Losing Focus on Original Goal

U.S. policy on Iraq takes on life of its own

Georgie Anne Geyer, Universal Press Syndicate. Georgie Anne Geyer is a syndicated columnist based in Washington, D.C.
Chicago Tribune

December 27, 2002

WASHINGTON -- Iraq is now being held in "material breach" of still another United Nations resolution. Secretary of State Colin Powell said so forcefully last week in an official no-nonsense reaction to the 12,000 pages Baghdad presented to the UN on its weapons of mass destruction, and one does not doubt it.

Saddam Hussein's Baghdad has never been a stickler for the truth, and if it can mislead you with 12,000 pages, well, all the better! Its Baathist regime, tactics and mindset are very close to the Marxist ones of the early 20th Century, and its defiant and oblivious lying is similar to that of the Communists' brutal and cynical dissembling.

But, strikingly, weapons inspections were not what this enterprise was originally supposed to be about. Remember when we were going to attack Iraq because it was allied with Al Qaeda, it was behind the Sept.11 attacks, it was the mother of all home pages for Islamic terrorism across the world? Remember when the administration was scurrying about looking under every dirty rock, trying to make the connection?

That conspiracy was supposed to be the reason for waging war against Iraq, and the administration made Herculean efforts to prove it. The Pentagon even set up a trim intelligence unit only to link Iraq with Al Qaeda. But as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said just this week, such a connection has simply not been found.

In fact, according to every Islamist specialist that I respect, it is the other way around. Secular Baathist Saddam Hussein cossets his weapons of mass destruction and holds them tightly around him for his own morbid and paranoid reasons; he is never going to give them over to anyone else, and surely not to a crazy "internationale" of Islamists who consider him a heretic. This does not, of course, mean that we could not push them into some kind of a jerry-built alliance.

But that's all in the past, anyway. Over this last year, the "Attack Iraq!" policy has come to have a life of its own. Very few remember that first reason for a war, or how it has been systematically disproven; fewer still now object to the idea, except the uniformed military--the only ones who remember international law and a century of work against pre-emptive warfare. And even fewer question whether it will work, how much it will cost or how many lives will be estimated to be lost.

At the end of this year, a war against Iraq, despite the original reasons for it having been quietly discarded, is generally accepted as a given. It is inevitable and something that President Bush cannot back down from--which, of course, is just what the war's planners had in mind all the time.

Let's consider some of the questions that nobody is demanding answers to: How much will such a war halfway across the world, in one of the world's most bitter desert countries, actually cost? Last spring, Pentagon planners told me it would cost $60 billion to $80 billion--that seemed absolutely humongous then. But nobody said a word.

Last summer, the price tag went up to $200 billion. More humongous, but still no complaints. Now they're saying perhaps a trillion dollars. Perhaps because none of us can write that much out, we're still not uttering a word; but then, we've got other worries, since half our friends are out of work and the American economy is near recession.

How many dead? Nobody speculates--and nobody asks. (Middle-class families by and large don't have boys or girls in the armed forces. But there were always estimates of casualties beforehand.) How long? The administration answers, "A cakewalk," even while Hussein threatens to set his oil wells burning and perhaps massively slay his population a la Jim Jones.

A years-long occupation of Iraq? Coalition forces would have to stay in Iraq for several years, Sens. Joseph R. Biden (D-Del.) and Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) wrote when they had just returned from the area. "Various experts have testified that as many as 75,000 troops may be necessary, at a cost of up to $20 billion a year. That does not include the cost of the war itself, or the effort to rebuild Iraq. Americans are largely unprepared for such an undertaking. President Bush must make clear to the American people the scale of the commitment."

Yet Bush gives no speeches soberly explaining in depth the reasons for such an attack, one that is utterly unprecedented in American history. The American public is not consulted; it is simply a cushion out there, advised to keep working and spending and not get in Washington's way.

And how will we win over the Arab world, which is already in a deep anti-American mood over the administration's refusal to move on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is the core of the terrorism problem? The administration announced a $29 million program, stunning in its modesty, to push democracy in the Arab world. That, on top of State Department-produced TV spots depicting happy Muslims in the United States (they remind one of the old Soviet films on happy Uzbeks pickin' cotton in the fields of ol' Uzbekistan).

Yes, it has been a successful year for those in the administration's war party who have brought us to the very brink of war without proving anything to us or telling us much of anything. Congratulations to them! One can almost see them drawing themselves up by their holiday fires and saying of the American public, "Let them eat [fruit] cake."