Kudos to McClatchy’s Mark Seibel for writing a terrific piece about exaggerations and omissions that continue to plague the White House’s case for an escalation. As Seibel explained today, “President Bush and his aides, explaining their reasons for sending more American troops to Iraq, are offering an incomplete, oversimplified and possibly untrue version of events there that raises new questions about the accuracy of the administration’s statements about Iraq.” I could hardly believe my eyes.
Bush, for example, explained on Wednesday night that his new plan for Iraq would target Sunni insurgents, while leaving it to Maliki to disarm Shiite militias and death squads.
But the president’s account understates by at least 15 months when Shiite death squads began targeting Sunni politicians and clerics. It also ignores the role that Iranian-backed Shiite groups had in death squad activities prior to the Samarra bombing.
Blaming the start of sectarian violence in Iraq on the Golden Dome bombing risks policy errors because it underestimates the depth of sectarian hatred in Iraq and overlooks the conflict’s root causes. The Bush account also fails to acknowledge that Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite groups stoked the conflict.
President Bush met at the White House in November with the head of one of those groups: Abdul Aziz al-Hakim of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. SCIRI’s Badr Organization militia is widely reported to have infiltrated Iraq’s security forces and to be involved in death squad activities.
Sounds like a detail Bush neglected to mention on Wednesday.
Indeed, on Wednesday night, the president identified the bombing of the Golden Mosque of Samarra as the reason for the sectarian violence of 2006. Seibel noted the importance of the Shiite mosque, but added that there’s more to it than Bush led his audience to believe.
Much like the administration’s pre-war claims about Saddam’s alleged ties to al-Qaida and purported nuclear weapons program, the claims about the bombing of the Shiite mosque in Samarra ignore inconvenient facts and highlight questionable but politically useful assumptions. […]
The concerns about Shiite militias grew after the Jan. 30, 2005, elections that brought the Shiite-led government of then-Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari to power. Journalists in Iraq, the CIA station, the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. military all reported throughout 2005 that evidence was mounting that Jaafari’s government was incorporating Shiite militias and death squads into the Iraqi army and police.
A year before the Samarra bombing, Hannah Allam, writing for what was then Knight Ridder Newspapers, reported that Iraq could be headed toward civil war…. “Shiite Muslim assassins are killing former members of Saddam Hussein’s mostly Sunni Muslim regime with impunity in a wave of violence that, combined with the ongoing Sunni insurgency, threatens to escalate into civil war,” Allam, then the news organization’s Baghdad bureau chief, wrote on Feb. 27, 2005. “The war between Shiite vigilantes and former Baath Party members is seldom investigated and largely overshadowed by the insurgency.” […]
The story quoted the then-spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry, Sabah Kadhim: “It’s the beginning, and we could go down the slippery slope very quickly. … Both sides are sharpening their knives.”
As for why all of this matters, Seibel explains that the administration’s case has been plagued by “oversights, oversimplifications, misjudgments and misinformation” since 2002, and the same pattern continues today. “The administration has continued to offer inaccurate information to Congress, the American people and sometimes to itself,” Seibel wrote.
Seibel can now expect to be bombarded with right-wing talking points from any war supporters in 3…2…1…