W's Mistakes?
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JUNE 7, 2007
“W’s” Worst Mistakes
In Tuesday’s Republican CNN-hosted Debate, all of the participating presidential aspirants were asked a question by correspondent Wolf Blitzer. That question was designed to generate the very headlines we read on Wednesday:
What was President Bush's worst mistake?
Everyone took the bait, and nobody, in my opinion, got it quite right. To make that case, I have four, closely related errors, each of which flowed from the initial one. I'll list them in chronological order with the following caveat: Both of this president's democratic opponents would probably have made the same mistakes. Of all the actual contenders, Senator McCain would have probably done better. But hindsight is an unfair standard, except for those who are determined to learn from the past as opposed to make rhetorical points in a partisan political context.
Mistake One:This takes us back to the closing days of that pivotal first campaign against Senator Al Gore, the one in which President Bush won in the Electoral College, but narrowly lost the raw popular vote.
He was the popular republican Texas governor with a common touch, and he was running very well indeed against Senator Gore, an eastern liberal without the common touch. In some polls, Governor Bush was running 3 to 5% ahead.
It was W’s race to lose.
Then a democratic lawyer from Maine, Tom Connolly, “leaked” a 1976 arrest report to Fox News. Mr. Connolly claimed that he had sympathy for Mr. Bush, but “It’s conceivable that Bush could relapse.” It seems that the 30 year old George W. Bush had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor driving under the influence, paid a fine and “had his driving privileges rescinded in Maine for a period of time.” The arresting officer, Calvin Bridges, said that Mr. Bush had failed field sobriety tests and registered a 0.10 percent blood-alcohol level.
Presidential candidate Bush was forced in the closing days of the campaign to talk about his arrest in 1976 for drunken driving and plea of guilty. He had been visiting the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. “I’ve oftentimes said that years ago I made some mistakes. I occasionally drank too much, and I did on that night. I regret that it happened.’ .As Texas governor, Bush had only referred vaguely to a history of excessive drinking that ended with in 1986, on his 40th birthday.
And that was Mistake One. A pattern of partial, politically sanitized disclosure was evident, even then.
First, we are entitled to assume that key members of Mr. Bush’s inner circle were well aware of the problem. After all, the matter had already surfaced in Texas. No doubt, Mr. Bush agreed to the sage guidance of his close political advisors who urged an approach that amounted to a vague disclosure, while avoiding embarrassing clarity. No one (he would have been assured) would later be able to claim “dishonesty”.
They were too clever by half.We have several reports over the years in which Governor Bush referred to youthful “mistakes” without detailing them, admitting he had been engaged in excessive drinking, a pattern that he stopped on his 40th birthday. In 1998, a Dallas newspaper reported asked Mr. Bush if he had and prior “arrests”. His not quite opaque reply was - “I do not have a perfect record.”
That kind of disclosure-non-disclosure might have flown under the Texas radar, where after all, “boys will be boys”. But anything less than full disclosure was a very high stakes gamble in the 1998 Presidential race.
That DUI burst into the presidential race like a grenade at a coming out party. Political strategists were surprised that Governor Bush hadn’t leaked the arrest story early, giving his campaign time to rebound. But the timing of the disclosure was perfect for the Bush opponents. The president-to-be was damaged by an immediate several point drop in the polls, and his recovery was too weak and too late to prevent losing the popular vote.
So Mr. Bush entered office in a pre-weakened position. This was not an ideal posture for the leader of the free world whose nation would, just few months later, be thrown off balance by a surprise attack on its major economic and military nerve centers.
Mistake Two:
The attacks on 9-11-1 exposed the vulnerabilities of a complacent nation enjoying its post Cold War “peace dividend”.
The outgoing Clinton Administration had drawn down American military capabilities by two and a half divisions. After all, what kind of trouble couldn’t be handled by deft diplomacy and a few Cruise Missiles? Boots on the ground are messy, unpopular and expensive.
