Dance of the Reptiles (31 page)

Unfortunately, the reasons given for invading Iraq, the reasons eventually embraced and promoted by the president, have been exposed one after another as bunk.

Hussein’s nuclear program? Can’t seem to find one.

Banned biological weapons? Can’t find them, either.

Chemical stash? Ditto.

To all those never-minds, we now add one more. The theory of a sinister Hussein–bin Laden covenant has been officially discredited, leaving the Bush administration batting .000 on its prewar hype.

We weren’t just misled, we were duped.

Most Iraqis feel the same way. Fifteen months after the invasion, a paltry 2 percent of Iraqi citizens consider U.S. forces to be liberators. That’s according to a survey arranged by the Coalition Provisional Authority—our own guys.

Following last week’s disclosures, President Bush insisted there had been a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda,
though he offered no new details. He noted the current presence in Iraq of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the notorious Jordanian terrorist who has sought help from Al Qaeda.

As for Cheney, he refuses to back away from his previous claims, no matter how speculative or unproved. In a doomed effort to justify this messy and sapping war, the vice president is sticking to his original script.

So far, 832 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq, and many more will die in the long months ahead. Most Americans are eager for us to pull out, but how we got there is a question that still awaits a full and honest answer.

Don’t expect to hear one from Cheney.

May 15, 2005

Iraq’s Numbers, Bodies Keep Piling Up

The number is there. Hunt hard enough through the newspaper stories and you’ll find it.

Last week it surpassed 1,600. This week it will go higher.

You could write it on the blackboard in a hundred classrooms, and probably in 99 of them, nobody could tell you what it stood for.

Here’s the answer: As of Thursday, 1,609 was the number of American soldiers who died in Iraq since we invaded 26 months ago.

That works out to more than two soldiers killed every day, which in actuarial terms isn’t a huge toll when compared with other long wars. Unless it’s your son or daughter or wife or husband coming home in the coffins, in which case the number is devastating.

Americans haven’t completely lost interest in what’s happening to our troops in Iraq, but an inevitable numbness has set in as the casualty figures rise steadily. The tragic has
become the routine. Lots more people could tell you the score of the Heat–Wizards play-off game or where the Dow Jones closed on Friday than could tell you how many soldiers died last week in roadside bombings.

They could tell you who got the most votes on
American Idol
. They could tell you how many times that “runaway bride” from Atlanta has been busted for shoplifting. They could tell you who won the NASCAR race at Darlington and even the new Nextel Cup standings. That kind of stuff isn’t hard to find. Just park yourself in front of the TV or laptop and relax. It’s one big happy avalanche of entertainment.

Obviously, we in the media have gone numb, too. And let’s be honest—it’s much more fun to write about Paula Abdul than Ibrahim al-Jaafari. He is Iraq’s new prime minister, struggling to put together a cabinet to appease the various religious factions that have detested each other as long as anyone can remember.

The last few weeks have been a bloodbath, with upward of 400 Iraqi civilians and security forces murdered in car bombings and armed attacks. Fourteen American troops were killed between May 7 and May 12, some of them in a bold Marine offensive along the Syrian border. Currently, the insurgency is being led by members of the Sunni minority who are extremely unhappy about having to surrender their long-held political power to the Shiites and the Kurds.

Also at work is an active Al Qaeda cell that, according to our own intelligence analysts, did not exist in Iraq before we invaded. Because of the U.S. military presence, the country is now attracting assassins and suicidal zealots from all over the Muslim world.

As detached about Iraq as Americans seem to be, polls show that many still doubt our reasons for being there. Originally, the stated mission was to “disarm” Saddam Hussein,
but even a presidential panel of experts now says there was nothing to disarm. Saddam hoarded no weapons of mass destruction and had no connection whatsoever to the 9/11 hijackings.

Thus, it became necessary to devise a new face-saving reason for invading Iraq. Today the White House says that U.S. troops are there to establish a beachhead for democracy in the Mideast—this, as Bush strolls hand in hand with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive and undemocratic regimes in the world.

