It is not
difficult to make the case that economic issues – and scandal - will damage the
Bush administration in upcoming elections more than the Iraq war, which the
president acknowledges will be his legacy. But we should not just judge the war hawk administration for
incompetence in the execution of a war of choice, we should hold them
accountable for going to war in the first place. This is the issue that will
divide the political establishment this year.
In the foreword
of his War and the American Presidency
(2004) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the eminent presidential historian, says the
obvious: “Pres. Bush has rendered the Bush Doctrine
obsolete. [It] requires near-perfect intelligence about the enemy’s intentions
and capabilities. Its first application to Iraq shows that our intelligence
agencies have a damned long way to go in the quest for accuracy. The
credibility gap opened up by the failure to find WMDs in Iraq makes a second
application of the Bush Doctrine very unlikely. Remember the boy who cried “wolf”.”
We went to war against Iraq because of presidential reaction to phony
intelligence. Thirty years ago in a book called The Imperial Presidency, I pointed out that war customarily
expands presidential power. Then the return of peace emboldens the Congress to
restore the constitutional balance between the executive and the legislative
branches. After the end of the Civil War, in which James Bryce noted that
Abraham Lincoln “wielded more authority than any single Englishman since Oliver
Cromwell”, it took only 3 years for Congress to impeach Lincoln’s successor. After
the end of the Cold War, Congress took 7 years to find a second president to impeach. Impeachment is an extreme way of
teaching presidents lessons.”
Iraq: What Cheney Truly Has to Answer For
Tom Lasseter, intrepid war correspondent for
Knight Ridder, has an appointment in Samarra. In this city,
"re-taken" by the U.S., death, devastation and cries of "Why?
Why?" come from both Iraqis and Americans.
By Greg Mitchell, Editor, Editor & Publisher, Feb. 16, 2006
We’d like to give Vice President Cheney a break from the wall-the-wall coverage
of the face-shooting incident of this past week, so let’s turn to his war in
the Middle East, which continues maiming (and creating more terrorists) every
day. Over there, the warriors on each side are not using birdshot.
My favorite editorial cartoon of the week comes from my local paper here in the
Hudson Valley, The Journal News, which happens to employ recent Pulitzer
winner, Matt Davies. He pictured a barren landscape, looking much like Iraq,
with buckshot-riddled bodies strewn across the field, Cheney with his shotgun
still smoking, and flying harmlessly overhead a duck labled “WMDs.” Cheney
looks up at the honking duck, says, “Damn. Missed.”
Well, that pretty much says it all. Yet one of the top American correspondents
in Iraq, Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder, still manages to say quite a bit more,
in a gripping, and depressing, article distributed today and posted at the
www.krwashington.com site.
E&P has profiled Lasseter and his work numerous times in the past 2 years,
and last we heard he was supposed to be back home in the USA, but there he is,
still risking life, limb and, no doubt, sanity in Iraq.
Based in Baghdad, Lasseter often gets embedded with U.S. or Iraqi troops out in
the hellish beyond. Inevitably he gets ordinary grunts to speak honest truths.
His latest piece focuses strictly on Samarra, a city that has lost half of its
population of 200,000 since the U.S. supposedly pacified the area more than a
year ago. Lasseter reveals the true costs—and the real chance that the death
and destruction will go for naught.
Lasseter opens by observing that more than a year after some 5,000 Iraqi and
U.S. soldiers re-took the city from the enemy, “American troops still are
battling insurgents in Samarra. Bloodshed is destroying the city and driving a
wedge between the Iraqis who live there and the U.S. troops who are trying to
keep order.
“Violence, police corruption and the blurry lines of guerrilla warfare are
clouding any hopes of victory. ‘It's apocalyptic out there. Life has definitely
gotten worse for’ Iraqis, said Maj. Curtis Strange, 36, of Mobile, Ala., who
works with Iraqi troops in Samarra. ‘You see Samarra and you almost want to
build a new city and move all these people there.’
“Soldiers such as Sgt. Powell desperately want to reach out to the community,
but they're mired in daily skirmishes. Residents have fled, and a 7-mile-long,
5-foot-high earthen wall that U.S. soldiers built around the city last August
has failed to keep out the insurgents.
“Many of the American troops who patrol the city say they don't see much hope
for Samarra. Some officers privately worry that the city will fall to
insurgents as American troops withdraw." Already, roadside bomb attacks
are increasing, with at least 15 going off in January.
And it’s hard to tell who is in the enemy. U.S. military officials suspect that
many of the Iraqi soldiers, including a company commander, are on the
insurgents' payroll, possibly in league with terror master Zargawi. Yet the
101st Airborne plans to hand over the town to the Iraqi police and army by July
1.
One recent day, which Lasseter describes in vivid detail, a .50-caliber machine
gun, on the roof of a schoolhouse, manned by a 21-year-old Texan name Michael
Pena blasted an unarmed man on the street into oblivion. Horrified soldiers
rushed to the Iraqi, or what was left of him—his organs were now slithering
out—and watched him die, as he praised god and muttered, “Why? Why?”
“Haji, I don’t know,” an American soldier replied.
A few days later, Lasseter finds the gunner, Pena, still manning the machine
gun on the same roof. Pena doesn’t say a word about the man he killed but he is
boiling with frustration.
"No one told me why I'm putting my life on the line in Samarra, and you
know why they didn't?" Pena asks. "Because there is no f------
reason."
Perhaps Vice President Cheney, or his new press secretary, Katharine Armstrong,
can explain that to him.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002034521
