| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat May 14, 2005 5:39 pm Post subject: British Intelligence Warned of Iraq War |
| British Intelligence Warned of Iraq War
By Walter Pincus
The Washington Post
Friday 13 May 2005
Blair was told of White House's determination to use military against Hussein.
Seven months before the invasion of Iraq, the head of British foreign intelligence reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair that President Bush wanted to topple Saddam Hussein by military action and warned that in Washington intelligence was "being fixed around the policy," according to notes of a July 23, 2002, meeting with Blair at No. 10 Downing Street.
"Military action was now seen as inevitable," said the notes, summarizing a report by Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, British intelligence, who had just returned from consultations in Washington along with other senior British officials. Dearlove went on, "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
"The case was thin," summarized the notes taken by a British national security aide at the meeting. "Saddam was not threatening his neighbours and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."
The notes were first disclosed last week by the Sunday Times of London, triggering criticism of Blair on the eve of the May 5 British parliamentary elections that he had decided to support an invasion of Iraq well before informing the public of his views.
The notes of the Blair meeting, attended by the prime minister's senior national security team, also disclose for the first time that Britain's intelligence boss believed that Bush had decided to go to war in mid-2002, and that he believed U.S. policymakers were trying to use the limited intelligence they had to make the Iraqi leader appear to be a bigger threat than was supported by known facts.
Although critics of the Iraq war have accused Bush and his top aides of misusing what has since been shown as limited intelligence in the prewar period, Bush's critics have been unsuccessful in getting an investigation of that matter.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has dropped its previous plan to review how U.S. policymakers used Iraq intelligence, and the president's commission on intelligence did not look into the subject because it was not authorized to do so by its charter, Laurence H. Silberman, the co-chairman, told reporters last month.
The British Butler Commission, which last year reviewed that country's intelligence performance on Iraq, also studied how that material was used by the Blair government. The panel concluded that Blair's speeches and a published dossier on Iraq used language that left "the impression that there was fuller and firmer intelligence than was the case," according to the Butler report.
It described the July 23 meeting as coming at a "key stage" in preparation for taking action against Iraq but described it primarily as a session at which Blair favored reengagement of U.N. inspectors against a background of intelligence that Hussein would not accept them unless "the threat of military action were real."
During the July 2002 time frame, Bush was working to build support in the United States for a war against Hussein, while a U.S. base in Qatar was being expanded and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was trying to get Turkey to assist in potential military action against the Iraqi leader.
A spokesman for the British Embassy in Washington said he would not comment on the substance of the document.
Blair's senior advisers at the July 2002 session decided they would prepare an "ultimatum" for Iraq to permit U.N. inspectors to return, despite being told that Bush's National Security Council, then headed by Condoleezza Rice, "had no patience with the U.N. route," according to the notes. "The prime minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the U.N. inspectors."
Although Dearlove reported that the NSC had "no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record," the Blair team soon set in motion preparation of the public dossier on Iraq, which was published in late September 2002.
Another piece of the British memo has relevance now, as the United States battles an insurgency that some say was exacerbated by faulty planning for the post-invasion period. "There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action," the notes say, without attributing that directly to Dearlove.
The "U.S. has already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime," the British defense secretary reported, according to the notes. Although no final decision had been made, "he thought the most likely timing in U.S. minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the U.S. congressional elections."
As it finally worked out, the Bush administration's public campaign for supporting a possible invasion of Iraq began the next month, in late August, with speeches by Vice President Cheney, followed by a late October vote in Congress to grant the president authority to use force if necessary. Later in October, the British and the Americans introduced their resolution on Iraq in the U.N. Security Council and it passed in early November, shortly after the Nov. 2 elections. | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat May 14, 2005 5:50 pm Post subject: Re: British Intelligence Warned of Iraq War |
| Of course the Iraq invasion was long desired in advance by the Likudnik (JINSA/CSP/PNAC) Neocons in accordance with the 'A Clean Break'/war for Israel agenda as conveyed by esteemed US intelligence writer/author James Bamford in his 'A Pretext for War' book:
'A Clean Break'/war for Israel (pages 261-269 from James Bamford's 'A Pretext for War'):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/02/11/a-clean-break-from-james-bamford-s-a-pretext-for-war.php
AIPAC Fifth Columnists trying to get US to attack Iran as well:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/05/14/aipac-fifth-columnists-pushing-us-to-attack-iran-for-israel.php
| Alpha wrote: | British Intelligence Warned of Iraq War
By Walter Pincus
The Washington Post
Friday 13 May 2005
Blair was told of White House's determination to use military against Hussein.
Seven months before the invasion of Iraq, the head of British foreign intelligence reported to Prime Minister Tony Blair that President Bush wanted to topple Saddam Hussein by military action and warned that in Washington intelligence was "being fixed around the policy," according to notes of a July 23, 2002, meeting with Blair at No. 10 Downing Street.
"Military action was now seen as inevitable," said the notes, summarizing a report by Richard Dearlove, then head of MI6, British intelligence, who had just returned from consultations in Washington along with other senior British officials. Dearlove went on, "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD [weapons of mass destruction]. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
"The case was thin," summarized the notes taken by a British national security aide at the meeting. "Saddam was not threatening his neighbours and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."
The notes were first disclosed last week by the Sunday Times of London, triggering criticism of Blair on the eve of the May 5 British parliamentary elections that he had decided to support an invasion of Iraq well before informing the public of his views.
The notes of the Blair meeting, attended by the prime minister's senior national security team, also disclose for the first time that Britain's intelligence boss believed that Bush had decided to go to war in mid-2002, and that he believed U.S. policymakers were trying to use the limited intelligence they had to make the Iraqi leader appear to be a bigger threat than was supported by known facts.
Although critics of the Iraq war have accused Bush and his top aides of misusing what has since been shown as limited intelligence in the prewar period, Bush's critics have been unsuccessful in getting an investigation of that matter.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has dropped its previous plan to review how U.S. policymakers used Iraq intelligence, and the president's commission on intelligence did not look into the subject because it was not authorized to do so by its charter, Laurence H. Silberman, the co-chairman, told reporters last month.
The British Butler Commission, which last year reviewed that country's intelligence performance on Iraq, also studied how that material was used by the Blair government. The panel concluded that Blair's speeches and a published dossier on Iraq used language that left "the impression that there was fuller and firmer intelligence than was the case," according to the Butler report.
It described the July 23 meeting as coming at a "key stage" in preparation for taking action against Iraq but described it primarily as a session at which Blair favored reengagement of U.N. inspectors against a background of intelligence that Hussein would not accept them unless "the threat of military action were real."
During the July 2002 time frame, Bush was working to build support in the United States for a war against Hussein, while a U.S. base in Qatar was being expanded and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz was trying to get Turkey to assist in potential military action against the Iraqi leader.
A spokesman for the British Embassy in Washington said he would not comment on the substance of the document.
Blair's senior advisers at the July 2002 session decided they would prepare an "ultimatum" for Iraq to permit U.N. inspectors to return, despite being told that Bush's National Security Council, then headed by Condoleezza Rice, "had no patience with the U.N. route," according to the notes. "The prime minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the U.N. inspectors."
