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COMMENTARY
October 11, 2003
Oversight
One of the problems for every great democracy is how to maintain civilian oversight of the military. This is never more difficult than in those rare moments when the military offers more competence. The subject is the tittle-tattle of Washington just now where the press with their usual partiality are reporting that Donald Rumsfeld lord of the Pentagon has been "demoted"; and Condoleezza Rice mistress of the National Security Council promoted to oversee Iraqi reconstruction. As usual the story is false but conceals something more interesting. Mr. Rumsfeld was never in charge of Iraqi reconstruction only of the military trying to maintain order and train up a non-Saddamite local militia for the longer term. He is in charge of delivering force where required; he has never had the slightest responsibility for civilian agencies and has only appeared to have some because of his personal strengths of mind and will as a general adviser. It was the State Department driving the civilian reconstruction effort in Iraq under constant harassment from the Pentagon -- who thought they knew better than State how to orchestrate the Iraqi political transition from their hands-on experience with the country's exiled political leaders and domestic underground. And according to me they did know better; but they also knew their place. What has happened is the opposite of what the press is reporting. The power of civilian oversight is now passing from State to the White House. Miss Rice is Mr. Bush's direct agent and has indeed emerged as the "point man" for the Iraqi mission with input from all sides. It is not I think the first time the Bush administration has allowed an appearance to contradict a reality. The news is bad incidentally. For what it shows is an administration acknowledging to itself that Iraq is an American domestic political football; one which will remain in play daily for the rest of the presidential term. The temptation to micromanage events in the field of a foreign country a long distance away in order to influence impressions back home is indeed something to remind us of President Lyndon Johnson and another distant country called Vietnam. More: the administration is showing it will allow Iraq to remain the centre of public consciousness in the "war on terror". On one level this is compatible with the "flypaper" simile I have used to describe the U.S. mission in Iraq -- the creation of an immense distraction in the heart of the Middle East to lead Arab attention away from Israel and encourage international terrorism to shift its efforts to an irresistibly symbolic theatre away from Israel or the West. But that mission has been compromised by the media obsession with (modest) U.S. casualties. With the laudable exception of the odd catch-up feature article the media simply will not report good news in Iraq -- whether the good news is the Iraqi national renaissance after Saddam or the progress made in hunting down and eliminating the perpetrators of terror. For example the reader may be unaware that the U.S. captured more than 100 Iraqi and foreign terrorists together with one of Saddam's senior Republican Guard commanders at Al-Qaim near the Syrian border earlier this week in a large military operation without U.S. casualties. Large quantities of weapons and cash were swept up. The story one among many similar rated only a wire-service news brief which in turn made the inside pages of only a few newspapers. Yet it is far more significant as news than any of the numerous front-page accounts of U.S. soldiers killed in sniping incidents or the wall-to-wall coverage given terrorist bombings. The real story is no longer the reported story. Here is where the interim report by David Kay -- which the reader should examine for himself at cia.gov -- comes in. The report documents a vast clandestine network of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons laboratories and dozens of WMD-related activities that neither the U.N. nor the CIA suspected. It uncovered even an unknown prison complex where terror weapons could be tested on human subjects. Stockpiles have not been found -- the only thing that interests the media -- but the mystery of their likely location has deepened. Indeed the report emphasizes that only the surface has yet been scratched and shows why this is so. Mr. Kay's staff of 1400 has been able in the available time to search less than 10 per cent even of the known weapons caches in Iraq because of their immense size. His report should raise rather than lower alarm about the scale upon which regimes like that of Saddam have been developing easily concealed weapons tailored for delivery by terrorists not armies. The media don't want to know because such information vindicates the course the Bush administration and its allies have taken so far. And the administration's response to this is equally alarming: to politically micromanage what the public can see while abandoning the effort to point where the Kay report is pointing. There is one war for show and another war for keeps; with the danger of less and less civilian oversight of the latter. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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