Still, it’s significant that nine million Iraqis risked their lives to vote in January. There’s bedlam and carnage in the streets, but the country at least has the framework of an elected government. It’s also got a foreign army of occupation, historically not a beneficial ingredient in the making of a new democracy.

So how long do we stay, and at what final cost? Nobody has a clue. U.S. troops are busily training the Iraqi military and security forces, but the Pentagon has provided no timetable for returning control of the country to the people who live there. Meanwhile, the heavy numbers keep piling up, although some are even more difficult to find than the death toll.

In addition to the 1,609 U.S. soldiers lost, the Department of Defense lists 12,350 as wounded in action. Many have crippling injuries, and others are returning home with emotional damage that will take years to heal, if ever. As for the Iraqi casualties, we don’t even count them. Nobody is sure how many civilian noncombatants—men, women, and children—have died since the night we started bombing Baghdad.

Here in the United States, we’re a long way from the
car bombs and the mangled corpses, horrific images briefly glimpsed on CNN. Most of us remain comfortably buffered from the war by the reams of fluff and celebrity scandal that now pass for front-page news.

Yet the coffins quietly keep coming home from Iraq, on the average of two a day. That’s two more funerals, two more families left to mourn and wonder and hope that someday it all adds up to something noble and enduring.

Something more than another stark number in a history book.

January 28, 2007

In Veep’s World, We’re Safer Now Than Before Iraq

The wacky, upside-down world of Dick Cheney keeps getting weirder. Last week he went on CNN and defiantly declared that the situation in Iraq is not so terrible.

This must have been surprising to the families of the 88 Iraqi civilians who were slaughtered the day before by car bombers at a busy Baghdad market.

Surprising to the loved ones and comrades of the 27 American troops who died last weekend, one of the costliest for coalition forces since the occupation.

Surprising to Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, soon to be commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, who two days earlier had informed a Senate panel that the situation there was “dire.”

Surprising to Sen. John Warner and other top Republicans who have warned that Iraq is sliding into chaos, and have publicly questioned the decision to send more troops.

Surprising to Cheney’s own boss, President Bush, who in a recent interview conceded that the administration’s original game plan for Iraq was heading toward “slow failure.”

Yet in his interview with Wolf Blitzer, Cheney brushed away as “hogwash” any suggestion that the war has been mishandled. “Bottom line is that we’ve had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes,” he said.

There are several possible explanations for the vice president’s bizarre performance:

He’s crazy as a loon.

He’s a compulsive liar.

He’s gotten his prescriptions mixed up with Rush Limbaugh’s.

Whatever the clinical reason might be, Cheney continues to float blissfully through a smug and surreal fog. “The pressure is from some quarters to get out of Iraq,” he said. “If we were to do that, we simply validate the terrorists’ strategy that says the Americans will not stay to complete the task, that we don’t have the stomach for the fight.”

Oddly, Cheney’s stout appetite for battle never manifested itself when he was of draft age, during the Vietnam War. Five times he declined his country’s call to serve there. Now, as the last cheerleader for the fiasco in Iraq, Cheney revels in the self-imagined role of Tough Guy. In fact, he is simply the Guy Who’s Never Been Right.

Before, during, and after the invasion, it was Cheney who most strenuously promoted the fiction of Saddam Hussein’s stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. It was Cheney who insisted there was a link between Hussein and Al Qaeda’s 9/11 coconspirators, long after U.S. intelligence agencies had discredited the idea. It was also Cheney who predicted that American soldiers would be welcomed as “liberators” on the streets where they are now being blown up. And it was he who in 2005 confidently asserted that the insurgency was in its “last throes.”

On the topic of Iraq, the vice president has been uncannily wrong about everything, yet he seldom bypasses an opportunity to play the pompous stooge. Here are some true statements that you will never hear from Cheney’s lips:

The war has so far cost American taxpayers at least $500 billion, or 10 times more than the administration’s initial estimate.