Although Dearlove reported that the NSC had "no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record," the Blair team soon set in motion preparation of the public dossier on Iraq, which was published in late September 2002.
Another piece of the British memo has relevance now, as the United States battles an insurgency that some say was exacerbated by faulty planning for the post-invasion period. "There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action," the notes say, without attributing that directly to Dearlove.
The "U.S. has already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime," the British defense secretary reported, according to the notes. Although no final decision had been made, "he thought the most likely timing in U.S. minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the U.S. congressional elections."
As it finally worked out, the Bush administration's public campaign for supporting a possible invasion of Iraq began the next month, in late August, with speeches by Vice President Cheney, followed by a late October vote in Congress to grant the president authority to use force if necessary. Later in October, the British and the Americans introduced their resolution on Iraq in the U.N. Security Council and it passed in early November, shortly after the Nov. 2 elections. | | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun May 15, 2005 1:49 am Post subject: Lies in Zionist Controlled/Influenced US Media |
| Montpelier, VT, May. 13 (UPI) -- A few months ago, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey of public attitudes about U.S. news coverage, asking people whether the media "usually get the facts straight." In past polls, 55 percent have said the media usually gets it right, an outcome considered shockingly low at the time.
This time, 36 percent said that coverage of major stories is accurate. And this isn't an isolated finding. Explaining the survey, Pew Research Center President Andrew Kohut added that various questions show "fewer people believing what they read, what they hear and what they see in the news media."
You can't blame them. The disconnect between "official" news and reality on the ground continues to grow. It doesn't help that the government openly pays journalists to plant stories and spin policy.
In that regard, the most recent revelation is the Agriculture Department's payment of a freelance writer to place stories about preservation of wetlands in hunting and fishing magazines. The writer, Dave Smith, received $9,375 for promoting the administration's line, a pittance compared to the $240,000 commentator Armstrong Williams was paid by the Education Department to promote the "no child left behind" program or the $40,000 two columnists received from the Health and Human Services Department for writing brochures and training its staff in how to manage the media.
But the problem goes even deeper. Sometimes the mainstream media simply ignore the news. Case in point: a British newspaper recently revealed clear evidence that U.S. intelligence was shaped to support the drive for war in Iraq. The evidence includes various documents, including the minutes of a July 23, 2002 meeting in the office of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, during which British support for the war was considered a given. "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided," the minutes state.
As a result, 88 members of the House of Representatives are demanding an investigation. But this so-called "smoking gun" memo and the congressional response it has sparked have received little attention in the U.S. media.
According to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a self-described progressive group offering criticism of media bias and censorship, the most widely circulated story came from the Knight-Ridder wire service, which mentioned a leaked memo that said "facts were being fixed around the policy." A columnist for the Cox News Service also mentioned the memos, as did Washington Post Ombudsman Michael Getler, who noted that Post readers were complaining about the lack of coverage. However, he didn't explain why the paper decided to ignore the story. The New York Times offered only a passing mention.
A CNN correspondent did report that the memos were receiving attention on various Web sites, where bloggers were "wondering why it's not getting more coverage in the U.S. media." But that apparently didn't impress the network's gatekeepers. When CNN covered the complaints coming from Congress, it failed to explain the alleged manipulation of intelligence.
Another recent example of how the media carries water for the administration and its friends comes from The New York Times, which recently was drawn into some historical revision work. According to a May 7 article in the newspaper, Latvian President Vaira Vike-Freiberga wants an apology from Russia for the Soviet Union's decision in 1939 to join German forces in occupying Poland.
Vike-Freiberga's statement followed a letter sent by President George W. Bush to the presidents of several Baltic nations on the eve his trip to Moscow to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Nazi Germany's World War II defeat. In the letter, Bush called the end of the war the beginning of the unlawful Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
Vike-Freiberga, a close U.S. ally, also told the Times about a "Soviet occupation" of the three Baltic nations. In 1940, however, after the German invasion of Poland, the three Baltic countries initially invited in Soviet troops for protection.
Soviet troops also never joined forces with Germany in attacking Poland. Rather, a week after Germany invaded, they moved into eastern regions of the country, taking back territory Poland had previously annexed from Soviet Ukraine.
Bush's letter provoked an angry response from Russia, which in turn prompted the Latvian president's retort. The Times printed the U.S.-Latvian version of history as if it was fact.
With coverage like this, it's no wonder people think the media often don't get it right. News consumers may be misinformed due to all the spin and omissions, but fortunately most aren't as gullible as the administration and its water-bearers in the national media corps think.
--
(Greg Guma edits the Vermont Guardian, a statewide weekly. Guma can be reached at Greg@vermontguardian.com.)
--
(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.) | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun May 15, 2005 12:39 pm Post subject: Iraq intelligence efforts led by Cheney magnified errors |
| Posted on Mon, Feb. 02, 2004
Iraq intelligence efforts led by Cheney magnified errors, officials say
By Jonathan S. Landay, Warren P. Strobel and Joseph L. Galloway
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - What went wrong with intelligence on Iraq will never be known unless the inquiry proposed by President Bush examines secret intelligence efforts led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon hawks, current and former U.S officials said Monday.
The officials said they feared that Bush, gearing up his fight for re-election, would try to limit the inquiry's scope to the CIA and other agencies, and ignore the key role the administration's own internal intelligence efforts played in making the case for war.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, didn't dispute that the CIA failed to accurately assess the state of Iraq's weapons programs. But they said that the intelligence efforts led by Cheney magnified the errors through exaggeration, oversights and mistaken deductions.
Those efforts bypassed normal channels, used Iraqi exiles and defectors of questionable reliability, and produced findings on former dictator Saddam Hussein's links to al-Qaida and his illicit arms programs that were disputed by analysts at the CIA, the State Department and other agencies, the officials said.
"There were more agencies than CIA providing intelligence ... that are worth scrutiny, including the (Pentagon's now-disbanded) Office of Special Plans and the office of the vice president," said a former senior military official who was involved in planning the Iraq invasion.
Some of the disputed findings were presented as facts to Americans as Bush drummed up his case for war.
Those findings included charges of cooperation between Saddam and al-Qaida, Cheney's assertion that Iraq had rebuilt its nuclear weapons program and would "soon" have a nuclear bomb, and Bush's contention in his 2003 State of the Union address that Saddam was seeking nuclear bomb-making material from Africa.
Senior officials on Monday revealed new details of how Cheney's office pressed Secretary of State Colin Powell to use large amounts of disputed intelligence in a February 2003 presentation to the United Nations Security Council laying out the U.S. case for an invasion.
A senior administration official said that during a three-day pre-speech review, Powell rejected more than half of a 45-page assessment on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction compiled by Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, and based on materials assembled by pro-invasion hard-liners in the Pentagon and the White House.
Powell also jettisoned 75 percent of a separate report on al-Qaida, said the official.
