The 'progress' we are making in postwar Iraq

The Bush administration's "spin" on Iraq gets worse by the day, but Americans aren't fooled. What the administration says at home simply isn't matched by reports from the field.

The administration's last two attempts to inform us how "normal" things are in Iraq were particularly egregious. They come soon after the attempt to punish former U.S. ambassador Joseph Wilson – who informed the nation of the White House deception about Iraq's alleged uranium purchases from Africa.

Unnamed administration officials leaked to the media that Wilson's wife is a CIA agent. Leaking a CIA agent's name is a federal crime. Will John Ashcroft prosecute this crime?

These incidents have a common theme: they are attempts to deceive the nation about the progress of Iraqi "pacification" and to discredit those who see the origins of war and the occupation of Iraq differently.

Last week, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, gave a speech to mark the 100th day since President Bush pronounced major hostilities in Iraq over. She called on Americans to make a "generational commitment" to bringing democracy to the Middle East and compared the attacks that continue daily against U.S. forces in Iraq with the alleged "werewolf" attacks against U.S. forces in Germany after World War II.

The attacks against U.S. forces don't stop. At least 58 U.S. troops have been killed in combat since Bush's May speech, with another 67 "non-combat" deaths, some combat related. The numbers rise almost daily.

Rice indicated this was "normal" postwar chaos. Just as Hitler's "werewolves" attacked allied forces in 1945, she said, Saddam's diehards were harassing Americans today. Don't worry about it. All postwars are hell.

Her analogy fails badly: There is no valid comparison between World War II and Iraq, and none between the postwar occupations of Germany and of Iraq. The German werewolves simply didn't exist. More on that later.

Paul Wolfowitz, the principal architect of Bush's war, took a five-day tour of Iraq last month and announced that "conditions are much better than I thought." He told how he was given the "thumbs up" sign everywhere. Had he checked, he would have known that thumbs up in the Arab world is an obscene gesture.

Wolfowitz' testimony did not go down well with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., accused the administration of "unrealistic expectations." George Voinovich, R- Ohio, asked "how long, how much?" for Iraq occupation. "When will you guys start to get honest with us?" asked Joe Biden, D-Del.

For a chronically truth-challenged administration, the answer may be, never. For now, it says only that it needs $3.9 billion a month from Congress for Iraq war costs.

As in Vietnam, a gap is opening between the field and Washington. When Gen. Eric Shinseki, the former Army chief of staff, claimed Iraq occupation would require several hundred thousand troops, he was chastised and soon retired.

Yet there are close to 200,000 allied forces now in Iraq.

L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq, says the occupation "could cost $100 billion and take three years." Neither Wolfowitz nor Joshua Bolten, the budget director who testified with him, would ratify Bremer's comments.

"We simply don't know what the costs will be," said Bolten. Bremer calls them "staggering."

Reports from the field show a worsening situation. Reuters, which runs a daily table, shows that between 6,000 and 8,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed so far. But the overall body count does not show the gruesomeness of individual experiences, which, as they mount, pose a deepening problem for U.S. pacification. Example:

A Knight Ridder News Service story reported the deaths of four family members slain in their car last week by "nervous U.S. soldiers firing prematurely." The surviving 13-year-old daughter broke down when asked if she was angry with the Americans for killing her father, brother and two sisters.

"We will not take revenge," said an uncle. "Every one of the soldiers will have to answer to God."

Rice's attempt to compare the Iraq tragedy with postwar Germany is a misuse of history. I can only guess that Rice took the information from Perry Biddiscombe's book "The Last Nazis," a bit of revisionist nonsense written a few years ago attempting to trace the genealogy of Germany's recent skinhead and neo-Nazi movements.

In truth, as Antony Beevor makes clear in his seminal "The Fall of Berlin 1945," the werewolves were a demented idea that mostly lived in Joseph Goebbels' mind and died with him on May 1, 1945, in Hitler's bunker.

"It just didn't happen," says Alfons Heck, a German leader of the Hitler Youth who, in Goebbels' mind at least, were to be the backbone of the werewolves. Heck now lives in San Diego.

Rice, who was ultimately responsible for Bush's misleading the nation on Iraq's attempts to buy uranium from Africa and later warned that Saddam would create a "mushroom cloud" if he was not stopped, does shoddy research. The Iraq war has no points in common with World War II, whatever she might like to think.

Goldsborough can be reached via e-mail at jim.goldsborough@uniontrib.com.