Gibbons warned against Iraq war, now defends it

By J. Patrick Coolican

Monday, Sept. 4, 2006 | 7:43 a.m.

During the 1990s, Rep. Jim Gibbons offered some extraordinarily prescient warnings about any U.S. attempt to invade and occupy Iraq.

"You don't want to invite yourself into an internal struggle of an Arab nation that has gone on for centuries," the Reno Republican said during his first campaign for the House of Representatives in 1996.

Gibbons later said religious factions had been quarreling in Iraq for generations and that then-President Bill Clinton would be foolish to thrust the U.S. into a civil war.

In the '90s, Gibbons, now the Republican nominee for governor, warned of a power vacuum if Saddam Hussein was deposed, and said Iran or Syria would quickly fill the vacuum.

Now, a decade later, Shiite militias torture and murder Sunnis, and Sunnis blow themselves up in Shiite marketplaces. More than 3,400 Iraqi civilians died in sectarian violence in the month of July alone.

With a Shiite government in place in Iraq, most observers believe Iran, which is ruled by Shiite clerics, is a stronger player in the region.

In other words, Gibbons was dead-on right.

Curiously, however, he's hesitant to take credit for his starkly accurate warnings.

Perhaps that's because after President Bush began selling his case for war with images of a mushroom cloud, Gibbons jumped on board and has supported the Bush administration ever since.

When reminded during an interview of his statements from the '90s, Gibbons, a veteran of the first Persian Gulf war, laughed and said, "I guess my crystal ball was better than most."

And yet, he refused to criticize Bush or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for failing to prepare for a lengthy sectarian war between Shiites and Sunnis, which many experts are now calling a civil war.

"With 20-20 hindsight, we can say more troops should have been put in place. We can all second-guess everything in our lives," he said.

In the interview, Gibbons interspersed continued support for the mission in Iraq with doses of realism from his thinking back in the '90s.

"There is a light at the end of the tunnel," he said, echoing a common - and often ridiculed - refrain heard during the Vietnam War.

But he added: "I'm not sure they can stop the deep-rooted, centuries-old conflict between Shiites and Sunnis. This is not unique to Iraq, and this has gone on since the beginning of Islam."

Wasn't that the warning he delivered in the '90s? Shouldn't his foresight have been heeded?

"Like I said, 20-20 hindsight is a miraculous tool," he said.