Rice appeared rattled when Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste confronted her with the title of the presidential daily briefing (PDB) forwarded to Bush at his Crawford ranch on Aug. 6, 2001: “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.” Rice called it “historical information based on old reporting” that did not warn of new attacks. Ben-Veniste countered that it established a pattern of suspicious activities and challenged the administration to declassify the memo so the American people could decided its relevance for themselves.
The exchange is reminiscent of the country music song “My Lyin’ Eyes,” where the cuckolded husband has to decide whether he believes what he sees or what he’s being told. Even if the memo is a rundown of bin Laden’s greatest hits, it arrived in the midst of a summer when terror czar Richard Clarke and others in the intelligence community were warning the White House something big was about to happen. Even if Rice’s explanation is legitimate, keeping the memo from the public and the press gives the impression the administration is hiding something.
With U.S. Marines dying in Iraq and the administration’s postwar policy in shambles, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s reassurances that American forces would prevail met with skepticism on Capitol Hill. “Baghdad Bob could be working for the Coalition,” said a Senate aide to a senior Republican. “The scary thing is, the administration doesn’t know how bad it is, or they know it’s bad and they’re misleading the public. They’re telling congressional leaders this is a minor flare-up.”
There are those lyin’ eyes again. Reporters on the ground in Iraq describe a wider uprising among the Shiite population than Rumsfeld acknowledges. He clings to the notion that the insurgency is primarily a function of Saddam holdovers, foreign fighters and common criminals. But to say the majority doesn’t support the uprising misses the point. All that’s needed is a determined minority fueled by religious zeal. The spreading insurrection is reminiscent of Iran in the late 1970s when the Shiite followers of Ayatollah Khomeini filled the vacuum after the shah fell.
This is the week Iraq spun out of control. And where is Bush? He’s on a weeklong spring break at his ranch. He seems increasingly disengaged. Perhaps behind the scenes he’s calling Rumsfeld and demanding to know what’s going on. When he finds out, he owes the country an explanation, and not just a speech, a full-blown news conference where he engages the press and lays out what is happening. The Iraqi people are supposed to be our friends. We liberated them. Why are they fighting us? And, Mr. President, it’s not enough to say, “They don’t love freedom.”
The Iraqi police are fleeing and militias loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr are tightening their grip in cities that are the center of the country’s religious life. The June 30 deadline looms to turn sovereignty over to the Iraqis. But it’s meaningless, says an analyst on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Instead of a puppet government that doesn’t pretend to be a government, we’ll have a puppet government that pretends to be a government. Neither has the support of the Iraqi people.”
If the definition of a quagmire is the more you struggle, the more you get pulled in, Iraq qualifies. It’s a loaded term because it evokes Vietnam. Sen. Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the explosion of violence this week in Iraq reminded him of the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam in the sense that it awakened the public to a failed policy. It took a change of presidents and several more deadly years before America cut its losses and withdrew from Vietnam.
Withdrawing from Iraq now is not an option, leaders in both parties agree. But if it is a quagmire, what is the way out? “Somebody has to toss you a rope,” says the foreign-policy analyst. “If we flail around on our own, we keep sinking.” Persuading the United Nations, NATO and the other Arab countries that a stable Iraq is in their interest, and getting them to help shoulder the burden is the only reasonable exit strategy. “Republicans laugh at the idea that foreign leaders have more confidence in [Democratic presidential contender John] Kerry, like it’s treasonous, but they’re the ones who will throw us the rope,” says the aide.
Candidate Kerry has not yet found his voice in saying clearly what he would do in Iraq. But his election in November would offer a clear break from the past and an ability to reassess. Short of regime change here and at home, the prospects of sharing the burden are bleak. Bush would have to go before the U.N. and do a major mea culpa, not a smirking “mistakes were made.” He would have to present himself as a humbled man from a humbled country. Rice’s testimony gave no indication that Bush is ready to descend from the pedestal his aides built from the ashes of September 11.
