Cheney Rumsfeld And Bremer Deserting

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.

On Monday, remarks of L. Paul Bremer were released AP reports that he said of the looting in April-May 2003,

“We paid a big price for not stopping it because it established an atmosphere of lawlessness,” Bremer said during an address to an insurance group. It released a summary of his remarks in Washington. “We never had enough troops on the ground,” Bremer said, while insisting that he was “more convinced than ever that regime change was the right thing to do.”

CNN notes some backtracking:

“Bremer attempted to clarify his comments in a statement released Tuesday, saying his remarks referred only to “the situation as I found it on the ground, when I arrived in Baghdad in May 2003, and when I believed we needed either more Coalition troops or Iraqi security forces to address the looting.”

The problem is that a statement like “we never had enough troops on the ground,” if it is what he said, cannot possibly refer only to May, 2003. It seems to be a more honest evaluation of Bremer’s year in Iraq. And, it is rich that Bremer should complain about the need for more Iraqi security forces on the ground. This is the man who dissolved the Iraqi army in the first place!

Bremer’s remark clearly puts the blame for the Iraq quagmire squarely on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the two architects of the new Pentagon policy of “small force wars.” Both were harsh to Gen. Shinseki for daring to suggest that pacifying Iraq would require 300,000 troops. Actually, this is already a low estimate. Calculating on the basis of the situation in the Balkans, some security specialists at the National Security Council estimated in spring of 2003 that 500,000 troops would be needed. In contrast, Rumsfeld forced the Joint Chiefs of Staff to accept an invasion force of only 100,000, which was good enough to win the war but not enough to secure the peace.

Why did Bremer speak out now in the middle of the election season? It may just have been an error of judgment on his part. He was speaking to an insurance association in West Virginia, and may not have intended his remarks to become public. I have been told that he spoke at DePauw U. in mid-September and said the same thing. A “no-recording rule” had been announced to the audience, presumably for deniability’s sake. As for the substance of his original statement, it is clearly an attempt on his part to begin shifting some of the blame for the Iraq debacle from himself onto other players, chiefly Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Bremer’s place in history, not to mention any future career in Washington, depends on his ability to convince analysts that he was not principally at fault for how things went bad in Iraq.

The Philadelphia Inquirer had reported on July 2, 2003:

U.S. overseer in Iraq seeks reinforcements

By Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel

Inquirer Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON – The top American administrator in Iraq, confronting growing anti-U.S. anger and guerrilla-style attacks, is asking for more American troops and dozens of civilian officials to help speed up the restoration of order and public services.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld was reviewing the request from L. Paul Bremer, U.S. officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

So Bremer could be settling scores on that rebuff. For more see Poynteronline run by Jim Romenesko.

Then there was this amazing admission by Rumsfeld at a news conference:

QUESTIONER: My name is Glenn Hutchins. Mr. Secretary, what exactly was the connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda?

RUMSFELD: I tell you, I’m not going to answer the question. I have seen the answer to that question migrate in the intelligence community over the period of a year in the most amazing way. Second, there are differences in the intelligence community as to what the relationship was. To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two.

Why did Rummy suddenly have this episode of conscience? It may well be a sign of a rift with the Neoconservatives in the Pentagon. They made him look like a fool, and he seems happy to repudiate them. I suspect he is setting up the Neonservatives to take the fall, after the election, when he will ask for their resignations. And it won’t be pro forma.