Why I asked Bush about his mistakes in Iraq

Toby Harnden, who has spent much of the past three years in Iraq, finds the political and media class in Washington alarmingly out of touch with the grim reality of the conflict

Washington

Even on Memorial Day, when the fallen are honoured, it seemed impossible to comprehend the reality of Iraq in what Americans refer to reverentially as ‘our nation’s capital’. A wave of suicide bombs hit Baghdad, killing 40 and wounding dozens more. Among the victims were a CBS News team. A massive explosion killed the cameraman and soundman — both Britons — and left Kimberly Dozier, a familiar, reassuring on-screen face, fighting devastating injuries. The US army captain chaperoning them also died.

In the teeth of a political clamour for troop withdrawals, the Pentagon was announcing that an extra brigade would be moving north from Kuwait to Anbar province, where a full-scale war has been raging almost unabated for the past three years. Over all of this hung the pall of Haditha, as anonymous American officials briefed that murder charges would be brought against a handful of vengeful US marines who allegedly massacred 24 civilians in Anbar last November after one of their own number had been killed by a roadside bomb.

On the Thursday before Memorial Day, in what seemed another world, two altogether more composed US marines in dress uniforms, their white belts gleaming, marched smartly up to a pair of huge oak doors on a corridor off the White House’s East Room and opened them. On cue and in step, the most powerful man in the world and his sidekick strode towards the world’s press. In his preamble, Bush alluded to errors over Iraq. His chastened tone was startlingly different from the swaggering confidence I had seen in 2003 at the end of my last stint in Washington. Having spent significant chunks of the intervening three years in places like Baghdad, Tikrit, Fallujah and Ramadi watching the mirage of a new Iraq seemingly disappearing in a bloody mist, I was aching to learn just what he thought had been got wrong.

Squeezing a question in at such press conferences is not easy. Invariably, on these occasions, the American reporters arrange with the White House who will pipe up and in what order. When it comes to the Brits, it’s always the big beasts of broadcasting who go first. But this, I sensed, was a rare chance. Hardly any journalists had made the trip from London because Tony Blair had chosen to travel on a plane so conveniently small that it could not accommodate the fourth estate. There would thus be time for at least one newspaper reporter to ask a question.

My opportunity came at the end. As Blair hesitated and half looked at me, I grabbed the microphone from a White House aide. ‘Mr President, you spoke about mis-steps and mistakes in Iraq,’ I said. ‘Could I ask both of you which missteps and mistakes of your own you most regret?’ The answers I got were to dominate the world headlines for the next 24 hours and beyond.

Although clearly irked, Bush — looking me dead in the eyes — explained that he regretted his Wild West rhetoric of ‘bring it on’ and ‘wanted dead or alive’. He had learnt ‘some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner’. America’s ‘biggest mistake’, he said, had been the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.

For his part, Blair said that deBaathification had been crudely implemented and then offered a startling though abstract enough to be ignored by much of the press afterwards — admission: ‘We were always going to have to be prepared for the fall of Saddam not to be the rise of a democratic Iraq.’ I have little doubt that Bush’s aides had prepared him for a question such as mine. With the US military death toll inexorably approaching 2,500, a civil war looming and the President’s popularity rating hovering around 30 per cent, to pretend that everything was just hunky-dory would simply make him appear as out of touch as his father seemed in 1992. Americans, moreover, love a confession — Bill Clinton being the best political exponent. On the face of it, Bush made a pretty good fist of feeling the nation’s pain.

He also made a decent stab at answering my question. But these sessions are always tricky, not least for reporters. My attempting something a little too complicated a few years back led to Robin Cook fixing me with a cock-eyed stare and a withering, ‘I’m not quite sure I follow your syntax.’ An overly aggressive or impertinent question can provoke an injudicious response, but the journalist often attracts opprobrium. When I asked Mo Mowlam, on the eve of her Cabinet departure, how she felt about her spectacular fall from grace, her aide interrupted me by shouting, ‘Disgraceful!’ Furthermore, long questions seldom get good answers, because a politician has more scope to dodge. Vanity questions designed to make the journalist look clever or erudite invariably leave them looking pompous.