Still, he said, Libby continued pressing Powell unsuccessfully right up until a few minutes before the speech to include dubious information purportedly linking Saddam to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Bush said Monday he would name an independent bipartisan commission to review intelligence failures in Iraq. It would also look at what is known about efforts by Iran, North Korea and terrorist groups to obtain nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
Two congressional committees, an internal CIA board and a White House advisory panel are already reviewing the Iraq intelligence.
Bush's decision to name an independent commission followed assertions by David Kay, who quit last month as chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, that Saddam had not hidden the banned chemical and biological warfare stockpiles. The president had cited such weapons as his prime justification for the March invasion.
Bush and GOP leaders in Congress had resisted a demand by Democrats for an independent review of the Iraq intelligence, but calls by Kay and key Republicans last week for such an inquiry forced the president to reconsider.
"I want to know all the facts," Bush told reporters after a Cabinet meeting.
He insisted, however, that the war and occupation - in which more than 500 U.S. troops have died - were justified because Saddam had failed to halt all illicit weapons activities in violation of numerous U.N. resolutions.
"Saddam Hussein had the intent and capabilities to cause great harm," Bush asserted.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the membership and duration of the independent commission weren't settled. He skirted the question of whether the panel would examine whether Bush and his top aides exaggerated or misrepresented intelligence on Iraq.
"I'm not going to get into the scope issues at this point," he said.
Top Democratic lawmakers said Bush should allow Congress to appoint the commission and determine the scope and duration of its inquiry.
"One of the major questions that needs to be addressed is whether senior administration officials ... misled the Congress and the public about the nature of the threat from Iraq. Even some of your own statements and those of Vice President Cheney need independent scrutiny. A commission appointed and controlled by the White House will not have the independence or credibility necessary to investigate these issues," Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D., S.D.) and four other senior Democrats wrote in a letter to Bush.
The former and current officials said that an objective inquiry would require the panel to look at the roles that Cheney, his office and his neoconservative allies at the Pentagon played in collecting and analyzing intelligence on Iraq.
Reviewing what the CIA did "is half the picture," said Melvin Goodman, a former senior CIA analyst who teaches at the National Defense University. "What you want is an open-ended, blue-ribbon inquiry of the whole picture, which is what (intelligence) the White House got and how the White House used what it got."
Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld have long expressed serious doubts about the CIA's abilities.
Cheney, according to a senior U.S. official, began visiting the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency during his first days in office for briefings on Iraq and other pressing national security issues.
His staff collected intelligence on Iraq from sources such as newspapers, as well as from regular intelligence channels and from internal Pentagon initiatives directed by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.
Those efforts, according to the current and former U.S. officials, combined raw intelligence from the CIA and DIA with information from defectors and Iraqi exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi, now a member of the U.S.-installed Iraqi Governing Council.
The CIA and State Department saw Chalabi, who is close to neoconservatives inside and outside the administration, as an unreliable source of information with a self-interest in pressing the case for Saddam's ouster.
The senior administration official said the assessments on illicit weapons, al-Qaida and human rights in Iraq that Libby pressed on Powell were products of Cheney's office and Feith's efforts.
The bulk of the work on illicit weapons and al-Qaida links was rejected after representatives from Cheney's office failed in a 10-hour meeting to show that the materials were from reliable sources, he said.
He said that materials rejected as dubious or false included:
-Sept. 11 terrorist Mohamed Atta met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague, the Czech Republic, five months before the attacks;
-Iraqi efforts to purchase software from an Australian company to use for mapping the East Coast of the United States;
-Satellite pictures that Libby insisted showed Iraq possessed robot aircraft capable of spraying lethal chemicals;
-A chronology of contacts "going back years" between Iraqi officials and al-Qaida. "These pages put the two in contact, but they didn't prove a damn thing," said the senior official, who added that follow-up reports showed that "in meeting after meeting Iraq rebuffed al-Qaida, that Saddam had serious differences reconciling fundamentalist Islam with secular Iraq."
Still, Powell included in his U.N. speech charges that Iraq had provided chemical and biological warfare training to several al-Qaida members and that he had helped an al-Qaida-linked group produce crude poisons. | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 1:07 pm Post subject: Tomgram: Mark Danner on the British Smoking-Gun Memo |
| http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=2486
Tomgram: Mark Danner on the British Smoking-Gun Memo
In its June 9 issue (on sale this week), the New York Review of Books will be the first American print publication to publish the full British "smoking gun" document, the secret memorandum of the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair's top advisors in July 2002, eight months before the Iraq War commenced. Leaked to the London Sunday Times, which first published it on May 1, the memo offers irrefutable proof of the way in which the Bush administration made its decision to invade Iraq -- without significant consultation, reasonable intelligence on Iraq, or any desire to explore ways to avoid war -- and well before seeking a Congressional or United Nations mandate of any sort.
By July, as the British officials reported, the decision to invade was already in the bag. The only real questions -- other than those involving war planning -- were how to organize the intelligence in such a way as to promote the war to come and how to finesse Congress (and the UN). While people often speak of the "road to war," in the case of the invasion of Iraq, as this document makes clear, a more accurate phrase might be "the bum's rush to war." The Review is also publishing an accompanying piece on the secret memo and what to make of it by their regular Iraq correspondent, Mark Danner, and its editors have been kind enough to allow Tomdispatch to distribute the piece early on-line.
That the Review is the first publication here to print the document is not only an honorable (and important) act, but a measure of the failure of major American papers to offer attention where it is clearly due. After all, whole government investigations have, in the past, gone in search of "smoking guns." In fact, the Bush administration spent much time searching fruitlessly for its own "smoking gun" of WMD in Iraq -- and this process was considered of front-page importance in our major papers and on the TV news. That a "smoking gun" document about the nature of the war in the making has appeared in this fashion, not in Kyrgyzstan but in England; that no one in the British or American governments has even bothered to dispute its provenance or accuracy; and that, with a few honorable exceptions like columnist Molly Ivins, that gun was allowed to lie on the ground smoking for days, hardly commented upon (except on the political internet, of course), tells us much about our present moment. Should you want to consider the miserable coverage in this country, check out FAIR's commentary on the matter.
Congressman John Conyers has just sent a letter, signed by eighty-nine Democratic congressional representatives, to the President demanding some answers to the document's revelations. And articles by good reporters in major papers finally did start to appear late this week -- but those of John Daniszewski at the Los Angeles Times and Walter Pincus at the Washington Post were typically tucked away on inside pages (meant for political news jockeys), and they had a distinctly just-the-facts-maam, nothing-out-of-the-ordinary feel to them.
But shouldn't it be a front-page story that, as Danner points out below, all the subsequent arguments we've had to endure about the state of, and accuracy of American intelligence on Iraq, were actually beside the point? After all, as the smoking-gun memo makes perfectly clear, the decision to go to war was made before the intelligence -- good, bad, or indifferent -- was even seriously put into play. As the secret memo also makes clear, administration officials, and the President himself, had already rolled the dice and placed their bet -- on the existence of WMD in Iraq as an excuse for the war they so desperately wanted. (Their Iraqi exile sources had, of course, assured them that it was so and, as the Brits reported in July 2002, they were already wondering, "For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one [of an invasion].") After all, it seemed so logical. Saddam had used such weapons in the 1980s in the Iran-Iraq War and against Kurds in Iraq. American troops and UN inspectors had found such weaponry in profusion after our first Gulf War. So why not now as well?
