PROVIDENCE / Updated 9:30 a.m. -- Terrorist threats! Suicide
bombs! This war had turned very disturbing, the man fumed.
America's great soldiers -- "they did not sign up for this."
His comments were addressed to Andrea Mitchell, the chief foreign
affairs correspondent for NBC News, who spoke at Brown University
yesterday. She responded that this citizen's question could be a big
one: Just what did the troops sign up for?
Mitchell, keynote speaker at the 23rd Brown University/Providence
Journal Public Affairs Conference, said that the Bush administration
will be called upon to answer: What was the war game? What was the
mission? Were people in the field not adequately prepared for what they
faced in the field?
The possibility that the architects of the war misjudged their foes
comes from the field itself. The commander of the ground war, Lt. Gen.
William S. Wallace, told The Washington Post and The New York Times last
week: "The enemy we're fighting against is different from the one we'd
war-gamed against."
Intricacies in wartime are elusive, Mitchell said. The Bush
administration has the ability to "control information," in a way that
Mitchell -- who covered the Reagan Cabinet -- said she has "not seen
previously in the White House." There is "a premium on loyalty to George
Bush."
Mitchell said the tight grip on information makes it difficult for
reporters to "separate spin from fact." Sources she's had for 20 years
will tell her what they think, and she'll wonder how much of it is
accurate, and what they want her to say so it "blows back around" to the
nation. Watching that she does not become a "propaganda tool" for the
U.S. government is a challenge unlike any she has previously encountered
as a journalist, she said.
Mitchell was this year's recipient of Brown's Welles Hangen Award for
Distinguished Journalism, named for the Brown graduate and journalist,
who was killed while reporting in Vietnam in 1970.
Mitchell described how after 9/11, Saddam Hussein was moved up on Mr.
Bush's priority-list of problems. After Afghanistan, she said, Mr. Bush
decided, "Saddam would be next."
Sept. 11 changed Bush's mindset about the risk of weapons being in the
hands of a terrorist, she said.
In July, she said, after Afghanistan reached the point of control,
National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice told an administrator who was
discussing how to deal with Iraq: "Don't waste your breath; that
decision has already been made."
Mitchell said that Mr. Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell saw
success at the United Nations, with their 15-0 Security Council vote to
force Iraq to disarm, but that the resolution was "ambiguous." To French
President Jacques Chirac, for one, it did not mean war.
Mitchell said that the U.N. weapons inspection team was weak and "eager
to please all sides."
As the war moved into the Senate, Mitchell said, she kept waiting for
debate, the kind of "push-pull" she saw in the first Gulf War. It never
came, she said.
"Everyone was afraid to challenge this popular president," she said.
Mitchell said she doesn't think the war is about Iraq's oil, but she
said oil "is a major part of the calculus of this decision, as
administration officials will privately admit." Their idea is not to
make a power grab for oil, but to ensure security of the world's energy
supplies, she said
After Mitchell's speech, the audience filtered out, buzzing.
". . . France in 1936 . . . ," said one man outside.
"There is no comparison between Hussein and Hitler," came a response.
Michael Hammerschlag, a Providence resident, stopped outside to talk to
U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, who supported the war. Do you really
support this? Do you argue with your father over this? (Sen. Edward M.
Kennedy is opposed to the war.)
Kennedy answered yes, to both questions.
"This is a white whale," Hammerschlag said, comparing Mr. Bush to the
obsessed Ahab in Moby Dick. "This is Bush's white whale."
Kennedy said that Mr. Bush had "totally botched diplomacy." But, he
added, Saddam was deadly, and had been skimming billions off the
oil-for-food program. That kind of money could buy "some pretty bad
stuff."
"If you can imagine the Middle East, already disturbed," Kennedy said,
voice rising, "with nuclear weapons . . . . we are this far from the end
of civilization as we know it."
Where are the weapons? Hammerschlag asked. "He doesn't have them!"
"You don't know that!" Kennedy said.
The conference, "A Time of Great Consequence: America and the World,"
continues today at 6:30 p.m. at Brown's Salomon Center for Teaching.
The speaker will be Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson
School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and
president of the American Society of International Law. The topic will
be: "Human Rights and Human Security."
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report incorrectly spelled
the name of Michael Hammerschlag of Providence.
