President Bush, in his Veterans Day
speech at Tobyhanna Army Depot in Pennsylvania,
angrily pointed fingers at "some Democrats and anti-war critics" for trying to rewrite the history of the Iraq War.
This is the same president whose administration has given countless reasons for why we needed this war, and whose administration has been wrong nearly every step of the way.
Let's review, with a little game of "What if" ...
What if the White House had listened to a host of opinions, such as U.N. weapons inspector
Hans Blix and IAEA Director
Mohamed ElBaradei, that there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?
The White House didn't, and it ultimately was proven wrong.
What if the White House had paid attention to
caveats in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, instead of making urgent claims about Iraq's WMD -- claims not backed up by the NIE. Or a Defense Intelligence Agency
report from 2002 saying that most of Iraq's chemical weapons had been destroyed before 1998. Or a CIA
report from early 2003 that
the intelligence community has no “direct evidence” that Iraq has succeeded in reconstituting its biological, chemical, nuclear or long-range missile programs in the two years since U.N. weapons inspectors left and U.S. planes bombed Iraqi facilities.
The White House didn't, and it ultimately was proven wrong.
***
Once the decision was made to go to Iraq, what if the White House had respected the opinion of the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shineski, who in March 2003
offered that an occupying force might involve <strong>several hundred thousand U.S. troops</strong>.
Instead, it respected the opinion of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who said Shineski's estimate was "
way off the mark," because other countries would take part in an occupying force. Wolfowitz proved to be wrong.
***
Upon toppling Saddam Hussein's government, what if the U.S. military had immediately guarded Al-Qaqaa weapons depot, where 377 tons of explosives
were looted?
Instead, the U.S. military made a concerted effort to
protect the Iraqi Oil Ministry.
Is it fair to say that these two events simultaneously armed the insurgency, and left the last impression that the reason for the war was not Iraqi WMD or even Iraqi democracy, but instead Iraqi oil?
***
Once the looting had begun in Iraq, what if the U.S.-led forces had listened to the first head of what would eventually be known as the Coalition Provisional Authority, Army Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, who
championed using the Iraqi military to reconstruct Iraq -- akin to a "Works Project Administration," as he told UPI.
"We really need to have a massive effort to employ the youth of Iraq," he said.
Instead, the U.S. retired Garner, and replaced him with L. Paul Bremer, who
dissolved Iraq's 400,000-strong army soon after American forces overthrew Saddam's regime in April 2003.
The decision is now seen as a mistake because
it drove many disaffected officers into the ranks of the insurgency, fearing they had no future in the new Iraq.
It did, however, allow for a host of companies, such as Halliburton, to swoop in and grab multi-billion no-bid contracts to reconstruct the country.
***
This is not "rewriting" history. It's simply documenting all the times -- in "real time," and there are plenty of others -- that the Bush Administration failed to listen to anyone but themselves.
***
This item first appeared at
Journalists Against Bush's B.S.
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