For those who remember Vietnam, the echoes are startling–from the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel mentality to the disconnect between hawk and dove. Iraq hasn’t reached the critical mass of dissatisfaction we had with Vietnam, but the trend line is about right. Rumblings about the mounting cost of pacifying postwar Iraq are prompting calls for the resignations of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. “It’s been noted that Bush fired his entire economic team when the economy wasn’t going well,” says Geoffrey Kemp, a Middle East expert at the Nixon Center. “People are asking: When is he going to fire some of his security team?”
As the architects of the minimalist strategy that has left U.S. forces stretched thin in Iraq, the Darth Vaders of defense will bear the blame if the pace of reconstruction doesn’t improve. Firing Rumsfeld would be tantamount to admitting the Iraq war was a mistake, which is why it probably won’t happen. But if Bush wins a second term, sources close to Bush 41 say junior will clean house and the neocons who pushed him into the war will get their walking papers.
The public is far more suspicious now of Bush than it was even a month ago. A recent poll shows that 72 percent of Americans believe another major terrorist attack is likely within the next year. A key question in the 2004 presidential campaign will be: how safe do you feel? That’s why Bush will run a law-and-order campaign. His speech calling for the expansion of the 2001 USA Patriot Act lays the foundation for that strategy.
Bush knows Congress won’t pass additional curbs on civil liberties, but this isn’t about getting legislation. This is an insurance policy for the president. In the event of another attack, he can say he wanted more authority for law enforcement, and the Democrats wouldn’t give it to him. The strategy is reminiscent of the 2002 Senate elections, when the GOP accused Democrats who voted against watering-down worker protections in the new Homeland Security Department of endangering national security. It also takes a page out of the elder Bush’s 1988 playbook when he hammered Democrat Michael Dukakis for being soft on crime and a card-carrying member of the ACLU. “This is law and order versus the ACLU, just like his father,” says a Republican strategist.
The White House itself has told Congress that the initial estimate for reconstruction of Iraq is $50 billion to $75 billion. But of the $87 billion Bush asked for during his Sunday-evening address to the nation, only $20 billion is slated for reconstruction. The rest is for the care and feeding of U.S. troops. That leaves a shortfall of $30 billion to $55 billion. The administration says the money will come from Iraqi oil reserves and the rest of the world. So far, the Bush White House has just $2 billion in pledges. “Why should anybody fund this?” says a Senate Democrat. “In the eyes of the world this is our baby, this is our mistake.”
The true cost of reconstruction is closer to $300 billion, says Michele Flournoy, a senior advisor for international security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. The $20 billion won’t cover much more than repairing infrastructure damaged by sabotage. “We’re coasting rather than developing,” she says. Of the top 20 security concerns confronting America, toppling Saddam wouldn’t have made her list. “And because of Iraq, we’re not doing other things” like funding homeland security and protecting U.S. ports.
Bush has the bully pulpit, and if he says something often enough, it becomes common wisdom. As long as people believe Iraq is the “central front” in the war against terrorism, they’re very forgiving. Iraq has become a haven for Al Qaeda, a development that a Hill Republican dubs “the flypaper theory.” Having failed to rout the opposition in Iraq, Bush would have us believe the bad guys are now flocking to their destruction, making our job easier, not harder. This administration has great powers of self-delusion. The neocons are isolated from reality, but they run the government, and they’re unrepentant.
People are tired of Rummy’s I-know-better-than-you shtick, but it’s hard to imagine Bush standing up to him. Robert McNamara, the Kennedy-era whiz kid who pushed the country into Vietnam, resigned as Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of Defense while the war was raging, leaving LBJ without an exit strategy. Consumed by a war he couldn’t win, and didn’t dare lose, Johnson told the country he would not stand for re-election. More than 40 years after the war began and 58,000 lives later, McNamara published a memoir that was his mea culpa. If history is repeating itself, would we know it now?