This is not, however, a consideration that bothers the great and the good of America’s White House press corps. Dressed immaculately, their three-part questions honed and polished, these are men and women who are seldom accused of failing to take themselves or their calling seriously enough.

The high seriousness of American journalism is reflected in a plaque in Washington’s National Press Club. It outlines the American Journalists’ Creed, by which their work ‘fears God and honours man ... is profoundly patriotic while sincerely promoting international good will and cementing world-comradeship, is a journalism of humanity, of and for today’s world’. No doubt many in the East Room could have recited the whole thing by heart.

At the press conference they were separated from the small collection of slightly grubby and somewhat grumpy British hacks (security honchos had dictated we pitch up three hours early). There was a dividing aisle between us and our illustrious American counterparts — as if our jaded cynicism might contaminate their noble principles. Still, the White House had very generously allowed the Brits 50 per cent of the questions, and that meant I was able to get my 15 seconds of fame.

In the past, Bush had been unwilling to address the issue of mistakes, never apologising, never explaining, but as mea culpas go, his performance last week was thin on substance. Bush regretted (there was in fact no apology) his cowboy style rather than any policy decision. Few, of course, would hold Bush responsible for Abu Ghraib, disgraceful as it was, except in the most tenuously indirect sense. The messianic belief that Bush and Blair have in the moral rectitude of their Iraq project was as intense as ever as they stood together. Bush’s contrite tone might ultimately serve only to unnerve those who previously admired his resoluteness — a quality that for many Americans trumps almost anything else in a war leader.

Yet even if the tactic buys Bush a few percentage points in the polls, a lot more will be needed from him if he is to prevent a disastrous showing for his Republican party in November’s mid-terms. The loss of either or both Houses of Congress would render him a lame duck snared in a trap.

But the Iraq situation is desperate, and this was rammed home to me by Major General John Batiste, a distinguished combat commander of the US army’s 1st Infantry Division in Iraq until 2005. The last time I had seen him had been in Kirkuk just before last January’s Iraqi elections — prematurely hyped (like the votes since) as an historic turning point. Having turned down promotion and retired in disgust over Iraq, in recent weeks he has become a potent critic of Donald Rumsfeld, Mr Bush’s cocksure Pentagon chief.

‘I’m as mad as hell,’ he told me over a coffee on Capitol Hill. The shortage of boots on the ground ‘by a factor of twoand-a-half to three’ meant that during his year in Iraq he had to ‘lend’ his troops to other sectors, leaving dangerous gaps and wrecking painstakingly achieved progress. ‘When you pull a battalion commander out of his zone, you can hear the sucking chest wound,’ he said. ‘His guys are gone and guess what — the insurgents see that and they immediately move in.’ Lack of protection on Humvees was such a ‘big problem’ that he had to take DIY measures. ‘We took advantage of any number of Iraqi Arab and Kurdish workshops to fashion our own armour.’ His voice breaking, this lifelong Republican, 9/11 Pentagon survivor and loyal military man explained how mismanagement of the war had led to the futile deaths of brave soldiers under his command.

As I reflected on General Batiste’s words, the Beltway analysis of Bush’s answer to my question seemed so much blather. In the view of some network commentators, Bush’s response was a slick move that could boost his ratings. Others believed that it would give his opponents heart while demoralising his core supporters. Most said he had appeared sincerely contrite. A few branded it pure politics.

In the twisted logic of 24-hour television news and celebrity correspondents, the fact that Dozier has been critically injured puts more pressure on the White House than the deaths of a few dozen soldiers. Out in Iraq, however, coalition troops and — in far greater numbers — Iraqi civilians are continuing to die. And at this juncture it is likely that almost nothing Bush or Blair can say about it, whether gung-ho or apologetic, will make any difference.

Toby Harnden is the Washington bureau chief of the Sunday Telegraph.