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Iraq Is the Ultimate
Aphrodisiac
By Frank Rich
04/22/07 "
New York Times" -- -- -- President Bush has
skipped the funerals of the troops he sent to Iraq. He took his
sweet time to get to Katrina-devastated New Orleans. But last
week he raced to Virginia Tech with an alacrity not seen since
he hustled from Crawford to Washington to sign a bill
interfering in Terri Schiavo's end-of-life medical care. Mr.
Bush assumes the role of mourner in chief on a selective basis,
and, as usual with the decider, the decisive factor is politics.
Let Walter Reed erupt in scandal, and he'll take six weeks to
show his face - and on a Friday at that, to hide the story in
the Saturday papers. The heinous slaughter in Blacksburg, Va.,
by contrast, was a rare opportunity for him to ostentatiously
feel the pain of families whose suffering cannot be blamed on
the administration.
But he couldn't inspire the kind of public acclaim that followed
his post-9/11 visit to ground zero or the political comeback
that buoyed his predecessor after Oklahoma City. The cancer on
the Bush White House, Iraq, is now spreading too fast. The
president had barely returned to Washington when the empty hope
of the "surge" was hideously mocked by a one-day Baghdad
civilian death toll more than five times that of Blacksburg's.
McClatchy Newspapers reported that the death rate for American
troops over the past six months was at its all-time high for
this war.
At home, the president is also hobbled by the Iraq cancer's
metastasis - the twin implosions of Alberto Gonzales and Paul
Wolfowitz. Technically, both men have been pilloried for sins
unrelated to the war. The attorney general has repeatedly been
caught changing his story about the extent of his involvement in
purging eight federal prosecutors. The Financial Times caught
the former deputy secretary of defense turned World Bank
president privately dictating the extravagant terms of a State
Department sinecure for a crony (a k a romantic partner) that
showers her with more take-home pay than Condoleezza Rice.
Yet each man's latest infractions, however serious, are mere
misdemeanors next to their roles in the Iraq war. What's being
lost in the Beltway uproar is the extent to which the lying,
cronyism and arrogance showcased by the current scandals are of
a piece with the lying, cronyism and arrogance that led to all
the military funerals that Mr. Bush dares not attend. Having
slept through the fraudulent selling of the war, Washington is
still having trouble confronting the big picture of the Bush
White House. Its dense web of deceit is the deliberate product
of its amoral culture, not a haphazard potpourri of individual
blunders.
Mr. Gonzales's politicizing of the Justice Department is a mere
bagatelle next to his role as White House counsel in 2002, when
he helped shape the administration's legal argument to justify
torture. That paved the way for Abu Ghraib, the episode that
destroyed America's image and gave terrorists a moral victory.
But his efforts to sabotage national security didn't end there.
In a front-page exposé lost in the Imus avalanche two Sundays
ago, The Washington Post uncovered Mr. Gonzales's reckless role
in vetting the nomination of Bernard Kerik as secretary of
homeland security in December 2004.
Mr. Kerik, you may recall, withdrew from consideration for that
cabinet post after a week of embarrassing headlines. Back then,
the White House ducked any culpability for the mess by
attributing it to a single legal issue, a supposedly
undocumented nanny, and by pinning it on a single,
nonadministration scapegoat, Mr. Kerik's longtime patron, Rudy
Giuliani. The president's spokesman at the time, Scott
McClellan, told reporters that the White House had had "no
reason to believe" that Mr. Kerik lied during his vetting
process and that it would be inaccurate to say that process had
been rushed.
Thanks to John Solomon and Peter Baker of The Post, we now know
that Mr. McClellan's spin was no more accurate than his
exoneration of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby in the Wilson leak
case. The Kerik vetting process was indeed rushed - by Mr.
Gonzales - and the administration had every reason to believe
that it was turning over homeland security to a liar. Mr.
Gonzales was privy from the get-go to a Kerik dossier ablaze
with red flags pointing to "questionable financial deals, an
ethics violation, allegations of mismanagement and a top deputy
prosecuted for corruption," not to mention a "friendship with a
businessman who was linked to organized crime." Yet Mr. Gonzales
and the president persisted in shoving Mr. Kerik into the top
job of an already troubled federal department encompassing 22
agencies, 180,000 employees and the very safety of America in
the post-9/11 era.
