The portrayals of Uncle Sam were not getting any better. The Financial Times captioned its editorial page cartoon "Security and Stability." President Bush and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sit in their tanks each atop separate piles of bombed-out houses in Gaza and Iraq.
With neo-con idol Ahmed Chalabi now accusing Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet and the CIA of smearing him and retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, blaming the neocons for the way they maneuvered President Bush into an unnecessary war, the 56-card "most wanted" deck of Iraqi villains was overdue for an American edition.
The neocons -- led by the Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, the National Security Council's Eliot Abrams and Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Richard Cheney's chief of staff -- first conned themselves into believing the super con man's disinformation about Saddam Hussein's Iraq. They were willing to believe any lie, provided it lent credence and support to Mr. Bush's war effort, guided not by the war on terror, but by the need to promote democracy in the Middle East in order to strengthen Israel's security needs.
This is where war plans went awry. There was almost a desperate need to believe anything Mr. Chalabi's disinformation machine fabricated, provided it concluded the invasion would be a "cakewalk."
As the bearer of good "cakewalk" news, Mr. Chalabi collected almost $40 million from U.S. taxpayers before the plug was pulled on his ambitions to succeed Saddam. Even though the CIA and the State Department certified Mr. Chalabi as a super con man, the Defense Intelligence Agency decided he was on the level and went on paying him $340,000 monthly until early May. Now everyone is running for cover.
Dick Lugar of Indiana, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, two of the Senate's most knowledgeable Republican foreign policy voices, added their heft to growing discontent about President Bush's conduct of the war. The two senators complained the president had not consulted them for months. "He has isolated himself from anyone who does not toe the White House line on the Iraqi war," Mr. Hagel complained.
A number of retired army four-stars voiced strong opposition to the war while the neo-con ideologues were still using Mr. Chalabi and his minions to lend credence to Saddam Hussein as "a clear and present danger" to U.S. security. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, the Gulf War commander, Gen. Wesley Clark and Gen. Joe Ralston, both former NATO supreme commanders, Gen. Eric Shinseki, former Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser to the first President Bush ("41"), and Gen. Zinni sounded 2- and 5-minute warnings right up to h-hour 14 months ago. After the invasion got rolling, they became circumspect, invoking the need to show the armed forces a united domestic front.
All except Gen. Zinni, that is. A former commander in chief of all U.S. forces in the Middle East, Gen. Zinni also was appointed after his retirement special envoy to the Middle East by Secretary of State Colin Powell. His scathing attack on the prosecution of the war, delivered on "60 Minutes" last Sunday, called for the Pentagon's top civilian leadership to resign.
The course set in Iraq is headed over Niagara Falls, Gen. Zinni said, as he blasted the wrong war at the wrong time with the wrong strategy. His criticism was precisely the opposite of the neocons' threadbare conventional wisdom:
(1) Saddam Hussein was contained in his dirty little sandbox.
