After 5 years, a broken military, broken Constitution, broken laws, broken troops

Wed, Mar. 21, 2007

COMMENTARY
After 5 years, a broken military, broken Constitution, broken laws and
broken troops

By JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY McClatchy Newspapers

Wars are deceptively easy to get into, but harder than calculus to get
out of, especially when things aren't going well.

President Bush is learning the truth of that the hard way this week as
his war in Iraq enters its fifth year. Starting He is starting off the
fifth year with $400 billion already spent foolishly, 3,200 soldiers
and Marines killed, more than 50,000 wounded or injured and nothing in
sight but more of the same.

Remember the fall of 2002 and the beginning of 2003? How fast and easy
a cakewalk it would be? How Iraq oil revenues would pay most of the
cost? How our troops would mostly be greeted as liberators with
flowers and chocolates? How toppling Saddam Hussein's dictatorship
would trigger a democratic wave that would sweep the Middle East?

President Bush and Vice President *** Cheney and, sadly, the then-
Secretary of State Colin Powell all declared that invading Iraq was
vital to our national security and national interests.

They all asserted that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction
and was well along the road to developing the most fearful of all WMDs
- an atomic bomb. George Tenet, the CIA director at the time, was
certain that this was a slam dunk, even though many of his own
analysts and others at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State
Department, the Energy Department and elsewhere were skeptical, and
some were downright dissenters.

Across the Potomac in the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld ripped up the carefully thought out contingency plan for
invading Iraq - a plan that called for 400,000 U.S. and coalition
troops to seize and hold the country - in favor of the tactics that
seemingly had worked so well in Afghanistan.

Rumsfeld dismissed his Republican predecessor Caspar Weinberger's
doctrine, later embraced by Powell, as outmoded, rendered irrelevant
by satellite-guided "smart" bombs, Predator drones and other high-
priced products of the defense contractors. Surely a couple of
divisions of soldiers and Marines would be sufficient to topple
Saddam.

That done, the neo-conservatives around Rumsfeld and Cheney told Bush,
all we'd have to do is hand the reins of power in Iraq to their buddy
Ahmad Chalabi, whose resume didn't include sharing the suffering that
Saddam visited on the Iraqi people. No matter. Chalabi would take
over, and most American troops would pack up and head home no later
than the summer of 2003.

There'd be no costly nation building, which Rumsfeld and Bush hated.
There was no need to plan for post-war security operations beyond
mopping up a few Baathist dead-enders. In fact, the generals who
suggested that it might be wise to do a little planning in case things
went wrong were ordered to shut up or be fired.

None of these notions turned out to be true, except one - a small
invasion force was sufficient to overthrow the dictator - and now
we're in the fifth year of a war that's lasted longer than World War
II and has cost more than the Vietnam War.

A nation that approved the president's conduct of the war by nearly 70
percent now disapproves by almost the same percentage. That nation
underlined its disapproval by handing control of Congress to the
Democrats last fall.

The president can still swagger and smirk on occasion, but all he can
promise now - with 150,000 American troops operating in the middle of
a bloody civil war that our actions unleashed - is more of the same.
More billions. More dead and wounded Americans. More slaughtered
Iraqis. That, and as he told the nation: "There will be good days and
bad days."

I can promise the president from Texas that this ill-begotten, poorly
planned and mismanaged war will be his lasting legacy when, in 22
months, he packs his bags and heads home to the ranch in Crawford.

Iraq will hang around his neck - and those of Cheney and Rumsfeld and
Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle and Douglas Feith - like a rotting
albatross for all the days of their lives.

No doubt the contractors who are bloated like ticks on the billions
they've sucked out of the public trough will write the checks to build
George W. Bush a really fine presidential library on the campus of
Southern Methodist University.

All of it will be a lie, just like the lies his administration told to
beat the war drums five years ago.

How will the curators portray the broken military, the broken
Constitution, the broken laws, the forever broken troops who came home
missing limbs or eyes or pieces of their brains, the broken promises
to cherish and care for the families of those who were killed and
those very wounded veterans?

How will they portray the corruption, both real and spiritual, that
this man and his accomplices have visited upon a nation and a people
who once could be proud of their place in this world?

How and why did so many Americans, including so many in Congress and
in the media, sit idly by while so much that was precious to us was
bent and twisted and broken by men who had the power and the money to
do the right things but chose to do the wrong things?
---

ABOUT THE WRITER
Joseph L. Galloway is former senior military correspondent for Knight
Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller "We Were
Soldiers Once ... and Young." Readers may write to him at: P.O. Box
399, Bayside, Texas 78340; e-mail: jlgalloway2@xxxxxxx

.

Quantcast