Tag: iraq

One part each

jimmy baker2.jpg

According to a story in The Times, Bush and Rice “have finally noticed that [Iraq] is being partitioned by civil war” and are open to the notion of formal partition (under the guise of “federalization,” mind you).

According to the article, venerable Bush-crony James Baker, co-chair of the Iraq Study Group (sounds like something that meets in the library after class, doesn’t it?) has already met with the Syrians and the Iranians–and the Turks?–and that within the ISG “there is a growing consensus that America can neither pour more soldiers into Iraq nor suffer mounting casualties without any sign of progress.

For a clue what this refers to see today’s Washington Post for an article on rising US casualties.

So anyway, the theory seems to be that if they snip the country into three, at least the Kurds and the Shia’a will be quiet long enough for the troops to be brought home.

Kind of turns that “cutting and running” phrase on its head.

Losin’ it

Kilocompany.jpg

The other Vanity Fair piece that’s worth a look-see this month is William Langewiesche’s piece on the November 2005 Haditha massacre. It too comes with a photo essay—portraits of Marines from the company alleged to have gone on a killing spree after a roadside bomb attack.

Like the Andersen piece, it’s a great read. In vivid, dense packed and elegantly structured prose, Langewiesche explores the context of the killings and makes the case that there was really nothing very extra-ordinary about them, “just another shitty Anbar morning.â€� He even suggests that some of the killing may have been technically within the rules of engagement—at least those to which the Marines were accustomed. He calls this “…a baseline narrative that becomes the happiest possible version of the morning’s events.â€�

Some people are going to read this as an attempt to smear the morning’s events into something palatable, and others will say that it is an attempt to normalize (for better or worse) civilian deaths.

Neither will do justice to the nuance of the piece.

Langewiesche notes that there is evidence that tells heavily against the Marines: photos and accounts that indicate that five Iraqi civilians who blundered upon the aftermath of the bomb attack were simply executed, and witnesses who say that subsequent killings were far less shadowed by the fog of war than participants later claimed. (Tim McGirk’s May 19 story in Time goes into this in far more detail, however).

The cumulative effect of his evocation of the horror of the killings weighs more heavily, however, than would a more fervent attempt to arrange fragments of evidence into a picture of indictable action.

This is part of his “happiest possible version:�

Nine people had sheltered in that room, three generations of the same family, from an ancient man paralyzed by a stroke to an infant girl just three months old. When the grenade exploded, it blew some of them apart, wounded others with penetrating shrapnel, and littered the room with evil-smelling body parts. In the urgency of the moment the old man forgot that he was paralyzed and tried to stand up. He took rounds to the chest, vomited blood as he fell, and then lay on the floor twitching as he died.

The unfortunate part about this piece is that Langewiesche wants us to understand that it doesn’t really matter whether his blankly horrific “happiest possible version� is correct, or whether something nastier and colder happened that morning in Haditha. No, what matters is the PR disaster that the massacre (however the hell it happened) represents, and its strategic implications.

This is him writing about a video that was shot just after the killings and used by McGirk to peer around the untruths of the marine press releases. The last line of this excerpt is the last line of the article. It is Langewiesche’s last word in a major American magazine on an incident in which, it appears very likely that, unarmed civilians in a land far away were executed by heavily armed American soldiers.

A man cries, “This is an act denied by God. What did he do? To be executed in the closet? Those bastards! Even the Jews would not do such an act! Why? Why did they kill him this way? Look, this is his brain on the ground!”

The boy continues to sob over the corpse on the floor. He shouts, “Father! I want my father!”

Another man cries, “This is democracy?”

Well yeah, well no, well actually this is Haditha. For the United States, it is what defeat looks like in this war.

The horror rings here the more clearly for the hard-edged shallowness of this conclusion, but is this Langewiesche’s intention? In my “happiest possible version� it is. But I have my doubts.

Media culpa

Just got this dispatch from a journo friend in Baghdad about the recent dismissal of the (latest) judge in the Saddam Hussein trial:

It was our fault. We brought him down. He seemed to be a perfectly good judge and by all counts was doing a better job than some of his predecessors.

He just made a little slip and we pounced on him.

