Bush and Cheney in Wonderland

Bush and Cheney in Wonderland

Since the fifth anniversary of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq on March 19^th, 2008, both President Bush and Vice-President Cheney have been working overtime to justify not only the reasons for starting the war in Iraq but also for claiming that it has been a success rather than a failure. These endeavors come at the same time as a substantial portion of the American public now judges the war to be “not worth” the efforts that were undertaken to launch it.

I do not use the “wonderland” metaphor lightly in describing the methods of the Bush Administration for justifying its action. In Lewis Carroll's fantastic tale, Alice literally falls down a rabbit hole (a seeming “dead end”) and finds herself instead in a world defined by logical inversions.

The first of these, with respect to Iraq, may be found in President Bush's assertion that Iraq is part of the “war on terror.” Now that it has been proven, unequivocally, that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with directly supporting Al-Qaeda in the September 11^th attacks on the U.S., the Bush administration has been confronted by the awkward problem of trying to explain why our invasion of Iraq resulted in the creation of a new Al-Qaeda training ground and the creation of a new terrorist insurgency, hitherto unknown.

The response of the Bush Administration has been to claim that we are fighting the “war on terror” over “there” (Iraq and Afghanistan) so that we don't have to fight it over “here” (on U.S. soil).

The attractiveness of this illogic cannot be overstated. As long as there are no major terrorist attacks within the continental United States, the government can maintain that this is because we fighting a “terrorist” war elsewhere. This focus on the absence of a major attack on U.S. soil also allows the Bush administration to ignore the 607 percent spike in the average yearly incidence of terrorist attacks worldwide after the U.S. invasion of Iraq (28.3 attacks on average the year before and 199.8 attacks the year after) (See the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, http://www.terrorismknowledgebase.org/).

Even though most of these attacks occurred in Iraq as the result of an increasingly active insurgency, incidents of terrorism were up all over the world. The idea that we're fighting terrorists overseas to prevent them from attacking us at home obscures the fact that millions of dollars now have to be expended to fight a terrorist insurgency that we ourselves helped to create by our invasion of another country that had no intention of attacking us.

Indeed, in the intervening years since the beginning of the Iraq war, the American public has learned that nearly all of the information given by the Bush administration to justify the war has turned out to be wrong, including the most incendiary claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and was ready to use them at a moment's notice.

The mushroom cloud alleged by Condoleeza Rice, Vice-President Cheney, and President Bush, has vanished into thin air, and yet we still have hundreds of thousands of combat troops on the ground: not to fight Saddam Hussein, nor to liberate Iraqi citizens, but simply to hold together a nation that was patched together after World War I by European powers and that a coalition of U.S. and European allies now struggle to keep from the brink of civil war.

Many academics and policy analysts¹ now consider that some form of civil war in Iraq is inevitable and that the U.S. “surge” in troop deployments has done nothing more than keep the combatants at arm's length, a situation that cannot be prolonged indefinitely, although some politicians like presidential candidate John McCain, seem inclined to spend whatever it takes to keep this stalemate in place. Even the Pentagon's quarterly report issued on March 15^th, 2008 now uses the term “civil war” to describe the violence plaguing the country.

An even more recent example of the Wonderland logic pervading the White House was exemplified by the President's decision to send Vice-President Dick Cheney to the Middle East, in part to urge progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. "His goal is to reassure people the U.S. is committed to a vision of peace in the Middle East," Mr Bush said. (“Cheney to tour Middle East States, BBC News, March 10, 2008).

Reassure people, indeed, by sending the most virulent neo-con hawk still residing in the Bush administration to press for peace. One could only wonder what the President was thinking, except that Cheney's itinerary also included a four hour plus meeting with Saudi King Abdullah about high oil prices as well as a range of Middle East issues including Iran, which Cheney has long painted as an aggressor in the region (“Cheney Meets with Saudi King, Discuss High Oil Prices” The Wall Street Journal, March 22, 2008).

Cheney's most visible “wonderland” moment occurred in Baghdad. "If you look back on those five years it has been a difficult, challenging but nonetheless successful endeavor ... and it has been well worth the effort," said Vice President Cheney, after meeting with Iraqi leaders on March 17^th (“Iraq invasion was "successful endeavor": Cheney,” Reuters). A few days later, when confronted by ABS correspondent Martha Raddatz with the statistic that
“two-thirds of Americans think that it's not worth fighting,” the Vice President responded with a succinct and dismissive: “So?”

A few days later on Easter Sunday, when the number of American soldiers killed in the war reached the 4,000 mark, Mr. Cheney was a little more chastened but quicker to pass the buck, noting that “the biggest burden is carried by President George W. Bush, who made the decision to commit US troops to war.”

But Cheney, like his Commander in Chief, has clearly committed himself to tunnel vision when it comes to Iraq, and this view of the war brooks no inconvenience of opposing public opinion, loss of American lives, or facts on the ground, like the female suicide bomber who killed herself and forty others on the day of his visit, or his inability to venture beyond the “green zone” or the complete failure of the Iraqi government to meet any of its political power-sharing commitments: "It's important to achieve victory in Iraq. It's important to win, to succeed in the objective that we've established," says Dick Cheney, and nothing will change his mind.

Like President Bush, who prides himself on being the “decider” and feels that it is a “weakness” to second-guess any decision he has taken, no matter how ill-considered it turns out to be, Cheney has committed the country to a “stay the course” military adventure in Iraq from which neither he nor the President see any turning back, at least not while they remain in office.

One might almost admire their resolve and determination were it not for one small and painful fact: these same war hawks and self-proclaimed patriots have projected not one penny of appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan beyond 2008. It's as if the war mysteriously disappears off the books the moment they leave office.

If you had any doubts that this administration really is living in Wonderland, just look at the way they pursue a war and then suddenly refuse to fund it, as soon as it becomes someone else's problem. NPR reporter Guy Raz noted that the Pentagon budget for next year, which was recently unveiled in Congress amounts to nearly $500 billion, larger than any military budget since World War II. “But one thing is missing,” notes Mr. Raz, and that is “most of the money to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Defense officials now say they'll only ask Congress to provide enough money to fund the wars through the end of the Bush administration,” “Pentagon Budget May Put Next President in a Pickle,” All Things Considered, January 28, 2008.

Why suddenly pretend the war requires no funding at the end of this year? Well, it is true that this administration has tried to fund the war “off the books” all along by requesting supplementary appropriations instead of having the budget reflect the true cost of the war, just as they have funded these appropriations by sending the nation deeper and deeper into debt instead of making today's taxpayers feel the real pinch of these expenditures.

But there may be an even more cynical reason for the funding sham – At the beginning of the year, President Bush unveiled a $3.1 trillion budget plan for fiscal 2009 that will leave deficits of more than $400 billion this year but claims to bring that deficit to zero by 2012 – by once again leaving the war funding off the books.

So Bush and Cheney go on living in Wonderland, certain that history will vindicate their invasion of Iraq, and apparently even believing that they can hoodwink the public into thinking that they can have their cake and eat it too – fight a war and not acknowledge its costs – at least until they can ride off into the sunset like the cowboy heroes they imagine they are.

1See James D. Fearon writing on “Iraq's Civil War” in Foreign Affairs (March/April 2007) or Kenneth Pollack, “Apres-Surge: The Next Iraq Debates,” The New Republic, December 2007.