After Pearl Harbor, we were even an more gravely disabled nation, but FDR was able to rouse us from depression, and lead the country through a massive mobilization that rebuilt the world’s largest navy, almost from scratch, and fielded at least 25 more times soldiers than we currently have stationed in Iraq, drawn from a national population that was 45% of our current numbers.
Some perspective: We lost 4391 soldiers on D day, of 405, 399 killed in WW II, 54, 256 in Korea, 56, 244 in Vietnam. More than 10 million were drafted into the Armed Services 1940-1946. By 1945, 2.7 million US soldiers were “on the ground”, and several million more military personnel were in active duty “in theater”. As of June, 2007, the US has stationed about 260,000 soldiers in Iraq. US combat related deaths in Iraq to date are about 3,600. We more the loss of every one of these brave men and women, but, given the ultimate stakes, the perspective of history is needed.
In 2001, President Bush faced a far more prosperous country, happy in its creature comforts, and in a state of denial about the jihad. He would need to face the electorate and tell them hard truths and demand of them hard things. I’m certain the fact that about 50% of the electorate were convinced he had “stolen” the election, weighed on his mind.
But for a brief time, starting when he found his footing on the World Trade Center rubble, the President probably could have gotten almost anything he asked for from the Congress with the full support of the American people. But he did not ask for a dramatic surge in American force readiness, and he did not do an equally dramatic purge in the less-than ready American intelligence and security apparatus. That failure, however understandable, was Mistake Two.
Only now, seven years later, is the political establishment finally considering restoring some of the ground forces and other traditional military assets that were cut during those happy Clinton years.
Mistake Three:
Attacking Afghanistan was appropriate and well within our advanced military capabilities. Frankly, so was attacking Iraq, at least in prospect, provided three conditions were met:
(1) That we would enjoy good luck;
(2) That we would play our remaining cards astutely.
(3) That we would be able to supplement our inadequate ground forces with allies.
This required a careful and candid public explanation of the real stakes, the real risks and the real burdens, because, in war – as in a presidential campaign -- things rarely go the way you plan or hope.
On October, 2002 the President made the case for using military force against Saddam’s Iraq in these words:
The threat comes from Iraq. It arises directly from the Iraqi regime's own actions, its history of aggression and its drive toward an arsenal of terror.
Eleven years ago, as a condition for ending the Persian Gulf War, the Iraqi regime was required to destroy its weapons of mass destruction, to cease all development of such weapons and to stop all support for terrorist groups. The Iraqi regime has violated all of those obligations. It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. It has given shelter and support to terrorism and practices terror against its own people.
First, some ask why Iraq is different from other countries or regimes that also have terrible weapons. While there are many dangers in the world, the threat from Iraq stands alone because it gathers the most serious dangers of our age in one place.
Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a murderous tyrant who has already used chemical weapons to kill thousands of people. This same tyrant has tried to dominate the Middle East, has invaded and brutally occupied a small neighbor, has struck other nations without warning and holds an unrelenting hostility toward the United States. By its past and present actions, by its technological capabilities, by the merciless nature of its regime, Iraq is unique.
And surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons. Every chemical and biological weapon that Iraq has or makes is a direct violation of the truce that ended the Persian Gulf War in 1991.Yet Saddam Hussein has chosen to build and keep these weapons, despite international sanctions, UN demands and isolation from the civilized world.
Iraq possesses ballistic missiles with a likely range of hundreds of miles; far enough to strike Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey and other nations in a region where more than 135,000 American civilians and service members live and work.
Over the years Iraq has provided safe haven to terrorists such as Abu Nidal, whose terror organization carried out more than 90 terrorist attacks in 20 countries that killed or injured nearly 900 people, including 12 Americans.
Iraq has also provided safe haven to Abu Abbas, who is responsible for seizing the Achille Lauro and killing an American passenger. And we know that Iraq is continuing to finance terror and gives assistance to groups that use terrorism to undermine Middle East peace.
As the invasion began in March 2003, the President said:
American and coalition forces have begun a concerted campaign against the regime of Saddam Hussein. In this war, our coalition is broad, more than 40 countries from across the globe. Our cause is just, the security of the nations we serve and the peace of the world. And our mission is clear, to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.