This trial was supposed to be different. The first trial of Saddam Hussein was a circus. Saddam Hussein and three cronies and four total unknown minor officials were on trial for the brutal crackdown on the Shiite village of Dujail following an assassination attempt on Saddam in 1982.

It was an odd choice to start with, of all of Saddam’s crimes, this was the one to kick off with? Who’s ever heard of Dujail? Only 148 people died in this one, compared to hundreds of thousands in the other cases.

But so it went and soon each session became about Saddam’s half brother, Barzan. A crude showman who still quite hadn’t figured out that it was all over.

He would bluster, roar, then cringing before the judge, who at first just let him talk. Saddam would occasionally sound off too – and of course for us in the press, two words from Saddam would leave pages and pages of notes on Barzan’s rantings discarded on the floor.

The silver haired judge, a Kurd by the name of Rizkar, had a fair bit of patience… but the government didn’t and their’s ran out first. Rizkar abruptly resigned, for “personal reasons”. To this day he has never said the true reason – the one we all know – that the government told him to crack the whip, and he told them to shove it.

So a new judge came in, another Kurd, bald, wizened, sharp-beaked, he was like a tough old bird of prey with a short temper. Within his first session Barzan was thrown out, Saddam walked out, the defense lawyers mounted a boycott.

High entertainment, at least for the journalists watching this trial day in and day out, but not necessarily in line with anyone’s ideas of what due process should be all about.

But anyway, it finally ended, with a fair bit of relief for everyone – it ended with a whimper, the final statements weren’t from Saddam, but rather from a minor defendant, and one day we just looked at each other in the press gallery and realized that was it. Just a matter of waiting for the verdict on October 16.

Next up, though, was the Anfal trial, the genocide campaign against the Kurds in 1988, that saw over 100,000 Kurds killed, many with poison gas, thousands more imprisoned, whole villages wiped off the map.

This would be a serious trial, there was to mass graves, forensic evidence, diagrams, the whole bit. Dujail – whatever – that was a dress rehearsal. Now this would be a proper court case.

The new judge, Abdallah al-Ameri, a Shiite, presided over a very different court. With Barzan gone, everyone was a bit quieter. The new defendants didn’t mouth off as much and Saddam – mostly – kept a low profile. Everyone was polite.

Among the journalists it was a welcome change, though it meant we had to pay more attention to the witnesses for our story and less to the antics of the defendants.

At the end of the every session, though, the judge would usually give Saddam or one of the other defendants a chance to talk – and Saddam would make some pronouncement like if he was still in charge the country, it wouldn’t be such a mess.

So then the grumblings started, from the prosecutors of all people, one even burst out in court that the judge was being too sympathetic to the defendant.

Bit shocking really, I mean not telling someone to shut up and sit down all the time isn’t being sympathetic. Besides, maybe being allowed to mouth off every now and then kept the defendants a little more passive.

They’re going to hang them anyway.

So the next session, the angry prosecutor was relegated to a back seat and that was that.

Except for one little off hand comment that very few people heard.

One of the witnesses described how he sent to a petition to Saddam to find out what had happened to his family. When it came to his turn to question the witness (defendants get to question the witness, it’s bizarre), Saddam said, if I was such a dictator, why were you allowed to appeal to me?

It was a pointless question, and enraged the witness, so the judge decided to calm things down, and said (dismissively) to Saddam “no, you weren’t a dictator, sometimes it’s just the people around one that make one seem to be a dictator.” Perhaps sarcastic? Whatever it was, it was offhand.

Everyone had it in their notes, but only AP passed it on to their desker and then that became the top of the story.

Just to back up a bit, the way the wires cover the trial – since we have to be filing information throughout – is that we take notes and then periodically send them from the press room to our editors (via Yahoo Messenger, as it turns out). Back at the office, there is a desker who receives the quotes and the description and then writes the actual story.

I’ve done both ends and the simple formula is, find the quote, and the fact or two that will make an attractive interesting story. Basically you need two or three quotes from the unhappy witness (my family was gassed, I saw the dead bodies, and then they beat us some more, whatever) and the Saddam quote. There is always one good quote from him every trial and it usually leads the story, unless there is a something particularly awful described in court like a rape or a child dying.

