Troubles arose almost immediately. The administration did not take the Al Qaeda threat as serious as they should have and as a result failed to show leadership in mobilizing the country’s institutions against the terrorist threat and relatedly failed to establish the necessary governmental apparatus for responding to a major terrorist attack. Indeed, although George Tenet ran around most of the summer as if his “hair was on fire”, there were plans to roll back counter terrorism funding just before 911.

Things did not get better after 911. First there was the surreal debate about whether the US should strike Iraq right away instead of Afghanistan. Although, sanity did prevail, the whole debate reinforced just how seriously Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld underestimated the Al Qaeda threat. Certainly, Rumsfeld comment that Afghanistan should not be attacked because it was not a “target rich” environment is certainly one for the ages and proves that despite all his talk about modern army he was still stuck in the Cold War.

The actual Afghanistan campaign, of course, was an unmediated disaster, which was made all the more intolerable by the meek and submissive tone the media took during the entire thing.  Various newspapers (e.g., Washington Post, NY Times, and The Christian Science Monitor) did grasp immediate cause of why Tora Bora failed, but they did not go beyond that and hammer the Administration.   The goal of the campaign should have been to kill and capture as many Taliban and Al Qaeda as possible. However, this was secondary in Rumsfeld’s mind to proving that a small force of US troops could topple a government whose army only had a few outdated tanks and airplanes. You see, in order for the pie in the sky doctrine of preemption to at least scare people, the political and economic cost of invading a country had to be sharply reduced or in Neo Con speak size of the size of the “footprint” did.

By the summer of 2002, it was clear that it was just a matter of when not if the US would attack Iraq. Initially things looked promising for the administration. Powell was able to convince Bush to go the UN route and Security Council resolution 1441 received unanimous approval. Thereafter things did not go nearly as well. The publication of Britain’s dodgy dossier, the appearance and Niger forgeries, Rumsfeld’s yammerings and the fact that the US made little effort to disguise the fact they were trying to buy the support of allies, such as Turkey, if not outright bullying them, all of this hurt the cause for war. The administration’s attempt to tie the Iraq War with the wider “War on Terror” was tenuous at best and was greeted with a great deal of skepticism in the international arena. The administration, of course, knew this. Hence, not only did Powell play down any supposed connection, but according to NBC the administration put the politics of war ahead of the national security. NBC alleges that a few months before the war, the administration had good idea that Zarqawi was in Northern Iraq in a region of Kurdistan controlled by Ansar al Islam. However, rather than striking at Zarqawi the administration decided to postpone an attack until after the war began. The reason being they feared that if the attack was successful, their case tying Al Qaeda to Iraq would be fatally undermined and with potentially the cause for war. (I hope the Bergs read the story.) http://slate.com/id/2100549" title="http://slate.com/id/2100549" target="_blank"http://slate.com/id/2100549  

The Administration’s one saving grace was the three audio tapes Colin Powell played for UN on February 5 of last year. Continued Iraqi obstinatance and in retrospect governmental incompetence and corruption also helped immensely.

On March 19th of last year the US invaded Iraq with the express purpose of liberating Iraq from itself. Somehow the Neo Conservatives had been able to convince themselves and the media that what the US was doing was akin to the US kicking the Nazis out of France in 1944. Woolsey and Wolfowitz even named a small group of Iraqi ex pats accompanying the American forces the Free Iraqis and up until his arrest the Neo Cons complained bitterly about the CIA not buying into the notion of Chalabi being the second coming of De Gaulle. The CIA should have given their views more credence. Both De Gaulle and Chalabi proved to be a royal pain. (A more accurate historical comparison along the lines the US envisioned would be to have compare Saddam to his hero Stalin and Iraq to Soviet Union in the wake of the German invasion. Many ethnic Ukrainians did, at least at first, view the Nazis as liberators. The comparison breaks down in two respects though, one historical and one practical. The Ukrainians were more like the Kurds than Iraqi Shia. They simply did not identify themselves with their country the way Iraqi Shia do. The second problem is that the Americans did not want to in anyway compare themselves to the, ahem, the Nazis. Incidentally, Pearl’s predication, which turned out to be correct, about the Bath party’s grip on power collapsing shortly after the invasion seems eerily similar to Hitler’s comment that all the Wehrmacht needed to do was to break down the front door and the whole rotten structure would come crashing down.)

The delusional thinking of the Neo Cons immediately got the Americans in trouble. Because he thought he was liberating the country and not occupying it Rumsfeld again did not make killing and capturing military personnel, especially Republican guard members, a priority. (Hitchens, Woolsey and a few others have made this point, but have used euphemistic language in making it.  They have said such things as there was no northern hammer to come down on the a south anvil.  Once more a few have blamed Turkey for not letting US forces in.  Blaming Turkey for inept planning is a minimum just plain silly and is worst just plain spin.)  In fact, Rumsfeld said that he preferred the Iraqi forces to just melt away than to have them surrender to US forces. This made the post war situation even worse. As it was, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz vastly underestimated the number of troops needed to “secure the peace” and secure vast weapons stores throughout the country, let alone in a case where vast majority of Iraqi army had survived the war and where most its soldiers where still in possession of their small arms.