Recently, Ted Rall, considering press response to a more modest smoking-gun incident -- the covered up friendly-fire death of former NFL star Pat Tillman in Afghanistan whose revelation was reported rather reluctantly on the inside pages of papers -- wrote tellingly: "For journalists supposedly dedicated to uncovering the truth and informing the public, this is exactly the opposite of how things ought to be. Corrections and exposés should always run bigger, longer and more often than initial, discredited stories." Dream on, as we smoking-gunsters like to say.
The least commented upon aspect of the smoking-gun memo has been its military side. It is, in significant part, a military document, reflecting how much serious thinking and planning at the highest levels in the U.S. and Britain had already gone into the question of how to have a war by July 2002. The question of how technically to launch the "military action" -- whether by a "generated start" or a "running start" -- was, for instance, front and center. Also addressed was the mundane but crucial issue (for the Pentagon) of where, around Iraq, to base forces. "The US," reads the memo, "saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either [the generated or running start] option." Diego Garcia is the British-controlled Indian Ocean Island that was already a stationary American "aircraft carrier" and from which, 8 months later, B-2s would fly on Baghdad.
Since Danner -- whose book Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror does much to explain the nature of the fix the Bush administration now finds itself in -- covers the British document in great and fascinating detail below, let me just add a final note: To me, perhaps the most telling line in the memo, given what's happened since, is the observation of Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of M16 (the British CIA equivalent), just back from a U.S. visit, that "[t]here was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." This line not only represented the greatest gamble the Bush administration's top officials would make, but the hubris with which they approached the taking of Iraq. As true believers in force – nothing impressed them more than the advanced technology of destruction they possessed and its possible applications -- they were already awed by themselves and deeply believed in the shock to come once they hit Iraq hard. As the British smoking-gun memo indicates in that single classic line, they placed their deepest faith in their conviction that, once the invasion was completed successful and Saddam had fallen, everything else in Iraq would simply fall into place as well. Planning for a post-war occupation? What me worry? Tom
Secret Way to War
By Mark Danner
1.
It was October 16, 2002, and the United States Congress had just voted to authorize the President to go to war against Iraq. When George W. Bush came before members of his Cabinet and Congress gathered in the East Room of the White House and addressed the American people, he was in a somber mood befitting a leader speaking frankly to free citizens about the gravest decision their country could make.
The 107th Congress, the President said, had just become "one of the few called by history to authorize military action to defend our country and the cause of peace." But, he hastened to add, no one should assume that war was inevitable. Though "Congress has now authorized the use of force," the President said emphatically, "I have not ordered the use of force. I hope the use of force will not become necessary." The President went on:
"Our goal is to fully and finally remove a real threat to world peace and to America. Hopefully this can be done peacefully. Hopefully we can do this without any military action. Yet, if Iraq is to avoid military action by the international community, it has the obligation to prove compliance with all the world's demands. It's the obligation of Iraq."
Iraq, the President said, still had the power to prevent war by "declaring and destroying all its weapons of mass destruction" -- but if Iraq did not declare and destroy those weapons, the President warned, the United States would "go into battle, as a last resort."
It is safe to say that, at the time, it surprised almost no one when the Iraqis answered the President's demand by repeating their claim that in fact there were no weapons of mass destruction. As we now know, the Iraqis had in fact destroyed these weapons, probably years before George W. Bush's ultimatum: "the Iraqis" -- in the words of chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kaye -- "were telling the truth."
As Americans watch their young men and women fighting in the third year of a bloody counterinsurgency war in Iraq -- a war that has now killed more than 1,600 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis -- they are left to ponder "the unanswered question" of what would have happened if the United Nations weapons inspectors had been allowed -- as all the major powers except the United Kingdom had urged they should be -- to complete their work. What would have happened if the UN weapons inspectors had been allowed to prove, before the U.S. went "into battle," what David Kaye and his colleagues finally proved afterward?
Thanks to a formerly secret memorandum published by the London Sunday Times on May 1, during the run-up to the British elections, we now have a partial answer to that question. The memo, which records the minutes of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair's senior foreign policy and security officials, shows that even as President Bush told Americans in October 2002 that he "hope[d] the use of force will not become necessary" -- that such a decision depended on whether or not the Iraqis complied with his demands to rid themselves of their weapons of mass destruction -- the President had in fact already definitively decided, at least three months before, to choose this "last resort" of going "into battle" with Iraq. Whatever the Iraqis chose to do or not do, the President's decision to go to war had long since been made.
On July 23, 2002, eight months before American and British forces invaded, senior British officials met with Prime Minister Tony Blair to discuss Iraq. The gathering, similar to an American "principals meeting," brought together Geoffrey Hoon, the defense secretary; Jack Straw, the foreign secretary; Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general; John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which advises the prime minister; Sir Richard Dearlove, also known as "C," the head of MI6 (the equivalent of the CIA); David Manning, the equivalent of the national security adviser; Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, the chief of the Defense Staff (or CDS, equivalent to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs); Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff; Alastair Campbell, director of strategy (Blair's communications and political adviser); and Sally Morgan, director of government relations.
After John Scarlett began the meeting with a summary of intelligence on Iraq -- notably, that "the regime was tough and based on extreme fear" and that thus the "only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action," "C" offered a report on his visit to Washington, where he had conducted talks with George Tenet, his counterpart at the CIA, and other high officials. This passage is worth quoting in full:
"C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."
Seen from today's perspective this short paragraph is a strikingly clear template for the future, establishing these points:
1. By mid-July 2002, eight months before the war began, President Bush had decided to invade and occupy Iraq.
2. Bush had decided to "justify" the war "by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD."
3. Already "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
4. Many at the top of the administration did not want to seek approval from the United Nations (going "the UN route").
5. Few in Washington seemed much interested in the aftermath of the war.
We have long known, thanks to Bob Woodward and others, that military planning for the Iraq war began as early as November 21, 2001, after the President ordered Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to look at "what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein if we have to," and that Secretary Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, who headed Central Command, were briefing American senior officials on the progress of military planning during the late spring and summer of 2002; indeed, a few days after the meeting in London leaks about specific plans for a possible Iraq war appeared on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post.
What the Downing Street memo confirms for the first time is that President Bush had decided, no later than July 2002, to "remove Saddam, through military action," that war with Iraq was "inevitable" -- and that what remained was simply to establish and develop the modalities of justification; that is, to come up with a means of "justifying" the war and "fixing" the "intelligence and facts...around the policy." The great value of the discussion recounted in the memo, then, is to show, for the governments of both countries, a clear hierarchy of decision-making. By July 2002 at the latest, war had been decided on; the question at issue now was how to justify it -- how to "fix," as it were, what Blair will later call "the political context." Specifically, though by this point in July the President had decided to go to war, he had not yet decided to go to the United Nations and demand inspectors; indeed, as "C" points out, those on the National Security Council -- the senior security officials of the U.S. government -- "had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record." This would later change, largely as a result of the political concerns of these very people gathered together at 10 Downing Street.
