CAKEWALK.(Iraq War)

LETTER FROM BAGHDAD

LETTER FROM NORTHERN IRAQ

PORTFOLIO

FOLDER

More than a year ago, Kenneth Adelman, a prominent national-security official in the Reagan Administration who now serves part time, with Richard Perle, on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, wrote a piece for the Washington Post. Its title was "Cakewalk in Iraq,"and its payoff went like this: "I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk. Let me give simple, responsible reasons: (1) It was a cakewalk last time; (2) they've become much weaker; (3) we've become much stronger; and (4) now we're playing for keeps."It's worth remembering that "last time”--that is, in 1991, when a genuine coalition of American, European, and Arab armies expelled Saddam Hussein from Kuwait--the ground war was over in a hundred hours. Next time, the reader was left to conclude, the job would be wrapped up even faster.

During the long runup to the present war in Iraq, assumptions of this kind came almost universally to be taken for granted. That was the work partly of high officials of the Bush Administration, partly of quasi-governmental outriders like Adelman and Perle, and partly of the neoconservative fedayeen of the op-ed pages and the cable talkathons. In early March, for example, General Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, serenely anticipated "a short, short conflict."On the Sunday before the opening "shock and awe"barrage, Vice-President Cheney said that the war would go "relatively quickly,"and that American troops would be "greeted as liberators."He went on, when asked if the fighting might prove to be long, costly, and bloody, "Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way."(As Dana Milbank, a Washington Post White House correspondent, noted, "Cheney has spoken that way for months.”) Perle, still a Defense Policy Board member, though no longer its unpaid (if not exactly unremunerated) chairman, predicted on the eve of the war that it would last no longer than three weeks, adding, "And there is a good chance that it will be less than that."Last summer, he declared that "support for Saddam, including within his military organization, will collapse at the first whiff of gunpowder."In the February 24th issue of National Review, David Frum, the former "axis of evil"White House speechwriter, wrote that "the Iraq fight itself is probably going to go very, very fast. The shooting should be over within just a very few days from when it starts."

To be sure, Administration officials themselves were usually careful to include what is known in the editorial trade as a "to be sure"sentence, acknowledging that you never can tell, nothing is guaranteed, there might be bumps in the road. (For example, right after asserting that the war would go quickly, Cheney added quickly, "But we can't count on that.”) Still, the Administration's body English conveyed the conviction that Iraq was going to turn out just as neoconservative enthusiasts like Adelman thought it would. "The media did not make up the expectation that they expected this to be a brief, essentially bloodless war,"Marvin Kalb, a senior fellow at Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, said the other day. "They got that from officials, from the Vice-President and the Joint Chiefs chairman."That authoritative expectation was widely accepted across the spectrum of opinion. There was no shortage either of debate on the diplomacy leading up to the war or of speculation about ...