Truth - Al Franken [96]
A cinch.
“My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,” Dick Cheney said on Meet the Press on March 16, 2003. Wide-eyed Tim Russert, uncharacteristically, followed up with a skeptical question:
RUSSERT: If your analysis is not correct, and we’re not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?
CHENEY: Well, I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators.
He’d already said that. But that was part of the strategy. If you want someone to remember something, you have to say it over and over again. That’s the way to get an idea to sink in: Say it over and over again. If you’re serious about getting your point across, say it over and over again. That’s the only way to get people to remember your point. Say it over and over again. Then they’ll remember it.
Cheney again put this theory into practice only seconds later:
CHENEY: The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.
Exactly how many liberators were the Iraqis going to be greeting? That was the question, not just for Iraqi florists and candy shops, but for the Pentagon. Would seventy-five thousand liberators be enough to do the job, as Donald Rumsfeld believed? Or would it take the hundreds of thousands of liberators that Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki had calculated were necessary?
Testifying before Congress, Shinseki had been asked how many troops would be needed for a postwar occupation. Shinseki replied:
SHINSEKI: Something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required. We’re talking about post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that’s fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so it takes a significant ground-force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment, to ensure that people are fed, that water is distributed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this.
Clearly, Shinseki hadn’t gotten the memo that Chalabi’s Iraq wouldn’t need to be secured by U.S. troops. Or if he had gotten the memo, he’d sure done a bad job of internalizing it. Shinseki, a thirty-eight-year military officer and proud member of the reality-based community, had reached his estimate using a study by the Army War College and his own experiences in the Balkans. His dangerous and unwelcome attempt to inject reality into the Iraq debate had to be met, unlike Iraq itself, with overwhelming force—as well as an exit strategy. The latter was easy. Shinseki “resigned” a few months later. (There is no record of whether or not the door struck him on the ass on the way out.) As for the overwhelming force, the Pentagon’s top civilian officials led the charge against the military brass.
“What is, I think, reasonably certain,” Donald Rumsfeld told reporters two days later, “is the idea that it would take several hundred thousand U.S. forces is far from the mark.”
Paul Wolfowitz, testifying to Congress the same day, concurred that Shinseki’s assessment was off the mark.
We can say with reasonable confidence that the notion of hundreds of thousands of American troops is way off the mark.
Wolfowitz knew the power of the “over and over again” approach. In the same testimony:
Some of the higher-end predictions that we have been hearing recently, such as the notion that it will take several hundred thousand U.S. troops to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq, are wildly off the mark.
As it turned out, Shinseki was wildly on the mark. It was Wolfowitz who was wildly off the mark. Not only on troop strength, but also on the financial cost of the war.
According to Wolfowitz, it was gonna be cheap. In fact, the war