• Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

October 7, 2005

President Bush's Major Speech: Doing the 9/11 Time Warp Again

Yesterday, the same day New Yorkers were warned there was a "specific threat" of a bombing on their subways, President Bush delivered what the White House promoted as a major address on terrorism. It seemed, on the surface, like a perfect topic for the moment. But his talk was not about the nation's current challenges. He delivered a reprise of his Sept. 11 rhetoric that suggested an avoidance of today's reality that seemed downright frightening.
The period right after 9/11, for all its pain, was the high point of the Bush presidency. Four years ago, we hung on every word when Mr. Bush denounced Al Qaeda and made the emotional - but, as it turned out, empty - vow to track down Osama bin Laden. Yesterday, it seemed as if the president was still trying to live in 2001. It was eerie to hear him urge Americans to take terrorism seriously. There wasn't any reason to worry about that even before subway riders were being told about the threat of a terrorist attack on their commute home.
He seemed to be reading from a very old and familiar script as he revealed that terrorists recruit "disillusioned young men and women," some of whom build weapons based on information available on the Internet. He shared his conviction that "it is cowardice that seeks to kill children and the elderly with car bombs." He said his team was "reforming our intelligence agency" and reorganizing government for "a broad and coordinated homeland defense."
Americans have seen the Department of Homeland Security in action for several years now, under two directors. The first, a former governor with whom the president had a good personal relationship, was an inept bureaucratic and political player who had a strange obsession with color-coded states of emergency. The current one was at the helm during the Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster in New Orleans, when that agency was overseen by an unqualified political appointee.
The administration is still trying to recover politically from Katrina. The hurricane was not just a bad stretch that could be cured by a promise of federal aid and a demonstration of presidential concern. The hurricane showed that despite four years of spinning, America is still unprepared for a catastrophe. It raised major questions about the caliber of people with whom Mr. Bush surrounds himself.
Ever since the terrorist attacks, the main thing Americans have wanted from Washington is a sense of safety. That takes more than hyperalertness to suicide bombing threats, important as that is. No matter what the terrorists are up to, it is not possible to feel safe if the federal government does not appear to know what it is doing on so many different levels.
Yesterday was an ideal moment for Mr. Bush to demonstrate that he was really in control of his administration. He could have taken any one of a number of pressing worries and demonstrated that he was on the job, re-examining the problems, working on answers. For instance, he could have addressed the crisis facing the overstretched military due to the endless demands made by Iraq on both the Army and the beleaguered National Guard.
The speech came one day after the White House threatened to veto a bill onto which the Senate added a ban on the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" against prisoners of the American government. This president could not find the spine to veto a bloated transportation bill that included wildly wasteful projects like the now-famous "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska. What kind of priorities does that suggest? If we ever needed the president to demonstrate that he has a working understanding of exactly where he wants to take this country, we need it now.
The president's inability to grow beyond his big moment in 2001 is unnerving. But the fact that his handlers continue to encourage him to milk 9/11 is infuriating. For most of us, the memories are fresh and painful. We mourn the people who died on Sept. 11, as we mourn Daniel Pearl and other Americans, not to mention innocents from other countries, who were murdered by terrorists. The administration's penchant for using them as political cover is offensive. It threatens to turn our wounds, and our current fears, into cynical and desperate spin.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

October 7, 2005

What Were They Thinking?


By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

When the definitive history of the Iraq war is written, future historians will surely want to ask Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush each one big question. To Saddam, the question would be: What were you thinking? If you had no weapons of mass destruction, why did you keep acting as though you did? For Mr. Bush, the question would be: What were you thinking? If you bet your whole presidency on succeeding in Iraq, why did you let Donald Rumsfeld run the war with just enough troops to lose? Why didn't you establish security inside Iraq and along its borders? How could you ever have thought this would be easy?

The answer to these questions can be found in what was America's greatest intelligence failure in Iraq - and that was not about W.M.D.

Let me explain. While visiting the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr last week, I spent a morning watching the commanders of the Iraqi Navy hold a staff meeting, while their British and U.S. advisers looked on. On the one hand, you felt as if they were doing a pretty good imitation of a British command briefing. On the other hand, the slightly ragged quality left you feeling that if you pulled the British and U.S. advisers out tomorrow, the whole Iraqi Navy would collapse. The human capital and institutional foundation are simply not there yet. "How these guys ever fought the Iranians for eight years, I will never know," a British trainer remarked to me.

After that staff meeting, a British Royal Navy officer who was escorting me suggested that we go to Basra to see the flea market there. He said I could find anything I wanted, because so many Iraqis have had to hock basic household goods - stereos, refrigerators, air-conditioners, cars - to survive the last decade under Saddam.

Message: Failing to find W.M.D. was a big intelligence failure. But the even bigger failure - the one that is the source of all our troubles today - was the failure to understand just how devastated Iraq's society, economy and institutions had become - after eight years of war with Iran, a crushing defeat in Gulf War I and then a decade of U.N. sanctions.

But I think Saddam knew how busted and bankrupt his country and army were. Therefore, he never wanted to completely erase the impression that he had W.M.D. Saddam lived in a den of wolves. The hint of W.M.D. was his only deterrent shield left against his neighbors, his enemies at home and the West. (This was alluded to in the Duelfer W.M.D. report.) So he tried to allow just enough U.N. inspections to clear him on W.M.D., while playing just enough cat and mouse with the U.N. to leave the impression that he still had something dangerous in the closet.

The Bush team, and the C.I.A., not only failed to learn that Saddam had no W.M.D., they failed to appreciate how devastated Iraqi society really was. The Bush team, listening largely to exiles who had not lived in Iraq for years, thought that there were much more of an Iraqi middle class and more institutions than actually existed. So Mr. Bush thought taking over Iraq would be easy. That is the only way I can explain his behavior.

This intelligence failure about Iraqi society is what is killing us today. Because what really happened after the U.S. invasion is that what little Iraqi state existed just fell apart in our hands, like a broken vase. And then Rummy let the shards get looted. So yes, when the Bush team says rebuilding Iraq is like rebuilding Germany, it's half right. It is like rebuilding Germany, but not post-World War II Germany. It is like rebuilding medieval, pre-modern Germany - the Germany of clans and feudal fiefs, before there was a state.

As this column has long insisted, we are not doing nation-building in Iraq. We are doing nation-creating. It is hugely important, but hugely difficult. I can only assume the C.I.A. didn't know how broken Iraq was, because if the president knew and still put in so few troops, it was criminal.

Sadly, what Iraq desperately needs most from the U.S. today are A.I.D. workers, State Department advisers and technical experts from every agency of the government who can help rebuild Iraq's human capital. But people are afraid to go. And who can blame them? We have never established basic public order there, because we never had enough troops.

The president's speech on terrorism yesterday was excellent. He made clear, better than ever, why winning in Iraq is so important to the wider struggle against Islamo-fascism. But it only makes me that much more angry that he fought this war as though it would be easy - never asking for any sacrifice, any military draft, any tax hikes or any gasoline tax - and that he tolerated so much incompetence along the way.

* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Pentagon report links Katrina, Iraq problems: paper

Pentagon report links Katrina, Iraq problems: paper