Bush's mistakes have been acts of commission which he cannot deny.

9/11 excuses won't work on Iraq

Condoleezza Rice valiantly defended President Bush from the chargeof negligence before Sept. 11 in her testimony last week. But as shespoke, U.S. troops faced a spreading revolt in Iraq, and there is nodefense for the mess the president has made in that country.

The Iraq war was his choice, his strategy, and his occupation.Before Sept. 11, he may have been lax, guilty of acts of omission.But on Iraq, his mistakes have been acts of commission for which hecannot deny responsibility.

The majority of the Sept. 11 inquiry commissioners, Republican andDemocrat alike, appear to believe that the horrors of Sept. 11 couldhave and should have been prevented. The warnings were clear, theevidence was available -- but the government didn't react.

The Bush administration was focused elsewhere -- on missiledefense, on China, on not being Bill Clinton. As the president toldBob Woodward, there was "no sense of urgency" at the top, andtherefore none through the bureaucracy.

However, Americans aren't likely to hold the president responsiblefor not stopping what seemed like a bolt from the blue. The war inIraq is a different story altogether. This is a war the White Housechose. The ideologues in the administration -- led by Vice PresidentDick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz -- lobbiedhard for it.

The president rushed us into the war over the objections of thecounterterrorism professionals, who correctly saw Iraq as adistraction from the war on terror that could make things much worse.He overruled the strong doubts of the professionals in the militarywho thought it would take hundreds of thousands of troops to occupyIraq. The president dismissed the doubts of the diplomatic corps. Andhe ignored the opposition of his allies and scorned the cautions ofthe United Nations.

He chose to put American troops on the ground essentially alone,without allies to share the burden. He ruled the U.N. would have norole after we took Baghdad and put his own team in charge of theoccupation. He ignored military warnings that the troops were too fewto provide security, and too many to sustain for more than a year. Hesigned off on using the National Guard and the reserves in a cavalierfashion, extending their tours repeatedly at the last moment. He andhis vice president assumed that we'd be greeted as "liberators," sothat our troops didn't really need body armor or training in nationbuilding.

The president's team ignored the State Department's detailedplanning for the occupation. They chose to disband the Iraqimilitary, throwing tens of thousands of armed soldiers into thestreets and unemployment. They put together the preposterousprovisional coalition, stacked with exiles who had no legitimacy inIraq.

They fanned the fears of both the minority Sunnis who haddominated under Saddam Hussein and the majority Shiites who had beenpersecuted by him. They hid the costs from Congress and the Americanpeople. Even the president's current budget does not include the $50billion to $75 billion more that he will need for Iraq this year.

Now the liberation has turned to occupation, and the occupationhas met with revolt. What is truly stunning, however, is that theadministration has managed to do what most thought impossible: turnSunni and Shiite factions that despise each other into allies.

Here, the fact that the president skipped out of Vietnam andducked out of his commitment to the National Guard probablycontributed to the fiasco. He scorned the pros as weak-willedbureaucrats rather than warriors. But neither Bush nor Cheney norDefense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld nor Wolfowitz ever served incombat.

Now reality is proving the professionals right and Bush and hisideologues terribly, dangerously, ruinously wrong. Hopefully, theU.N. and the allies will help bail us out.

But it is already too late -- too late for hundreds of brave youngmen and women in the U.S. military. And too late to keep the war fromgenerating hatred for America and recruits for terror from across theIslamic world. We will all pay the price for Bush's mess.