Secret Squirrel
08-29-2004, 02:25 PM
When President Bush acknowledged for the first time the other day a "miscalculation" about how the occupation of Iraq would unfold, it was the latest example of a subtle presidential strategy that has unfolded in the run-up to the Republican National Convention: admit to the narrowest of errors, on the way to arguing that his missteps were overwhelmed by a far larger victory.
At every stop on his campaign tour - yesterday he opened a three-city bus tour of Ohio in the picturesque town square of this suburb of Dayton - Bush now readily concedes that his main rationale for going to war, Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, was based on a misconception. But in the next breath he dismisses its import.
"Even though we didn't find the stockpiles we expected to find, Saddam Hussein had the capability of making weapons of mass destruction, and he could have passed that capability on to the enemy," Bush said yesterday morning, before a crowd of thousands gathered around small shops and a looming flagpole. Then, to growing applause, he added: "Knowing what I know today, I would have made the same decision."
It is an argument he makes daily, on the way to arguing that Sen. John Kerry came to the same conclusion - but may change his mind, Bush says, in the 60 days to the election.
Yet until he sat down with two New York Times correspondents on Thursday, Bush had resisted, for more than a year, any public concession that the occupation, too, had been based on some faulty assumptions. To admit error there, one of his senior aides suggested a month ago, would be "to give the Kerry campaign an endless opportunity."
So Bush slipped into the subject gently, casting the failure to contain the Iraqi insurgency as the narrowest of mistakes, the unintended consequence of quick military victory. True, Bush acknowledged, no one expected 17 months of continuing street battles and roadside attacks, but like the failure to find unconventional weapons, he said, the insurgency will be viewed as far less significant than the benefits of being rid of Saddam.
"We planned for a series of events, some of which happened and some of which didn't happen," Bush said in the interview, which took place under a New Mexico stadium before a rally. "And it turns out that as a result of a quick, substantial victory, we faced conditions on the ground that were different than we assumed initially. And that is, we thought that the Baathists would stand and fight and much of the Saddam army would be ready to engage."
He continued: "And instead, because we moved so quickly into the country, they dissipated and spread out into the countryside, and now we're having to face them again." Later he said that "what's important is, is that our strategy was flexible enough to adjust to conditions on the ground as we eventually found them."
Bush's description of what he called, at the interview's end, a "miscalculation of what conditions would be like after a swift victory" omitted any mention of some of the mistakes his own aides, current and former, say also contributed to the insurgency's rise.
In an article in this month's "Foreign Affairs," Larry Diamond, a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a former aide to L. Paul Bremer, the head of the U.S. coalition authority until it disbanded on June 28, described how the administration's decision to limit the number of troops sent to Iraq led to the deterioration of the security situation and allowed the insurgency to gain strength.
"In truth, around 300,000 troops might have been enough to make Iraq largely secure after the war," Diamond wrote, citing a figure that is more than twice the number of U.S. troops now in the country.
"Administration officials repeatedly deluded themselves into believing that the defeat of the insurgency was just around the corner," he wrote.
But Bush declined to take up that argument, or talk about whether it was a mistake to pursue de-Baathification of the government so vigorously that many government officials were alienated and joined the resistance to the occupation. Speaking after the interview, which she sat in on, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said that Bush had been briefed before the war on a number of contingencies, including what she termed "catastrophic success," the collapse of Saddam's government, but that was only one of a number of possibilities the White House considered.
Like everything he says about Iraq, Bush's acknowledgment of miscalculation has resounded in the echo chamber of the campaign, and beyond - it was news in Britain and India and South Korea, where the question of what went wrong goes to the heart of political debates about whether international forces should still be there.
Kerry's foreign policy adviser, Rand Beers, seized on the president's comment on Friday, calling it "welcome, but hardly enough."
"For well over a year, our troops have been paying the price of President Bush's failure to plan to win the peace," he said. "The president has taken a step in the direction of leveling with the American people, but he has still not offered a workable plan."
At every stop on his campaign tour - yesterday he opened a three-city bus tour of Ohio in the picturesque town square of this suburb of Dayton - Bush now readily concedes that his main rationale for going to war, Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, was based on a misconception. But in the next breath he dismisses its import.
"Even though we didn't find the stockpiles we expected to find, Saddam Hussein had the capability of making weapons of mass destruction, and he could have passed that capability on to the enemy," Bush said yesterday morning, before a crowd of thousands gathered around small shops and a looming flagpole. Then, to growing applause, he added: "Knowing what I know today, I would have made the same decision."
It is an argument he makes daily, on the way to arguing that Sen. John Kerry came to the same conclusion - but may change his mind, Bush says, in the 60 days to the election.
Yet until he sat down with two New York Times correspondents on Thursday, Bush had resisted, for more than a year, any public concession that the occupation, too, had been based on some faulty assumptions. To admit error there, one of his senior aides suggested a month ago, would be "to give the Kerry campaign an endless opportunity."
So Bush slipped into the subject gently, casting the failure to contain the Iraqi insurgency as the narrowest of mistakes, the unintended consequence of quick military victory. True, Bush acknowledged, no one expected 17 months of continuing street battles and roadside attacks, but like the failure to find unconventional weapons, he said, the insurgency will be viewed as far less significant than the benefits of being rid of Saddam.
"We planned for a series of events, some of which happened and some of which didn't happen," Bush said in the interview, which took place under a New Mexico stadium before a rally. "And it turns out that as a result of a quick, substantial victory, we faced conditions on the ground that were different than we assumed initially. And that is, we thought that the Baathists would stand and fight and much of the Saddam army would be ready to engage."
He continued: "And instead, because we moved so quickly into the country, they dissipated and spread out into the countryside, and now we're having to face them again." Later he said that "what's important is, is that our strategy was flexible enough to adjust to conditions on the ground as we eventually found them."
Bush's description of what he called, at the interview's end, a "miscalculation of what conditions would be like after a swift victory" omitted any mention of some of the mistakes his own aides, current and former, say also contributed to the insurgency's rise.
In an article in this month's "Foreign Affairs," Larry Diamond, a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and a former aide to L. Paul Bremer, the head of the U.S. coalition authority until it disbanded on June 28, described how the administration's decision to limit the number of troops sent to Iraq led to the deterioration of the security situation and allowed the insurgency to gain strength.
"In truth, around 300,000 troops might have been enough to make Iraq largely secure after the war," Diamond wrote, citing a figure that is more than twice the number of U.S. troops now in the country.
"Administration officials repeatedly deluded themselves into believing that the defeat of the insurgency was just around the corner," he wrote.
But Bush declined to take up that argument, or talk about whether it was a mistake to pursue de-Baathification of the government so vigorously that many government officials were alienated and joined the resistance to the occupation. Speaking after the interview, which she sat in on, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said that Bush had been briefed before the war on a number of contingencies, including what she termed "catastrophic success," the collapse of Saddam's government, but that was only one of a number of possibilities the White House considered.
Like everything he says about Iraq, Bush's acknowledgment of miscalculation has resounded in the echo chamber of the campaign, and beyond - it was news in Britain and India and South Korea, where the question of what went wrong goes to the heart of political debates about whether international forces should still be there.
Kerry's foreign policy adviser, Rand Beers, seized on the president's comment on Friday, calling it "welcome, but hardly enough."
"For well over a year, our troops have been paying the price of President Bush's failure to plan to win the peace," he said. "The president has taken a step in the direction of leveling with the American people, but he has still not offered a workable plan."