After Admiral Boyce offered a brief discussion of the war plans then on the table and the defense secretary said a word or two about timing -- "the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections" -- Foreign Secretary Jack Straw got to the heart of the matter: not whether or not to invade Iraq but how to justify such an invasion:
"The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss [the timing of the war] with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."
Given that Saddam was not threatening to attack his neighbors and that his weapons of mass destruction program was less extensive than those of a number of other countries, how does one justify attacking? Foreign Secretary Straw had an idea: "We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force."
The British realized they needed "help with the legal justification for the use of force" because, as the attorney general pointed out, rather dryly, "the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action." Which is to say, the simple desire to overthrow the leadership of a given sovereign country does not make it legal to invade that country; on the contrary. And, said the attorney general, of the "three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or [United Nations Security Council] authorization," the first two "could not be the base in this case." In other words, Iraq was not attacking the United States or the United Kingdom, so the leaders could not claim to be acting in self-defense; nor was Iraq's leadership in the process of committing genocide, so the United States and the United Kingdom could not claim to be invading for humanitarian reasons.[1] This left Security Council authorization as the only conceivable legal justification for war. But how to get it?
At this point in the meeting Prime Minister Tony Blair weighed in. He had heard his foreign minister's suggestion about drafting an ultimatum demanding that Saddam let back in the United Nations inspectors. Such an ultimatum could be politically critical, said Blair -- but only if the Iraqi leader turned it down:
"The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD.... If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work."
Here the inspectors were introduced, but as a means to create the missing casus belli. If the UN could be made to agree on an ultimatum that Saddam accept inspectors, and if Saddam then refused to accept them, the Americans and the British would be well on their way to having a legal justification to go to war (the attorney general's third alternative of UN Security Council authorization).
Thus, the idea of UN inspectors was introduced not as a means to avoid war, as President Bush repeatedly assured Americans, but as a means to make war possible. War had been decided on; the problem under discussion here was how to make, in the prime minister's words, "the political context ...right." The "political strategy" -- at the center of which, as with the Americans, was weapons of mass destruction, for "it was the regime that was producing the WMD" -- must be strong enough to give "the military plan the space to work." Which is to say, once the allies were victorious the war would justify itself. The demand that Iraq accept UN inspectors, especially if refused, could form the political bridge by which the allies could reach their goal: "regime change" through "military action."
But there was a problem: as the foreign secretary pointed out, "on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences." While the British considered legal justification for going to war critical -- they, unlike the Americans, were members of the International Criminal Court -- the Americans did not. Mr. Straw suggested that given "US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum." The defense secretary, Geoffrey Hoon, was more blunt, arguing "that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the U.S. did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush." The key negotiation in view at this point, in other words, was not with Saddam over letting in the United Nations inspectors -- both parties hoped he would refuse to admit them, and thus provide the justification for invading. The key negotiation would be between the Americans, who had shown "resistance" to the idea of involving the United Nations at all, and the British, who were more concerned than their American cousins about having some kind of legal fig leaf for attacking Iraq. Three weeks later, Foreign Secretary Straw arrived in the Hamptons to "discreetly explore the ultimatum" with Secretary of State Powell, perhaps the only senior American official who shared some of the British concerns; as Straw told the secretary, in Bob Woodward's account, "If you are really thinking about war and you want us Brits to be a player, we cannot be unless you go to the United Nations." [2]
2.
Britain's strong support for the "UN route" that most American officials so distrusted was critical in helping Powell in the bureaucratic battle over going to the United Nations. As late as August 26, Vice President Dick Cheney had appeared before a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and publicly denounced "the UN route." Asserting that "simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction [and] there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us," Cheney advanced the view that going to the United Nations would itself be dangerous:
"A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with UN resolutions. On the contrary, there is great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow 'back in the box.'"
Cheney, like other administration "hard-liners," feared "the UN route" not because it might fail but because it might succeed and thereby prevent a war that they were convinced had to be fought.
As Woodward recounts, it would finally take a personal visit by Blair on September 7 to persuade President Bush to go to the United Nations:
"For Blair the immediate question was, Would the United Nations be used? He was keenly aware that in Britain the question was, Does Blair believe in the UN? It was critical domestically for the prime minister to show his own Labour Party, a pacifist party at heart, opposed to war in principle, that he had gone the UN route. Public opinion in the UK favored trying to make international institutions work before resorting to force. Going through the UN would be a large and much-needed plus."[3]
The President now told Blair that he had decided "to go to the UN" and the prime minister, according to Woodward, "was relieved." After the session with Blair, Bush later recounts to Woodward, he walked into a conference room and told the British officials gathered there that "your man has got cojones." ("And of course these Brits don't know what cojones are," Bush tells Woodward.) Henceforth this particular conference with Blair would be known, Bush declares, as "the cojones meeting."
That September the attempt to sell the war began in earnest, for, as White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card had told the New York Times in an unusually candid moment, "You don't roll out a new product in August." At the heart of the sales campaign was the United Nations. Thanks in substantial part to Blair's prodding, George W. Bush would come before the UN General Assembly on September 12 and, after denouncing the Iraqi regime, announce that "we will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions." The main phase of public diplomacy -- giving the war a "political context," in Blair's phrase -- had begun. Though "the UN route" would be styled as an attempt to avoid war, its essence, as the Downing Street memo makes clear, was a strategy to make the war possible, partly by making it politically palatable.
As it turned out, however -- and as Cheney and others had feared -- the "UN route" to war was by no means smooth, or direct. Though Powell managed the considerable feat of securing unanimous approval for Security Council Resolution 1441, winning even Syria's support, the allies differed on the key question of whether or not the resolution gave United Nations approval for the use of force against Saddam, as the Americans contended, or whether a second resolution would be required, as the majority of the council, and even the British, conceded it would. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador to the UN, put this position bluntly on November 8, the day Resolution 1441 was passed:
"We heard loud and clear during the negotiations about 'automaticity' and 'hidden triggers' -- the concerns that on a decision so crucial we should not rush into military action.... Let me be equally clear.... There is no 'automaticity' in this Resolution. If there is a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter will return to the Council for discussion as required.... We would expect the Security Council then to meet its responsibilities."
Vice President Cheney could have expected no worse. Having decided to travel down "the UN route," the Americans and British would now need a second resolution to gain the necessary approval to attack Iraq. Worse, Saddam frustrated British and American hopes, as articulated by Blair in the July 23 meeting, that he would simply refuse to admit the inspectors and thereby offer the allies an immediate casus belli. Instead, hundreds of inspectors entered Iraq, began to search, and found...nothing. January, which Defence Secretary Hoon had suggested was the "most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin," came and went, and the inspectors went on searching.
