The mountain undermined

Vice President Dick Cheney’s surprise visit to the troops in Iraq Sunday was supposed to be a heartwarming precede to President Bush’s upbeat message to the nation from the Oval Office. It had the effect of undercutting the president.

Bush told the nation, ‘‘Our forces in Iraq are on the road to victory.’’

But a few hours earlier, soldiers asked Cheney for his 2006 Rand McNally Road-To-Victory Atlas.

‘‘From our perspective, we don’t see much as far as gains,’’ Marine Corporal Bradley Warren said to Cheney in a round-table discussion. ‘‘We’re looking at small-picture stuff, not many gains. I was wondering what it looks like from the big side of the mountain — how’s Iraq looking.’’

Back at the Oval Office, Bush told Americans, ‘‘I have never been more certain that America’s actions in Iraq are essential to the security of our citizens and will lay the foundation of peace for our children and grandchildren.’’

A few hours earlier in Iraq, Corporal R.P. Zapella asked Cheney, ‘‘Sir, what are the benefits of doing all this work to get Iraq on its feet?’’

Back at the Oval Office, Bush said, ‘‘Our troops in the field, who bear the burden and make the sacrifice, do not believe that America has lost.’’

In Iraq, the men and women who risk their lives to move the mountain for Bush and Cheney cannot see the gains, cannot see the benefits and cannot see the other side of that mountain. They ask if the administration is lost.

A year ago, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was in Kuwait to speak to troops who were about to go to Iraq. Rumsfeld, like Bush and Cheney, tried to imbue the troops with a sweeping historical purpose. He related Pearl Harbor and the crumbling of the Berlin Wall to elections in Ukraine and Afghanistan. Rumsfeld cited Franklin Roosevelt’s address of December 8, 1941 to say that in Iraq, like World War II, we ‘‘will make it very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.’’

The endangerment of treachery was less on the minds of the troops than the endangerment of incompetence. Soldier Thomas Wilson asked Rumsfeld, ‘‘Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromise ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles and why don’t we have those resources readily available to us?’’

Rumsfeld asked Wilson to repeat the question. Wilson was more graphic. He said that ever since the war started, ‘‘Our vehicles are not armored. We’re digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that’s already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat.’’

That resulted in Rumsfeld’s famous, unfeeling answer, ‘‘As you know, you go to war with the Army you have.’’

As loyal, dedicated and sacrificing as the soldiers are, these questions make you wonder if they are weary of the White House commanders they have. After all, nothing Cheney claimed before the war has come to pass, from ‘‘we will be greeted as liberators,’’ to ‘‘there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,’’ to ‘‘we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.’’

Yet the same Cheney keeps reconstituting his choice lines for the troops. He repeated his line that Iraq was the ‘‘central front’’ in the war on terror despite there being no tie between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. He said, ‘‘The terrorists understand what is at stake in Iraq. That is why they commit acts of random war calculated to shock and intimidate the civilized world.’’

Then he said something that a vice president with five military deferments probably should not have said. ‘‘We know how tough your work really is,’’ Cheney said, ‘‘and we know how tough a person it takes to get the job done right — tough enough to wear heavy armor when the thermometer hits 125; to work seven days a week, often 14, 16, 18 hours a day. Americans are not the kind of people to take our military for granted. We’re a democracy, defended by volunteers who deserve all the tools and all the support we can possibly provide.’’

A year ago, Rumsfeld was asked about the tools. On Sunday, Cheney was asked for his road atlas to victory. The thermometer of the soldiers appears to be climbing above 125. It is not from the body armor. They wonder more and more if the invasion and occupation was a random act.

Derrick Z. Jackson’s e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.