Truth - Al Franken [95]
Rumsfeld looked Bandar in the eye. “You can count on this,” Rumsfeld said, pointing to the map. “You can take that to the bank.”
The subsequent rise in the price of oil would give Bandar many reasons to visit the bank.
“Saddam, this time, will be out period?” Bandar asked skeptically. “What will happen to him?”
In Dick Cheney’s movie, Plan of Attack III: Sticking to the Plan, it was the vice president who had all the good lines. “Prince Bandar,” Cheney intoned, “once we start, Saddam is toast.”
As opposed to the toast, as in “the toast of the terrorist community.” That role is currently being played by Osama bin Laden, who fell out of favor at the White House when he proved difficult to capture.
A movie entitled The Judicious Study of Discernible Reality would not have sold a lot of tickets in Bush’s fantasy multiplex. “Take that to the bank!” “Saddam is toast!” “Put on your war uniform!” That’s leadership. That’s decisiveness. In Plan of Attack, you didn’t hear lines like “Putting on your war uniform would help to convince Saddam that we’re serious about backing up the U.N. weapons inspectors, thereby possibly averting a horrible war.”
There’s also no scene where Bush meets with his advisers and says, “Give me twelve reasons to do this and twelve reasons not to.” No meeting where he asks one team of intelligence analysts to make the case that Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction, and another team to make the case that he didn’t.5 No assessment of the worst-case scenario. No consideration of “opportunity costs”—all the things we could have done with the resources that would be poured into the sand in Iraq.
Bush didn’t even consult the only U.S. president who had fought a war against Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t that Bush didn’t have his own father’s phone number. “I can’t remember a moment where I said to myself, ‘Maybe he can help me make the decision’ ” he told Woodward. “He was the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appealed to.”
Prayer is a perfectly legitimate supplement to a decision-making process, but not a substitute. And when Bush talked to God, he wasn’t even asking Him whether or not to go in. All he seemed to want from the Almighty was the fortitude to continue looking resolute.
Freed from the constraints of reality, everything for the Bush team was just politics. The only requirement of victory is convincing 50 percent plus one of the voters, or five Supreme Court justices, to pick your story line over the other guy’s. That was the strategy in 2004, when Bush convinced a bare majority of Americans that the only way to protect their children from nuclear annihilation was to reject the flip-flopper for the unyielding man of God. Bush and his advisers approached the war with the same mind-set. The German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously said that “war is politics conducted by other means.” For Bush, war was politics conducted by the same means. Politics.
Relying on fantasy was a bad way to win an election. But clinging to a fantasy when you’re leading a country to war is inexcusable.
But that’s how they did it. In the months leading up to the war, the Bush administration tried to sell its version of reality to a skeptical America. Earlier in this book, I described the administration’s lies regarding Iraq’s ties to al Qaeda and its perilously advanced WMD arsenal. That was all to convince the public that not going to war would be dangerous. The other half of their case was that attacking Iraq would be easy, cheap, quick, and fun. Fun, in a gee-whiz, shock-and-awe kind of way.
Easy? Invading and occupying an Arab country of 25 million people? The most militarized country in the region? And a country where the majority Shia still hated us for double-crossing them in 1991, and where the Sunni had nothing to gain from a democracy in which they’d be at the mercy of the ethnic groups they’d been oppressing for decades?