Desperate Times

These are truly desperate times for the Bush Administration. After saying over and over again that the “handover of sovereignty” in Iraq would magically solve all our problems, the handover came and went – and everything pretty much stayed the same. It was business as usual with more bombings, more fighting, and more deaths. I can just imagine President Bush sitting in the Oval Office, scratching his head at how all these Iraqis could be so ungrateful, even after we handed token power over to some handpicked figureheads, and wondering what the next step could possibly be.

With their one and only plan (actually, it was more of a wish) for getting us out of the Iraq mess not working, the White House is starting to show real anxiety. Bush’s blatantly made-for-public-consumption “let freedom reign” scribble went over like a lead balloon. (Note to Karl Rove and other Administration image-meisters: Doing something that obvious is guaranteed to backfire and make you look stupid as well as reckless. Next time, think subtle.)

Meanwhile, Vice President Cheney is still insisting that Iraq and al Qaeda were partners in crime despite all the evidence to the contrary. In a speech he gave yesterday in New Orleans, Cheney said that “in the early 1990s, Saddam [Hussein] had sent a brigadier general in the Iraqi intelligence service to Sudan to train al Qaeda in bomb-making and document forgery.” There is, however, one minor problem with this: intelligence services say such an event never happened, it was just a rumor.

Cheney also insisted that Iraq and al Qaeda were pals because alleged al Qaeda deputy Abu Musab al-Zarqawi lived in Baghdad. Not only is there no evidence of any collaboration between the Iraqi government and Zarqawi, but by that logic, the United States and al Qaeda are pals because the 9/11 hijackers lived in America before the 2001 attack. He also accuses Baghdad of having refused to turn over Zarqawi to the US, conveniently forgetting to mention that with a constant pattern of threats, bombings and accusations going back to the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq would be loath to do anything Washington asked.

And once again he dragged out the matter of the allegedly al Qaeda-affiliated Ansar al-Islam group in northern Iraq, once again neglecting to point out that (a) it was located outside Saddam’s control in the northern no-fly zone, and that (b) far from being allied with Saddam, Ansar was dedicated to overthrowing him.

(In response to Cheney’s speech, a 9/11 commission spokesman stood by the report issued two weeks ago, which said there was no operational relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and said they have seen no information since then to make them change their findings.)

Cheney then took a new and different tack: it’s all Bill Clinton’s fault. Apparently, Clinton did not “respond very forcefully” to such attacks as the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the African embassy attacks in 1998, and so on. “Our enemies took lessons from this experience,” Cheney went on to say. “They concluded that our country was soft... Terrorists were emboldened by years of being able to strike us with impunity.”

This, of course, turns history on its ear. Saudi intelligence dragged its feet and refused to aggressively investigate the Khobar Towers attack, much to Clinton’s disgust. He ordered attacks on al Qaeda facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan after the embassy bombings, and Congressional Republicans pounced on him – not for using too little force but for using too much. They also accused him of launching the attacks solely to distract attention from the Monica Lewinsky ruckus. To claim that Clinton did nothing to strike against al Qaeda, as the GOP is now doing, is a gross distortion of history. And to explain away Bush’s failures by putting all the blame on the previous occupant of the White House is not only wrong politically, it insults the memory of the Americans who have died because of this Administration’s incompetence.

By now, this is to be expected from the Bush Administration; it’s standard procedure to present rumors as facts, to keep on with the same sales pitch even after it’s discredited, and to ignore anything which doesn’t fit into the official ideological matrix.

Each time Cheney opens his mouth and proclaims the existence of a phantom Iraq-al Qaeda connection, he makes himself look more and more like a fool who is so blinded by his own ideology that he simply cannot see anything else. And each time Bush lets himself be part of a ham-handed scheme to put a happy face on a crumbling situation, he reveals himself to be either hopelessly naïve or just plain hopeless.