraq as, well, let's just say, loopy.
For what it's worth, I have no regrets, or even second thoughts about my position. About a year ago, when Bush was fiddling over Iraq, his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, put brilliantly all that needed to be said about Saddam: "This is an evil man who, left to his own devices, will wreak havoc on his own population, his neighbors and, if he gets weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them, on all of us. There is a very powerful moral case for regime change. We certainly do not have the luxury of doing nothing." And even a renewed U.N. weapons inspection regime, she could have added, would amount to "nothing."
As summer turned to fall, Bush eventually became more resolute but never matched the clarity of Rice's statement (in which you will note the subjunctive nature of her warning on WMDs). Bush got hung up on his attempts to tweak upward the public polls and grew ever, unnecessarily firmer, especially on Iraq's nuclear threat. He opened himself, to repeat, unnecessarily to the miasm in which he is now slogging about.
It's not my fault that Bush was a weak salesman of the rationale for deposing Saddam, that he presided over faulty collection, interpretation and use of intelligence before and during the conflict and that he is now revealed as a poor planner for the post-war period.
Almost a year ago I complained about Bush's dithering ("Just spell it right out: Saddam must go," Aug. 18) in the face of dissent from a couple of sectors in the Republican Party, including some key folks who had been in the foreign policy establishment of Bush's father. There was already, as Rice insisted, "a very stunning indictment" against Saddam.
As Blair, in his beleaguerment, has pointed out repeatedly, and noted again during his Washington visit, the idea of Saddam developing, possessing and using weapons of mass destruction was not concocted in the early days of this year as a fictive basis for invasion of Iraq.
Saddam's enthrallment with WMDs has been on the record and on view for way more than a decade. Ask the families of dead Iraqi Kurds and dead Iranians. Ask U.N. weapons inspectors as late as 1998. Ask U.N. Security Council members who unanimously passed Resolution 1441 last November, in which were memorialized 10 previous resolutions that Saddam had flaunted to one degree or another.
Oh, yes, Bush was on firm ground and remained there, even as he allowed a few grains of shifting sand into his State of the Union address. That those 16 words are now the focus of such turmoil means that we really cannot see the forest for the trees, and mere saplings at that.
Discrepancies should be investigated, blame assigned and cookies crumble, but they should not be allowed to substitute for the accomplishment of removing Saddam from power.
That it took Blair to spell that out gloriously in his address to a joint session of Congress is more than a critique of Bush's rhetorical shortcomings. The prime minister, speaking of history and whether it will forgive, might have been giving one of the great speeches from Henry V.
But Blair also had his usefully practical moments, recalling in his press conference with Bush that the link between Iraq and uranium from Niger was hardly, historically speaking, whole cloth. He reminded that in the 1980s "we know for sure" that Iraq purchased some 270 tons of uranium from the African nation.
A headline in the July 12 issue of The Spectator, the droll British journal of High Toryism, put its Anglo-spin on the situation: "The cause for war was good - don't let Blair's dishonesty spoil it." That is a vacuous overreaction. But U.S. supporters of ousting Saddam can write our own caption: The cause for war was good - don't let Bush's inarticulate bumbling (intentionally dishonest or mindlessly unthinking) spoil it.
Hines is a Houston Chronicle columnist based in Washington, D.C. cragg.hines@chron.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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