Mr. Kerik may soon face federal charges, and at a most
inopportune time for the Giuliani presidential campaign. But
it's as a paradigm of the Bush White House's waging of the Iraq
war that the Kerik case is most telling. The crucial point to
remember is this: Even had there been no alleged improprieties
in the former police chief's New York résumé, there still would
have been his public record in Iraq to disqualify him from any
administration job.
The year before Mr. Kerik's nomination to the cabinet, he was
dispatched by the president to take charge of training the Iraqi
police - and completely failed at that mission. As Rajiv
Chandrasekaran recounts in his invaluable chronicle of Green
Zone shenanigans, "Imperial Life in the Emerald City," Mr. Kerik
slept all day and held only two staff meetings, one upon arrival
and one for the benefit of a Times reporter doing a profile.
Rather than train Iraqi police, Mr. Kerik gave upbeat McCain-esque
appraisals of the dandy shopping in Baghdad's markets.
Had Mr. Kerik actually helped stand up an Iraqi police force
instead of hastening its descent into a haven for sectarian
death squads, there might not now be extended tours for American
troops in an open-ended escalation of the war. But in the White
House's priorities, rebuilding Iraq came in a poor third to
cronyism and domestic politics. Mr. Kerik's P.R. usefulness as a
symbol of 9/11 was particularly irresistible to an
administration that has exploited the carnage of 9/11 in ways
both grandiose (to gin up the Iraq invasion) and tacky (in 2004
campaign ads).
Mr. Kerik was an exploiter of 9/11 in his own right: he had
commandeered an apartment assigned to ground zero police and
rescue workers to carry out his extramarital tryst with the
publisher Judith Regan. The sex angle of Mr. Wolfowitz's scandal
is a comparable symptom of the hubris that warped the judgment
of those in power after 9/11. Not only did he help secure Shaha
Riza her over-the-top raise in 2005, but as The Times reported,
he also helped get her a junket to Iraq when he was riding high
at the Pentagon in 2003. No one seems to know what she actually
accomplished there, but the bill was paid by a Defense
Department contractor that has since come under official
scrutiny for its noncompetitive contracts and poor performance.
So it went with the entire Iraq fiasco.
You don't have to be a cynic to ask if the White House's
practice of bestowing better jobs on those who bungled the war
might be a form of hush money. Mr. Wolfowitz was promoted to the
World Bank despite a Pentagon record that included (in part) his
prewar hyping of bogus intelligence about W.M.D. and a
nonexistent 9/11-Saddam connection; his assurance to the world
that Iraq's oil revenues would pay for reconstruction; and his
public humiliation of Gen. Eric Shinseki after the general dared
tell Congress (correctly) that several hundred thousand troops
would be needed to secure Iraq after the invasion. Once the war
began, Mr. Wolfowitz cited national security to bar businesses
from noncoalition countries (like Germany) from competing for
major contracts in Iraq. That helped ensure the disastrous
monopoly of Halliburton and other White House-connected
companies, including the one that employed Ms. Riza.
Had Iraqi reconstruction, like the training of Iraqi police, not
been betrayed by politics and cronyism, the Iraq story might
have a different ending. But maybe not all that different. The
cancer on the Bush White House connects and contaminates all its
organs. It's no surprise that one United States attorney fired
without plausible cause by the Gonzales Justice Department,
Carol Lam, was in hot pursuit of defense contractors with
administration connections. Or that another crony brought by Mr.
Wolfowitz to the World Bank was caught asking the Air Force
secretary to secure a job for her brother at a defense
contractor while she was overseeing aspects of the Air Force
budget at the White House. A government with values this sleazy
couldn't possibly win a war.
Like the C.I.A. leak case, each new scandal is filling in a
different piece of the elaborate White House scheme to cover up
the lies that took us into Iraq and the failures that keep us
mired there. As the cover-up unravels and Congress steps up its
confrontation over the war's endgame, our desperate president is
reverting to his old fear-mongering habit of invoking 9/11
incessantly in every speech. The more we learn, the more it's
clear that he's the one with reason to be afraid.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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