On the Security Council, a majority -- led by France, Germany, and Russia -- would push for the inspections to run their course. President Jacques Chirac of France later put this argument succinctly in an interview with CBS and CNN just as the war was about to begin:
"France is not pacifist. We are not anti-American either. We are not just going to use our veto to nag and annoy the US. But we just feel that there is another option, another way, another more normal way, a less dramatic way than war, and that we have to go through that path. And we should pursue it until we've come [to] a dead end, but that isn't the case."[4]
Where would this "dead end" be found, however, and who would determine that it had been found? Would it be the French, or the Americans? The logical flaw that threatened the administration's policy now began to become clear. Had the inspectors found weapons, or had they been presented with them by Saddam Hussein, many who had supported the resolution would argue that the inspections regime it established had indeed begun to work -- that by multilateral action the world was succeeding, peacefully, in "disarming Iraq." As long as the inspectors found no weapons, however, many would argue that the inspectors "must be given time to do their work" -- until, in Chirac's words, they "came to a dead end." However that point might be determined, it is likely that, long before it was reached, the failure to find weapons would have undermined the administration's central argument for going to war -- "the conjunction," as ‘C' had put it that morning in July, "of terrorism and WMD." And as we now know, the inspectors would never have found weapons of mass destruction.
Vice President Cheney had anticipated this problem, as he had explained frankly to Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, during an October 30 meeting in the White House. Cheney, according to Blix,
"stated the position that inspections, if they do not give results, cannot go on forever, and said the U.S. was 'ready to discredit inspections in favor of disarmament.' A pretty straight way, I thought, of saying that if we did not soon find the weapons of mass destruction that the US was convinced Iraq possessed (though they did not know where), the US would be ready to say that the inspectors were useless and embark on disarmament by other means."[5]
Indeed, the inspectors' failure to find any evidence of weapons came in the wake of a very large effort launched by the administration to put before the world evidence of Saddam's arsenal, an effort spearheaded by George W. Bush's speech in Cincinnati on October 7, and followed by a series of increasingly lurid disclosures to the press that reached a crescendo with Colin Powell's multimedia presentation to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. Throughout the fall and winter, the administration had "rolled out the product," in Card's phrase, with great skill, making use of television, radio, and all the print press to get its message out about the imminent threat of Saddam's arsenal. ("Think of the press," advised Josef Goebbels, "as a great keyboard on which the government can play.")
As the gap between administration rhetoric about enormous arsenals -- "we know where they are," asserted Donald Rumsfeld -- and the inspectors' empty hands grew wider, that gap, as Cheney had predicted, had the effect in many quarters of undermining the credibility of the United Nations process itself. The inspectors' failure to find weapons in Iraq was taken to discredit the worth of the inspections, rather than to cast doubt on the administration's contention that Saddam possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.
Oddly enough, Saddam's only effective strategy to prevent war at this point might have been to reveal and yield up some weapons, thus demonstrating to the world that the inspections were working. As we now know, however, he had no weapons to yield up. As Blix remarks, "It occurred to me [on March 7] that the Iraqis would be in greater difficulty if...there truly were no weapons of which they could ‘yield possession.'" The fact that, in Blix's words, "the UN and the world had succeeded in disarming Iraq without knowing it" -- that the UN process had been successful --meant, in effect, that the inspectors would be discredited and the United States would go to war.
President Bush would do so, of course, having failed to get the "second resolution" so desired by his friend and ally, Tony Blair. Blair had predicted, that July morning on Downing Street, that the "two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work." He seems to have been proved right in this. In the end his political strategy only half worked: the Security Council's refusal to vote a second resolution approving the use of force left "the UN route" discussed that day incomplete, and Blair found himself forced to follow the United States without the protection of international approval. Had the military plan "worked" -- had the war been short and decisive rather than long, bloody, and inconclusive -- Blair would perhaps have escaped the political damage the war has caused him. A week after the Downing Street memo was published in the Sunday Times, Tony Blair was reelected, but his majority in Parliament was reduced, from 161 to 67. The Iraq war, and the damage it had done to his reputation for probity, was widely believed to have been a principal cause.
In the United States, on the other hand, the Downing Street memorandum has attracted little attention. As I write, no American newspaper has published it and few writers have bothered to comment on it. The war continues, and Americans have grown weary of it; few seem much interested now in discussing how it began, and why their country came to fight a war in the cause of destroying weapons that turned out not to exist. For those who want answers, the Bush administration has followed a simple and heretofore largely successful policy: blame the intelligence agencies. Since "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" as early as July 2002 (as "C," the head of British intelligence, reported upon his return from Washington), it seems a matter of remarkable hubris, even for this administration, that its officials now explain their misjudgments in going to war by blaming them on "intelligence failures" -- that is, on the intelligence that they themselves politicized. Still, for the most part, Congress has cooperated. Though the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the failures of the CIA and other agencies before the war, a promised second report that was to take up the administration's political use of intelligence -- which is, after all, the critical issue -- was postponed until after the 2004 elections, then quietly abandoned.
In the end, the Downing Street memo, and Americans' lack of interest in what it shows, has to do with a certain attitude about facts, or rather about where the line should be drawn between facts and political opinion. It calls to mind an interesting observation that an unnamed "senior advisor" to President Bush made to a New York Times Magazine reporter last fall:
"The aide said that guys like me [i.e., reporters and commentators] were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"
Though this seems on its face to be a disquisition on religion and faith, it is of course an argument about power, and its influence on truth. Power, the argument runs, can shape truth: power, in the end, can determine reality, or at least the reality that most people accept -- a critical point, for the administration has been singularly effective in its recognition that what is most politically important is not what readers of the New York Times believe but what most Americans are willing to believe. The last century's most innovative authority on power and truth, Joseph Goebbels, made the same point but rather more directly:
"There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be 'the man in the street.' Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology."
I thought of this quotation when I first read the Downing Street memorandum; but I had first looked it up several months earlier, on December 14, 2004, after I had seen the images of the newly reelected President George W. Bush awarding the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor the United States can bestow, to George Tenet, the former director of central intelligence; L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq; and General (ret.) Tommy Franks, the commander who had led American forces during the first phase of the Iraq war. Tenet, of course, would be known to history as the intelligence director who had failed to detect and prevent the attacks of September 11 and the man who had assured President Bush that the case for Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction was "a slam dunk." Franks had allowed the looting of Baghdad and had generally done little to prepare for what would come after the taking of Baghdad. ("There was little discussion in Washington," as "C" told the Prime Minister on July 23, "of the aftermath after military action.") Bremer had dissolved the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police and thereby created 400,000 or so available recruits for the insurgency. One might debate their ultimate responsibility for these grave errors, but it is difficult to argue that these officials merited the highest recognition the country could offer.
