"wolfowitz of arabia"

Wolfie's Fuzzy Math

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: May 2, 2004
This administration is the opposite of "The Sixth Sense."
They don't see any dead people.
Beyond the president's glaring absence at military funerals; beyond the
Pentagon's self-serving ban on photographing the returning flag-draped
coffins at Dover; beyond playing down the thousands of wounded and
maimed American troops and the thousands of hurt and dead Iraqi
civilians, now comes the cruel arithmetic of Paul Wolfowitz.

What can you say about a deputy defense secretary so eager to invade
Iraq he was nicknamed Wolfowitz of Arabia, so bullish to remold the
Middle East he froze the State Department out of the occupation and then
mangled it, who doesn't bother to keep track of the young Americans who
died for his delusion?

Those troops were killed while they were still trying to fathom the
treacherous tribal and religious beehive they were never prepared for,
since they thought they'd be helping build schools and hospitals for
grateful Iraqis.

Asked during a Congressional budget hearing on Thursday how many
American troops had been killed in Iraq, Mr. Wolfowitz missed by more
than 30 percent. "It's approximately 500, of whichÝ  I can get the
exact numbersÝ  approximately 350 are combat deaths," he said.

As of Thursday, there were 722 deaths, 521 in combat. The No. 2 man at
the Pentagon was oblivious in the bloodiest month of the war, with the
number of Americans killed in April overtaking those killed in the
six-week siege of Baghdad last year.

This is, of course, an administration that refuses to quantify or
acknowledge the cost of its chuckleheaded empire policies, in bodies,
money, credibility in the Arab world, reputation among our allies or the
reinvigoration of militant Muslims around the globe. Duped themselves,
they duped Americans into thinking it would be easy, paid for with Iraqi
oil. But Donald Rumsfeld's vision of showing off a slim, agile military
was always at odds with the neocons' vision of infusing enough security

into Iraq to turn it into an instant democratic paradise.

Crushed in the collision of these two grandiose dreams are all the
smaller dreams of fallen soldiers, to raise kids and watch baseball and
grill hot dogs on the Fourth of July.

Now things have deteriorated to the point that the administration is
pathetically begging for help from the very people it was trying to roll
overÝ  the U.N., Saddam's Baathist generals and the Iranians.

When Ted Koppel decided to devote his Friday "Nightline" to showing the
faces and reading the names of the men and women killed in action, Bill
Kristol of The Weekly Standard denounced it as "a stupid statement" and
the conservative Sinclair media company, one of the country's largest
owners of local stations, said it would pre-empt the program on its ABC
affiliates. Sinclair, a big Republican donor, felt Mr. Koppel was
undermining the war effort.

Bill O'Reilly suggested that CBS, by breaking the news of the grotesque
pictures of American soldiers gaily tormenting Iraqi prisoners, had put
American lives at risk.

But it's unhealthy to censor the ugly realities of war. The real danger
is when the architects of war refuse to rethink bad assumptions,
wrapping themselves in the blindly ideological nobility of their mission.

Senator John McCain let Sinclair have it with both barrels, noting that
the public needed "to be reminded of war's terrible costs, in all their
heartbreaking detail" and calling the pre-emption "unpatriotic."
(Shouldn't John Kerry be running as John McCain's vice president?)

Mr. Koppel told me that he neither wanted to beat the drums for war nor
"encourage flower children to come back." He said war is "a bitter,
bitter business and we need to keep talking to each other about where
the war goes from here." The tolerance for casualties, he said, shortly
before the start of his wrenching roll call of all those baby-faced and
smiling soldiers and marines, will be in direct relation to faith in the
motivation for war.

The W.M.D. reason vanished. And, with the re-Baathification of the
de-Baathification, the American idealism rational is not panning out.

Hiding the faces of the war dead makes the motivation seem like saving
face in an election year.
Americans won't take casualties for the credibility of the Bush
administration. That's not a good enough reason for people to die.