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N.Y. Times
Taking On the Myth
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 14, 2004
On Sunday, a celebrating crowd gathered around a burning U.S. armored vehicle. Then a helicopter opened fire; a child and a journalist for an Arabic TV news channel were among those killed. Later, the channel repeatedly showed the journalist doubling over and screaming, "I'm dying; I'm dying."
Such scenes, which enlarge the ranks of our enemies by making America look
both weak and brutal, are inevitable in the guerrilla war President Bush got us
into. Osama bin Laden must be smiling.
U.S. news organizations are under constant pressure to report good news from
Iraq. In fact, as a Newsweek headline puts it, "It's worse than you
think." Attacks on coalition forces are intensifying and getting more
effective; no-go zones, which the military prefers to call "insurgent
enclaves," are spreading - even in Baghdad. We're losing ground.
And the losses aren't only in Iraq. Al Qaeda has regrouped. The invasion of
Iraq, intended to demonstrate American power, has done just the opposite: nasty
regimes around the world feel empowered now that our forces are bogged down.
When a Times reporter asked Mr. Bush about North Korea's ongoing nuclear
program, "he opened his palms and shrugged."
Yet many voters still believe that Mr. Bush is doing a good job protecting
America.
If Senator John Kerry really has advisers telling him not to attack Mr. Bush on
national security, he should dump them. When Dick Cheney is saying vote Bush or
die, responding with speeches about jobs and health care doesn't cut it.
Mr. Kerry should counterattack by saying that Mr. Bush is endangering the nation
by subordinating national security to politics.
In early 2002 the Bush administration, already focused on Iraq, ignored pleas to
commit more forces to Afghanistan. As a result, the Taliban is resurgent, and
Osama is still out there.
In the buildup to the Iraq war, commanders wanted a bigger invasion force to
help secure the country. But civilian officials, eager to prove that wars can be
fought on the cheap, refused. And that's one main reason our soldiers are still
dying in Iraq.
This past April, U.S. forces, surely acting on White House orders after American
television showed gruesome images of dead contractors, attacked Falluja. Lt.
Gen. James Conway, the Marine commander on the scene, opposed "attacking
out of revenge" but was overruled - and he was overruled again with an
equally disastrous decision to call off the attack after it had begun.
"Once you commit," General Conway said, "you got to stay
committed." But Mr. Bush, faced with the prospect of a casualty toll that
would have hurt his approval rating, didn't.
Can Mr. Kerry, who voted to authorize the Iraq war, criticize it? Yes, by
pointing out that he voted only to give Mr. Bush a big stick. Once that stick
had forced Saddam to let W.M.D. inspectors back in, there was no need to invade.
And Mr. Kerry should keep pounding Mr. Cheney, who is trying to cover for the
absence of W.M.D. by lying, yet again, about Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda.
Some pundits are demanding that Mr. Kerry produce a specific plan for Iraq - a
demand they never make of Mr. Bush. Mr. Kerry should turn the tables, and demand
to know what - aside from pretending that things are going fine - Mr. Bush
intends to do about the spiraling disaster. And Mr. Kerry can ask why anyone
should trust a leader who refuses to replace the people who created that
disaster because he thinks it's bad politics to admit a mistake.
Mr. Kerry can argue that he wouldn't have overruled the commanders who had
wanted to keep the pressure on Al Qaeda, or dismissed warnings from former Gen.
Eric Shinseki, then the Army's chief of staff, that peacekeeping would require a
large force. He wouldn't have ignored General Conway's warnings about the
dangers of storming into Falluja, or overruled his protests about calling off
that assault halfway through.
On the other hand, he can argue that he would have fired Paul Wolfowitz, the
deputy defense secretary who ridiculed General Shinseki. And he would definitely
have fired Donald Rumsfeld for the failure to go in with enough troops, the
atrocities at Abu Ghraib and more.
The truth is that Mr. Bush, by politicizing the "war on terror," is putting America at risk. And Mr. Kerry has to say that.
