By Steven R Hurst
Dick Cheney
Dick
Cheney's autobiography presents a robust defense of his push for the U.S.
invasion of Iraq without critically examining two issues central to America's
near-failure in the war: The Bush administration's decision to disband the
country's army and banish all members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. Cheney
has said that "In My Time" would cause "heads to explode"
in Washington, and it is juicy reading for its harsh criticism of two
secretaries of state, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, and one defense secretary,
Robert Gates. Not surprising was Cheney's adulation of Gates' Pentagon
predecessor, Donald H Rumsfeld, the vice president's political mentor.
Cheney's
parting shot after decades of public service comes in the run-up to the 10th
anniversary of the Sept 11 attacks. The book has rekindled debate over the
rationale to attack Iraq in 2003 and the cost in American lives and dollars. It
also has focused attention on whether the war diverted US attention from
catching Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and eradicating the group's hideouts
in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Cheney
and former President George W Bush had said invading Iraq and removing Saddam
was imperative after Sept 11. They insisted Saddam was working with bin Laden
and that Iraq had amassed weapons of mass destruction to use against its
neighbors or to give to Al-Qaeda for use against America. But the bipartisan
Sept 11 commission, which Congress created, found "no credible evidence
that Iraq and Al-Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States".
Despite
that and other solid evidence to the contrary, Cheney insists that Iraq was a
nexus of terrorism and Saddam was working hand-in-glove with bin Laden.
Confronted by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, Cheney does
accept that Saddam did not have such armaments, an error that Cheney blames on
faulty US intelligence. Some critics say he carefully selected intelligence
material that made the case for Saddam having those weapons while ignoring
evidence on the other side.
Cheney
virtually ignores the conduct of the war effort to the point where the Bush
administration began to realize that the US was on the verge of failure in
2006, three years after the invasion. Sectarian violence between Sunni and
Shiite Muslims raged. It was not uncommon in late 2006 and into 2007 for
authorities to find as many as 100 dead bodies in the streets of Baghdad each
morning after a night of savagery. Al-Qaeda linked fighters had flooded into
the country and were inflaming the Sunni insurgency. Iran was deeply involved
in arming, financing and encouraging Shiite radicals.
The
proximate causes of that chaos were the lack of a national organization to keep
order and an interim government to put an Iraqi face on political
decision-making. Cheney deals with this in a single paragraph. "There were
also some things we failed to anticipate. Based on intelligence reports, we
believed we would be able to rely on the Iraqi police to keep the peace and
prove security.
That
turned out not to be true. The Iraqi police were among the least trusted, most
infiltrated institutions in Iraqi society. We also thought that once we removed
the top Baathists leaders from Saddam's government, we'd be able to get things
up and running relatively quickly, but we discovered that many people were so
accustomed to acting only on orders from the top that they were paralyzed
without them.
Cheney
says nothing about disbanding the military. He doesn't detail the wholesale
banishment of Baath Party members - not just government figures - from
positions of leadership and authority. Membership in the party was key to
career advancement in Iraq, much as was Communist Party membership in the
former Soviet Union. It did not necessarily prove political beliefs.
Without
a viable military, the job of policing an alien culture fell to US forces,
trained to fight wars but not enforce civil order. Without an interim
government that had support from both Shiites and Sunni Muslims, the country
was under the one-man rule of American L Paul Bremer. He ran the occupation
until June 2004 and then was involved in a long and destabilizing struggle to
elect a government and write a constitution. The Sunnis, the heart of the
insurgency, felt sidetracked in the new power structure and were angry. While a
minority of Iraq's population, they wielded power under Saddam. The Shiites
majority had been brutalized by Saddam and wanted revenge.
Cheney
deals with the crisis tangentially as he details the political back and forth
when Bush, with his vice president's full backing, was deciding to send even
more American forces into Iraq, beginning in early 2007. Before that, the
administration had been running a policy that was headed toward a reduction of
US troop strength in the midst of unimaginable violence, brutality and a
near-civil war.
Once
additional troops were decided upon, Bush put Gen David Petraeus, the new CIA
director, and his US Ambassador Ryan Crocker in charge. In time the gamble paid
off and The Associated Press was among the first American news organizations to
report declining violence. But as many as 100,000, perhaps many more, Iraqis
had already died and the death toll among American forces continues to rise. It
now stands at 4,474. - AP
This analysis was published in The Kuwait Times on 06/09/2011
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