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Wrong-Way BushIn the war on terror, the worst defense is a bad offense.

By William Saletan
Posted Thursday, Sept. 9, 2004, at 6:42 PM ET
Tricky Dick

Seventy-five years ago in the Rose Bowl, a University of California football player named Roy Riegels picked up a fumble by the opposing team, spun around, and started running for the end zone. Unfortunately, he was heading the wrong way. He ran with such purpose that people in the stands, including the play-by-play announcer, doubted their own sanity. When a teammate tried to stop him, Riegels—who would go down in history as "Wrong-Way Riegels"—shook him off. He was a man on a mission.

This is what's now happening in Iraq and the presidential campaign. President Bush and Vice President Cheney are framing the election as a choice between playing "defense" and going on "offense" in the war on terror. The attacks of 9/11 presented the United States with a grave new challenge. Bush picked up this football and started running with it—toward Iraq. But Iraq wasn't among the states closely linked to 9/11 or al-Qaida. Nor did it have the weapons of mass destruction Bush advertised. We've spent more than 1,000 American lives and close to $200 billion running the wrong way.

Here's how Cheney put the argument three days ago:

We also have gone on the offense on the war on terror. But the President's opponent even seems to object to that. Senator Kerry has even said that by using our strength, we are creating terrorists and placing ourselves in greater danger. But that is a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the world we live in works. Terrorist attacks are not caused by the use of strength. They are invited by the perception of weakness.

And here's how Bush put it a week earlier:

We have a difference of opinion on the enemy, it seems. My opponent said that going to war with the terrorists is actually improving their recruiting efforts. The logic is upside-down. I think it shows a misunderstanding of the enemy. See, during the 1990's, the terrorists were recruiting and training for war with us long before we went to war with them. They don't need an excuse for their hatred. It is wrong to blame this country for staying on the offense. See, we don't create enemies and terrorists by fighting back; we defeat the terrorists by fighting back.

Those two quotes encapsulate the central question of this election. In the Bush-Cheney worldview, all foreign adversaries blur into one: "the enemy." All U.S. options simplify to two: "offense" or "defense." Going on offense shows "strength" and defeats the enemy. If the president starts running with the ball, and you criticize him, you show "weakness" and invite terrorism.

But what if there's more than one enemy? What if the enemy we're "fighting back" at isn't the one that struck or threatened us? What if the president turns away from the team that was trying to score on us, and he starts heading for another team that's sitting in the stands, behind our own end zone? What if his "offense" is losing yards with every stride?

That's the lesson of three years of investigations. The 9/11 commission has found "no evidence" of "a collaborative operational relationship" between Iraq and al-Qaida. Bush's handpicked chief weapons inspector, David Kay, says there "were no large stockpiles of WMD." What has this diversion done for the war on terror? A year ago, U.S. intelligence officials told reporters that "as much as half of the intelligence and special forces assets in Afghanistan and Pakistan were diverted to support the war in Iraq." While we've been bogged down in Iraq, Iran has revved up its own nuclear program, and North Korea has acquired the fuel for as many as eight nukes.

Bush screwed up. He picked the wrong target. He's been running the wrong way.

Bush says, "The world is a safer place with Saddam Hussein sitting in a prison cell." That's true. Every arrest of a bad guy makes the world safer. But the world is full of bad guys, and we have limited resources. The arrest of Saddam has cost us about $200 billion, absorbed our attention, and forced us to pull American troops from other countries. That means other bad guys have gone unchecked. Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind of the worst attack on the U.S. mainland, remains at large. In North Korea, the world's worst proliferator, Kim Jong-il, has built more nukes. Saddam had no nukes and never attacked the U.S. mainland.

Bush says, "Free societies in the Middle East will be hopeful societies, which no longer feed resentment and breed violence for export." That's true, too. But it will take a lot more time, money, and American casualties to transform Iraq into a free society. It would take still more time and money—and perhaps more casualties—to spread that transformation to the countries that contributed to the 9/11 plot. Even if this were possible, it's a very long and roundabout way of getting to a result that could be addressed more immediately by pursuing the people who struck us on 9/11 or threaten us today.

Is Bin Laden upset that we're spending our time, money, and resources in Iraq? Ask the coach whose team Roy Riegels was playing against in that Rose Bowl. "He's running the wrong way," the coach told his players as Riegels whizzed by. "Let's see how far he can go."

When the president runs the wrong way, the first thing to do is show him the evidence and hope he'll change course. That's what the weapons inspectors and the 9/11 commission tried to do. The evidence that Iraq's WMD programs had decayed to impotence has shaken many people, including me, who originally supported the war. I thought Saddam should be ousted for jerking around the weapons inspectors he accepted as part of the Gulf War cease-fire. I still think so. But that was an international offense and deserved an international response. We shouldn't have made the laziness of France and Russia our problem. Without the WMD, there was no direct threat to the United States and no need for us to punish Saddam now, at the price of so much American blood and treasure, while graver threats to us brewed elsewhere.

But Bush and Cheney refuse to listen. "Knowing what I know today, I would have made the same decision" to invade Iraq, Bush repeated last week. He continues to confuse Saddam with Bin Laden. The choice in Iraq, according to Bush, was, "Do I forget the lessons of September the 11th—trust a madman—or take action to defend America?" Cheney blurs the same distinction. He proposes to remake "places like Iraq and Afghanistan so they never again become breeding grounds for the terrorists that launched those deadly attacks, not only against the United States, but obviously, for the kinds of terrorist attacks that we've seen around the world."

When Roy Riegels was heading the wrong way, one of his teammates chased him and pleaded with him to stop. Riegels blew him off. "Get away from me," he said. "This is my touchdown." So at the 3-yard-line, the teammate did the only thing he could: He grabbed Riegels and held him until Riegels was tackled, 1 yard shy of the end zone.

There isn't much we can do now about the damage the Iraq war has done to our campaigns against al-Qaida and WMD proliferation. But there is something we can do at election time about a president who persists in running the wrong way despite all pleas and evidence: We can tackle him.

The next time Bush or Cheney brags about going on the "offense" in the war on terror, remember Wrong-Way Riegels. Sometimes the worst defense is a bad offense.

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William Saletan is Slate's national correspondent and author of Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War.
Photograph of Vice President Dick Cheney by Robert Galbraith/Reuters.
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Remarks from the Fray:

…Mr. Saletan is absolutely right. You can say that the President's response in the aftermath of September 11 was a positive and appropriate action in the war against terrorism. You could also say the same thing about his preemptive invasion of Iraq. You just cannot make the same claim about both actions because Bush's own words at different times confirm that at some point he turned around and began running in a different direction. Cheney is the teammate who ultimately talks him out of his "mistake" but, in this case, that was before Bush decided to reverse course.

From my perspective, Bush responded bravely and well by snatching up and saving our nation's government from the fumble of September 11. But like Saletan, I hold that with his rushed overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, he began running in the wrong direction and is now on the one-yard line from his re-election. The stakes could not be higher. After all, at least "Wrong-Way Riegels" would have stopped running and released the ball upon reaching the incorrect end zone. Bush shows no signs of relinquishing his hold should we grant him that extra yard this November.

Indeed, he shows every sign of keeping his head down, plowing through the end zone, and running clear out of the stadium. A sign, no doubt, of his determined and strong leadership.

--The_Bell

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