The total absence of post war planning is now readily acknowledged by both sides of the ideological divide and this includes the boys at the Weekly Standard. What is really irksome though is that far from stemming the bleeding many of the stop gap measures made things worse. The whole incident with the Iraqi Museum is a good case in point. Naturally enough the Iraqi Museum and the National Library was seen as something the US must protect once the regime fell. The problem was that instructions to that effect where lost in the black hole known as Douglas Feith’s desk. As result, when looting broke out the local commander, having received no orders to protect anything, decided to protect what he thought was important, viz., the Oil Ministry. He could not have picked a worse building to protect. The political optics where terrible; it played right into the no blood for oil crowd’s hands. To add insult to injury, the information in the Oil Ministry was not of great use to the Americans. Meanwhile, an administration, which is already, not without reason, branded by critics as being anti-intellectual and anti expert, got hammered in the international press for what happened to the National Museum and Library.

Despite all of this, all was not lost for the administration at this point. The war had gone better than many opponents had suggested and many reached out to the US. So, what did the US do? Well, the Pentagon made darn sure that Iraq would not be internationalized. Their first order of business was to proclaim that all the reconstruction goodies would be going to the coalition of the willing thank you very much and that was pretty much ended such talk right there.

By summer it was becoming obvious that WMD would not be found. With that, people started raising questions about the State of the Union address and those now infamous 16 words. In what has become a familiar tactic, the Bushies blamed the CIA for what they admitted should not have made it into the SOU. The CIA stuck it to them and relieved that they had gotten taken out of an October 2002 speech and doing so had talked to Stephen Hadley who is Rice deputy. Joe Wilson, who I will get to in a second, mentioned the communications in a letter to the senate committee looking at the WMD issue. It clear from this that the CIA did not mince their words. “On Oct. 6, 2002, the DCI called the deputy national security advisor directly to outline the CIA's concerns. The DCI testified to the SSCI on July 16, 2003, that he told the deputy national security advisor that the ‘President should not be a fact witness on this issue,’ because his analysts had told him the ‘reporting was weak.’ On Oct. 6, 2002, the CIA sent a second fax to the White House that said, ‘More on why we recommend removing the sentence about procuring uranium oxide from Africa: Three points (1) The evidence is weak. One of the two mines cited by the source as the location of the uranium oxide is flooded. The other mine cited by the source is under the control of the French authorities. (2) The procurement is not particularly significant to Iraq's nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already have a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory. And (3) we have shared points one and two with Congress, telling them that the Africa story is overblown and telling them this is one of the two issues where we differed with the British.’” So much for Rice’s claim that only those deep inside the CIA new that information was suspect.

If that was not enough, ex Iraqi ambassador Wilson revealed that he had been sent to Niger by the CIA to check out allegations that Iraq had tried to purchase yellow cake from them, but had found nothing. Even though the CIA sent Wilson at Cheney’s behest, Cheney outrageously claimed that Wilson’s finding had not been reported to him. Good humor. In order to get back at Wilson, one of the Bushies ruined the career of Wilson’s wife by outing her as an undercover agent of the CIA. As such an act is potentially illegal, the CIA had the Justice Department launch a criminal investigation.

Meanwhile the insurgency got progressively worse in Iraq and this all but ended the slim possibility that the international community would send more troops. It did something else as well. As the insurgency worsened it became apparent to one and all that America did not have the wherewithal to overthrow other despots and assume control of those countries. The US was having more than a tough enough time in Iraq; the idea of attacking, say, Iran looked like so much pie in the sky. This should have been readily apparent everyone all along, but it was not. Chomsky, for one, droned about how Iraq was just first of many countries that the US would take out. Having grasped America’s weakness and not believing for a second the administration’s rhetoric over Libya, Iranian hardliners have acted and continue to act boldly. They have more or less openly helped to arm and organize Shia militiamen in Iraq; they have cracked down hard and reformers inside Iran; they have been standoffish towards the International Atomic Energy commission and just recently they seized British soldier’s patrolling in Iraqi waters.  Oh yeah, American actions against Sadr and the mess Iraq is in has strengthened the hardliners.  (There are two things that should be said about Libya. First negotiations had begun well before the Iraq war. Second, a large shipment of nuclear material headed for Libya was seized well after the War! That is right. The Libyans, knowing the Bushies were in bind, had no qualms about trying to get their hands on nuclear material.  http://slate.com/id/2103989" title="http://slate.com/id/2103989" target="_blank"http://slate.com/id/2103989 )

By late summer, Rumsfeld wanted the US to get tougher. Part of this involved a plan to extract more intelligence about insurgents from Iraqi prisoners. Rumsfeld sent Miller from Guantanamo Bay to “Gitmotize” Abu Ghraib. Under Miller’s command the US has been much better at extracting information from Al Qaeda prisoners. What Miller did precisely is not exactly clear. What is clear is that after he left, Abu Ghraib was even more of a mess than it had been before. What appears to have happened is this: private contractors and low ranking intelligence officials, were given more freedom by higher ups, as to how they could handle prisoners. This, coupled with the fact that there was no clear command structure at Abu Ghraib, was taken as sign by the these people that they had carte blanche to do what they wanted with the prisoners. The intelligence guys and private contractors quickly recruited a unit of former traffic cops with no training whatsoever to help soften up prisoners.

