Misleading Assertions Cover Iraq War and Voting Records
By Glenn Kessler and Jim VandeHei Washington Post Staff Writers Wednesday, October 6, 2004; Page A15
Sen. John Edwards and Vice President Cheney clashed repeatedly in their debate last night, making impressive-sounding but misleading statements on issues including the war in Iraq, tax cuts and each other's records, often omitting key facts along the way.
Early in the debate, Cheney snapped at Edwards, "The senator has got his facts wrong. I have not suggested there's a connection between Iraq and 9/11." But in numerous interviews, Cheney has skated close to the line in ways that may have certainly left that impression on viewers, usually when he cited the possibility that Mohamed Atta, one of the hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001, met with an Iraqi official -- even after that theory was largely discredited.
On Dec. 9, 2001, Cheney said on NBC's "Meet The Press" that "it's been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack." On March 24, 2002, Cheney again told NBC, "We discovered . . . the allegation that one of the lead hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had, in fact, met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague."
On Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney, again on "Meet the Press," said that Atta "did apparently travel to Prague. . . . We have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center." And a year ago, also on "Meet the Press," Cheney described Iraq as part of "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
In the debate, Cheney referred to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as having "an established relationship with al Qaeda" and said then-CIA Director George J. Tenet talked about "a 10-year relationship" in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. What Tenet cited were several "high-level contacts" over a 10-year period, but he also said the agency reported they never led to any cooperative activity.
Edwards, for his part, asserted that the war in Iraq has cost $200 billion "and counting," an assertion that Cheney called him on. Cheney said the government has "allocated" $120 billion. As of Sept. 30, the government has spent about $120 billion, and it has allocated -- or plans to spend -- $174 billion. The tab should run as high as $200 billion in the next year once other expected supplemental spending is added.
Cheney suggested that an agreement had been reached on debt relief for Iraq, saying that "the allies have stepped forward and agreed to reduce and forgive Iraqi debt to the tune of nearly $80 billion, by one estimate." While there are reports of some sort of agreement, no plan has been made public. Cheney also said that allies had contributed $14 billion in "direct aid." Actually, $13 billion was pledged, but only $1 billion has arrived.
Cheney also said Iraqi security forces have "taken almost 50 percent of the casualties in operations in Iraq, which leaves the U.S. with 50 percent, not 90 percent." The United States does not keep track of Iraqi casualties, either civilian or in the security services. Recently, a senior U.S. official in Baghdad estimated that 750 Iraqi policemen have been killed but has no estimate of those wounded. The United States as of yesterday has had 1,061 deaths and 7,730 wounded.
Cheney and Edwards tangled repeatedly over each other's voting records, or the record of presidential challenger John F. Kerry. But many of these votes took place long ago and appear to have little relevance to current issues. Edwards cited a long list of conservative votes by Cheney, made decades ago when he was a House member from Wyoming.
Cheney said Kerry once vowed to allow a veto by the United Nations over U.S. troops. This refers to a statement made nearly 35 years ago, when Kerry gave an interview to the Harvard Crimson, 10 months after he had returned from the Vietnam War angry and disillusioned by his experiences there.
Cheney said Kerry's tax-cut rollback would hit 900,000 small businesses. This is misleading. Under Cheney's definition, a small business is any taxpayer who includes some income from a small business investment, partnership, limited liability corporation or trust. By that definition, every partner at a huge accounting firm or at the largest law firm would represent small businesses. According to IRS data, a tiny fraction of small business "S-corporations" earn enough profits to be in the top two tax brackets. Most are in the bottom two brackets.
Edwards asserted that "millionaires sitting by their swimming pool . . . pay a lower tax rate than the men and women who are receiving paychecks for serving" in Iraq. President Bush last year cut the tax rate on dividends to 15 percent, whereas most soldiers would be in a 15 percent tax bracket -- and pay an effective rate much less after taking deductions for children and mortgages.
Edwards also asserted that "the president is proposing a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage that is completely unnecessary." But Bush simply endorsed such an amendment that had already been introduced on Capitol Hill.
Cheney continued to charge that Kerry voted 98 times to raise taxes. But FactCheck.org -- a nonpartisan group Cheney cited during the debate as a fair data checker -- says nearly half were not for tax increases per se and many others were on procedural motions.
