Bush supporters, one former, debate Iraq war

By Mark Fischenich
The Free Press

October 08, 2006 12:47 am

— Retired Air Force Gen. Merrill “Tony” McPeak worked unsuccessfully in 1996 to get Bob Dole elected president. McPeak, a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, supported another Republican — George W. Bush — in the 2000 presidential election.
In 2004, McPeak was visiting Mankato and endless other places saying he’d made “a big mistake” in supporting George W. Bush in the previous presidential election.
McPeak, urging support for Democrat John Kerry, was harshly critical of Bush and his administration, saying a combination of arrogance and ignorance in the White House had led America into a tremendous mess in Iraq — an unnecessary war that resulted in 1,100 dead American soldiers and more than 7,000 wounded.
“So here we are two years later and both of those numbers have doubled,” McPeak said.
And there’s no progress to show for all the pain and death, he said.
“No. The situation has deteriorated and deteriorated quite badly.”
McPeak, who led the Air Force during the Gulf War in 1991, continues to be stinging in his critique of Bush and his advisers, saying they not only took America into a dishonest war — they’ve been incompetent in conducting it.
But McPeak doesn’t let Congress escape the criticism.
“I regard the performance of Congress in the period leading up to the war as absolutely without stomach,” he said.
A longtime Republican who was a big admirer of the first President Bush, McPeak is now a registered Independent in his retirement home of Oregon. He unabashedly suggests that voters need to hold the GOP majority in Congress accountable for the failure to provide proper oversight of the Iraq war.
“The Congress supposedly has the power to declare war. They have the power to control money,” he said. “In this case they didn’t do it because they’re a bunch of chickens.”
‘Bullish about Iraq’
For former Minnesota Sen. Rudy Boschwitz, who was a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and chairman of the Middle East Subcommittee for six years, what’s happening today in Iraq is one of America’s proudest moments.
“I just believe the United States is an exceptional country,” said Boschwitz, a Republican and a strong supporter of the Iraq war.
What America is doing in Iraq may be unprecedented, he said.
“It’s just remarkable in history that a strong power would put its young people in harm’s way and spend its money to bring freedom (to another country) and ask nothing in return,” Boschwitz said.
While he admits that the war isn’t going perfectly right now, Boschwitz remains optimistic about the outcome. He points to the return of many refugees who left the country during the reign of Saddam Hussein, the millions of Muslims who are able to visit Shiite shrines in the country, signs of economic growth, a revitalization of the Iraqi agricultural sector and the growth of free speech in Iraq.
He lists Iranian and Iraqi authors as the sources of his information on progress in the country, saying he doesn’t trust American television and newspaper reports of a deteriorating situation that is bordering on civil war.
“I am more bullish about Iraq than some who only read the papers,” Boschwitz said. “The media is blood and guts — and what bleeds, leads.”
‘A cause celebre for jihadists’
To feel positive about the situation in Iraq virtually requires discounting the accounts from news correspondents covering the war.
More than 20,000 American soldiers have been wounded since the war began and more than 2,700 have been killed. The news is much worse for Iraqi civilians. In recent months, civilian deaths have topped 3,000 a month, according to United Nations reports.
There are reports almost daily of dozens of civilian deaths, often involving bodies mutilated from torture found in locations around Baghdad as Shiite and Sunni militias attack members of opposing sects. The next day, their counterparts retaliate with similar murderous tactics against civilians.
But the bad news doesn’t come solely from the news media. A leaked report from the U.S. ambassador to Iraq last summer talked of the experiences of Iraqis who work at the embassy there. It told of constant fear faced by many Iraqis, of women’s rights declining, of completely unreliable electrical power, of kidnappings and of local employees hiding from everyone that they work with the Americans because they fear for their lives if people find out.
Then came the leak, and resulting partial declassification, of a joint assessment by America’s combined intelligence agencies of terrorism trends.
The report said that the number of Islamic terrorists was increasing and that attacks on U.S. interests worldwide would grow if present trends continue. It listed America’s war in Iraq as a major factor in “fueling the spread of the jihadist movement.”
It suggests that the spread of the terrorist movement is likely to continue for at least five years.
“The Iraq conflict has become the ‘cause celebre’ for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement,” the declassified summary of the report states.
The summary says that “perceived jihadist success (in Iraq) would inspire more fighters to continue the struggle elsewhere.”
‘It’s too late’
Boschwitz and McPeak were interviewed by The Free Press before the leak of the intelligence report. But both echoed the conclusion that a failure in Iraq would embolden terrorists.
