The New York Times has taken a lot of lumps in the past couple years, many of them deserved. But two series in the paper over the past week demonstrate its continued ability to provide a kind of definitive depth that eludes most other media sources.
Michael Gordon’s three part series (part one, two and three) on the war in Iraq gives a military expert’s view of how the war went awry. It’s not partisan and it mostly offers the perspective of military leaders and analysts; much of the material is drawn from the people President Bush chose to lead the occupation of Iraq in its early days. It begins with General Tommy Franks in full “mission accomplished” mode, making plans to begin an American withdrawal within 60 days.
Within a few months, though, the Bush administration’s optimistic assumptions had been upended. Many of the foreign troops never came. The Iraqi institutions expected to help run the country collapsed. The adversary that was supposed to have been shocked and awed into submission was reorganizing beyond the reach of overstretched American troops.
In the debate over the war and its aftermath, the Bush administration has portrayed the insurgency that is still roiling Iraq today as an unfortunate, and unavoidable, accident of history, an enemy that emerged only after melting away during the rapid American advance toward Baghdad. The sole mistake Mr. Bush has acknowledged in the war is in not foreseeing what he termed that “catastrophic success.” But many military officers and civilian officials who served in Iraq in the spring and summer of 2003 say the administration’s miscalculations cost the United States valuable momentum — and enabled an insurgency that was in its early phases to intensify and spread. |
What Gordon’s series makes clear is that — putting aside the debate over weapons of mass destruction and the Bush administration’s rhetorical deceptions to shove the nation toward an ill-conceived war — the administration failed the Iraq test on the simple ground of competence. It used bad information, made bad plans, ignored good intelligence that failed to tell it what it wanted to hear, and found itself in a rapidly deteriorating military situation that it is still scratching its head over.
Then turn to today’s Times and you’ll find a lengthy piece by Tim Golden (first in a series) detailing Bush failures in the war on terrorism’s legal front. In the weeks after 9/11 Bush seized the moment to break from the American legal mainstream in the name of defending the U.S. from new attacks:
White House officials said their use of extraordinary powers would allow the Pentagon to collect crucial intelligence and mete out swift, unmerciful justice. “We think it guarantees that we’ll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve,” said Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a driving force behind the policy.
But three years later, not a single terrorist has been prosecuted. Of the roughly 560 men being held at the United States naval base at Guantà¡mo Bay, Cuba, only 4 have been formally charged. Preliminary hearings for those suspects brought such a barrage of procedural challenges and public criticism that verdicts could still be months away. And since a Supreme Court decision in June that gave the detainees the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court, the Pentagon has stepped up efforts to send home hundreds of men whom it once branded as dangerous terrorists. |
Again, the conclusion is not about partisan ideology but about effectiveness: The Bush team said they needed certain powers to prosecute terrorists, but despite getting everything they asked for, they’ve failed miserably in finding and charging actual terrorists. The thread that runs through both series is how a band of ideologues seized the Bush administration’s reins after 9/11 and enacted pre-existing agendas (invade Iraq, mock international law and bolster the federal government’s power) that ended up undermining the war on al-Qaida rather than strengthening the U.S. hand.
Incompetence on the field, incompetence in the courts — it really has no end, and yet the cornerstone of the Bush campaign remains the promise that the current guys can best protect the nation. These articles are lengthy, dispassionate presentations of the factual record based largely on interviews not with critics from across the aisle but with insiders (many of them, understandably, disillusioned). I can understand that Bush supporters might not embrace the Kerry campaign’s criticisms of the president, but I wish every Bush voter would sit down and read these pieces and then see whether their man’s record matches his rhetoric of strength by any standard of reality.
UPDATE: Part two of Golden’s series is now online.
Post Revisions:
There are no revisions for this post.