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Richard Cohen

Thursday, July 10th, 2003

The Bush White House is run on a business model. The President is the CEO. He delegates to others. It therefore should come as no surprise that President Bush is doing what other CEOs do when they get into trouble. In his case, he's "restated" his reasons for going to war.

Corporations do this all the time. If a profit of, say, $2.8 billion turns out to be a loss of a similar amount on account of unanticipated developments (corruption, greed and the demands of mistresses), the figure merely gets "restated." In the same way, the President recently restated some of the reasons for invading Iraq. The White House the other day restated its insistence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from the West African nation of Niger. It turned out the supporting documents had been forged. The White House admitted that in a press release left behind after Bush had departed for Africa.

Similarly, the accusation that Iraq was purchasing high-strength aluminum tubes that Bush said were "used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons" has to be restated.

As for the charge that Iraq was bristling with other weapons of mass destruction, none have yet been found, raising the possibility that this, too, will be restated and the Bush administration will take a one-time charge against future credibility.

In fact, should we - the stockholders - look back at the original business plan for the proposed Bush administration, we will find that almost everything has been restated. During the campaign, Bush said he would not go in for peacekeeping operations abroad. He appears ready to do so in Liberia. He also said he would not get engaged in the nitty-gritty of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. The administration is now choosing intersections in Gaza for traffic lights.

Restatement follows restatement until we stockholders have no choice but to conclude that either the administration didn't know what it was talking about when it came into office or does not know what it is talking about now.

The Bush administration's interim business plan called for the capture or killing of Osama Bin Laden. This now has to be restated. Similarly, the proclaimed determination to rid the world of Saddam Hussein has not succeeded. As with Bin Laden, this failure will be restated as not being all that important. You learn this sort of thing in business school.

In fact, the entire business plan for Iraq has to be restated. It turns out that the country simply will not govern itself, that some elements resent the U.S. occupation and that it will take more troops to administer the country than originally thought. In some way, this abject failure to plan for an occupation - despite repeated warnings - will have to be creatively restated. To paraphrase the President, bring on the restatement.

The dangers of an immense budget deficit have been restated. Rising unemployment has been restated to blame the Clinton administration. The critical importance of relations with Mexico has been restated.

The reasons for going to war in Iraq have been restated. Now they are to rid that country of Saddam and establish the predicates for a Middle East peace. I like them both.

Still, all these restatements suggest a business plan that was both flawed from the start and implemented with an appalling level of incompetence. Despite that, the CEO of this mismanaged operation is not held accountable and remains popular with the shareholders. It used to be that the buck stopped with the President. To state the obvious, that's been restated.

Richard Cohen, a syndicated columnist for the Washinton Post, is a graduate of Far Rockaway High School and attended Hunter, NYU and Columbia. He was a four-time honorable-mention winner in Pulitzer Prize competitions (he doesn't know if that's a record, but says it's his personal best). Cohen splits his time between Washington D.C. and New York City.