I know that being a lame duck can make presidents act strangely, and this president has never had anything more than a nodding relationship with reality itself, let alone a deep-seated concern for truth. But it seems to me that President Bush has become almost pathological in his determination to sell the public on the reality he perceives, even if it makes him look increasingly ridiculous in the eyes of anybody who doesn’t work for the Weekly Standard or the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
Political analysts say he’s trying to keep the "base" – perhaps the 18 percent of Americans who still admire Vice President Cheney. But in the process he’s making the base smaller and alienating an increasing number of Republicans who would desperately love to see Iraq as something that’s either over and done with, or at least starting to decline in importance and number of troops deployed by the 2008 election, and that can hardly be canny politics.
Is it a certain desperation? Public opinion has turned solidly against continuing the war in Iraq any longer than absolutely necessary, but out of stubbornness or conviction President Bush opposes an early withdrawal, and military planners talk of maintaining a substantial military presence for at least another two years.
Or is it denial? The occupation of Iraq has been characterized by a pattern of denial by the administration and its apologists – those WMDs were going to turn up any day or were buried in Syria, de-Ba’athification wouldn’t alienate anyone important, no it wasn’t an "insurgency," no it certainly wasn’t a civil war, the rumors that no American would travel outside the "green zone" without armed guards were exaggerated, the violence was less important than all the schools and hospitals the media weren’t writing about, and on and on. Denial certainly continues to be part of the mix for the dwindling band of war apologists.
In the latest stuff about al-Qaeda in Iraq there is a certain degree of almost cunning calculation, but so steeped in dishonesty and a determination never to concede anything at all to his critics that he just couldn’t pull it off. In some dim way Bush seems to know or believe that even most Americans who oppose the war in Iraq understand that there is a pervasive threat from al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups that must be countered in various ways, and that Osama bin Laden is still unpopular. So in his speech Tuesday at Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina, he sought to link the war in Iraq to the larger struggle against Islamist terrorism. In the process, however, he just couldn’t help presenting the case in seriously misleading ways.
At least he didn’t make the bald – and false – assertion he made the previous week – that "The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on Sept. 11." As he acknowledged Tuesday, al-Qaeda in Iraq was not founded until after the U.S. invaded that country, sometime in 2004, and it could not claim to be affiliated with al-Qaeda’s central leadership until 2005. So there’s no question that while al-Qaeda in Iraq consists of ruthless and cruel people who wish America ill, they are not the same people who pulled off the 9/11 attacks.
What the president stressed Tuesday were ties between al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and Osama bin Laden, making the case that they were all part of a global terrorist network and that failure to defeat them in Iraq would have grave consequences. There was actually a fair amount of detail in the speech, and I’m guessing that the Bushlet actually though he was making an intellectually respectable statement. The only way he could think that, however, was to start by setting up a straw man to knock down.
Critics of the war, he said, "claim that the organization called al-Qaeda in Iraq is an Iraqi phenomenon, that it’s independent of Osama bin Laden and that it’s not interested in attacking America."
Balderdash. I’ve been a critic since before the war started, and while there may be some nutcase out there who’s said something close to what Bush asserted, I’ve not seen a remotely respectable war critic make such a bald claim. Most war critics have stressed, as I have (and as Bush finally had to acknowledge, though it seemed to make no difference to his conviction that he had never ever been wrong), that AQI didn’t exist until the U.S. invaded Iraq, and thus whatever threat it poses – including its later affiliation with the larger global al-Qaeda network – is an artifact of the U.S. decision to invade a country that posed no imminent threat to the United States or to its neighbors, none of whom begged for the country to be invaded.
President Bush asserts, without bothering to offer anything like compelling, let alone plausible evidence, that if the U.S. leaves Iraq "too soon" (an apparently infinitely elastic concept ranging from six months to 10 years from now), al-Qaeda in Iraq will have the kind of safe haven Osama bin Laden had for many years in Afghanistan. That is probably the least likely outcome.
Such an assertion ignores the fact that AQI accounts for only about 5 percent of the insurgent fighters in Iraq. Whatever government (or governments) emerges after the U.S. leaves – and let’s be honest, it is quite possible that a period of intense violence will ensue before things settle out – is most unlikely to welcome AQI as the Taliban regime harbored bin Laden in the 1990s. It is far more likely to suppress the organization in ways that many Americans might find shocking.
There’s only one argument for not beginning the withdrawal from Iraq immediately that has a shred of intellectual respectability. It is that the U.S. attack and mismanagement of the occupation have unleashed such dangerous and violent forces that we have a moral responsibility to try to calm things down a bit before we leave.
If stay-the-course advocates want to make that case, we’d have something to talk about. Granting that there may be some moral responsibility (though whether it is collective and implicates those who warned against the invasion is worth discussing), how long and how persistently does it last? Is it enough to make good-faith efforts to set things straight, or can only be discharged by actually making things better, even if we’re not sure how to do it? If we stay a little longer, will one of the implications be that we have finally begun to recognize that the U.S. has a limited capacity to fix other countries? Do we recognize Iraq as a mistake, and are we ready, even as we try to rectify things there, to discuss not just incompetence but a latent imperial impulse as one of the reasons the mistake was made?
As long as the president insists on making his case by stretching the facts about al-Qaeda in Iraq (and an almost infinite number of other issues), however, it’s difficult to envision an honest discussion of why things went wrong and what kind of policies we should consider going forward.
