As Senate pushes, Bush looks for excuses

WASHINGTON -- Just so the history books get it straight, this week it was abundantly clear that the president and the Congress are approaching the Iraq war from different perspectives.
It's an important point, because the administration, rather than coming up with a workable strategy for ending the war, is trying to rewrite history before it's even written.
The president's posturing this week, as the dreary machinery of war ground on, was still about the original, obviously flawed intelligence that sent us to war over weapons of mass destruction. He does not deny their surprising absence; now his point is that everyone believed the same thing (a little like a teenager in trouble trying to convince his mother that, after all, everybody's doing it).
But the logic has always been faulty. Just before Christmas 2002, I was talking with former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. A scrupulous scholar, Brzezinski told me, "I've been in on every one of those Pentagon briefings on those weapons -- and I just don't see that they're there."
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, and his inspectors also argued cogently that they had the Iraqi weapons question under control. And of course, the now famous Ambassador Joe Wilson, after his trip to Niger in Africa, could have disabused the administration of its passionate ideas about WMD -- if the administration had wanted to listen to anyone.
Same story
Moreover, every single book about the administration's road to war -- whether from White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke, legendary journalist Bob Woodward, or famous foreign correspondent James Mann -- tells the same story. Immediately after the horrors of 9/11, a long-festering desire on the part of Bush's team to invade Iraq was made policy -- and the intelligence was uncovered, crafted and finally created to permit it.
If one needed any further confirmation of this administration's propensity to disregard the serious consequences of its embrace of questionable intelligence, one had only to note that, this week, Ahmad Chalabi was being whisked into the inner sanctums of Cheney's and Rumsfeld's offices.
You do remember Ahmad Chalabi, don't you? You should, if only because so much of your tax money went to him. He's the Iraqi, silver-tongued, debonair and wanted for bank fraud in Jordan, whom the U.S. was paying $400,000 a month to "liberate" Iraq, even after it was known that his "intelligence" about WMD was largely made up. He even admitted it.
This same week, as the president was trying to exonerate his early decisions, it was all forgive and forget with Chalabi, now a deputy prime minister in Iraq. (Maybe they're going to renew his stipend?)
Someday, some psycho-historians will do an in-depth study of how this administration worked to create its own realities; meanwhile, one Yale scholar, Lloyd Etheredge of the Policy Sciences Center, has proactively analyzed the mind-sets and mentalities among Americans who tend to get us into "optional wars" such as Vietnam, Somalia and Iraq.
He lists as common characteristics in his writing: ambition and overconfidence; the desire for unchallenged domination and control; abnormal fear and suspicion; defective ethics and the absence of principled restraint; thought that is so emotionally organized that discussions appear "slightly drunken" and "decoupled from reality."
Optional war
Much of this analysis comes out of his research in the 1970s and 1980s when he applied similar sets of questions to American policy-makers in wars in Central America and Cuba. "It proposed a new theory of American optional war," he told me, "and predicted the psychology of the architects, including a prediction of the types of ambitions and fears, misperceptions, bureaucratic behavior and ethics to which they are prone."
Words to ponder as some of the rest of us not in the administration, and not in the strange closed and cloying circle of its mind-set, try to figure out how to get out of Iraq.
That is what Congress moved toward this week, when the Senate voted to press the administration for more public information about the causes of the war, making clear it wanted responsibility for the security of the country shifted to the Iraqi government within the next year. Quarterly reports on progress have been legislated. And that is surely what the American people want.
Universal Press Syndicate