Groping in the Dark

摘要

Iraq may be spinning out of control, but in the Bush administration, the spin was strictly controlled. From Baghdad to the White House, administration spokesmen went to elaborate lengths to argue that the presence of terrorists in Iraq was somehow a positive development. Paul Bremer, the U.S. civil administrator in Iraq, adopted a tone of "we've got 'em right where we want 'em." Bremer said: "Better to fight it here than to fight it somewhere else, like the United States." At a White House briefing, a senior administration official echoed, "I would rather fight them in Baghdad than in New York." If Al Qaeda has popped up in Baghdad, the Bushies defiantly proclaimed, it only goes to show that the administration was right all along to label Iraq as a terrorist haven. "Those who said there was no link between Iraq and the war on terror were dead wrong," said the White House official. (Writing in The New York Times, Harvard lecturer and former Clinton national-security official Jessica Stern caustically observed, "America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one.")