[Mb-civic] Bush of a Thousand DaysBy FRANK RICH

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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April 30, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Bush of a Thousand Days
By FRANK RICH

LIKE the hand that suddenly pops out of the grave at the end of "Carrie,"
the past keeps coming back to haunt the Bush White House. Last week was no
exception. No sooner did the Great Decider introduce the Fox News showman
anointed to repackage the same old bad decisions than the spotlight shifted
back to Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury room, where Karl Rove testified for
a fifth time. Nightfall brought the release of an NBC News-Wall Street
Journal poll with its record-low numbers for a lame-duck president with a
thousand days to go and no way out.

The demons that keep rising up from the past to grab Mr. Bush are the
fictional W.M.D. he wielded to take us into Iraq. They stalk him as
relentlessly as Banquo's ghost did Macbeth. From that original sin, all else
flows. Mr. Rove wouldn't be in jeopardy if the White House hadn't hatched a
clumsy plot to cover up its fictions. Mr. Bush's poll numbers wouldn't be in
the toilet if American blood was not being spilled daily because of his
fictions. By recruiting a practiced Fox News performer to better spin this
history, the White House reveals that it has learned nothing. Made-for-TV
propaganda propelled the Bush presidency into its quagmire in the first
place. At this late date only the truth, the whole and nothing but, can set
it free.

All too fittingly, Tony Snow's appointment was announced just before May
Day, a red-letter day twice over in the history of the Iraq war. It was on
May 1 three years ago that Mr. Bush did his victory jig on the aircraft
carrier Abraham Lincoln. It was May 1 last year that The Sunday Times of
London published the so-called Downing Street memo. These events bracket all
that has gone wrong and will keep going wrong for this president until he
comes clean.

To mark the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion last month, the White
House hyped something called Operation Swarmer, "the largest air assault"
since the start of the war, complete with Pentagon-produced video suitable
for the evening news. (What the operation actually accomplished as either
warfare or P.R. remains a mystery.) It will take nothing less than a replay
of D-Day with the original cast to put a happy gloss on tomorrow's
anniversary. Looking back at "Mission Accomplished" now is like playing that
childhood game of "What's wrong with this picture?" It wasn't just the
banner or the "Top Gun" joyride or the declaration of the end of "major
combat operations" that was bogus. Everything was fake except the troops.

"We're helping to rebuild Iraq, where the dictator built palaces for
himself, instead of hospitals and schools," Mr. Bush said on that glorious
day. Three years later we know, courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers,
that our corrupt, Enron-like Iraq reconstruction effort has yielded at most
20 of those 142 promised hospitals. But we did build a palace for ourselves.
The only building project on time and on budget, USA Today reported, is a
$592 million embassy complex in the Green Zone on acreage the size of 80
football fields. Symbolically enough, it will have its own water-treatment
plant and power generator to provide the basic services that we still have
not restored to pre-invasion levels for the poor unwashed Iraqis beyond the
American bunker.

These days Mr. Bush seems to be hoping that we'll just forget every
falsehood in his "Mission Accomplished" oration. Trying to deflect a
citizen's hostile question about prewar intelligence claims, the president
asserted at a public forum last month that he had never said "there was a
direct connection between September the 11th and Saddam Hussein." But on May
1, 2003, as on countless other occasions, he repeatedly made that direct
connection. "With those attacks the terrorists and their supporters declared
war on the United States," he intoned then. "And war is what they got." It
was typical of the bait-and-switch rhetoric he used to substitute a war of
choice against an enemy who did not attack us on 9/11 for the war against
the non-Iraqi terrorists who did.

At the time, "Mission Accomplished" was cheered by the Beltway
establishment. "This fellow's won a war," the dean of the capital's press
corps, David Broder, announced on "Meet the Press" after complimenting the
president on the "great sense of authority and command" he exhibited in a
flight suit. By contrast, the Washington grandees mostly ignored the Downing
Street memo when it was first published in Britain, much as they initially
underestimated the import of the Valerie Wilson leak investigation.

