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Bush and Co. still distorting facts about Iraq

By PHILIP GAILEY
Published June 26, 2005

If only George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld hated war as much as they hate admitting a mistake. To hear them tell it, Iraq is a success story and the Guantanamo prison is a tropical paradise.

Last week the defense secretary and his top generals went to Capitol Hill to report on the state of the war. The situation looks pretty grim on the evening news, but Rumsfeld assured members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that we're winning the war and that success "cannot be defined by domestic tranquility," a reference to the bloody chaos in much of Iraq.

Message: Democracy is a "messy" business, and the Iraqis will have to get used to the car-bomb carnage on their streets.

Army Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, provided a sober reality check on the Iraqi insurgency. "I believe there are more foreign fighters coming into Iraq than there were six months ago," he told the committee, adding that insurgency's "overall strength" is about the same. "There's a lot of work to be done against the insurgency."

Was the general off-message? Only last month Dick Cheney assured us that the insurgency was in its "last throes." Asked if he was contradicting the vice president, Abizaid sidestepped the question, saying, "I gave you my opinion."

We know from the runup to the war how Cheney has little use for intelligence that doesn't conform to his purposes. So I wonder what he thinks of a new classified CIA assessment warning that Iraq is becoming a training school for terrorists who could use their insurgency skills in other parts of the world. According to a story in the New York Times last week, the CIA report says Iraq "may prove to be a more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in al-Qaida's early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory for militants to improve their skills in urban combat."

No wonder recent polls show that a majority of Americans now believe the war in Iraq was a mistake that has not made us more secure, as Bush and Cheney promised. Even prowar Republicans are beginning to express concern over public pessimism about the war.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., had this message for Rumsfeld and the generals: "We will lose this war if we leave too soon, and what is likely to make us leave too soon? The public going south." It is happening even in his own "patriotic" state, Graham said. "People are beginning to question. And I don't think it's a blip on the radar screen. We have a chronic problem on our hands."

Abizaid, who just returned from a trip to Iraq, said the drop in public support for the war concerns U.S. commanders and soldiers on the ground. "They worry we don't have the staying power to see the mission through," the general said.

President Bush, speaking Friday at a White House news conference with visiting Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, made it clear he intends to stay the course, with or without public opinion on his side. He rejected calls from some Democrats to set a timetable to begin the withdrawal of U.S. troops, saying the terrorists would simply "wait us out." He is probably right about that. Bush said there is "reason to be optimistic" and vowed, "I'm not giving up on the mission."

We might as well face it: We're stuck in Iraq indefinitely. We broke that country and now we own it. So far the war has cost $230-billion and more than 1,700 Americans lives. Iraqi casualties are in the thousands - the dead and the maimed. Here at home we're debating a constitutional amendment to ban desecration of the American flag, as if that would make us more patriotic. It certainly won't stop anti-American protesters from burning our flag in other countries.

Meanwhile, Cheney shrugged off charges from domestic and foreign critics that Islamic detainees have been abused at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "They're living in the tropics," he said in a CNN interview. "They're well fed. They've got everything they could possibly want."

Indeed, what more could the detainees (yes, these are nasty people) ask for - except maybe some measure of due process?

Philip Gailey's e-mail address is gailey@sptimes.com

[Last modified June 24, 2005, 20:21:02]