Who's Really Morally and Intellectually Challenged?

by Joseph L. Galloway

Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld took to the road this week trying to sell the message that Iraq is part of the war on terrorism and that anyone who thinks differently is morally or intellectually challenged.

With the president himself batting clean-up on Thursday, the dynamic duo and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made the rounds of the conventions of the biggest national veterans' organizations -- the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Reno, Nev., and the American Legion in Salt Lake City -- peddling the Bush administration's beleaguered line of bull to guaranteed friendly audiences.

Rumsfeld's message to the American Legion was that critics of the Bush administration's policies on Iraq and terrorism were guilty of ``moral or intellectual confusion about what is right or wrong.''

Cheney's sound bites out of the Reno gathering of the VFW included assertions that the federal-court ruling that warrantless wiretapping was unconstitutional was ''dead wrong.'' That ''sound policies by the president'' have prevented any more terrorist attacks on the United States since 9/11 and that the terrorists, whom he declared ''in the last throes'' last year, are now ``weakened and fractured, yet still lethal.''

These statements reflect the administration's persistent moral or intellectual confusion about what is and isn't true. From Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush, we hear how well things are going in Iraq, under new democratic local management.

• In fact, Iraqis are dying by the thousands every month, Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim militias are growing stronger, ordinary Iraqis are lining up for passports to flee a civil war that the administration won't admit is happening and the American death toll is rising above 2,600.

• In fact, we are bogged down in a no-win, no-way-out war in part because our military commanders have been browbeaten into fighting it on the cheap, with perhaps half the number of troops they needed to get a grip on a fractious people before the place dissolved into anarchy, sectarian bloodshed and revenge-taking.
Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush claim that their invasion of Iraq has made us safer.

• In fact, Hezbollah has survived an ill-conceived and U.S.-backed Israeli campaign in Lebanon, Iran is defiantly pursuing nuclear weapons, the Taliban and al Qaeda are on the march in Afghanistan and terrorist cells keep popping up in Western Europe and elsewhere.

We can't win in Iraq with the current U.S. force, strategy and tactics, even using the White House's fluid definition of victory, which currently is that we'll somehow train and equip Iraqi soldiers and police who will take control of the country and allow us to begin bringing our soldiers home.

Those Iraqi soldiers who are taking over security in broad stretches of the country ran out of ammunition this week in a fierce gun battle with militiamen and were executed by their captors. Other Iraqi units refused orders to deploy to Baghdad in the wake of the debacle.

So what's the administration to do to divert the attention of Americans on the eve of a mid-term congressional election and looking hard at the presidential sweepstakes in 2008? If I were betting on a likely next move, I'd put some money on a really big ''wag the dog'' scenario. I'd suggest that some people high in government are going to start cooking the intelligence on Iran, just as they cooked the intelligence on Saddam Hussein's ties to al Qaeda, chemical and biological weapons and ''re constituted'' nuclear program, none of which actually existed.

Our leaders know that the U.N. Security Council, where Russia and China are sure to veto actions against their business partner Iran, will never approve tough sanctions on Iran. If they can squeeze U.S. analysts hard enough or have some Iranian exiles (sound familiar?) cook up dubious intelligence about an Iranian nuclear-weapons program, they might have an excuse for a preemptive attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

Have the neoconservatives learned nothing from Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon? Yes, I fear that it could be so. If we go down that road, gasoline is going to cost more than Chanel perfume by the gallon, the entire Middle East will go up in flames and the conflagration will wipe out our moderate Arab friends. We will end up in even deeper kimchi than we are already in.

Joseph L. Galloway is former senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young."