Sidney Blumenthal: How Bush Is Trying To Save Face In Iraq

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/09/13/iraq_war

How Bush is trying to save face in Iraq
The president is now taking credit for turning Sunni tribes against al-Qaida in Iraq. But two years ago he rejected a Sunni offer to negotiate an end to the violence.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Sept. 13, 2007 | Two years ago the Sunni sheiks leading the insurgency in Iraq's Anbar province approached the United States, offering to end the violence in exchange for a timetable establishing that U.S. forces would withdraw from the country, a senior official at the highest level of the British government told me. Without some sort of negotiated deal that the Sunni leaders could brandish, they explained, they would not have the essential political justification for quelling the conflict. The British believed that the Sunni offer was being made in good faith and urged that it be accepted. But according to the senior British source, President Bush rejected it out of hand, still certain that he could achieve a military victory. He saw any agreement with the Sunnis as tantamount to defeat, the British official said. And yet, even as the Sunnis were rebuffed, Bush continued to invest trust in the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government to forge a political conciliation.

Now, Thursday night, in a nationally televised address from the Oval Office, President Bush will announce the withdrawal of 30,000 troops from Iraq by July 2008, leaving the U.S. force at the level it was before the "surge," through the presidential election year. He will claim that he is able to withdraw these troops because of the success of his plan, as proved by the result of the turning of Sunni tribes in Anbar province against al-Qaida in Iraq.

As Gen. David Petraeus did in his congressional testimony, Bush will point to events in Anbar as the key evidence of the surge's triumph. What he will not be discussing is how he discarded the earlier Sunni offer to negotiate and dismissed the advice of the British government as he pursued the chimera of "victory." He will also carefully neglect to observe that the Sunni action against al-Qaida in Iraq began independently before the surge, that it was never foreseen as part of the surge, that the Sunnis politically are more estranged than ever from the Shiite-run government of Nouri al-Maliki, or that the U.S. arming of the Sunnis may be a perverse preparation for the next phase of the Iraqi sectarian civil war in the likely absence of political power sharing. Nor will Bush explain the contradiction between his withdrawal of these 30,000 troops and his doomsday scenarios that withdrawing U.S. forces will presage genocide on the scale of Cambodia.

The appearance of Gen. Petraeus was staged to coincide with the sixth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Yet the emotional impact of the memorials has been overshadowed by the fresh casualty lists from Iraq. The day before this Sept. 11, two U.S. soldiers from the 82nd Airborne, who had joined five others in writing an Op-Ed article for the New York Times saying that the surge was not working, were killed in action. Yet Bush still sought to wring political gain out of the tragic memories of 9/11 as though his paradise lost -- the national unity after 9/11 -- could be regained.

Artillery barrages of TV commercials seeking to soften public opinion preceded Petraeus' report. A new front group, Freedom's Watch, founded at the instigation of the White House, funded by Bush's political financiers (including prominent members of the Scooter Libby Defense Fund) and directed by Dan Senor (former press secretary for the catastrophic Coalition Provisional Authority), launched a series of ads that were a pastiche of past Republican themes. Children in small-town America were depicted raising a flag, a scene plagiarized from Ronald Reagan's 1984 "Morning Again in America" commercial. Then fragments of Bush's 2004 campaign washed up like messages in bottles. Soldiers who had lost limbs in Iraq segued into pictures of the burning World Trade Center as words appeared on the screen: "They attacked us." A soldier said, "We're winning on the ground in Iraq. It's no time to quit." A bereaved woman whose uncle died as a fireman in the twin towers and whose husband was killed in Iraq spoke as words flashed on the screen: "More attacks." "Surrender is not an option." In another ad, a Marine in a wheelchair said, "To hear Congress talk about surrendering really makes me angry." After these poisons were injected into the atmosphere, Petraeus emerged from behind the curtain as the sober voice of reason.

Seated side by side, Petraeus and U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker presented less a united front than the antipodes of Bush's strategy. Both men were great stone faces, droning and dull, their lack of affect serving as masks for their onerous tasks. Instead of complementing each other, the men's testimonies made plain the surge's strategic incoherence. Deploying the classic euphemisms and misdirections of diplomacy, Crocker demolished, intentionally or not, whatever Petraeus sought to achieve with his dazzling display of dubious statistics. Then, in response to a single pointed question, Petraeus conceded the emptiness of his performance. He aimed friendly fire at himself.

Next page: Petraeus had to plead that his statistics were valid even as he refused to reveal his full methodology

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