WHITE HOUSE OF HORRORS

[Guest guest]

White House of Horrors

 

by MAUREEN DOWD

The New York Times

October 28, 2004

 

Dick Cheney peaked too soon. We've still got a few days left until

Halloween.

 

It was scary enough when we thought the vice president had created his

own reality for spin purposes. But if he actually believes that Iraq

is

" a remarkable success story,'' it's downright spooky. He's already got

his persona for Sunday: he's the mad scientist in the haunted mansion,

fiddling with test tubes to force the world to conform to his twisted

vision.

 

After 9/11, Mr. Cheney swirled his big black cape and hunkered down in

his undisclosed dungeon, reading books about smallpox and plague and

worst-case terrorist scenarios. His ghoulish imagination ran wild, and

he dragged the untested president and jittery country into his house

of

horrors, painting a gory picture of how Iraq could let fearsome

munitions fall into the hands of evildoers.

 

He yanked America into war to preclude that chilling bloodbath. But

in a

spine-tingling switch, the administration's misbegotten invasion of

Iraq

has let fearsome munitions fall into the hands of evildoers. It's also

forged the links between Al Qaeda and the Sunni Baathists that Mr.

Cheney and his crazy-eyed Igors at the Pentagon had fantasized about

to

justify their hunger to remake the Middle East.

 

It's often seen in scary movies: you play God to create something in

your own image, and the monster you make ends up coming after you.

 

Determined to throw a good scare into the Arab world, the vice

president

ended up scaring up the swarm of jihadist evil spirits he had

conjured,

like the overreaching sorcerer in " Fantasia. " The Pentagon bungled the

occupation so badly, it caused the insurgency to grow like the Blob.

 

Just as Catherine Deneuve had bizarre hallucinations in the horror

classic " Repulsion,'' Mr. Cheney and the neocons were in a deranged

ideological psychosis, obsessing about imaginary weapons while

allowing

enemies to spirit the real ones away.

 

The officials charged with protecting us set off so many false alarms

that they ignored all the real ones.

 

President Bush is like one of the blissfully ignorant teenagers in

" Friday the 13th'' movies, spouting slogans like " Freedom is on the

march'' while Freddy Krueger is in the closet, ready to claw his skin

off.

 

Mr. Bush ignored his own experts' warnings that Osama bin Laden

planned

to attack inside the U.S., that an invasion of Iraq could create a

toxic

partnership between outside terrorists and Baathists and create

sympathy

for them across the Islamic world, that Donald Rumsfeld was planning a

war and occupation without enough troops, that Saddam's aluminum tubes

were not for nuclear purposes, that U.S. troops should safeguard 380

tons of sealed explosives that could bring down planes and buildings,

and that, after the invasion, Iraq could erupt into civil war.

 

And, of course, the president ignored Colin Powell's Pottery Barn

warning: if you break it, you own it.

 

Their Iraqi puppet, Ayad Allawi, turned on Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush

this

week, in a scene right out of " Chucky.'' Mr. Allawi accused coalition

forces of " major negligence'' for not protecting the unarmed Iraqi

National Guard trainees who were slaughtered by insurgents wearing

Iraqi

police uniforms. Iraqi recruits are getting killed so fast we can't

even

pretend that we're going to turn the country over to them.

 

If you really want to be chilled to the bone this Halloween, listen to

what Peter W. Galbraith, a former diplomat who helped advance the case

for an Iraq invasion at the request of Paul Wolfowitz, said in a

column

yesterday in The Boston Globe.

 

He said he'd told Mr. Wolfowitz about " the catastrophic aftermath of

the

invasion, the unchecked looting of every public institution in

Baghdad,

the devastation of Iraq's cultural heritage, the anger of ordinary

Iraqis who couldn't understand why the world's only superpower was

letting this happen.'' He told Mr. Wolfowitz that mobs were looting

Iraqi labs of live H.I.V. and black fever viruses and making off with

barrels of yellowcake.

 

" Even after my briefing, the Pentagon leaders did nothing to safeguard

Iraq's nuclear sites,'' he said.

 

In his column, Mr. Galbraith said weapons looted from the arms site

called Al Qaqaa might have wound up in Iran, which could obviously use

them to pursue nuclear weapons.

 

In April 2003 in Baghdad, he said, he told a young U.S. lieutenant

stationed across the street that H.I.V. and black fever viruses had

just

been looted. The soldier had been devastated and said, " I hope I'm not

responsible for Armageddon.''

 

Too bad that never occurred to Dr. Cheneystein.