By Bill Forry

First in a two-part report on the Dorchester Congressional dele-gation's reaction to the ongoing war in Iraq.

Ninth District Congressman Stephen F. Lynch, who voted to authorize military action in Iraq in 2002, but has grown more and more critical of the Bush administration's decision to invade and occupy Iraq, hopes to return to the war zone to get a ground-level view of the situation facing American troops. Lynch, in an interview with the Reporter in his South Boston waterfront office last week, blasted Bush's handling of prewar intelligence and warned that the president's re-election campaign is compromising the safety of men and women in the line of fire.

Still, after a week of violence which claimed the lives of more than 70 United States soldiers and Marines, Lynch indicated that he would support sending reinforcements to the region.

"It's becoming clear that the president's decisions are sensitive to the [November] election and that's dangerous," Lynch told the Reporter. "We need to just do what we've got to do. I think the early withdrawal of some of the troops was to get the number down and this establishment of the June 30 date [to transfer power to the Iraqi authorities] was to, perhaps, to get the issue off the political radar screen, to shift the discussion because [Bush] was taking such heavy criticism. My fear is that these decisions will not be in the best interests of the men and women in uniform in Iraq and Kuwait and Afghanistan and that we work some harm on them because of political expedience."

Lynch said that he is convinced that more troops - as many as 10,000 - are needed in Iraq.

"I would like to see some of our allies come up with the extra 10,000 troops and it is telling that these generals who have been standing behind [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, saying this is the number of troops we need, after the last couple of weeks, you had a couple of the generals come forward and say we need 10,000 more. If they're asking for more troops, they need them, no question about it."

Next Steps

Lynch, who visited American troops in Iraq and Kuwait in May of 2003, said that he and a number of his fellow U.S. representatives have asked to return to the region soon to inspect conditions personally.

"There are a lot of members who feel like we need to go back over because we didn't have an accurate picture last time. We're looking for clearance from the State Department to go back in," Lynch told the Reporter.

"When I went over, on the TV there were widespread reports of chaos and lawlessness and all of that and when we got there it was largely under control. Now, we're seeing considerable conflict and the military is admitting that there is significant fire coming from Fallujah and Karbala and other cities west and southwest of Baghdad. They're saying it's isolated. I don't know how you determine that other than by going there. There are certain cities where you can take the temperature of the whole country, and not just Baghdad.

"I think if you spend four or five days over there you can probably get a good sense as to what's going on and talk to our frontline troops over there," Lynch said.

Lynch says that, ideally, he would like to see a NATO-led force take control of the country. But, as two coalition countries - Spain and Honduras - announced imminent withdrawals from Iraq this week, Lynch acknowledged that "internationalizing" the force in Iraq seems increasingly unlikely, especially under the Bush administration. Lynch said a Kerry victory in the fall is the best hope for such a shift.

"I think the situation will be improved, definitely," Lynch told the Reporter. "I don't think there's anywhere to go but up, coming from the Bush administration. I think (Bush) has so damaged his own personal credibility and his administration has been in lock step with him. I think that Kerry would have a much better chance of convincing the allies around the globe that we will be a good partner and that we're no here overreaching.

"The American people are looking for a steady hand and so are our allies in Europe and Asia and around the globe. They're not looking for people in an administration calling people 'Old Europe.' How offensive when you consider that, if someone discounted our importance and our heritage and history. It must have infuriated our international neighbors in Europe. And now they're sitting on their hands and watching us struggle. So I think if John Kerry went in and made a good faith effort to heal those wounds, I think the international community would respond. I think they would to try and strike a new balance.

"I think a lot of our neighbors around the world want us to be out of Iraq, maybe for the wrong reasons. They may see it as a long term grab for oil. They may think it's a military stratagem that wants us to have a solid base in that region. I would think that you'd probably have unanimity to have us out of that region, with the exception maybe of some of the Iraqis who would like us to stay. They're relying on us."

'Less than Accurate'

Lynch, who - like John Kerry - voted in October 2002 to authorize the president to use force in Iraq, came to that decision after several high-level briefings, including one at the White House with Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice. Most persuasive, he said then and now, was a briefing he received from former UN weapons inspection chief David Kaye.

"There are only so many sources that we can go to as members of Congress," Lynch explained last week. "You can go to the White House, we can sit with Condoleeza Rice and [Secretary of State Colin] Powell and [CIA director George] Tenet - which I did on numerous occasions - and hope that the information you're getting is correct. And then you can also go to the previous administration and get the information that they have.

"And, with all due respect to David Kaye, when I sat with him, he did not discourage this sense of urgency that the president was pushing. He reinforced it, quite frankly. I'm a little bit surprised [that] he's saying now that he was given false information. In the meantime, he handed it off to me. I relied on his statements prior to the invasion that this was all the stuff they had....He was very, very precise. He had daily logs of what they found and it was very alarming what they did find in their time there."

Lynch said he was given "less than accurate intelligence," mainly because Bush advisors "relied heavily" on opponents of Saddam Hussein who were living in exile in London for assessments of a post-war Iraq.

"They told us that we would be welcomed as liberators and that the Iraqi people would assume control of their own country," Lynch says. "There was supposed to be sweets and roses for us when we arrived. And that was over-reliance on the Iraqi National Congress. They were not welcomed. They were seen as interlopers and so were we, largely. So I think in part we got faulty information.

"And, I think on the other side, that the administration cherry-picked the information that they caught. That's the charge of George Tenet - that we gave you information and you picked from it to get to your end. I think the bottom line was that they wanted to take out Saddam and that's why they go such support in the Congress.

"Where the fixing came in was that somehow in the time (weapons inspectors) had been out (of Iraq) from 1998 to 2002 that there had been a meaningful effort to reconstitute all those weapons systems," Lynch said.