McPeak argues that the failure has already occurred.
Several months ago, he wrote an opinion piece that called for a doubling, even a tripling, of troops in Iraq to get the country stabilized so it could be rebuilt properly. Trying to accomplish anything in the current state of chaos is impossible, he reasoned.
“Now I think it’s too late even for that,” he said. “Now I think what we must do is just leave. Our presence there sabotages our own national interest.”
McPeak, a Vietnam veteran, makes clear that he is far from a pacifist.
“I enjoyed winning the Cold War. ... I enjoyed my time in Vietnam. I got a kick out of Desert Storm.”
A war, however, must be entered into honestly, conducted competently and waged with a realistic strategy that can lead to victory. This war fails that test on all counts, he said.
Even now, there seems to be no blueprint for winning the war, said McPeak, who points to a recent Bush press conference. The president was asked twice about the strategy for victory, and Bush twice answered that “the strategy is a democratic Iraq.”
“That’s not a strategy,” McPeak says, his voice registering a combination of exasperation and disgust. “It may be a strategic objective, but it’s not a strategy. The president doesn’t understand the difference between a strategic objective and a strategy.”
‘Freedom and democracy’
Boschwitz doesn’t offer a specific plan for winning the Iraq war. But he calls for resolve. Democracy is worth fighting for, he said, and each conversion of a dictatorship to a democracy makes the world a little safer.
“(Success in Iraq) will have a very, very positive effect on peace in the world,” he said. “The reason I support freedom and democracy is there has never been a war between two democracies.”
Pulling out before a democratic government in Iraq is firmly established is unthinkable to Boschwitz. First, it would weaken America.
“It would embolden the troublemakers if they thought they could chase us out or if they thought there was a date certain that we were going to leave.”
Second, the situation for the Iraqi people would be awful.
“All hell would break lose,” he said.
On the second point, McPeak and Boschwitz agree.
“The situation on the ground will be terrible,” McPeak said.
But it’s time to face an unpleasant reality, the retired general said. “We’re going to lose and it’s irretrievable.”
The only question is how long it will take America to accept that truth.
“If you keep doing what you have been doing and expect a different result, that’s the clinical definition of insanity,” McPeak said.
Iraqi government officials are no longer capable of securing and controlling their divided country, he said. No amount of American military might can overcome that. In that respect, Iraq is similar to South Vietnam — U.S. soldiers attempting to prop up a government doomed to fail.
“You cannot build a military victory on a rotten political foundation,” McPeak said.
Boschwitz draws a distinction.
“The South Vietnamese government was not an elected government,” he said.
‘Everybody makes mistakes’
McPeak was on record opposing the war before it started. Despite that and despite McPeak’s pessimism about the situation in Iraq, he believes it could have been different with more competence by the Bush administration and more questions by Congress leading up to the war.
“It’s a mission impossible, and it didn’t need to be,” McPeak said. “So it’s our fault.”
The Bush administration assumed American troops would be greeted as liberators once they defeated Saddam Hussein’s military. So they sent a force large enough to win the military conflict but far too small to control the predictable insurgency that would spring up, McPeak said.
American administrators also disbanded the Iraqi army, spurring some of those soldiers to join the insurgency. All civil servants with ties to Hussein’s Baath Party were kicked out of their positions, contributing to the chaos in the country.
“This gang that can’t shoot straight in Washington, D.C. — almost none of whom have had a uniform on in their life — doesn’t know how to do an occupation,” he said.
And Congress wasn’t asking questions about how the occupation would be handled, what the back-up plan would be if an insurgency developed, according to McPeak. There are lawmakers who understand the Middle East and should have been asking those questions. Those lawmakers — Republicans and Democrats alike — didn’t have the courage to question a then-popular administration pushing a then-popular plan to topple Iraq.
“There are smart people and there are courageous people in Washington,” McPeak said. “The people who have both qualities are rather rare.”
Boschwitz thinks it was reasonable that Congress expected the military to have contingency plans for the period after Hussein’s government fell.
“In retrospect, should they have thought more about that before the fact? I’m not sure,” Boschwitz said. “The military normally plans very well. On Monday morning, can you look back and say ‘Should they have done this or should they have done that?’ Sure. ... Everybody makes mistakes.”
When they do, the voters should hold them accountable, McPeak said.
“In our system if somebody messes up, you throw them out and replace them with the other guys,” he said. “And after a while, the other guys will screw up and you replace them.”

