Jeff Koopersmith

No Time to Gloat
George W. Bush has finally seen the enemy. Is it Rumsfeld? Is it Cheney? Is it both? Heads should roll!
by Jeff Koopersmith

September 4th, 2003 (apj.us) -- The New York Times and most major media outlets were more than kind to George W. Bush this morning after the startling but forthcoming appearance of Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday. Powell made an almost apologetic but uneasy announcement that the United States had officially begun a 180-degree turn toward the United Nations for assistance with Iraq -- instead of backing the UN bashers within the Administration.

Don't be fooled. The debate about coming hat in hand to the UN has been roiling at the White House and the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas for weeks now.

It was no coincidence that France, nearly a week ago, spoke out loudly, warning that the situation in Iraq was close to "anarchy." The Chirac government in Paris said it wanted an international military force and at least a provisional government in Baghdad -- and under United Nations authority.

But Paris doesn't make such announcements without first mixing it up with Washington.

The deal was done at least a week ago -- and if the US sticks to it, we may see a true multi-national force, and a true multilateral reconstruction of Iraq.

The price?

We don't yet know, but it may the Bush Presidency in the end.

Why?

He may have waited a bit too long.

In the end, it was the men and women who lay their lives down for the American people who changed the tide, and a quiet but brutal revolt at the Pentagon -- where the real generals leading the true heroes, not the corporate apparatchiks filling civilian jobs, became enraged with the nonstop stream half-truths that were crippling them. Top military officials launched a direct assault on Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and our war-mongering Vice President, Dick Cheney, who up until then had held all the cards in the Oval Office.

It was the generals, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Richard Meyers and General John Abizaid, the new chief of the US Central Command and the top commander in Iraq, who met secretly and then openly with Colin Powell to set Mr. Bush straight, willing or not.

The generals, in a nutshell, told the White House, "Enough is enough."

It was no accident that Secretary of State Colin Powell, standing alone, was chosen to make the announcement regarding our newfound willingness -- conceivably our desperation -- to ask the nations of the world to join the United States in rebuilding a nation we destroyed based on scanty intelligence, manipulated facts, and out-and-out lies.

Others in the White House had tried to kill Powell's efforts to internationalize the efforts in Iraq until the last moment. They did not succeed.

Powell stood unaccompanied at the State Department yesterday. There was no Condoleezza Rice, no Donald Rumsfeld, no Dick Cheney -- only their ghosts.

After all, it was these three and their cohorts who led this ill-prepared President down the primrose path.

Either Mr. Bush wasn't willing to underscore their ineptness yesterday, or they were indisposed to do so.

It is, in a sense, nothing more than a board room providing a forum for debate.

Yet nothing like a face-saving deal on Iraq gets accomplished there.

Make no mistake: this transaction is being done between Secretary Powell and French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, who hammered out the deal day and night over secure telephones and via tested telex. The majority of other UN member nations will go along -- this time regrettably with France, not the United States. It is France who will lead during the next few weeks, not America.

There's plenty of crow to eat, but one must give due credit to the George W. Bush, no matter how culpable he may be in other conduct. He did make this decision, and it's the right one if a new role for the U.N. can be cemented and we can bring our soldiers home.

As an added attraction, and additional evidence that underscores the tumble of Cheney and Rumsfeld from presidential grace, superweasel and now marginalized-for-life Richard Perle, a key hooligan thorn in the Pentagon's side and nonstop critic of France for opposing the war, said in an interview in the French newspaper Le Figaro this week that the United States had erred by planning poorly for the postwar situation in Iraq.

Perle indicted himself -- threw himself on his own sword, saying, "Our main mistake, in my opinion, is that we haven't succeeded in working closely with Iraqis before the war so that an Iraqi opposition could have been able to immediately take the matter in hand. The solution is to hand over power to the Iraqis as soon as possible."

Perle, still not able to swallow his own load, added, "The United Nations system is not adapted to deal with the new threats, like international terrorism."

True -- and neither are we.

It is time for Mr. Perle to admit as well that he and his mob are the most prominent parties to blame for the soaring postwar rise in international terrorism and the hatred now targeting innocent and caring Americans, Israelis, Iraqis, Indonesians and Afghanis.

It is Mr. Perle, along with other Cheney-led pseudointellectual gangsters, who served as key architect for this chaos now spreading in the Middle East to the four corners of the globe.

It was Mr. Perle who failed to plan, and it was he who sent our boys and girls to Iraq to be slaughtered, first by the hundreds and now in twos or threes each day. It was he who snickered and shrugged off the deaths of some thirty thousand Iraqi civilians instead of laying sufficient groundwork to preempt the chaos although he was warned, time and again, by far more experienced and braver men that if he was going to go forward with this ill-conceived war, then he must do it correctly.

Yes, the buck stops at George W. Bush's desk -- but it started a dozen years ago in a neoconservative think tank filled with gutless corporate stooges eager for some payback.

It is time for the President of the United States to ask Richard Cheney to take his mob of ill-prepared war gamers and hit the road.

Admittedly, the Vice President is a virtual campaign-cash machine -- but all the money on earth won't buy the re-election of an apparent international thug.

Mr. Bush still has a way out. Let him take it.

Perhaps then the United Nations will be graceful enough to help us out of this toilet bowl of iniquity.

JEFF KOOPERSMITH is a political consultant, opinion research authority, policy analyst, and self-described "renegade lobbyist."