Truth - Al Franken [98]
So at the same time America was presented with a nightmarish vision of what could happen if we didn’t go in (millions infected with smallpox before being mercifully vaporized by nuclear bombs), it was also presented with a dreamlike picture of what would happen if we did invade: instant victory, rivers of oil, chocolate-covered flowers. Not to mention the peace of mind that comes from eliminating the people who attacked us on 9/11. This was going to be such a good war that it would make World War II look like World War I.7
In the inner sanctum of Bush’s war cabinet, not everyone was buying into this having-your-cakewalk-and-eating-it-too scenario. Although Colin Powell had put on his war uniform, he had not taken off his thinking cap. The Old Soldier didn’t think things were going to be as quick, cheap, and easy as the rest of the gang. Powell seemed reluctant to entrust Iraq’s postwar fate to the shady Chalabi. The Iraqi exile leader was regarded with distrust by both the State Department and the CIA after feeding them inaccurate intelligence and wildly exaggerating his own popularity. Furthermore, Chalabi had been convicted in absentia of thirty-one counts of embezzlement, theft, misuse of depositors’ funds, and currency speculation after he fled Jordan in the wake of the collapse of the bank he had founded there. In Powell’s view, the mere fact that he would be better than Saddam Hussein was hardly a sufficient qualification to recommend Chalabi as the next leader of Iraq.
Until the time that a democratic, self-sufficient Iraq was able to handle its own affairs, Powell felt that the person most likely to wind up holding the bag in Iraq was his boss, George Bush. It was the Pottery Barn Rule. “You break it, you own it,” Powell argued. Once the United States invaded Iraq—“broke it”—it would fall to the United States to govern (“own”) that country and its 25 million people, give or take however many we killed in the invasion. To the rest of the inner circle, invoking the Pottery Barn Rule was a namby-pamby, passive-aggressive way to argue against the war itself. For Powell, it was meant as a reminder that with victory would come great responsibility.8
But Bush didn’t get it. Or, more likely, didn’t want to get it. Even when they were presented in the simplistic form of the Pottery Barn Rule, Bush couldn’t or wouldn’t grasp the full dimensions of the responsibilities he was about to undertake.
Bush’s failure to look reality full in the face extended to even the most basic facts about the country he had chosen to invade. There is one anecdote in particular that I keep coming back to. David Phillips, a former State Department official, tells the story in his book, Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco. Phillips was in charge of the Democratic Principles Working Group of the Future of Iraq Project, where he convened a variety of Iraqi exiles to envision how Iraq would be governed after the fall of Saddam. The most prominent exile in the group was Brandeis professor Kanan Makiya, one of Ahmed Chalabi’s chief deputies. Makiya was the man who had famously told Bush that Americans would be greeted in Iraq with sweets and flowers. In late January 2003, less than eight weeks before the war began, Phillips wrote:
Kanan was invited to watch the Super Bowl at the White House; he told me later that he had to explain to the president of the United States the differences between Arab Shi’a, Arab Sunnis, and Kurds.
I talked to David Phillips over breakfast and asked what Makiya had meant by this. Did he mean that Bush didn’t understand the fine points of their cultural and religious differences? No.
PHILLIPS: What