Those who don’t follow this callous (was that a whiff of evil?) formula, will find the next day that the newspapers have chosen the competition’s articles get chosen.

So the word came down the line, “AP’s leading with a dictator quote, do you have it?” So the other wires, went back through their notes (and perhaps maybe, in exasperation, asked the AP guy) and dutifully delivered up the requisite quote.

And where the wires go, the rest of the media will follow. It doesn’t matter what the other TV, newspaper reporters saw or heard, their editors will be sitting there looking at the wire copy that came out during the trial, saying “do you have the dictator quote?”

And of course the Iraqi media, follows the wires as well.

So that was the story the next day, not about the Kurds who suffered, or how well run the trial was, but that the judge thought Saddam wasn’t really a dictator.

For two days the government went out of their way to say the judiciary was independent and they would respect that.

And then on the third day they fired him.

The funniest part was the American advisors to the court, a rather righteous bunch of characters, who’s main role, as far as we can tell, is to convince the media that the trial isn’t really a travesty of justice. It’s an Iraqi process.

So the night the judge is fired we called them up and they swore up and down that the old judge would be there the next day. And the next day he wasn’t and they were spinning it along explaining how it was all within Iraqi laws.

“To say that removing a single judge out of a panel of five besmirches the whole process is a bit premature,” said an advisor to us angrily. Right. When the lead judge gets fired by the government for the second trial in a row, that’s nothing to worry about.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t like Saddam, or the toads and psychopaths he surrounded himself with. But there are principles here somewhere. There is an ideal of due process.

When you watch these badly managed stage shows that are just clearly unfair, you start thinking – he was only reacting to an assassination attempt, I mean wouldn’t that annoy anyone? And after all, the Kurds were rebelling and he was just using the same counter insurgency techniques of strategic hamlets and free-fire zones
the Americans used in Vietnam – albeit to rather extreme degree…

Anyway, what do I care, all that matters is the quote.

So the new judge came in, and on his first day he ejected Saddam, the defense lawyers walked out and at one point, the judge even threw out all of the defendants and then went on to hear the rest of the witnesses in an front of an empty dock.

Media Culpa (18)

October 3, 2006

It was our fault. We brought him down. He seemed to be a perfectly good judge and by all counts was doing a better job than some of his predecessors.

He just made a little slip and we pounced on him.

This trial was supposed to be different. The first trial of Saddam Hussein was a circus. Saddam Hussein and three cronies and four total unknown minor officials were on trial for the brutal crackdown on the Shiite village of Dujail following an assassination attempt on Saddam in 1982.

It was an odd choice to start with, of all of Saddam’s crimes, this was the one to kick off with? Who’s ever heard of Dujail? Only 148 people died in this one, compared to hundreds of thousands in the other cases.

But so it went and soon each session became about Saddam’s half brother, Barzan. A crude showman who still quite hadn’t figured out that it was all over.

He would bluster, roar, then cringing before the judge, who at first just let him talk. Saddam would occasionally sound off too – and of course for us in the press, two words from Saddam would leave pages and pages of notes on Barzan’s rantings discarded on the floor.

The silver haired judge, a Kurd by the name of Rizkar, had a fair bit of patience… but the government didn’t and their’s ran out first. Rizkar abruptly resigned, for “personal reasons”. To this day he has never said the true reason – the one we all know – that the government told him to crack the whip, and he told them to shove it.

So a new judge came in, another Kurd, bald, wizened, sharp-beaked, he was like a tough, old bird of prey with a short temper. Within his first session Barzan was thrown out, Saddam walked out, the defense lawyers mounted a boycott.

High entertainment, at least for the journalists watching this trial day in and day out, but not necessarily in line with anyone’s ideas of what due process should be all about.

But anyway, it finally ended, with a fair bit of relief for everyone – it ended with a whimper, the final statements weren’t from Saddam, but rather from a minor defendant, and one day we just looked at each other in the press gallery and realized that was it. Just a matter of waiting for the verdict on October 16.

Next up, though, was the Anfal trial, the genocide campaign against the Kurds in 1988, that saw over 100,000 Kurds killed, many with poison gas, thousands more imprisoned, whole villages wiped off the map.

