President George W. Bush was absolutely right to veto the Iraq funding bill. As he observed, "This is a prescription for chaos and confusion and we must not impose it on our troops." I also agree with the president’s statement that "our troops are worthy of this funding and we have a responsibility to get it to them without further delay."

The other side of the coin, however, is whether Mr. Bush is worthy of the nation’s confidence as a leader who can conduct the war in a responsible and effective manner. Public opinion polls provide a clear answer that a significant majority of Americans does not trust the president to bring the war to a successful conclusion. And that is not because the public is brainwashed by the left-wing media or is suffering, four years after the "Mission Accomplished" speech, from war fatigue.

The Bush Administration brought the United States into Iraq under false pretenses and it is disingenuous for the president and his advisors to proclaim that they, along with everybody else, were victims of faulty intelligence. First, different people drew different conclusions from the intelligence available at the time. With the notable exception of Tony Blair, not a single foreign government had the same sense of urgency to invade Iraq as the Bush Administration. Both Mohamed El Baradei’s International Atomic Energy Agency and UN inspectors in Iraq warned that there was, at a minimum, considerable uncertainty about whether Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and particularly whether he was close to obtaining nuclear weapons. It was the Bush Administration’s choice to dismiss those warnings contemptuously.

Second, the U.S. intelligence data that persuaded so many on the Hill from both parties was produced with White House guidance and sometimes outright pressure. This is not to say that analysts were instructed to fabricate facts. However, with CIA Director George Tenet fighting to keep his job, the CIA in general under attack from Donald Rumsfeld’s and Paul Wolfowtiz’s highly ideological and aggressive intelligence turf raids, and Vice President Dick Cheney’s not-so-subtle encouragement to find evidence of Saddam’s misdeeds, it is simply incredible for the administration to pretend that Bush and his associates were innocent bystanders or even victims of erroneous information they did so much to orchestrate. Finally, the President, Donald Rumsfeld and particularly Paul Wolfowitz also disregarded the advice of the professional military to use a much larger force for the initial stage of occupation and even punished those like General Eric K. Shinseki who performed their soldiers’ duty by speaking the truth to power.

Too much has happened, too many lives have been lost, too many hundreds of billions have been wasted and too much damage has been done to America’s credibility—and Mr. Bush’s personal credibility—for the President to continue to have a carte blanche from Congress and the American people. Yet the President remains commander-in-chief and the Congress has the power of the purse. If both continue playing the blame game, making unrealistic proposals and presenting exaggerated claims of each other’s culpability at the expense of American troops, American honor, and American interests, it would be a sad comment on the ability of our democratic process to do what is necessary to protect the nation. The Democrats need to abandon the notion of withdrawal deadlines that makes defeat a self-fulfilling prophecy. If that is the path they want to take, it would be much more honest to cut the funding right away, except what is necessary for the removal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Assuming that they are not prepared to make this choice for reasons of politics and national security, they should look for a solution that would at least allow the United States to try to reach some minimally acceptable outcome in Iraq.

The Republicans, on the other hand, should not insist on toothless and rather symbolic benchmarks for the Iraqi government that would allow the president to continue the war effort without any meaningful accountability. What is desperately needed is a formula that would allow continued funding, but with clear and binding guidelines that the president must observe in order to be allowed to lead the war effort. There is some truth in the Republicans’ argument that we cannot have 535 generals running the war from Capitol Hill—but at a certain point, even that unpleasant prospect should be weighted against the potential dangers of the president’s incompetent leadership. The American people and the American troops deserve for politicians in Washington—from both parties and all branches of government—to get off their white horses, suspend their demagoguery (to end it all together would be too much to ask) and to do the nation’s work at a moment of crisis.

Posted by Dimitri Simes at 05/02/2007 05:54:24 PM |