I noted earlier this week that the president went from being adamantly opposed to a troop escalation in Iraq to being adamantly supportive of a troop escalation in Iraq. Given the circumstances, it was imperative that Bush explain how and why he came to change his mind.
In remarks to troops at Fort Benning yesterday, the president gave it a shot.
“The [Iraqi] Prime Minister came and said, look, I understand we’ve got to do something about this violence, and here is what I suggest we do. Our commanders looked at it, helped fine-tune it so it would work….
“The commanders on the ground in Iraq, people who I listen to — by the way, that’s what you want your Commander-in-Chief to do. You don’t want decisions being made based upon politics, or focus groups, or political polls. You want your military decisions being made by military experts. And they analyzed the plan and they said to me, and to the Iraqi government, this won’t work unless we help them. There needs to be a bigger presence. …
“And so our commanders looked at the plan and said, ‘Mr. President, it’s not going to work until — unless we support — provide more troops.’ And so last night I told the country that I’ve committed an additional — a little over 20,000 more troops, five brigades of which will be in Baghdad.”
It’s an interesting explanation. It suggests to us that a) troop escalation was Maliki’s idea from the outset; b) U.S. commanders on the ground endorsed the plan; and c) Bush was just going along with what everyone else wanted to do. To believe this explanation is to believe that the president honored the wishes of his top military leaders and his White House was not responsible at all for creating the escalation plan in the first place.
Unfortunately, like so many other claims Bush has made about the war, all available information suggests none of this is even remotely true.
Dan Froomkin explains.
Previous reporting — see, for instance, Michael Abramowitz, Robin Wright and Thomas E. Ricks in The Washington Post on Wednesday) has made it abundantly clear that adding U.S. troops was not an idea that emerged from the American commanders — nor, for that matter, from the Iraqis. And, as it turns out, two stories in this morning’s New York Times add to the evidence.
Jim Rutenberg, David E. Sanger and Michael R. Gordon write: “A narrative pieced together from interviews with participants and from public testimony suggests that through much of the process, generals who had been on the ground in Iraq during the past year had favored that the new strategy begin with a substantially smaller force than the one that President Bush announced to the nation on Wednesday night. In the end, it was Mr. Bush who appeared to drive his commanders along to the conclusion that more troops were needed.”
They write: “White House officials were clearly sensitive on Thursday about any suggestions that the president countermanded his generals, and said his new plan had their full support. They said the generals sought and received assurances that the Iraqis would undertake political initiatives and end the practice of releasing militia figures who were friends of the government and captured by American or Iraqi forces.”
According to the New York Times, Bush didn’t necessarily start out pushing for escalation. “One senior official involved in the discussions said that Mr. Bush’s instinct toward the start of the review process — and that of others — was to consider a withdrawal from Baghdad, allow Iraqi-vs.-Iraqi fighting to settle itself, and dedicate United States forces to focus on pursuing Qaeda fighters….
As for Bush’s claim that this whole thing was Maliki’s idea, the president’s wrong on two counts. One, the original ideas came from NSA Stephen Hadley and were presented to Maliki, not the other way around. And two, Maliki actually wanted the opposite — a lower American profile in the war, not a bigger one.
What’s particularly odd about all of this is it’s transparently false. No one seriously believes Bush’s version of events at all, so there’s really no point in him even trying to mislead people, worse yet mislead the very troops who’ll be fighting the war. If everyone, including the president’s allies, freely accept that he’s bucked his generals and pushed this on Maliki, why bother creating a bogus narrative?
In this case, the truth was just as easy to tell as the lie, but for reasons that defy comprehension, Bush decided to go with dishonesty over veracity. When it comes to the war, lying just seems to come easier to him.