This would be a serious trial, there was to mass graves, forensic evidence, diagrams, the whole bit. Dujail – whatever – that was a dress rehearsal. Now this would be a proper court case.

The new judge, Abdallah al-Ameri, a Shiite, presided over a very different court. With Barzan gone, everyone was a bit quieter. The new defendants didn’t mouth off as much and Saddam – mostly – kept a low profile. Everyone was polite.

Among the journalists it was a welcome change, though it meant we had to pay more attention to the witnesses for our story and less to the antics of the defendants.

At the end of the every session, though, the judge would usually give Saddam or one of the other defendants a chance to talk – and Saddam would make some pronouncement like if he was still in charge the country, it wouldn’t be such a mess.

So then the grumblings started, from the prosecutors of all people, one even burst out in court that the judge was being too sympathetic to the defendant.

Bit shocking really, I mean not telling someone to shut up and sit down all the time isn’t being sympathetic. Besides, maybe being allowed to mouth off every now and then kept the defendants a little more passive.

They’re going to hang them anyway.

So the next session, the angry prosecutor was relegated to a back seat and that was that.

Except for one little off hand comment that very few people heard.

One of the witnesses described how he sent a petition to Saddam to find out what had happened to his family. When it came to his turn to question the witness (defendants get to question the witness, it’s bizarre), Saddam said, if I was such a dictator, why were you allowed to appeal to me?

It was a pointless question, and enraged the witness, so the judge decided to calm things down, and said (dismissively) to Saddam “no, you weren’t a dictator, sometimes it’s just the people around one that make one seem to be a dictator.” Perhaps sarcastic? Whatever it was, it was offhand.

Everyone had it in their notes, but only AP passed it on to their desker and then that became the top of the story.

Just to back up a bit, the way the wires cover the trial – since we have to be filing information throughout – is that we take notes and then periodically send them from the press room to our editors (via Yahoo Messenger, as it turns out). Back at the office, there is a desker who receives the quotes and the description and then writes the actual story.

I’ve done both ends and the simple formula is, find the quote, and the fact or two that will make an attractive interesting story. Basically you need two or three quotes from the unhappy witness (my family was gassed, I saw the dead bodies, and then they beat us some more, whatever) and the Saddam quote. There is always one good quote from him every trial and it usually leads the story, unless there is a something particularly awful described in court like a rape or a child dying.

Those who don’t follow this callous (was that a whiff of evil?) formula, will find the next day that the newspapers have chosen the competition’s articles.

So the word came down the line, “AP’s leading with a dictator quote, do you have it?” So the other wires, went back through their notes (and perhaps maybe, in exasperation, asked the AP guy) and dutifully delivered up the requisite quote.

And where the wires go, the rest of the media will follow. It doesn’t matter what the other TV, newspaper reporters saw or heard, their editors will be sitting there looking at the wire copy that came out during the trial, saying “do you have the dictator quote?”

And of course the Iraqi media, follow the wires as well.

So that was the story the next day, not about the Kurds who suffered, or how well run the trial was, but that the judge thought Saddam wasn’t really a dictator.

For two days the government went out of their way to say the judiciary was independent and they would respect that.

And then on the third day they fired him.

The funniest part was the American advisors to the court, a rather righteous bunch of characters, whose main role, as far as we can tell, is to convince the media that the trial isn’t really a travesty of justice. It’s an Iraqi process.

So the night the judge is fired we called them up and they swore up and down that the old judge would be there the next day. And the next day he wasn’t and they were spinning it along explaining how it was all within Iraqi laws.

“To say that removing a single judge out of a panel of five besmirches the whole process is a bit premature,” said an advisor to us angrily. Right. When the lead judge gets fired by the government for the second trial in a row, that’s nothing to worry about.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t like Saddam, or the toads and psychopaths he surrounded himself with. But there are principles here somewhere. There is an ideal of due process.

When you watch these badly managed stage shows that are just clearly unfair, you start thinking – he was only reacting to an assassination attempt, I mean wouldn’t that annoy anyone? And after all, the Kurds were rebelling and he was just using the same counter insurgency techniques of strategic hamlets and free-fire zones the Americans used in Vietnam – albeit to rather extreme degree…

Anyway, what do I care, all that matters is the quote.