Of course truth, as the master propagandist said, is "unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology." He of course would have instantly grasped the psychological tactic embodied in that White House ceremony, which was one more effort to reassure Americans that the war the administration launched against Iraq has been a success and was worth fighting. That barely four Americans in ten are still willing to believe this suggests that as time goes on and the gap grows between what Americans see and what they are told, membership in the "reality-based community" may grow along with it. We will see. Still, for those interested in the question of how our leaders persuaded the country to become embroiled in a counterinsurgency war in Iraq, the Downing Street memorandum offers one more confirmation of the truth. For those, that is, who want to hear
--May 12, 2005
Notes
1. The latter charge might have been given as a reason for intervention in 1988, for example, when the Iraqi regime was carrying out its Anfal campaign against the Kurds; at that time, though, the Reagan administration -- comprising many of the same officials who would later lead the invasion of Iraq -- was supporting Saddam in his war against Iran and kept largely silent. The second major killing campaign of the Saddam regime came in 1991, when Iraqi troops attacked Shiites in the south who had rebelled against the regime in the wake of Saddam's defeat in the Gulf War; the first Bush administration, despite President George H.W. Bush's urging Iraqis to "rise up against the dictator, Saddam Hussein," and despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of American troops within miles of the killing, stood by and did nothing. See Ken Roth, "War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention" (Human Rights Watch, January 2004).
2. See Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (Simon and Schuster, 2004), p. 162.
3. See Woodward, Plan of Attack, pp. 177–178.
4. See "Chirac Makes His Case on Iraq," an interview with Christiane Amanpour, CBS News, March 16, 2003.
5. See Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq (Pantheon, 2004), p. 86.
Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker Staff writer, is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His most recent book is Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, which collects his pieces on torture and Iraq that first appeared in the New York Review of Books. His work can be found at markdanner.com
This article appears in the June 9th issue of The New York Review of Books
Copyright 2005 Mark Danner | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue May 17, 2005 11:55 am Post subject: Staying What Course? |
| http://www.nytimes.com
May 16, 2005
Staying What Course?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Is there any point, now that November's election is behind us, in revisiting the history of the Iraq war? Yes: any path out of the quagmire will be blocked by people who call their opponents weak on national security, and portray themselves as tough guys who will keep America safe. So it's important to understand how the tough guys made America weak.
There has been notably little U.S. coverage of the "Downing Street memo" - actually the minutes of a British prime minister's meeting on July 23, 2002, during which officials reported on talks with the Bush administration about Iraq. But the memo, which was leaked to The Times of London during the British election campaign, confirms what apologists for the war have always denied: the Bush administration cooked up a case for a war it wanted.
Here's a sample: "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
(You can read the whole thing at www.downingstreetmemo.com.)
Why did the administration want to invade Iraq, when, as the memo noted, "the case was thin" and Saddam's "W.M.D. capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran"? Iraq was perceived as a soft target; a quick victory there, its domestic political advantages aside, could serve as a demonstration of American military might, one that would shock and awe the world.
But the Iraq war has, instead, demonstrated the limits of American power, and emboldened our potential enemies. Why should Kim Jong Il fear us, when we can't even secure the road from Baghdad to the airport?
At this point, the echoes of Vietnam are unmistakable. Reports from the recent offensive near the Syrian border sound just like those from a 1960's search-and-destroy mission, body count and all. Stories filed by reporters actually with the troops suggest that the insurgents, forewarned, mostly melted away, accepting battle only where and when they chose.
Meanwhile, America's strategic position is steadily deteriorating.
Next year, reports Jane's Defense Industry, the United States will spend as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. Yet the Pentagon now admits that our military is having severe trouble attracting recruits, and would have difficulty dealing with potential foes - those that, unlike Saddam's Iraq, might pose a real threat.
In other words, the people who got us into Iraq have done exactly what they falsely accused Bill Clinton of doing: they have stripped America of its capacity to respond to real threats.
So what's the plan?
The people who sold us this war continue to insist that success is just around the corner, and that things would be fine if the media would just stop reporting bad news. But the administration has declared victory in Iraq at least four times. January's election, it seems, was yet another turning point that wasn't.
Yet it's very hard to discuss getting out. Even most of those who vehemently opposed the war say that we have to stay on in Iraq now that we're there.
In effect, America has been taken hostage. Nobody wants to take responsibility for the terrible scenes that will surely unfold if we leave (even though terrible scenes are unfolding while we're there). Nobody wants to tell the grieving parents of American soldiers that their children died in vain. And nobody wants to be accused, by an administration always ready to impugn other people's patriotism, of stabbing the troops in the back.
But the American military isn't just bogged down in Iraq; it's deteriorating under the strain. We may already be in real danger: what threats, exactly, can we make against the North Koreans? That John Bolton will yell at them? And every year that the war goes on, our military gets weaker.
So we need to get beyond the clichés - please, no more "pottery barn principles" or "staying the course." I'm not advocating an immediate pullout, but we have to tell the Iraqi government that our stay is time-limited, and that it has to find a way to take care of itself. The point is that something has to give. We either need a much bigger army - which means a draft - or we need to find a way out of Iraq.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Tue May 17, 2005 5:25 pm Post subject: British Memo Reopens War Claim |
| British Memo Reopens War Claim
By Stephen J. Hedges and Mark Silva
The Chicago Tribune
Tuesday 17 May 2005
Leaked briefing says US intelligence facts `fixed' around policy.
Washington - A British official's report that the Bush administration appeared intent on invading Iraq long before it acknowledged as much or sought Congress' approval--and that it "fixed" intelligence to fit its intention--has caused a stir in Britain.
But the potentially explosive revelation has proven to be something of a dud in the United States. The White House has denied the premise of the memo, the American media have reacted slowly to it and the public generally seems indifferent to the issue or unwilling to rehash the bitter prewar debate over the reasons for the war.
All of this has contributed to something less than a robust discussion of a memo that would seem to bolster the strongest assertions of the war's critics.
Frustrated at the lack of attention to the memo, Democrats and war critics are working to make sure it gets a wider hearing, doing everything from writing letters to the White House to launching online petitions.
The memo was written by British national security aide Matthew Rycroft, based on notes he took during a July 2002 meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his advisers, including Richard Dearlove, the head of Britain's MI-6 intelligence service who had recently met with Bush administration officials.
Since being leaked to a British newspaper, the memo has raised questions anew about whether the Bush administration misrepresented prewar intelligence about suspected weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to justify military action against Saddam Hussein's regime.
"Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD," the memo said. "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening hi-bility was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."
Blair's office has not disputed the authenticity of the memo, but the White House categorically denies the assertions in it. And on Capitol Hill, where investigations already have denounced prewar intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as "deeply flawed," there appears to be little appetite for reopening the question of why the U.S. went to war.
"I suppose it hasn't played there because, basically, didn't everyone know that Bush decided early on to get rid of Saddam?" asked Philip Stephens, a Blair biographer and associate editor of the Financial Times of London.
Stephens argues that there was a basic difference in the argument over the invasion of Iraq in Britain and the U.S.
"The contexts of the debates have always been different," Stephens said. "There was never really a question [in the U.S.] about whether it was justified or not to go for regime change. This was the administration's objective. People either agreed with it or disagreed with it. There really wasn't a disagreement about the legal basis for it."
Dubbed "the Downing Street Memo," the report of the July 23, 2002, meeting of Blair and his aides purported to recount the Bush administration's approach to Iraq at that point. The memo asserted that Bush had decided to remove Hussein nearly eight months before U.S. and British troops invaded Iraq.
