Feb. 05, 2006 Copyright Las Vegas Review-Journal

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: Rewriting history with George W. Bush

All politicians say things that are supposed to sound like they mean something else. So calling George W. Bush -- who is, after all a professional politician -- "a liar" breaks little new ground.

Rather, it may be time to ask whether Mr. Bush is actually capable of constructing alternative realities that intersect the more commonly perceived world at oblique angles (at best) -- and then inhabiting them comfortably while shilling them to a populace that either judges on style points alone or just can't be bothered to read the fine print.

In his State of the Union speech, President Bush said, "On September the 11th, 2001, we found that problems originating in a failed and oppressive state 7,000 miles away could bring murder and destruction to our country. Dictatorships shelter terrorists, and feed resentment and radicalism, and seek weapons of mass destruction."

In context, it appeared the "failed and oppressive state" to which the president referred must be the one our troops so eventfully now occupy -- the one where we went hunting for those chimerical "weapons of mass destruction" -- Iraq.

But in fact, Iraq and its dictatorship had nothing to do with spawning the Sept. 11 terrorists. Hunting as hard as it could for pre-Sept. 11 links between al-Qaida, Iraq and Saddam Hussein, this administration has found none of any consequence.

Saddam Hussein's Iraq, for all its repression, was a secular state where radical Islam, that "perversion by a few of a noble faith into an ideology of terror and death" (the president's words) was allowed little foothold.

Nearly all the Sept. 11 terrorists were actually Arabian. Saudi Arabia is indeed a fairly repressive regime, about 7,000 miles from here, whose residents may conceivably blame the United States for helping to prop up its gold-gilt monarchy. So why didn't we invade the land of those great patrons of the Bush family, and set them on the path to "democracy"?

The countries overseas that "shelter terrorists" might have been ranked in 2001 as Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and the settlements of Yasser Arafat.

We did indeed invade Afghanistan for sheltering al-Qaida, and rightly so. But the president here attempts to rewrite history, asserting Iraq was the sponsor or training ground of the Sept. 11 attacks, which is not true.

Read the statement again. It appears carefully lawyered for "deniability." It doesn't say Iraq. It just implies it. But what other nation could Mr. Bush be referring to?

Lots of countries seek "weapons of mass destruction." When do we plan to disarm Israel and Russia? Of course dictatorships are repressive. When do we plan to liberate the people of Zimbabwe, Burma, Red China and Uzbekistan?

Iraq may have been targeted for geo-strategic reasons -- regardless of its blamelessness in Sept. 11 -- as a central "breadbasket" of the Middle East. But that's not the case Mr. Bush has tried to build.

"Terrorists like bin Laden ... seek to impose a heartless system of totalitarian control throughout the Middle East, and arm themselves with weapons of mass murder," the president said Tuesday night. "Their aim is to seize power in Iraq and use it as a safe haven to launch attacks against America and the world. ... A sudden withdrawal of our forces from Iraq ... would put men like bin Laden and Zarqawi in charge of a strategic country."

Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who command no conventional armed forces and have never been elected dog-catcher, are not Iraqi. Earlier in his speech, the president described them as on the run, their leadership mostly killed or captured. That they could ever rule Iraq would seem to qualify either as delusion, or as making up scary campfire stories for the kids. Are there now a lot of radical Wahhabi terrorists finding a haven in chaotic Iraq? Sure. What drew them there? Only the opportunity they saw in the chaos following the American invasion. Saddam Hussein had been at no demonstrable risk of turning his country over to al-Qaida three years ago.

Why did chaos descend after our invasion? Because the Washington neoconservative desk jockeys who dreamed the thing up had no military experience, blissfully ignored the British experience of 1918-1921, wishfully assumed the various Iraqi ethnic groups whose feuds had long been suppressed by the Baathists would welcome us with flowers and then promptly start holding orderly town meetings, and that we therefore wouldn't need much of an occupation force.

Why didn't our military men set them straight?

They tried.

Mr. Bush on Tuesday night repeated his oft-heard assurance that the level of our Iraq troop deployment and the speed of the drawdown "will be made by our military commanders, not by politicians in Washington, D.C."

The line even drew applause -- as it usually does.

But what happened to the Army's top general, Eric Shinseki, after he broke ranks with the neocon article of faith that occupying Iraq would be a cakewalk? The Army chief of staff correctly warned the Senate Armed Services Committee in public testimony prior to the Iraq invasion in 2003 that a successful occupation force would require "several hundred thousand soldiers."

"Pentagon officials ridiculed the estimate, but they later appeared to prove the general correct when they boosted coalition troops in Iraq beyond 150,000," reports the Army Times.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz called Gen. Sinseki's estimate "way out of line." The general was quickly advised to retire, sending a loud message to all others in the military to get with the program.

So what does it mean to say troop level decisions "will be made by our military commanders" and not by the politicians -- after the politicians have shown they'll remove any military commander who insists that to restore order in Iraq could take a force greater than 200,000?

The troublesome situation the president now faces in Iraq is thus of his own making twice over, not only because he decided to invade a nation uninvolved in Sept. 11, but then because he followed that decision with the even dumber move of sending too few occupation forces, against the best advice of his best (now removed) generals.

Next time: Where never is heard a discouraging word.