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.''