Both candidates promised to cut the deficit in half in four years. Independent budget experts say neither the Republican nor the Democratic ticket can make good on that promise unless it scales back funding promises made during the campaign. The Kerry health care plan, for instance, could cost as much as $1 trillion, experts say, which would eat up most if not all of the revenue generated by raising taxes on those making more than $200,000 a year. Edwards said the Democratic ticket is willing to scale back programs to make the numbers work.
Bush is digging an even deeper hole, experts say, because he has promised to partially privatize Social Security, which carries a transition cost likely to be much bigger than that of Kerry's health care plan.
Edwards asserted that "in the last four years, 1.6 million private-sector jobs have been lost." The actual number is close to 900,000 and will likely shrink further when Friday's jobs reports is released, though Bush is the first president in 72 years to preside over an overall job loss.
Edwards also misleadingly charged that the Bush administration is "for outsourcing of jobs." The Bush-Cheney ticket has not advocated sending jobs overseas, though administration officials have talked about how outsourcing can be good for the U.S. economy, a position many private economists echo.
Cheney charged that Kerry and Edwards oppose the No Child Left Behind education law, which imposes new accountability standards on public schools. Both senators voted for the law and support some modifications and billions of dollars to fully fund the education program.
Edwards claimed that part of Halliburton Corp.'s money in Iraqi contracts should have been withheld because the company is under investigation. Some funds were withheld but then paid out after an Army audit studied the matter.
In a week of devastating revelations about his Iraq policies, Bush has nothing new to say.
War Stories: Military analysis. By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 6, 2004, at 1:57 PM PT
Did CNN and MSNBC get hoodwinked this morning? Yesterday, the White House announced that President Bush would be delivering a "major policy address" on terrorism today. The cable news networks broadcast it live and in full. Yet the "address [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/10/20041006-9.html ]" turned out to be a standard campaign stump speech before a Pennsylvania crowd that seemed pumped on peyote, cheering, screaming, or whooping at every sentence.
The president announced no new policy, uttered not one new word about terrorism, foreign policy, or anything else. He did all the things he wanted to do in last Thursday's debate—accuse his opponent of weakness, bad judgment, vacillation, and other forms of flip-floppery—though this time without a moderator to hush the audience, much less an opponent to bite back. And Bush loved it, smiling, smirking, raising his eyebrows, as if to say, "How 'bout that zinger?"
In short, the cable networks were lured into airing an hourlong free campaign ad for George W. Bush. (CNN's spokeswoman did not return my calls inquiring if the producers felt used. The secretary to MSNBC President Rick Kaplan—no relation—connected me to a "viewer relations" line, where I could leave a message if I wished. I called again to clarify that I had a press question, not a consumer complaint. She connected me to the same line again. When I tried a third, fourth, and fifth time, she didn't even pick up the phone; no doubt seeing my number pop up on the Caller ID screen, she routed my call to the prerecorded announcement.)
It's hard to blame either network for taking the White House's bait. Most presidents would want to deliver, right about now, a major address on the war against terror and the war in Iraq. In the last few days, one blow after another has struck the very foundations of Bush's policies. The fact that, under the circumstances, Bush didn't deliver a major policy address after all, despite his advance word, should embarrass not only CNN and MSNBC but, still more, President Bush.
The week's most stunning development may have been the revelation in L. Paul Bremer's remarks [ http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/politics/06troops.html ], before a group of insurance agents at DePauw University, that we never had enough troops in Iraq, either to secure the country's borders or to provide the stability needed for reconstruction. "The single most important change, the one thing that would have improved the situation," Bremer said, "would have been having more troops in Iraq at the beginning and throughout."
Bremer, of course, was the Bush-appointed head of the U.S.-led occupation authority, so his words on such matters carry weight. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (and Rummy's neocon secretariat) have all insisted—before, during, and after the battlefield phase of the war—that they sent enough troops to accomplish the mission. It is worth recalling that when Gen. Eric Shinseki [ http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/attack/consequences/2003/0228pentagoncontra.htm ], then the Army chief of staff, told Congress that successful occupation would require a few hundred thousand troops, he was pushed into early retirement. Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz called his estimate "wildly off the mark."
Now we learn that Bremer agreed with Shinseki—and that he said as much to the White House and Pentagon chiefs at the time (a claim corroborated, to the Washington Post [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8554-2004Oct5.html ], by administration officials).