A change in Congress may mean a change in oversight of Iraq

Retired Air Force Gen. Tony McPeak and former U.S. Sen. Rudy Boschwitz don’t agree on much when it comes to how the Iraq war is going. Neither do Minnesota’s current pair of senators — Democrat Mark Dayton and Republican Norm Coleman.
The one point of agreement for all four is that big changes will come if voters on Nov. 7 give the Democrats a majority in the House, Senate or both. A Congress that has largely let the Bush administration take the lead on Iraq will start to ask a lot of questions.
“We simply have to elect a Democratic majority in one of these houses — the House or Senate — so that committee chairmen can call these hearings and get the truth out to the American people,” said McPeak, a Republican until 2002 who’s now an Independent. “Let’s throw some light on this problem rather than try to obscure it with a fog of rhetoric.”
McPeak has a long list of issues he thinks need to be investigated.
n The apparent failure of the Bush administration to prepare a strategy before the start of the war for containing the insurgency that developed.
n The decisions by L. Paul Bremer, the American administrator of Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s government was toppled, to disband the Iraqi Army and to fire any government employees with ties to Hussein’s Baath Party.
n The allegations of large-scale fraud by Halliburton and other contractors in Iraq.
n The use of armed civilian security forces — “20,000 civilian gunslingers,” in McPeak’s words — who operate outside the traditional systems of accountability and are paid salaries by American taxpayers that are much higher than what’s paid to American soldiers.
n The expenditure of billions of dollars to build permanent military bases in Iraq.
“We’re four years into this war,” he said. “We have yet to hear a peep out of a congressional committee. ... It would be very embarrassing to the administration, so it hasn’t been done.”
Boschwitz, a Republican who spent two terms as a senator from Minnesota, predicts the investigations that would follow a Democratic takeover of the House or Senate wouldn’t really be seeking objective answers.
“The situation does not call for more partisanship,” Boschwitz said. “... (With a) partisan investigation, you know what the results would be.”
To Dayton, who is retiring at the end of the year after one term in the Senate, the real partisanship has been by the leaders of the Republican-controlled Congress. They’ve abdicated the responsibility of Congress to serve as a check on the executive branch’s power, choosing instead to try to protect a Republican president.
“The lack of effective oversight has been extremely partisan,” Dayton said. “... Their view is ‘Our president, wrong, wrong or wrong.’”
Coleman, a first-termer facing re-election in 2008, said members of Congress receive regular briefings on the war and are able to ask questions at that time.
“If there’s an investigation to be done, we’ll do it,” Coleman promised.
If Democrats control the committees, a flurry of subpoenas will be tossed at Bush administration and Pentagon officials — and the nation’s ability to fight the war will be undermined.
“I presume that we’ll engage in finger-pointing at the administration for the next two years,” Coleman said.

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