How Could So Many People Buy into Bush's "Patriotism Sweepstakes"
The Iraq War -- now ending its fifth bloody year -- represents not only a human tragedy of enormous consequence and possibly the greatest strategic blunder in U.S. history but also a systemic failure of American political and journalistic institutions.
Instead of checking George W. Bush's imperial impulse for the good of the Republic, the Congress -- including Sen. Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats -- and the national press corps tended to their careers and their political viability.
In recognition of this tragedy, we are publishing the following excerpt from Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.
Iraq's "Day of Liberation" -- as George W. Bush called it -- was supposed to begin with a bombardment consisting of 3,000 U.S. missiles delivered over 48 hours, 10 times the number of bombs dropped during the first two days of the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
Officials, who were briefed on the plans, said the goal was to so stun the Iraqis that they would simply submit to the overwhelming force demonstrated by the U.S. military. Administration officials dubbed the strategy "shock and awe."
In his 2003 State of the Union speech, Bush had addressed the "brave and oppressed people of Iraq" with the reassuring message that "your enemy is not surrounding your country -- your enemy is ruling your country."
Bush promised that the day that Saddam Hussein and his regime "are removed from power will be the day of your liberation."
But never before in history had a dominant world power planned to strike a much weaker nation in a preemptive war with such ferocity. It would be liberation through devastation.
Many projections expected the deaths of thousands of Iraqi non-combatants, no matter how targeted or precise the U.S. weapons. For those civilians, their end would come in the dark terror of crushing concrete or in the blinding flash of high explosives.
In the prelude to the invasion, the United Nations predicted possibly more than 500,000 civilians injured or killed during the war and its aftermath and nearly one million displaced from their homes.
The International Study Team, a Canadian non-governmental organization, raised similar alarms. The invasion of Iraq would cause a "grave humanitarian disaster," with potential casualties among children in "the tens of thousands, and possibly in the hundreds of thousands," the group said.
Assuming U.S. forces succeeded in eliminating Saddam Hussein and his army with relative speed, the post-war period still promised to be complicated and dangerous. The Bush administration outlined plans to occupy Iraq for at least 18 months, installing a military governor in the style of Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Japan after World War II.
But it was not clear how the United States would police a population that was certain to include anti-American militants ready to employ suicide bombings and other irregular tactics against an occupying force.
Bin Laden's Message
There was the risk, too, that the U.S. invasion would play into the hands of Osama bin Laden, who circulated a message portraying himself as the defender of the Arab people.
"Anyone who tries to destroy our villages and cities, then we are going to destroy their villages and cities," the al-Qaeda leader said. "Anyone who steals our fortunes, then we must destroy their economy. Anyone who kills our civilians, then we are going to kill their civilians."
Some U.S. military strategists saw Bush's war plan as the worst sort of wishful thinking.
What if the Iraqi army -- instead of making itself an easy target for the U.S. missiles -- melted into urban centers and began coordinating with an armed civilian population to resist a foreign invasion of their homeland? What if the Iraqi people chose to fight the American invaders, rather than shower them with rose petals?
Already, Saddam Hussein had begun concentrating his troops in urban centers and passing out AK-47s to Iraqis, young and old, men and women. But Bush's biggest gamble was whether the "shock and awe" bombardment from the air and the stunning American firepower during the ground invasion would intimidate the Iraqis into surrendering.
The relatively light invading force of a couple hundred thousand troops would be enough to take Baghdad, most military analysts believed, but significant resistance during the invasion would be an early sign that the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, was right when he told Congress that the occupation could require "several hundred thousand troops."
After that alarming estimate, Shinseki was pushed into early retirement and drew a public rebuke from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who called Shinseki "wildly off the mark."
A similar dispute erupted over the expected cost of the war. White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsay had estimated a figure as high as one or two percent of the gross national product or about $100 billion to $200 billion.
To head off American worries about this high cost, Bush's budget director Mitch Daniels slapped down Lindsay's estimate as "very, very high," pegging it instead at between $50 billion and $60 billion. As for reconstruction costs, Wolfowitz and other administration officials suggested that Iraq's oil revenues would pay for nearly all of that.
Lindsay was soon headed for the door, fired in December 2002 along with Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, an even more outspoken Iraq War critic.
Lost Objectivity
There is the old cliché about war, that its first casualty is truth. But -- as U.S. forces began the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003, still the evening of March 19 in Washington -- an even more immediate casualty was the journalistic principle of objectivity.
Many U.S. news outlets dropped even the pretense of trying to stay neutral and just report the facts. TV anchors were soon opining about what strategies "we" should follow in prosecuting the Iraq War.
"One of the things that we don't want to do is to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq because in a few days we're going to own that country," NBC's Tom Brokaw explained as he sat among a panel of retired generals on the opening night of "Operation Iraqi Freedom."
There was little sensitivity to the sensibilities of the region. U.S. networks used large floor maps of Iraq so American analysts could stride across the country to point out troop movements. They looked like giants towering over the Middle East.
When American troops faced resistance from Iraqi paramilitary fighters, Fox termed them "Saddam's goons." When Iraqi forces surrendered, they were paraded before U.S. cameras as "proof" that Iraqi resistance was crumbling.
Some of the scenes showed Iraqi POWs forced at gunpoint to kneel down with their hands behind their heads as they were patted down by U.S. soldiers. Network executives apparently felt no sense of irony when they ran these images over the words, "Operation Iraqi Freedom," the title for the coverage and the code name for the invasion.
Showing these degrading images of captured Iraqi soldiers generated not even the mildest concern. Neither the Bush administration nor a single U.S. reporter covering the war for the news networks observed that these scenes might violate the Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners of war.
