By Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect. Posted October 25, 2004.
George W. Bush's push to keep outside advisers out was a catastrophic success.
"I have no outside advice" in the war on terrorism, President Bush told Bob Woodward in December of 2001. In an interview that Woodward revealed to Nicholas Lemann in last week's issue of the New Yorker, Bush insisted that, "Anybody who says they're an outside adviser of this Administration on this particular matter is not telling the truth. First of all, in the initial phase of the war, I never left the compound. Nor did anybody come in the compound. I was, you talk about one guy in a bubble."
Indeed. By every available indication, George W. Bush's is the most inside-the-bubble presidency in modern American history. It's not just that his campaign operatives exclude all but the true believers from his rallies, or that Bush, by the evidence of his debate performances, has grown utterly unaccustomed to criticism.
With each passing day, we learn that once Bush has decided on a course of action, he will not be swayed by mere intelligence estimates, military appraisals or facts on the ground. We already knew that when Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki told Congress during the run-up to the war that occupying Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of troops, he sealed his ticket to an early retirement. We've recently learned that Paul Bremer had told the president we needed more troops to secure postwar Iraq and the safety of our troops already there, and that Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez had pleaded for more armored vehicles to better shield our soldiers.
But these and other such assessments and pleas ran counter to the idea of the war that Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had lodged in their heads. This would be our lightning war, and after Saddam Hussein was deposed, resistance would cease and U.S. forces could pack up and go home. A report in Tuesday's New York Times documents a Defense Department plan to shrink the number of U.S. forces in Iraq by 50,000 within 90 days of the taking of Baghdad. There were estimates aplenty from the State Department, the CIA and the Army suggesting that we'd need more forces for the occupation than for the war, but they were all blithely ignored.
It wasn't as if the administration couldn't calculate the number of troops it would need to secure Iraq. If troops were required at the same ratio that they were deployed in Kosovo, then 480,000 troops would be needed in Iraq, according to James F. Dobbins, who'd served as the Bush administration's special envoy for Afghanistan and who was a former ambassador at large to Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti and Somalia. If we wanted to deploy troops at the same ratio we had in Bosnia, we would have needed 364,000 soldiers patrolling Iraq.
However, Dobbins told the Times, the administration "preferred to find a model for nation building that was not associated with the previous administration."
But the Clinton administration and its allies did not deploy troops in the former Yugoslavia for the sheer fun of it. They calculated the number of forces required to keep the ethnic and political hatreds that suffused the area from erupting into violence, and assigned forces accordingly.
Every remotely sober assessment of Iraq after Saddam Hussein turned up a picture with disquieting resemblances to Yugoslavia – a melange of separate peoples united only by force, with scant indigenous traditions of democracy and pluralism. But large-scale deployment of forces was nation-building in the mode of Bill Clinton, and thus to be shunned. It was empiricism in the manner of Clinton – or perhaps just empiricism itself was indictment enough – and thus to be shunned.
Generals, though, shun empiricism at their own peril – and their troops'. The Times reports that Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of coalition forces, requested right after the fall of Baghdad that the army's First Cavalry Division be sent to Iraq to bolster our forces there, but that his request was denied. "Rumsfeld just ground Franks down," said Thomas White, then-secretary of the Army.
In the debates, Bush insisted that he'd never turned down a request from his military commanders in Iraq. His denial didn't extend to Rumsfeld, and now we know why.
With the presidential race coming down to its final two weeks, the Bush campaign has all but made a virtue of the bubble in which Bush resides and presides. This presidency is a triumph of the will, of resolve. Facts are for flip-floppers; data, for girlie-men. Kerry commands the facts and it breeds vacillation. The force is with Bush, and that is all he, and the nation, need. Bush has fused anti-empiricism and cultural resentment – and that, should he ride it to victory, will truly be a catastrophic success.
posted on October 25, 2004 10:06:50 AM new
You find some good articles to read, Bunni.
This reminds me so much of what General Schwarzkopf advised before the invasion.
Gulf War general tells Bush: Don't go it alone
NORMAN SCHWARZKOPF, the US general who commanded allied forces during the Gulf War, joined a growing number of senior US military and political figures yesterday who are opposed to a unilateral invasion of Iraq and said President Bush “should not go it alone”.
General Schwarzkopf, now retired from the US Army but still a commanding voice on matters relating to Iraq, said that the success of Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and the expulsion of President Saddam Hussein’s troops from Kuwait was almost entirely based on the existence of a broad international coalition. He said: “In the Gulf War we had an international force and troops from many nations. We would be lacking if we went it alone at this time.”
He emphasised the dangers of an invasion without international consensus and military support because of the size and strength of the Iraqi Army. “It is not going to be an easy battle but it would be much more effective if we didn’t have to do it alone,” he said.
Bush had all this advice from everyone before the invasion but he took it upon himself to do it anyways.
Then to make matters worse, there was no strategy or planning. Then to make matters even worse than that, he (and Rummy etc) have ignored further advice once they are in there.
I can't believe that people trust Bush and want to vote for him when he is living in his own little bubble.
BTW, if you click on the link of the old Vendio thread from April you will see that nothing has changed much around here.
posted on October 25, 2004 12:08:16 PM newOf course, the problem is, that statement was made by an idiot.
Readmond, was the TV personality doing the preaching Pricklame?
There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again." —George W. Bush, Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002
---------------------------------- "Give it up for George W. Bush, the best friend international jihad ever had."
posted on October 25, 2004 02:15:38 PM new
George Soros is a follower of Sir Karl Popper. Popper was a philospher who was knighted for his writtings against Fascism and Communism. Popper also laid the modern foundation for most scientific disclipines as a philospher of science.
The snipet below tells why Soros and most people with IQs above that of a fence post want Bush defeated.
"The philosopher Karl Popper argued the key difference between science and dogma is that scientific theory is always open to challenge and possible falsification, on the basis of new evidence."
"Bush, Singer writes, "seems almost to boast that his view of the truth is not open
to falsification on the basis of evidence.""
"Bush's recent, and belated, admission that U.S. forces found no weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq, made after Singer published his book, is a spectacular example. After Bush's primary reason for invading Iraq was proven false, he again asserted his decision to invade was right."
"At the time Bush delivered his State of the Union address in January 2003, two months before the Iraq invasion, "there were good reasons for doubting the evidence that the Bush administration offered in support of its claims," Singer writes.""
