the contrarian - Strange Comments on War's 5th Anniversary

President Bush might be excused for saying, as he did, that the success of the surge in Iraq has justified the war's cost. As the architect and the man responsible, his statement could almost be considered understandable.

Some might say, on the other hand, that, at an enormous cost, we have created nothing more than a major fiasco.

The greatest cost of any war is the loss of life.  Within days, the 4,000^th American service person will be killed in Iraq.  And, as for the civilian population, no one has bothered to keep accurate records, but estimates range from 100,000 to over 1,000,000 deaths and the displacement of millions more.

And then there's the dollar cost to the American taxpayers.  Back in 2003, former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz estimated the cost would be $10 billion to $100 billion and that Iraq's oil exports would cover most of the post war costs.

So far, it appears that the war has cost about $½ trillion. Ultimately, however, it will be much greater. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has just published a book in which he claims the true cost of the war, extending beyond the U.S. budget and including veterans' costs and the impact on the U.S. economy, will exceed $3 trillion.

The question, then, and the one that the president's comment raises is: exactly what are the benefits that he says justify the tremendous costs cited above?  And, in fact, are there any benefits at all?

At the same time, Vice President Cheney was being interviewed on the subject of Iraq by Martha Raddatz of ABC News in Oman, where he was planning to go fishing with the sultan.  The exchange went as follows:

Raddatz: "Two-thirds of Americans say it's not worth fighting, and they're looking at the value gain versus the cost in American lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives."

Cheney: "So?"

Raddatz: "So-you don't care what the American people think?"

Cheney: "No, I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls."

A curious choice of words for the vice president. The term "fluctuate," according to the dictionary, means "to rise and fall in or as if in waves."  Over time, the direction of the public opinion poll results has been but one way, down, as support for the war and for the president himself, has sunk by about 40 points.

The poll referred to by Raddatz was a CNN-Opinion Research Corp. poll released Wednesday which found that only 32 percent of Americans support the conflict and 61 percent said they want the next president to remove most U.S. troops within a few months of taking office.

You might say, what a character that Cheney is.  He's not running for office and he's been well taken care of.  He's just going to tell it like it is.

Well, the only trouble with that is, he isn't telling it like it is.  And the 4,000 fallen heroes, those yet to fall, their loved ones, and the tens of thousands of wounded Americans, including many who are suffering from post traumatic stress disorders and traumatic brain injuries, deserve a better answer.

But by far the strangest comments of the week were those uttered by the apparent Republican nominee, John McCain.  McCain was in Iraq, Jordan and Israel with Senator Lieberman.

First of all, given the poll results mentioned above, it seems strange that McCain, by traveling with Lieberman, and by being in the region at the same time as Cheney, would allow such a hawkish profile of himself to be thus portrayed.

Lieberman, you may recall, said on Face the Nation last June that the United States should consider attacking Iran.

The position that McCain seems to be taking might be compared to someone walking the plank of an old pirate ship. It appears to be a doomsday scenario for the candidate, unless, of course, there happens to be an international crisis that he might be perceived to be best qualified to handle.

Much of his trip, in fact, did involve Iran bashing, and that brings us back to the subject of his strange comment.

Speaking in Jordan, he charged that Iran was taking al Qaeda personnel into Iran for training and then transporting them back to Iraq. He said it more than once, and on more than one occasion, until Lieberman finally leaned over and suggested he describe the trainees as insurgents, not al Qaeda operatives.

McCain corrected himself, but subsequently, his office released a statement that claimed Iran was training insurgents and members of al Qaeda.

For a man who may be on the threshold of the White House, this was an amazing blunder or, actually, series of blunders.

Iran is a Shiite nation. Al Qaeda is a Sunni organization. The Shiites and the Sunnis have been antagonists, more or less, for over one thousand years. Today, in Iraq, al Qaeda has been involved in perpetrating most of the major terrorist attacks that have occurred over the past few years, and the victims of such violence have been the Shiites.

In a contrarian article entitled "The Iran Smokescreen," published here on Gather on July 18, 2007, I included a list of the 14 most destructive terrorist attacks within Iraq, as reported by the Associated Press. No less than 13 of the 14 attacks were considered to have been made by Sunnis, with extensive Shiite victims in each case. The other attack involved the Kurds.

The Shiite nation of Iran would never, under the sun, consider, for one second, training al Qaeda operatives so they could then go back into Iraq and kill Shiites.

Lieberman corrected McCain because he knew that anyone with even a little understanding of the Middle East would recognize the candidate's statement to be inaccurate.

A Newsweek correspondent who travels with McCain said on MSNBC that McCain was lax on detail and that the press corps was generously tolerant of the mistakes he would typically make every ten days or so.

Be that as it may, and with all due respect for the man as a bonafide war hero, this cannot be excused as a simple case of inattention to detail.

The situation suggests that he lacks a basic understanding of the Middle East.  Being keenly aware of the relationships between the factions in the region is essential to dealing with the problems.

Furthermore, as I have suggested numerous times in numerous articles on Iraq, the real question is not what Iran may or may not be doing, but, rather, who is arming the much more dangerous Sunnis who make up al Qaeda.

There are five Sunni nations bordering on Iraq.  However, the source of the Sunni support is likely to be coming from one or more of just three of them, Saudi Arabia, Syria and/or Jordan.

It is baffling that the Bush administration and John McCain have never once raised this question.

In any event, it seems that the above comments by Bush, Cheney and McCain may have made for one of the strangest weeks, arguably, in the annals of this country's leading political personalities.

Dave McGill, News Correspondent

Dave's column, "The Contrarian," generally published every Friday, to Gather Essentials: News will sometimes present a contrary view to various aspects of the news, or an alternate take on the conventional wisdom of the day, and will occasionally also appear on other days of the week

Dave has been a senior officer of a large eastern insurance company, involved in economic projections and investment strategy, president of a Midwestern mortgage banking company, and a financial consultant in Southern California, serving clients in the field of commercial real estate development

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