The combat toll on our military now exceeds 3,065 dead and more than 22,000 wounded, many permanently disabled.

No one is sure how many Iraqi civilians have perished since the invasion, but at least 34,000 are known to have died in 2006. About two million Iraqis have fled the country to escape the continuing violence.

Osama bin Laden, the man who green-lighted the 9/11 attacks, is still alive and free—and he’s not hiding in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Taliban fighters who harbored Osama and his cohorts in Afghanistan are resurging with a vengeance.

And the next murderous generation of Al Qaeda fanatics has a new outpost of operations, a place where they were unwelcome for years. It’s called Iraq.

This is the truth that the vice president would prefer not be reported, much less discussed openly. Naturally, he blames the media for turning the public against the war, a trick borrowed from the old Vietnam hard-liners.

Hey, what about all those markets in Baghdad that
weren’t
car-bombed last week? How come you guys don’t write about them?

Without cracking a smile, Cheney told Blitzer that “the world is much safer today” because Bush took military action against Iraq.

That the invasion has galvanized Islamic extremists worldwide seems not to concern the vice president even slightly.
We’re all safer than we were before—that’s what the man said. If Hussein were still in power, Cheney added somberly, “we’d have a terrible situation” in Iraq.

In contrast to the peaceful, safe, and stable situation that exists now …

Only in the daffy, disconnected mind of Dick Cheney.

March 23, 2008

Iraq: No Light at the End of the Tunnel

On the five-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, President Bush declared that the United States is on the way to winning the war.

He made this stupefying pronouncement in the safe confines of the Pentagon, where it’s unacceptable to question the commander in chief, no matter how dense or self-deluded he might be. If Bush had dared to make the same speech in a public town hall, among civilians, the reception would have been chillier. According to almost every opinion poll, about two-thirds of all Americans now stand opposed to the war in Iraq. When reminded last week of this statistic, Vice President Dick Cheney responded: “So?”

Bush sent Cheney to Baghdad to mark the dubious anniversary of their costly, misbegotten adventure. What better way to buoy the spirits of the 160,000 U.S. soldiers who are now stuck in Iraq—a surprise visit by the Man Who’s Never Been Right.

True to form, the vice president repeated his dark assertion that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had close ties with Al Qaeda, a claim discredited and rejected by every U.S. intelligence agency. Cheney also described the American effort to bring stability and democracy to Iraq as “a successful
endeavor.” Compared to what—the landing of the
Hindenburg
?

There’s still no stable, functioning democracy in Iraq. Provincial elections might finally be held in October, although the Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites continue to fight about how power should be apportioned. It’s an ancient argument that won’t subside anytime soon.

After years of training, the Iraqi armed forces still aren’t prepared to keep order in the country, and senior U.S. military commanders don’t know when that particular miracle will come to pass.

Bush acts like there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is, it’s not a tunnel—it’s a pit.

As of March 19, the American toll in Iraq stood at 3,982 deaths and nearly 30,000 combat injuries. An additional 145 U.S. soldiers have committed suicide there. Such heavy losses are difficult to absorb, impossible to rationalize. Nobody knows for sure how many innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed during the U.S. occupation—at least 18,600 are known to have died in 2007 alone.

The monetary cost of the war is so high that the administration cannot—or will not—give Congress an accurate figure.

Five years ago, the Bush-Cheney brain trust said the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq would cost between $50 billion and $60 billion. That number was every bit as reliable as the assertion that Saddam had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. The Pentagon now says the war has cost about $600 billion, while congressional estimates put the sum in excess of $1 trillion—roughly 20 times more than the administration predicted. Currently, Bush and Cheney’s Iraq rodeo is sapping between $8 billion and $12 billion every month
from U.S. taxpayers, just what a battered and shaky economy needs.

Five years ago, we were assured that Iraqi oil revenues would finance the rebuilding of the country after we bombed it to rubble. It was one more false promise to be discarded with all the others.