But Bremer's disclosure slams himself no less than Team Bush. Bremer, after all, was the man who ordered the disbanding of the old Iraqi army. This decision is commonly seen in retrospect as the administration's first—and perhaps most—disastrous move after the fall of Baghdad. If Bremer thought there weren't enough U.S. troops on the ground, why did he call for the demobilization of Iraqi troops (many of whom had not been loyal to Saddam—they didn't, after all, fight for him)? This is one of the war's great remaining mysteries. (Another is why we went to war in the first place, but that's another story.) Bremer almost certainly didn't make this decision himself; it had to come from higher up. But from where? My guess is that, ultimately, Ahmad Chalabi was a big influence. He was still counting on taking the reins of power in the new Iraq (he had the support of the White House and the Pentagon at the time), and he hoped to install his own militia, the Free Iraqi Forces, as the new Iraqi army. The old, Baathist-dominated army would have been in the way; it had to go. Whatever the actual story, if Bremer truly thought at the time that there weren't enough troops, he should have resigned rather than carry out the order.
The second blow to the war's legitimacy came Monday, when Rumsfeld [ http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/politics/05rumsfeld.html ]—increasingly a loose cannon—appeared before the Council on Foreign Relations and, during the question-and-answer period, acknowledged that he had seen no evidence showing a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. The Pentagon later released a statement, claiming that Rumsfeld had been "misunderstood." He did not mean to deny the existence of "ties" between the two. However, as has been discussed in this space before [ http://slate.msn.com/id/2102589/ ], "ties" is a term that is so broad as to be (deliberately) meaningless.
Then came news reports of a CIA analysis [ http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-usa-zarqawi.html ]—ordered by Cheney—showing that Rumsfeld hadn't been misunderstood at all. The analysis concluded that there probably was no working relationship between Saddam's regime and al-Qaida lieutenant Abu Musab Zarqawi. This is significant in two ways. First, in the lead up to the war last year, the only physical evidence of a Saddam-al-Qaida tie was the presence of Zarqawi's training camp in northern Iraq. The camp was in Kurdish-controlled territory—an awkward caveat, but Bush officials at the time issued other, though looser, material suggesting a possible connection to Saddam himself.
Had the CIA's recent conclusion been reached two years ago, either within the administration or by Congress, the case for going to war would have been greatly weakened. In fact, as NBC News [ http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4431601/ ] reported last March (and as almost nobody has picked up since), the Bush administration had several opportunities to bomb Zarqawi's camp well before the war. On at least two occasions the U.S. military drew up plans for an attack. But the White House rejected the proposals—mainly because shutting down Zarqawi's operation would have removed a key rationale for invading Iraq. This was a jaw-dropping bit of cynicism: Bush sold, and continues to sell, the war in Iraq as a major campaign in the global war on terrorism, yet he repeatedly passed up the chance to neutralize or kill one of the most dangerous terrorists (Zarqawi has spent much of his time lately chopping off the heads of foreign contractors) for fear of weakening the case for war.
Today comes the long-awaited 900-plus-page report by Charles Duelfer [ http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/06/international/middleeast/06CND-INTE.html?hp ], the CIA's chief weapons inspector, which concludes pretty much what his predecessor, David Kay [ http://slate.msn.com/id/2089471/ ], figured out—that on the eve of the war Saddam Hussein had neither weapons of mass destruction nor a viable program for producing such weapons; that his capabilities were deteriorating; that his military might was diminishing, not gathering; that, in short, he posed no real threat. Duelfer did find that Saddam intended to reconstitute his programs once sanctions were dropped. Another way of stating this point: The sanctions were working; they were keeping Saddam Hussein in his box.
Finally, on the matter of the Bush administration's efforts to revive Iraq's economy, a report this week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9627-2004Oct5.html ]—a conservative Washington-based think tank—finds that for every dollar spent on aid to Iraq, only 27 cents filters down to projects benefiting Iraqis. The rest pays for administrative and management costs. (This is what happens when 85 percent of contracts are awarded to big U.S. or British firms, while just 2 percent go to Iraqi companies.) Add to this the fact that Bush has spent only a small fraction of the $18.5 billion that Congress appropriated for reconstruction, and the verdict can only be that we're doing just slightly more than squat. The evidence is seen in the continued electrical blackouts and the grave shortfall of basic services. The result is that Iraqis who might otherwise have been compliant citizens join the insurgency—or at least let the insurgents pass without turning them in. (For an excellent analysis on the insurgency's composition, click here [ http://bostonreview.net/BR29.5/hashim.html ].)
So, President Bush may well need to deliver a major policy address on all this sometime soon. Today, though, he just told the cheering throngs that he's strong and resolute while his opponent's a flip-flopper.
Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate.
Photograph of George Bush by Kevin Lamarque/Reuters.
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