W’s Iraq speeches were sincere and (I believe were) based on the best information available. But they were incomplete, much like telling a child whose mother is gravely ill, "Mom is going away for a little while". In this sense, it represented a longer and more eloquent version of: “Long ago I made some mistakes. I occasionally drank too much”, instead of coming clean: “I was arrested and convicted at the age thirty for drunk driving; it was an irresponsible time in my life that I have thankfully put behind me.”
I am persuaded that that the same advisors, who were whispering in the President’s ear about the DUI problem, urged the President to soft pedal the real challenge in the Middle East.
Here is the essence of the real message, the one I suspect Mr. Bush's advisors political advisors wanted suppressed because we Americans “weren’t ready”, and (sadly, this part is probably valid) because this pre-weakened president wouldn’t be able to sell a grim reality to a conflicted public in any event:
“We are at war, not against terror or terrorism, although that threat is all too real. We are at war against a malignant mutation in the religion of Islam that has declared a jihad against us. This is a war in which we will need allies from the sane and reasonable followers of that great religion. This is a war like no other we have faced since 1941. We are in the beginning stages of a challenge to our civilization on exactly the same scale and involving the same level of vital interests that were at stake in World War II. The jihad is a holy war against us and our best friends in the world, not for what we have done or not done, but just for being who we are. We do not face a few disconnected acts of terrorist villainy by a few deranged, misguided men. We face a multi-front war against us, using terrorism as a weapon, with the covert state sponsorship of Iran, Iraq, Syria and dangerous elements embedded in friendlier regimes in the Middle East. They want to take us down, destroy us if they can, intimidate us if they can’t. They want exclusive control of the vast oil revenues in the Middle East to buy weapons scientists, missile technology and ultimately nuclear weapons that can be delivered in Omaha, San Francisco, Detroit, Seattle, and New York. This is a war we must win because we have no other choice. It is a war that places our cities at risk of mass murder, our economy hostage to fanatic dictators in control of the world’s major oil supplies, and our causes our friends and allies in the region to face the prospect of mass graves. This is a war of such scope that our military engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq, as difficult as they might seem, will eventually be counted as battles in the larger war. It is a war whose duration will outlast this administration. It is the longest and most difficult war we have faced since the Cold War. We did not choose this war. It chose us. We will make them regret the day they took on the most powerful free nation in the world.”
Or something like that…
There was no Churchill in the race in the 2008 election, and to be fair, we Americans probably not have elected one. Instead we had a plain spoken Truman who occasionally mangled his sentences. We could have done much worse.
But the President made Mistake Three by overselling the imminent threat posed by Saddam and underselling the dangerous, long term threat posed by the larger movement in the Middle East in which taking out Saddam and replacing his regime with something stable and friendly was but one chess move in a long, bitter game of Survival.
Mistake Four:Having broken open the Iraqi egg so easily, we needed to have taken with utmost seriousness the prospect that we had embarked on the right strategy: But the attempt to attempt strangle the jihad in its cradle was bound to produce fierce blowback.
They understood the deadly seriousness of the challenge that would be posed by the emergence of a free Iraq lined up as a Western ally. The nihilistic ruthlessness of their counterattack was predictable (more so in hindsight) because our initial strategy was actually sound- if under-resourced.
We were unprepared. As the months of turmoil unfolded, we were painfully slow in remedying our under-resourced attempt to control that which our soldiers had so swiftly liberated. And, to be fair, we had a double handicap: Not enough soldiers and equipment and too much political correctness.
Having not psychologically prepared the American people, having lost executive credibility, the President would have been a crippled Churchill at best, had he somehow been able to channel that man’s rhetorical magic.
Now we and the enemy are waiting out the clock while the American people remain confused, cranky and irresolute. If we must wait for another Churchill, we should pray that we don’t also have to wait for another 9-11 to make the case that we desperately need one.
JBG
