9/11 excuses won't work on Iraq

JESSE JACKSON

_Condoleezza Rice valiantly de
fended President Bush from
the charge of negligence be-
fore Sept. 11 in her testimony last
week. But as she spoke, U.S.
troops faced a spreading revolt in
Iraq, and there is no defense for
the mess the president has made in
that country.
The Iraq war was his choice, his
strategy, and his occupation. Be-
fore Sept. 11, he may have been
lax, guilty of acts of omission. But
on Iraq, his mistakes have been
acts of commission for which he
cannot deny responsibility.
The majority of the Sept. 11 in-
quiry commissioners, Republican
and Democrat alike, appear to be-
lieve that the horrors of Sept. 11
could have and should have been
prevented. The warnings were
clear, the evidence was available --
but the government didn't react.
The Bush administration was
focused elsewhere -- on missile de-
fense, on China, on not being Bill
Clinton. As the president told Bob
Woodward, there was ''no sense of
urgency'' at the top, and therefore
none through the bureaucracy.
However, Americans aren't
likely to hold the president respon-
sible for not stopping what seemed
like a bolt from the blue. The war
in Iraq is a different story alto-
gether. This is a war the White

House chose. The ideologues in the
administration -- led by Vice
President Dick Cheney and
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz -- lobbied hard for it.
The president rushed us into the
war over the objections of the
counterterrorism professionals,
who correctly saw Iraq as a distrac-
tion from the war on terror that
could make things much worse. He
overruled the strong doubts of the
professionals in the military who
thought it would take hundreds of
thousands of troops to occupy
Iraq. The president dismissed the
doubts of the diplomatic corps.
And he ignored the opposition of
his allies and scorned the cautions
of the United Nations.
He chose to put American
troops on the ground essentially
alone, without allies to share the
burden. He ruled the U.N. would
__________
Bush's mistakes have
been acts of commission
which he cannot deny.

have no role after we took Bagh-
dad and put his own team in
charge of the occupation. He ig-
nored military warnings that the
troops were too few to provide se-
curity, and too many to sustain for
more than a year. He signed off on
using the National Guard and the
reserves in a cavalier fashion, ex-
tending their tours repeatedly at
the last moment. He and his vice
president assumed that we'd be
greeted as ''liberators,'' so that our
troops didn't really need body ar-
mor or training in nation building.
The president's team ignored
the State Department's detailed

planning for the occupation. They
chose to disband the Iraqi military,
throwing tens of thousands of
armed soldiers into the streets and
unemployment. They put together
the preposterous provisional coali-
tion, stacked with exiles who had
no legitimacy in Iraq.
They fanned the fears of both
the minority Sunnis who had dom-
inated under Saddam Hussein and
the majority Shiites who had been
persecuted by him. They hid the
costs from Congress and the Amer-
ican people. Even the president's
current budget does not include
the $50 billion to $75 billion more
that he will need for Iraq this year.
Now the liberation has turned to
occupation, and the occupation
has met with revolt. What is truly
stunning, however, is that the ad-
ministration has managed to do
what most thought impossible:
turn Sunni and Shiite factions that
despise each other into allies.
Here, the fact that the president
skipped out of Vietnam and
ducked out of his commitment to
the National Guard probably con-
tributed to the fiasco. He scorned
the pros as weak-willed bureau-
crats rather than warriors. But nei-
ther Bush nor Cheney nor Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld nor
Wolfowitz ever served in combat.
Now reality is proving the profes-
sionals right and Bush and his ideo-
logues terribly, dangerously, ru-
inously wrong. Hopefully, the U.N.
and the allies will help bail us out.
But it is already too late -- too
late for hundreds of brave young
men and women in the U.S. mili-
tary. And too late to keep the war
from generating hatred for America
and recruits for terror from across
the Islamic world. We will all pay
the price for Bush's mess.