Now, although, some members of the media made it out to be a systematic effort by the US to extract information from former insurgency, it is clear now that this was overstating things. The prisoners that where tortured, or if you prefer Rumsfeld’s wording “abused”, were not considered in anyway big fish, nor for that matter were they all insurgents. It has come out recently, that the guy standing on the box was just a common thief.

The way the story broke is just homely. Apparently a whistle blower informed the brass back in January. This prompted an investigation which in turn led to several low ranking privates being brought up for Court Marshall. An uncle of one of these men was angered his nephew had been singled out and that his nephew’s superiors were not going to face justice too. Armed with a bunch of incriminating pictures, this guy’s uncle tired to get the attention of various Senators and Congressman. He failed and so released the pictures to 60 minutes – I guess he must have seen the Insider. (Thanks to the work of his uncle, the private in question, who was probably facing little or no jail time, will no face the full force of the law.)

So, what did the US do to clean up the mess at Abu Ghraib? Well, they sent Miller back in, of course. Needless to say, the optics of such a move are terrible as was all the hype they gave to their decision to tear down Abu Ghraib in the near future. It amazes me how the US took great efforts to remove pictures of Saddam and statues of Saddam, but decided to leave up and worse use one of the places most associated with his rule, viz., Abu Ghraib prison.

Then in May things really took a surreal turn.

“Toward the end of a "Meet the Press" interview with Secretary of State Colin Powell in Jordan, the camera suddenly moved off Powell to a shot of trees in front of the water.
"You're off," State Department press aide Emily Miller was heard saying.
"I am not off," Powell insisted.
"No, they can't use it, they're editing it," Miller said.
"He's still asking the questions," Powell said.
Miller, a onetime NBC staffer who recently worked for House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, also told Powell: "He was going to go for another five minutes."
Undeterred, Russert complained from Washington: "I would hope they would put you back on camera. I don't know who did that." He later said, "I think that was one of your staff, Mr. Secretary. I don't think that's appropriate."
As the delay dragged on, Powell ordered: "Emily, get out of the way. Bring the camera back please." Powell's image returned to the screen, and Russert asked his last question.
What happened was that both NBC and Fox News were using Jordanian television facilities for back-to-back Powell interviews. Russert was allotted 10 minutes and was asked to wrap when he went over by about two minutes. He said "Finally, Mr. Secretary," but abruptly lost his guest.
Russert was still puzzled afterward. "A taxpayer-paid employee interrupted an interview," he said. "Not in the United States of America, that's not supposed to go on. This is attempted news management gone berserk. Secretary Powell was really stand-up. He was a general and took charge." Powell later called the NBC anchor from his plane to apologize for the glitch.
State Department spokeswoman Julie Reside disputed Russert's characterization, saying that NBC "went considerably beyond the agreed end time. Other networks were waiting for their interviews and had satellite time booked, and we didn't want to keep them waiting."
Asked why he simply didn't edit out the awkward interlude from the taped interview, Russert said: "It's part of the story."

I am no conspiracy theorist, but I have to agree with Russert’s meek characterization of what happened as “news management gone berserk”. Not only did Emily try muzzle/censor the Sectary of Defense she was obviously watching over Powell on the behest of someone quite powerful. Guppies do not attack sharks without the protection of another shark (most likely from the Pentagon, but more on that below.)

Whoever it was, they had reason to want Powell muzzled. Picking up on an earlier quote, indicating that Powell thought that the information he presented before UN was false, Russert asked Powell about the his earlier statement. This is what Powell said. “When I made that presentation in February 2003, it was based on the best information that the Central Intelligence Agency made available to me. We studied it carefully; we looked at the sourcing in the case of the mobile trucks and trains. There was multiple sourcing for that. Unfortunately, that multiple sourcing over time has turned out to be not accurate. And so I'm deeply disappointed. But I'm also comfortable that at the time that I made the presentation, it reflected the collective judgment, the sound judgment of the intelligence community. But it turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong and in some cases, deliberately misleading. And for that, I am disappointed and I regret it.”

Now, some members of the press have speculated that the reason that Powell did this was to sure up his legacy that was so damaged by his UN speech. Perhaps. However, I do not think that Powell is so selfish as to put his own legacy ahead of the interests of the country. I think Powell’s original comments and the last sentence quoted above is just one more saga in the continuing war between the Pentagon and State Department and the CIA over the reliability of the INC. Powell essentially called INC a bunch of liars. As for that long running war, pace those people who have all but written Powell off, the arrest of some of INC people, the leaked stories about the INC being suspect for some time and decision to no longer fund them is a sure sign that the INC battle is at last over and surprise the State Department and the CIA have all but won.

What has happened since, in terms of the take over, Allawi coming to power and Chalabi’s marginalization, seems to further confirm this.