So the new judge came in, and on his first day he ejected Saddam, the defense lawyers walked out and at one point, the judge even threw out all of the defendants and then went on to hear the rest of the witnesses in an front of an empty dock.

Woodward on Ghorbanifar, Ledeen and Cheney

Since we recently mentioned both Bob Woodward’s new book and Middle Eastern arms dealers, take a look at this Tapped post quoting Woodward on how Manucher Ghorbanifar got in touch with Dick Cheney via Michael Ledeen about Iraq’s WMDs. Ghorbanifar being a legendary Iranian arms dealer, of course.

I am constantly amazed that Michael Ledeen is still an influential personality in the Beltway. Or that the American Enterprise Institute is taken seriously at all. There should be a campaign to ban any contacts between elected officials and representatives of think tanks or lobbyists (they are one and the same, mind you.) What’s wrong with university professors if they need experts?

Updated: Have corrected typo in title.

More revolt among generals

It’s been a slowly growing movement for over three years now, but more and more recently retired military officers are speaking out in protest against US policy — and more specifically, about Iraq:

The dissenters include two generals who led combat troops in Iraq: Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack Jr., who commanded the 82nd Airborne Division, and Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who led the First Infantry Division (the “Big Red One”). These men recently sacrificed their careers by retiring and joining the public protest.

In late September Batiste, along with two other retired senior officers, spoke out about these failures at a Washington Democratic policy hearing, with Batiste saying Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was “not a competent wartime leader” who made “dismal strategic decisions” that “resulted in the unnecessary deaths of American servicemen and women, our allies and the good people of Iraq.” Rumsfeld, he said, “dismissed honest dissent” and “did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war.”

This kind of protest among senior military retirees during wartime is unprecedented in American history–and it is also deeply worrisome. The retired officers opposing the war and demanding Rumsfeld’s ouster represent a new political force, and therefore a potentially powerful factor in the future of our democracy. The former generals’ growing lobby could acquire a unique veto power in the future by publicly opposing reckless civilian warmaking in advance.

I keep hearing this kind of stuff more and more from people close to US military and foreign policy circles — but I’m afraid that the Nation hypes up exactly how much influence these people can have in a media news cycle much better handled by the White House than it was, say, in Nixon’s time.

Merchant of death

The Observer profiles Monzer al-Kassar, arms dealer extraordinaire. Someone needs to write a good book on arms dealers in the Middle East, some of the stories you hear are incredible. Said Aburish’s first book (unfortunately out-of-print, and considering its second-hand price now I can’t believe I’ve misplaced my copy) in the early 1980s was a very entertaining account of being a middleman in the region, but imagine what you could do if you added everyone since then. Khashoggi alone could be a book, and once you add all the Israeli, Egyptian, Syrian, etc. dealers you could basically have a parallel underground history of the Middle East. Of course not to forget their Western counterparts — people like Donald Rumsfeld who either facilitated arms deals as government defense officials or chairmen of corporations like Raytheon. Imagine that: an account of how Egyptian arms dealers with top government connections sold small arms to both sides of the Rwandan genocide, or Israeli arms dealers (including a very close friend of Ariel Sharon) sold weapons to South Africa’s Apartheid government and its various militias operating in southern Africa, or indeed how European companies, acting through Palestinian or Lebanese middlemen, sold all kinds of military systems to Saddam Hussein. This industry goes to the heart of virtually of every regime in the region.

Jesus, the hidden imam

This, written and sent by a friend at AFP in Baghdad, is just bizarre:

Iraq-US-Shiites-Jesus-offbeat Iraq Sadr City residents insulted by ‘Buddy Jesus’

BAGHDAD, Oct 1, 2006 (AFP) – Iraqi Shiite residents of Sadr City expressed anger on Sunday over a picture of a grinning Jesus they mistook for a Shiite holy figure that appeared in their neighborhood following a joint US-Iraqi operation.

Residents found a picture of “Buddy Jesus” from the 1999 film “Dogma” posted in the streets, accompanied by a badly photocopied pamphlet bearing a crude approximation of a US military crest and outlining a US “plan” to subjugate the area.

