The sixth of 20 excerpts from "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq" by Thomas Ricks regarding President Bush's May 1, 2003 "Mission Accomplished" speech aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln: In both image and word that day, what Bush did was tear down the goalposts at haltime in the game. But even as he spoke it was becoming clear on the ground that contrary to the official expectation the stockpiles of WMD weren't going to be found. The poor intelligence on WMD would continue to haunt troops in the field -- and, arguably, helped arm and protect the insurgency that would emerge in the following months. In bunkers across Iraq there were tens of thousands of tons of conventional weaponry -- mortar shells, RPGs, rifle ammunition, explosives, and so on. . . . Yet U.S. commanders rolling into Iraq refrained from detonating those bunkers for fear that they also contained stockpiles of poison gas or other weaponry that might be blown into the air and kill U.S. soldiers or Iraqi civilians. . . .
When Pentagon officials refused to acknowledge the realities of Iraq, the opportunity to take hold of the situation slipped between the fingers of the Americans. In military terms, in April and May, the U.S. military lost the initiative -- that is, it stopped being the side in the conflict that was driving events, acting at the time and place of its choosing.
© 2006, Thomas E. Ricks. All rights reserved.
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