'It's Not Just About Iraq'

"And if Jack Murtha is successful in persuading the country that somehow we should withdraw now from Iraq, then you have to ask what happens to all of those people who've signed up with the United States, who are on our side in this fight against the radical extremist Islamic types of bin Laden and al Qaeda. What happens to the 12 million Iraqis who went to the polls last December and voted in spite of the assassins and the car bombers? What happens to the quarter of a million Iraqis who've gotten into the fight to take on the terrorists? The worst possible thing we could do is what the Democrats are suggesting. And no matter how you carve it, you can call it anything you want, but basically it is packing it in, going home, persuading and convincing and validating the theory that the Americans don't have the stomach for this fight."

Unreality Check

I've written repeatedly about the White House's apparent lack of a realistic sense of what's going on in Iraq. (See, most recently, my May 24 column .)

Cheney's powerful disquisition to CNN offers an insight into why that might be. In Cheney's mind, the U.S. role in Iraq is fundamentally part of a global chess game -- not a troubled, bloody occupation. And in his mind it's still a war with extremist Islamic terrorists -- when instead, as is increasingly obvious, U.S. troops are largely fighting and dying in battles with Iraqis opposed to U.S. occupation, and a sectarian civil war is breaking out all around them.

And hey, don't just take my word for it. White House spokesman Tony Snow agrees with me that the battle in Iraq is not, by and large, with extremist Islamic militants anymore.

In defense of Cheney's widely-mocked claim a year ago that the Iraq insurgency was in its "last throes," Snow on May 31 said as much.

"I don't want to try to back-interpret what the Vice President said," Snow said. "But let me just offer at least one view on it, which is, for a long time, when we talked about insurgency -- that is, 'we,' generally, Americans -- we thought of al Qaeda. And I think it's pretty safe to say that the al Qaeda and the foreign fighters remnant presence in Iraq has been dramatically reduced, such that, at least, in the opinions of people there, it is no longer the major factor when it comes to what's going on. Now you do have former members of the Saddam regime and you do have Iraqi citizens who are in entrenched opposition and are using terror and other tactics to try to derail democracy."

What's It All About?

In a review of Suskind's book in Salon, Gary Kamiya offers this context and perspective: "Many reasons have been advanced for why Bush decided to attack Iraq, a third-rate Arab dictatorship that posed no threat to the United States. Some have argued that Bush and Cheney, old oilmen, wanted to get their hands on Iraq's oil. Others have posited that the neoconservative civilians in the Pentagon, [Paul] Wolfowitz and [Douglas] Feith, and their offstage guru Richard Perle, were driven by their passionate attachment to Israel. Suskind does not address these arguments, and his own thesis does not rule them out as contributing causes. But he argues persuasively that the war, above all, was a 'global experiment in behaviorism': If the U.S. simply hit misbehaving actors in the face again and again, they would eventually change their behavior.

" 'The primary impetus for invading Iraq, according to those attending NSC briefings on the Gulf in this period, was to create a demonstration model to guide the behavior of anyone with the temerity to acquire destructive weapons or, in any way, flout the authority of the United States.' This doctrine had been enunciated during the administration's first week by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, who had written a memo arguing that America must come up with strategies to 'dissuade nations abroad from challenging' America. Saddam was chosen simply because he was available, and the Wolfowitz-Feith wing was convinced he was an easy target.

"The choice to go to war, Suskind argues, was a 'default' -- a fallback, driven by the 'realization that the American mainland is indefensible.' America couldn't really do anything -- so Bush and Cheney decided they had to do something. And they decided to do this something, to attack Iraq, because after 9/11 Cheney embraced the radical doctrine found in the title of Suskind's book. 'If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response,' Suskind quotes Cheney as saying. And then Cheney went on to utter the lines that can be said to define the Bush presidency: 'It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence. It's about our response.' "

And if you subscribe to that theory -- that invading Iraq was fundamentally a way of delivering a message about U.S. power -- you can see why anything short of absolute victory would be so unpalatable.

Cheney on North Korea

Cheney also weighed in with some surprisingly tension-reducing talk on North Korea. As Reuters reports, "Cheney called North Korea's missile capabilities 'fairly rudimentary' on Thursday despite fears Pyongyang is preparing a test launch of a weapon that could reach the United States."

Libby Watch

Cheney refused to answer King's questions about his indicted former chief of staff, Scooter Libby -- though the vice president did acknowledge that he may be called as a witness in Libby's trial.