“That picture abuses our Imam Mahdi and his holy character, and mocks our sacred figures,” said resident Abu Riyam, apparently mistaking the satirical movie still of Jesus for one Shiism’s historical imams, whose images adopt a Jesus-like iconography.

The grinning, winking model of Buddy Jesus giving a thumbs-up sign appeared in the comedic film as a fictional attempt by the Catholic Church to present a kinder, more accessible image of Christianity.

“If it wasn’t so serious, it would be funny,” said a coalition spokesman Major Will Willhoite.

The pamphlets outlined a plan to discredit the militias in the sprawling two million person Baghdad slum, a stronghold of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

“Destabilize security in the militia areas with explosions and assassinations to create panic” and “killing, raping and kidnapping women” were all measures the pamphlet recommended for causing people to lose faith in the militias.

“Do not tell the suspect militias of these plans but keep them among friendly forces,” admonished the pamphlet.

The US military did not confirm that it had conducted a raid into Sadr City in the early hours of the morning, but said that an Iraq force with coalition advisors did conduct an operation in “northeast” Baghdad.

Much of Baghdad’s violence has been laid at the feet of Shiite militias, many of whom are based in Sadr City, but US forces have yet to enter the neighborhood in force.

And here’s the poster:

Buddyjesus

Always look on the bright side of life

There’s a long article by Bob Woodward in the WaPo about the discrepancies between what the Bush administration knew was going on in Iraq from secret military reports and what was publicly being stated in upbeat presidential speeches and other public information. Here’s a bit from an interview with Jay Garner, the first military governor of Iraq:

On June 18, 2003, Jay Garner went to see Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to report on his brief tenure in Iraq as head of the postwar planning office. Throughout the invasion and the early days of the war, Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general, had struggled just to get his team into Iraq. Two days after he arrived, Rumsfeld called to tell him that L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, a 61-year-old terrorism expert and protege of Henry A. Kissinger, would be coming over as the presidential envoy, effectively replacing Garner.

“We’ve made three tragic decisions,” Garner told Rumsfeld.

“Really?” Rumsfeld asked.

“Three terrible mistakes,” Garner said.

He cited the first two orders Bremer signed when he arrived, the first one banning as many as 50,000 members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party from government jobs and the second disbanding the Iraqi military. Now there were hundreds of thousands of disorganized, unemployed, armed Iraqis running around.

Third, Garner said, Bremer had summarily dismissed an interim Iraqi leadership group that had been eager to help the United States administer the country in the short term. “Jerry Bremer can’t be the face of the government to the Iraqi people. You’ve got to have an Iraqi face for the Iraqi people.”

Garner made his final point: “There’s still time to rectify this. There’s still time to turn it around.”

Rumsfeld looked at Garner for a moment with his take-no-prisoners gaze. “Well,” he said, “I don’t think there is anything we can do, because we are where we are.”

He thinks I’ve lost it, Garner thought. He thinks I’m absolutely wrong. Garner didn’t want it to sound like sour grapes, but facts were facts. “They’re all reversible,” Garner said again.

“We’re not going to go back,” Rumsfeld said emphatically.

Later that day, Garner went with Rumsfeld to the White House. But in a meeting with Bush, he made no mention of mistakes. Instead he regaled the president with stories from his time in Baghdad.

In an interview last December, I asked Garner if he had any regrets in not telling the president about his misgivings.

“You know, I don’t know if I had that moment to live over again, I don’t know if I’d do that or not. But if I had done that — and quite frankly, I mean, I wouldn’t have had a problem doing that — but in my thinking, the door’s closed. I mean, there’s nothing I can do to open this door again. And I think if I had said that to the president in front of Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Rumsfeld in there, the president would have looked at them and they would have rolled their eyes back and he would have thought, ‘Boy, I wonder why we didn’t get rid of this guy sooner?’ “

“They didn’t see it coming,” Garner added. “As the troops said, they drank the Kool-Aid.”

