Rumsfeld has trouble counting friends in the “Coalition of the Willing”

The Bush White House is clearly a bit sensitive about the new war being labeled “unilateral.” Every time someone uses the word — it’s usually Howard Dean, who’s added the word to his stump speech — Ari Fleischer and Bush allies in Congress go ballistic.

As war in Iraq got underway, the administration released a list of 30 countries the U.S. has labeled the “Coalition of the Willing.” Colin Powell indicated there are an additional 15 countries that are sort of in the coalition, but prefer to remain anonymous. How exciting — we have secret friends!

Any time someone uttered the phrase “unilateral attack,” the White House pulled out the list. (It’s almost as if someone got laminated, pocket-sized versions and passed them around the West Wing.)

Of course, looking over the list didn’t exactly ameliorate concerns about the lack of international support. Colombia is on the list, but the country’s ambassador soon after said the government wasn’t really supporting the war. Another one of the countries on the list — Japan — doesn’t even have an army.

Despite the administration’s touting of the Fellowship of the Ring, I mean, the Coalition of the Willing, the fact remains that there’s only three countries with troops fighting against Iraq — the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. We may be getting some moral support from countries like Estonia and Macedonia, but at the risk of sounding ungrateful, it doesn’t mean much. The administration even argues that some of these allies are crucial in providing access to bases and use of airspace, but many of these “coalition” members — such as the Netherlands, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and the Solomon Islands — are no where near Iraq and couldn’t provide bases and airspace if they wanted to.

Which leads me to (cue music)…The Carpetbagger Report’s Bush Administration Lie of the Day. Yesterday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld insisted that the war is “not unilateral action as is being characterized in the media,” and concluded, “Indeed, the coalition in this activity is larger than the coalition that existed during the Gulf War in 1991.”

Sorry Mr. Secretary, this is wrong and you know it. The first war in Iraq, endorsed by the United Nations, included a military force of 34 countries. This war has three.

As Ivo Daalder, a Brookings Institution scholar, told the Washington Post, “It’s a baldfaced lie to suggest that” the coalition for this war is greater than that for the 1991 war. In case you’re wondering, Daalder supports the war in Iraq.

Baldfaced or not, the lie was furiously spun by Fleischer, who, as Salon’s Jake Tapper noted, “offered some intriguingly applied numbers to back the argument.”

Apparently, Fleischer explained that the size of the coalition in 1991 is about the same as the coalition in 2003 based on the percentage the U.S. contributed to the military force. Fleischer said the percentage was in the mid-70s in ’91, and in the mid-80s now. “The numbers are not all that far off from where they were before,” Fleischer said with a straight face.

Even using Fleischer’s bizarre reasoning, the U.S. is responsible for more of the forces fighting the war than the last time around. More importantly, this doesn’t prove Rumsfeld was right; on the contrary, it further proves he was lying.

Maybe you’re thinking Rumsfeld wasn’t talking about military forces, maybe he meant the coalition is larger based on the countries providing financial support. Would that make what Rumsfeld said true? Nope, still a lie.

As Tapper’s Salon article explains, the cost-sharing effort of the first Iraq war was unprecedented. Total financial contributions from countries other than the U.S. were $70 billion in ’91, including almost $55 billion in military responsibility costs. Conversely, in this war, the U.S. is shouldering nearly the entire financial burden alone.

Anyway you slice it, Rumsfeld’s assertion (and Fleischer’s spinning) is completely and demonstrably false. It’s also unnecessary. The White House has said for a year that the United State was willing and able to wage this war alone. It blew off most of our allies, divided NATO, and undermined the United Nations. Why try and argue that the administration is suddenly a group of genuine multilateralists, when they’ve been proving the opposite for months? I say, embrace your ideology, defend it publicly, explain why you believe in it, and stop trying to deceive people.