The Downing Street memo ‹ minutes of a Tony Blair meeting with senior
advisers in July 2002, nearly eight months before the war began ‹ has proved
as accurate as "Mission Accomplished" was fantasy. Each week brings new
confirmation that the White House, as the head of British intelligence put
it, was determined to fix "the intelligence and facts" around its
predetermined policy of going to war in Iraq. Today Mr. Bush tries to pass
the buck on the missing W.M.D. to "faulty intelligence," but his alibi is
springing leaks faster than the White House and the C.I.A. can clamp down on
them. We now know the president knew that the intelligence he cherry-picked
was faulty ‹ and flogged it anyway to sell us the war.

The latest evidence that Mr. Bush knew that "uranium from Africa" was no
slam-dunk when he brandished it in his 2003 State of the Union address was
uncovered by The Washington Post: the coordinating council for the 15
American intelligence agencies had already informed the White House that the
Niger story had no factual basis and should be dropped. Last Sunday "60
Minutes" augmented this storyline and an earlier scoop by Lisa Myers of NBC
News by reporting that the White House had deliberately ignored its most
highly placed prewar informant, Saddam's final foreign minister, Naji Sabri,
once he sent the word that Saddam's nuclear cupboard was bare.

"There was almost a concern we'd find something that would slow up the war,"
Tyler Drumheller, a 26-year C.I.A. veteran and an on-camera source for "60
Minutes," said when I interviewed him last week. Since retiring from the
C.I.A. in fall 2004, Mr. Drumheller has played an important role in
revealing White House chicanery, including its dire hawking of Saddam's
mobile biological weapons labs, which turned out to be fictitious. Before
Colin Powell's fateful U.N. presentation, Mr. Drumheller conveyed vociferous
warnings that the sole human source on these nonexistent W.M.D. labs, an
Iraqi émigré known as Curveball, was mentally unstable and a fabricator.
"The real tragedy of this," Mr. Drumheller says, "is if they had let the
weapons inspectors play out, we could have had a Gulf War I-like coalition,
which would have given us the [300,000] to 400,000 troops needed to secure
the country after defeating the Iraqi Army."

Mr. Drumheller says that until the White House "comes to grips with why it
did this" and stops "propping up the original rationale" for the war, it
"will never get out of Iraq." He is right. But the White House clings to its
discredited fictions even though their expiration date is fast arriving.
There are new Drumhellers seeking out reporters each day. The Fitzgerald
investigation continues to yield revelations of administration W.M.D.
subterfuge, president-authorized leaks included. Should the Democrats retake
either house of Congress in November, their subpoena power will liberate the
investigation of the manipulation of prewar intelligence that the chairman
of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Pat Roberts, has stalled for almost
two years.

SET against this reality, the debate about Donald Rumsfeld's future is as
much of a sideshow as the installation of a slicker Fleischer-McClellan
marketer in the White House press room. The defense secretary's catastrophic
mistakes in Iraq cannot be undone now, and any successor would still be
beholden to the policy set from above. Mr. Rumsfeld is merely a useful, even
essential, scapegoat for the hawks in politics and punditland who are now
embarrassed to have signed on to this fiasco. For conservative hawks, he's a
convenient way to deflect blame from where it most belongs: with the
commander in chief. For liberal hawks, attacking Mr. Rumsfeld for his poor
execution of the war means never having to say you're sorry for leaping on
(and abetting) the blatant propaganda bandwagon that took us there. But
their history can't be rewritten any more than Mr. Bush's can: the war's
failures were manifestly foretold by the administration's arrogance and
haste during the run-up.

A new defense or press secretary changes nothing. The only person who can
try to save the administration from itself in Iraq is the president. He can
start telling the truth in the narrow window of time he has left and
initiate a candid national conversation about our inevitable exit strategy.
Or he can wait for events on the ground in Iraq and political realities at
home to do it for him.

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