There’s also some very interesting passages about the influence Henry Kissinger has had over Dick Cheney, notably pressing the argument that US troops should stick it out in Iraq and defeat the insurgency militarily before leaving. According to Woodward, Kissinger sees Iraq as another Vietnam, and thinks that Vietnam could have been won if the US had stayed longer. Senior military officials completely disagreed with this view, saying “we’ve got to get the fuck out.”

Finally, former White House Chief of Staff seems to have had a pretty accurate reading of the situation, even if he was unwilling to actually internalize it:

Card put it on the generals in the Pentagon and Iraq. If they had come forward and said to the president, “It’s not worth it,” or, “The mission can’t be accomplished,” Card was certain, the president would have said “I’m not going to ask another kid to sacrifice for it.”

Card was enough of a realist to see that there were two negative aspects to Bush’s public persona that had come to define his presidency: incompetence and arrogance. Card did not believe that Bush was incompetent, and so he had to face the possibility that, as Bush’s chief of staff, he might have been the incompetent one. In addition, he did not think the president was arrogant.

But the marketing of Bush had come across as arrogant. Maybe it was unfair in Card’s opinion, but there it was.

He was leaving. And the man he considered most responsible for the postwar troubles, the one who should have gone, Rumsfeld, was staying.

Even The Economist, which in 2002/2003 was largely pro-war and pro-Bush (and is now eating humble pie), had called for Rumsfeld to resign on its cover. One of the lessons of the Bush presidency will be that, as well as all the corruption, pork-barreling for big industry and ideological blindness, Bush’s personality will have been a key to his policy failures: he is a man unable to admit mistakes or consider that he may have been wrong. He confuses arrogance and groundless optimism with dogged resolve. You can imagine these meetings with the president, surrounded by his favorite yes-men, singing the Monty Python song “Always look on the bright side of life” in unison as they are delivered pessimistic report after pessimistic report from the uniformed professionals in Iraq. What a catastrophe.

Frank Rich: Why Bush went to war

I am seeing a lot of plugs for New York Times columnist Frank Rich’s new book, The Great Story Ever Sold, which makes the argument that Bush went to war against Iraq because Karl Rove needed a “war president” for the midterm elections in 2002. This simple explanation is perhaps the most convincing I have heard, especially as plenty of other people — big business, the neo-cons — were ready to jump on the bandwagon. From Gary Kamiya’s review in Salon:

Far more compelling — and originally argued — is his insight into the real reason Bush went to war in Iraq. His answer to this endlessly debated question, and his related excursus on the personality of Bush himself, may be the single most lucid and convincing one I’ve ever read. Although it is almost painfully obvious, and wins the Occam’s Razor test of being the simplest, it is put forward considerably less often than more ideological theories — whether about controlling oil, supporting Israel, establishing American hegemony, or one-upping his father.

Perhaps this is because Americans, in their innocence, cannot accept that any president would deliberately launch a major war simply to win the midterm elections. Yet Rich makes a powerful argument that that is the case.

Playing the key role, not surprisingly, is Karl Rove. “To track down Rove’s role, it’s necessary to flash back to January 2002,” Rich writes. The Afghanistan war had been a success. “In a triumphalist speech to the Republican National Committee, Rove for the first time openly advanced the idea that the war on terror was the path to victory for that November’s midterm elections.” Rove decided Bush needed to be a “war president.” The problem, however, was that Afghanistan was fading from American minds, Osama bin Laden had escaped, and the secret, unglamorous — and actually effective — approach America was taking to fighting terror wasn’t a political winner. “How do you run as a vainglorious ‘war president’ if the war looks as if it’s winding down and the number one evildoer has escaped?”

The answer: Wag the dog. Attack Iraq.

Now ideology comes in, along with the peculiar alliance of neocons and Cold War hawks that had been waiting for their chance. “Enter Scooter Libby, stage right.” As Rich explains, Libby, Cheney and Wolfowitz had wanted to attack Iraq for a long time, not to stop terrorism but for the familiar neocon reasons of remaking the Middle East and the familiar Cold War hawk reasons of trumpeting America’s might. “Here, ready and waiting on the shelf in-house, were the grounds for a grand new battle that would be showy, not secret, in its success — just the political Viagra that Rove needed for an election year.”

Obviously I’ll need to read the book to see what Rich’s argument really is, but this sounds very interesting indeed.