Who’s Really Morally and Intellectually Challenged?
Saturday, September 2, 2006 by the _Miami Herald_
( /opinion) (Florida)
by Joseph L. Galloway
Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
took to the road this week trying to sell the message that Iraq is
part of the waron terrorism and that anyone who thinks differently is
morally or intellectually challenged.
With the president himself batting clean-up on Thursday, the dynamic
duo and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made the rounds of the
conventions of the biggest national veterans’ organizations — the
Veterans of Foreign Wars in Reno, Nev., and the American Legion in
Salt Lake City — peddling the Bush administration’s beleaguered line
of bull to guaranteed friendly audiences.
Rumsfeld’s message to the American Legion was that critics of the Bush
administration’s policies on Iraq and terrorism were guilty of “moral
or intellectual confusion about what is right or wrong.”
Cheney’s sound bites out of the Reno gathering of the VFW included
assertions that the federal-court ruling that warrantless wiretapping
was unconstitutional was ”dead wrong.” That ”sound policies by the
president” have prevented any more terrorist attacks on the United
States since 9/11 and that the terrorists, whom he declared ”in the
last throes” last year, are now “weakened and fractured, yet still
lethal.”
These statements reflect the administration’s persistent moral or
intellectual confusion about what is and isn’t true. From Rumsfeld,
Cheney and Bush, we hear how well things are going in Iraq, under new
democratic local management.
– In fact, Iraqis are dying by the thousands every month,
Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim militias are growing stronger, ordinary
Iraqis are lining upfor passports to flee a civil war that the
administration won’t admit is happening and the American death toll is
rising above 2,600.
– In fact, we are bogged down in a no-win, no-way-out war in part
because our military commanders have been browbeaten into fighting it
on the cheap, with perhaps half the number of troops they needed to
get a grip on a fractious people before the place dissolved into
anarchy, sectarian bloodshed and revenge-taking.
Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush claim that their invasion of Iraq has made
us safer.
– In fact, Hezbollah has survived an ill-conceived and
U.S.-backedIsraeli campaign in Lebanon, Iran is defiantly pursuing
nuclear weapons, the Taliban and al Qaeda are on the march in
Afghanistan and terrorist cells keep popping up in Western Europe and
elsewhere.
We can’t win in Iraq with the current U.S. force, strategy and
tactics, even using the White House’s fluid definition of victory,
which currently is that we’ll somehow train and equip Iraqi soldiers
and police who will take control of the country and allow us to begin
bringing our soldiers home.
Those Iraqi soldiers who are taking over security in broad stretches
of the country ran out of ammunition this week in a fierce gun battle
with militiamen and were executed by their captors. Other Iraqi units
refused orders to deploy to Baghdad in the wake of the debacle.
So what’s the administration to do to divert the attention of
Americans on the eve of a mid-term congressional election and looking
hard at the presidential sweepstakes in 2008? If I were betting on a
likely next move, I’d put some money on a really big ”wag the dog”
scenario. I’d suggest that some people high in government are going to
start cooking the intelligence on Iran, just as they cooked the
intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s ties to al Qaeda, chemical and
biological weapons and ”re constituted” nuclear program, none of
which actually existed.
Our leaders know that the U.N. Security Council, where Russia and
China are sure to veto actions against their business partner Iran,
will never approve tough sanctions on Iran. If they can squeeze
U.S. analysts hard enough or have some Iranian exiles (sound
familiar?) cook up dubious intelligence about an Iranian
nuclear-weapons program, they might have an excuse for a preemptive
attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Have the neoconservatives learned nothing from Iraq, Afghanistan and
Lebanon? Yes, I fear that it could be so. If we go down that road,
gasoline is going to cost more than Chanel perfume by the gallon, the
entire Middle East will go up in flames and the conflagration will
wipe out our moderate Arab friends. We will end up in even deeper
kimchi than we are already in.
Joseph L. Galloway is former senior military correspondent for Knight
Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller "_We Were
Soldiers Once … and Young_
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