Sunday, July 20, 2003
Bush has also learned from his father's experience that siding with scientists gains him little politically, and often alienates conservatives. Bush and Rove have tried to woo portions of other groups that traditionally trend Democratic--steel tariffs for unions, faith-based grants for African-American ministers--but scientists are different. They aren't a big voting bloc. They are generally affluent, but not enough so to be major donors. They are capable of organizing under the auspices of a university to lobby for specific grants, but they aren't organized politically in a general way. In short, scientists aren't likely to cause the GOP problems if they are completely alienated. Scientists have almost never turned themselves into anything like a political force. Even Al Gore, the apotheosis of many scientists' political hopes, received little formal support from them during the 2000 campaign.
Consequently, the White House seems to have pushed scientific concerns down toward the bottom of its list of priorities. Bush, for instance, has half as many Ph.D.s in his cabinet as Clinton had two years into his term. Among the White House inner circle, Condoleezza Rice's doctorate distinguishes her as much as her race and more than her sex. Consider also the length of time the administration left top scientific positions vacant. It took 20 months to choose an FDA director, 14 months to choose an NIH director, and seven months to choose a White House science adviser for the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Once Bush had appointed a head of OSTP, he demoted the rank of the position, moved the office out of the White House, and cut the number of associate directors from four to two. An OSTP spokeswoman argues that the administration's decision to move OSTP was inconsequential and that reducing the number of associate directors was just a way of "reducing the stovepipes." But geography and staff equal clout in Washington, and unarguably signal how much the people in power care about what you do.
The rapid disintegration was largely preordained, Iraqis said. The Iraqi military was composed of disparate and competing armies with no central command authority, top generals inexplicably ordered some units not to fight, and security precautions left officers unable to communicate or to coordinate battle plans, according to interviews with more than two dozen former general officers and other field commanders serving in the regular army and special military units.
By the time the war began, most of the Iraqi air force's fighter planes had been disassembled and hidden, many air defense units were under orders not to turn on their radars and artillery batteries were operating at 50 percent capability, military leaders said.
In the end, former president Saddam Hussein was undercut not only by the destruction wrought by the Americans but by an Iraqi regular military that felt little loyalty to a leader who paid his special armies better salaries and intimidated generals into lying about the dilapidated state of his armed forces, the senior officers said.
Though it is impossible to independently verify the accounts provided by the officers interviewed over the past week, the close parallels among experiences described by military leaders from field units, headquarters divisions and special forces assigned to a wide variety of locations buttressed their credibility. Only a handful of the officers requested that their names be withheld.
Every commander interviewed said that despite the anxiety of U.S. officials, no Iraqi military unit had been issued chemical or biological weapons.
And while U.S. military leaders had also feared a bloodbath in the streets of Baghdad, all the commanders said their men were not under orders to fall back into the capital and wage urban warfare. Rather, they said, their men deserted or retreated with the aim of self-preservation. Some commanders said they ordered their soldiers to defend their homes and families, but did not tell them to take offensive action against Americans.
The jolly little wars against Afghanistan and Iraq were also designed to make Americans forget the Bush White House had been caught with its pants down by 9/11, and was asleep at the switch in the Enron financial disaster.
Who now remembers that Attorney General John Ashcroft actually cut spending on anti-terrorism before 9/11, or that Washington was giving millions to the Taliban until four months before 9/11?
How better to get Americans to support a war than by insinuating, as did Bush, that Iraq was responsible for 9/11, and claiming Saddam was about to attack the U.S. with weapons of mass destruction?
A pre-emptive attack on Iraq was urgent to save America, insisted Bush.
A weak-kneed Congress and credulous public went along with White House warmongering, while the spineless UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, and UN arms inspector Hans Blix wriggled like jellyfish.
Most Democrats, including some presidential candidates, joined Bush's lynch mob.
It was not just the Niger canard.
A torrent of lies poured from the administration, all aimed at justifying a war of aggression, thwarting the UN Security Council, ending UN inspections in Iraq and grabbing Iraq's oil riches.
Virtually all administration claims about Iraq's weapons had been disproved by UN inspectors before Bush went to war. ...
The litany of lies produced by the White House and its neo-con allies would be farcical were it not for the deaths of so many Americans and Iraqis.
Of course, all politicians lie.
But lying to get one's country into an unnecessary war is an outrage, and ought to be an impeachable offence.
