Public opinion won’t tolerate failure for long

  • David Broder / Washington Post columnist
  • Saturday, May 8, 2004 9:00pm
  • Opinion

WASHINGTON — The heads of the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency have failed the president and the country.

CIA chief George Tenet assured President Bush that it would be a "slam dunk" to prove Saddam Hussein threatened us with weapons of mass destruction. The weapons weren’t there.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld learned in January of credible allegations of abuse of detainees at an American military prison near Baghdad. He did nothing effective to head off the calamitous worldwide effects.

The first failure utterly undercut the original justification for waging war on Iraq — the need to pre-empt another horrendous attack on the United States or its allies. The second failure seriously compromises the backup rationale — the claim that we would provide a lesson in lawful democracy for a country that had known only abuse of power and police brutality.

Despite these twin failures by those on whom he has relied for military and intelligence advice, President Bush has expressed continued support for them and given no sign that he is about to replace either one.

The weapons of mass destruction misjudgment, which the White House attributes to Tenet’s CIA, has cost the United States the trust of traditional European allies. It has put heavy political pressure on Britain’s Tony Blair, the best friend the last two American presidents have found.

Now the scandals at the Abu Ghraib prison have inflamed anti-American opinion in Iraq and throughout the Muslim world, increasing the danger to U.S. troops and complicating the process of transition to Iraqi self-government at the end of June.

Bush was placed in the humiliating position of having to go on two Arab-language television stations to assert that he was "appalled" by the photographs of prisoner abuse and later to apologize for the United States to the whole world.

All this is taking place against a background of continuing conflict and mounting casualties on the ground in Iraq — and growing anxiety and dismay here at home.

On Wednesday, I was having breakfast with some business people who are leaders in an industry strongly supportive of the administration’s regulatory and environmental policies. Many at the table had just watched Rumsfeld do a round of interviews on the morning TV shows.

They were, to use the president’s word, "appalled." One man, who had spent many years in the military, said, "There had to be a complete breakdown of the command system. How could this have happened?" Another, familiar with the Middle East, said, "Even our friends will never forgive or forget this."

One moment in particular caught their attention. When Rumsfeld was interviewed by Matt Lauer on NBC’s "Today," they heard him say that "the system worked."

Lauer responded: "When you say the system worked, you’re talking about the system of investigation. Clearly there are parts of the system in place in the prisons in Iraq that are broken. The military report calls these incidents ‘horrific abuses.’ "

"Indeed," Rumsfeld said.

But he had used the same phrase — "The system works" — twice in his Pentagon briefing on Tuesday, after painstakingly explaining how the military bureaucracy deals, step-by-step and month after month, with allegations of misconduct. No one apparently thought the "horrific" prison scenes called for anything but routine examination.

This is a true McNamara moment for Rumsfeld, an echo of the technocratic-bureaucratic body-count mindset that blinded Robert McNamara to the realities of Vietnam when he was running the Pentagon.

The Vietnam parallel had never previously made much sense to me. But it was clearly on the mind of Secretary of State Colin Powell when he told CNN’s Larry King that having served in Vietnam "after My Lai happened," he knew that "in war, these sorts of horrible things happen every now and again."

The phrase that became famous back then — and undercut home front support for the war in Vietnam — was, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." Now, in Iraq, we find ourselves employing former officers in Saddam’s Republican Guard to quell the insurgents in Fallujah and aping Saddam’s brutal tactics in order to soften up prisoners for interrogation.

In an important column last week, much noted by other conservatives, George Will questioned the moral presumption underlying the administration’s "thinking America can transform the entire Middle East by constructing a liberal democracy in Iraq." A few weeks ago, I argued that such "visions, unhinged from strategies and heedless of risks, can lead to disasters." They can also lead — as they did in Vietnam — to suffering and death for those we set out to help and revulsion on their part toward their self-righteous rescuers.

The American people are eminently practical in judging such foreign ventures. And the prison photos are likely to weigh heavily with them.

David Broder is a Washington Post columnist. Contact him by writing to

davidbroder@washpost.com.

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