Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [120]
The administration’s diplomacy in the lead-up to Gulf War II was frankly disastrous. At the end of it, we had the majority of public opinion in exactly two countries on our side—the United States and Israel. Our “coalition of the willing” was thirty, including Ethiopia, Eritrea, and other countries afraid of having their foreign aid cut off. Only Britain and Australia agreed to commit troops (45,000 and 2,000, respectively). In every nation where people were free to demonstrate, they did so against this war, approximately 10 million from every continent.
The administration was repeatedly caught dissembling. In early December 2002 they leaked a painfully obvious fake story that Saddam Hussein had given chemical weapons to al-Qaeda. That one was shot down so fast—from within the administration—it didn’t even last a full news cycle. Meanwhile, Rumsfeld revived his dandy scheme for a Pentagon Office of Strategic Disinformation, in other words, a Department of Lies. The neocon hawks on the Pentagon Defense Advisory Board, including Kenneth Adelman and Eliot Cohen, took to attacking the entire religion of Islam directly. “The more you examine the religion, the more militaristic it seems,” announced Adelman. Cohen said, “Nobody would like to think that a major world religion has a deeply aggressive and dangerous strain in it—a strain often excused or misrepresented in the name of good feelings. But uttering uncomfortable and unpleasant truths is one of the things that define leadership.” We, of course, were the ones launching an unprovoked war.
Many, many chickens came home to roost. Fareed Zakaria reported in Newsweek, “I’ve been all over the world in the last year, and almost every country I’ve visited has felt humiliated by this administration. Jorge Castañeda, the recently resigned foreign minister of Mexico, said, ‘Most officials in Latin American countries today are not anti-American types. We have studied in the United States or worked there. We like and understand America. But we find it extremely irritating to be treated with utter contempt.’ ” Most people do. It turned out the reason we couldn’t get some African countries to go along with us rather than the French is because they get more foreign aid from the French. America ranks dead last among wealthy countries in foreign aid as a percentage of the economy.
Looking at the “legislative history” of 1441, as judges do when trying to interpret law, it is clear the other members of the Security Council believed they were signing off on a two-part process, that if inspectors found Saddam Hussein in (endlessly overworked meaningless phrase) material breach, the problem would be brought back to the council for further decision. Our ambassador, John Negroponte, told the council as 1441 was debated, “There is not ‘automaticity’ and this is a two-stage process, and in that regard, we have met the principal concerns that have been expressed for the resolution. Whatever violation there is, or is judged to exist, will be dealt with in the council, and the council will have an opportunity to consider the matter before any other action is taken.” Thus the bitter resentment of other nations that felt the United States dealt in bad faith.
The war itself brought an almost surreal disjuncture between what Americans saw of the war and what the rest of the world saw. A pop-eyed young reporter for Fox News, assigned to watch Arab television, announced indignantly, “They are reporting about a completely different war. They say this is a war of unprovoked aggression in order to get the Iraqi oil fields and control the whole region.” As they say in Sweetwater, no shit?
The United States spends $398 billion a year on its military; Iraq spends $1.4 billion. Thus we had every right to expect a short, easy war, if not the “cakewalk” predicted by the neocon enthusiasts. Our only real worry was that Saddam Hussein, cornered like a rat, would finally use his weapons of mass destruction. As the war began, American troops met unexpectedly heavy resistance in southern