Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bremer: Deserting a Sinking Ship

How to understand the sudden outbreak of candor among Bush administration officials (or former officials) about Iraq in the past couple of days? In the vice presidential debate on Tuesday evening, Dick Cheney said, "I have not suggested there's a connection between iraq and 9/11." Well, maybe not in so many words, but Cheney hinted around about this sort of thing relentlessly. E.g. consider this from an appearance on Meet the Press: "Cheney: "If we're successful in Iraq, if we can stand up a good representative government in Iraq, that secures the region so that it never again becomes a threat to its neighbors or to the United States, so it's not pursuing weapons of mass destruction, so that it's not a safe haven for terrorists, now we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11." [NBC, Meet the Press, 11/14/03] It is hard to read this statement in any other way than that Cheney mistakenly thought Iraq was the "geographic base" of al-Qaeda. Although he later went on in the same interview to deny an Iraq/9/11 connection, I fear I believe his tactics in this regard were deliberately dishonest. Cheney typically made these inflammatory associations up front, then quietly denied their full implication later, sure that the first, bold statement was what would stay in people's minds. This is the way that at one point a majority of Americans were bamboozled by the Bush administration into thinking that Saddam was somehow connected to 9/11, which he was not. So why is Cheney backtracking more explicitly now? It is because before, he could get away with saying these things despite their falsehood, because no one was seriously challenging him and the press did not want to get out ahead of a major political figure. But now it is the election season, such that the press can always find a legitimate counter-voice. In this situation where you cannot depend on a monopoly over official information, it starts to become dangerous to lie outright, because you know an opponent will call you on it and maybe weaken your credibility.

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U.S. Faces Complex Insurgency in Iraq

The U.S. military is fighting the most complex guerrilla war in its history, with 140,000 American soldiers trained for conventional warfare flailing against a thicket of insurgent groups with competing aims and no supreme leader. The three dozen or so guerrilla bands agree on little beyond forcing the Americans out of Iraq. In other U.S. wars, the enemy was clear. In Vietnam, a visible leader — Ho Chi Minh — led a single army fighting to unify the country under socialism. But in Iraq, the disorganized insurgency has no single commander, no political wing and no dominant group. U.S. troops can't settle on a single approach to fight groups whose goals and operations vary. And it's hard to sort combatants from civilians in a chaotic land where large parts of some communities support the insurgents and others are too afraid to risk their lives to help foreigners. "It's more complex and challenging than any other insurgency the United States has fought," aid Bruce Hoffman, a RAND counterinsurgency expert who served as an adviser to the U.S.-led occupation administration. Insurgents aren't striving for revolution as much as they are trying to spoil the U.S.-backed interim Iraqi regime by inflicting as much pain as possible on the United States and its Iraqi and foreign allies. "We want every U.S. dog to leave the country," said an insurgent leader in Fallujah who identified himself as Abu Thar, a 45-year-old former colonel in the Iraqi army.

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