Independent Online , Washington – It's a familiar sight on the Washington landscape. Something goes wrong, fingers are pointed, people eventually quit or get fired. It's known as the Blame Game, and this week the subject is Iraq, what went wrong and why.
President George Bush says he's responsible but it's clear that his idea of personal responsibility for Iraq does not include the planning and rationale by others.
Bush is responsible for putting those planners – Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, former head of the Defence Policy Board, among others – into positions of power.
As president – and therefore the final arbiter in the internal power struggles that always take place in any large governmental organisation -Bush was responsible for favouring the Pentagon, at the expense of the State Department.
This is more than just a matter of bureaucratic esteem. An exhaustive study of the pre-war policy decisions that has been released to Congress and leaked to The New York Times showed that the State Department had accurately predicted the chaos and breakdown of order that occurred after the swift military victory in Iraq.
The study also revealed other interesting information, including that the State Department also opposed the Pentagon's support for Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi expatriate and wheeler-dealer who had not lived in Iraq for the past 20 years, as potential head of state.
The State Department lost the battle, and its cautious, even pessimistic view of what would follow an American invasion was effectively excluded from any policy decisions that reached the president's desk, the study showed.
That makes Secretary of State Colin Powell one possible candidate for scapegoat in the post-invasion Blame Game since he didn't energetically back up his own staff and head off the Pentagon.
The State Department also comes in for its share of the blame. In the last administration, which tilted its policies heavily toward Israel, a class of foreign service officers known as Arabists because of their knowledge of the Arab world and its language was systematically purged. This made way for appointees who had close ties to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), an Israeli lobbying group in the United States.
Arab language lessons at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute, a sort of finishing school for promising diplomats, were slashed in favour of classes on the language of the “stans,” the Central Asian countries that were formerly republics of the Soviet Union. One acknowledged problem in the current Iraq situation is there are too few Arabic speakers assisting the US authorities in Iraq and too little understanding for Arabic culture.
The former State Department official Paul Bremer, who is now in charge of the reconstruction effort in Iraq, is not an Arabist and does not speak Arabic. He served in Africa and western Europe, but never was posted in the Middle East. He is a protege and former employee of Henry Kissinger, the former secretary of state, who was an influential supporter of the idea of removing Saddam Hussein from power in order to bring about a general spread of democracy and enlightenment in the Middle East.
The list goes on:
-Vice President Richard Cheney for his unshakable belief and assertions that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and nuclear arms – despite subsequent failure to substantiate those suspicions.
-The Central Intelligence Agency for failing to insist that its doubts about the Pentagon's suspicions about Iraq's weapon programmes be included in the papers that reached the president's desk. Those doubts were not included in Bush's or Powell's speeches to the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council.
-Members of Congress for not demanding more rigorous proof before voting to back Bush's plan to go to war.
Thus far, the Blame Game involves only the possible firing or disgracing of Bush administration officials who are accused of making mistakes. There is some precedence for this, such as Alexander Haig's resigned under fire after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which embarrassed President Ronald Reagan.
But the game soon will become a wider contest, with the voters in November 2004 asking: “Who got us into this mess?” At that point it will become a very nasty Blame Game. – Sapa-DPA