Summarizing the view of intelligence chief Dearlove after consulting with U.S. officials, the memo said: "Military action was now seen as inevitable."
Public Told Another Story
At the time, the Bush administration was assuring the public that a decision to go to war had not been made and that Iraq could prevent military action by complying with existing United Nations resolutions that were intended to curtail its chemical, nuclear, biological and missile weapons programs.
The memo was divulged earlier this month by the Sunday Times of London, four days before Blair's re-election. It caused a stir in Britain, where the war in Iraq has been deeply unpopular.
In the U.S., however, the account has drawn only passing attention, even in Washington, where the debate over prewar intelligence on Iraq once dogged the White House. No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, and Iraqi scientists have told U.S. inspectors that any weapons Iraq did possess were destroyed years ago.
Opponents of the war and administration have launched e-mail campaigns to elevate the issue. One Web site, DowningStreetMemo.com, encourages visitors to sign a petition and "take action." Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) wrote a letter earlier this month to the White House, signed by 89 House Democrats, that expressed concern about the memo's revelations.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan, asked Monday about the memo's implication that intelligence was being "fixed" on Iraq, said, "The suggestion is just flat-out wrong.
White House's Response
"Anyone who wants to know how the intelligence was used only has to go back and read everything that was said in public about the lead-up to the war," said McClellan, noting that Bush was pursuing diplomatic negotiations with Iraq through the United Nations into autumn 2003.
However, a commission appointed by the president to investigate intelligence gathering that led to the invasion concluded that all of the intelligence community's information about the existence of biological or any other weapons of mass destruction was "deeply flawed."
"The intelligence community was absolutely uniform, and uniformly wrong, about the existence of weapons of mass destruction. And they pushed that position," said Judge Laurence Silberman, co-chairman of the commission.
Critics of the Bush administration have long argued that Bush appeared intent on invading Iraq long before Congress voted to authorize military action in October 2002 if Hussein didn't abandon his alleged illegal weapons programs.
Former Sen. Bob Graham of Florida, who was chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee when Democrats ruled, has written in his book, "Intelligence Matters," about his visit to MacDill Air Force Base, home of the U.S. Central Command, on Feb. 19, 2002. He was going for a status report on Afghanistan, Graham wrote, but CENTCOM'S Gen. Tommy Franks called him aside to tell him, "Senator, we are not engaged in a war in Afghanistan."
"Excuse me?"' Graham replied.
"Military and intelligence personnel are being redeployed to prepare for an action in Iraq," Graham quoted Franks as saying.
Graham wrote: "I was stunned. This was the first time I had been informed that the decision to go to war with Iraq had not only been made but was being implemented, to the substantial disadvantage of the war in Afghanistan." | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri May 20, 2005 7:36 pm Post subject: The lies that led to war |
| The lies that led to war
A leaked British memo, and other documents, make it clear that Bush
intended all along to invade Iraq -- and lied about it to the American
people. The full gravity of his offense has not yet sunk in.
By Juan Cole
May 19, 2005 | When Newsweek's source admitted that he had
misidentified the government document in which he had seen an account
of Quran desecration at Guantánamo prison, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence
Di Rita exploded, "People are dead because of what this son of a bitch
said. How could he be credible now?"
Di Rita could have said the same things about his bosses in the Bush
administration.
Tens of thousands of people are dead in Iraq, including more than 1,600
U.S. soldiers and Marines, because of false allegations made by
President George W. Bush and Di Rita's more immediate boss, Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, about Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons
of mass destruction and equally imaginary active nuclear weapons
program. Bush, Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice repeatedly made unfounded allegations that led
to the continuing disaster in Iraq, much of which is now an economic
and military no man's land beset by bombings, assassinations,
kidnappings and political gridlock.
And we now know, thanks to a leaked British memo concerning the head of
British intelligence, that the Bush administration -- contrary to its
explicit denials -- had already made up its mind to attack Iraq and
"fixed" those bogus allegations to support its decision. In short, Bush
and his top officials lied about Iraq.
Going to war is the most serious decision a president can make. It
should never be approached in a cavalier fashion. American lives, the
prestige and influence of the country, international relations, the
health of its defenses, and the future of the next generation are at
stake. Yet every single piece of evidence we now have confirms that
George W. Bush, who was obsessed with unseating Saddam Hussein even
before 9/11, recklessly used the opportunity presented by the terror
attacks to march the country to war, fixing the intelligence to justify
his decision, and lying to the American people about the reasons for
the war. In other times, this might have been an impeachable offense.
The media circus around the Newsweek story arrived in time to further
divert attention from the explosive British memorandum. Although the
leaked Downing Street memo, published by the London Times on May 1,
revealed the deeply dishonest and manipulative way that the Bush
administration took the United States (and the United Kingdom) to war
against Iraq, the American press corps studiously ignored it for two
weeks.
The memo reported a July 2002 meeting of key British Cabinet and other
officials, held when Sir Richard Dearlove, head of the British
intelligence service, MI6, returned from a trip to Washington. It
revealed that the decision to go to war had already been made by that
point: "Military action was now seen as inevitable," the notes by
British national security aide Matthew Rycroft revealed. Dearlove
reported, "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action,
justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence
and facts were being fixed around the policy."
Members of the British Cabinet were worried by the news, the memo
shows, since they knew that the case against Iraq was tissue-thin in
international law and that there were several more egregious sinners in
the weapons area than Iraq. Because the United Kingdom, unlike the
United States, is a member of the International Criminal Court, its
officials had to worry about being tried for war crimes if they became
involved in an illegal war of aggression launched by Bush and lacking
U.N. Security Council sanction. Prime Minister Tony Blair put his hopes
in a ploy. He thought that Bush should arrange for the United Nations
to demand a return to Iraq of weapons inspectors, with the hope that
Saddam Hussein would refuse, thus creating a legal justification for
war acceptable to the international community.
On May 6, Knight Ridder reporters Warren Strobel and John Walcott said
that a former high official in the U.S. government told them that
Dearlove's remarks were "an absolutely accurate description of what
transpired" during his visit. This past Monday, White House spokesman
Scott McClellan finally responded to the leaked document but denied
that he had read it. Regarding the allegation that Bush fixed the
intelligence around the Iraq war policy he said, "The suggestion is
just flat-out wrong. Anyone who wants to know how the intelligence was
used only has to go back and read everything that was said in public
about the lead-up to the war."
It is hard to see how this absurdly vague methodology could actually
refute the memo's charges or, indeed, to know what exactly McClellan
was driving at. He added, "The president of the United States, in a
very public way, reached out to people across the world, went to the
United Nations, and tried to resolve this in a diplomatic manner." But
as the memo makes clear, that "reaching out" was fraudulent, a smoke
screen to cover a decision that had already been made. Bush went to the
United Nations reluctantly and against the advice of the Cheney and
Rumsfeld faction, mainly as a way of giving Saddam an ultimatum that
would form the basis for a war.
The Bush administration, and some credulous or loyal members of the
press, have long tried to blame U.S. intelligence services for
exaggerating the Iraq threat and thus misleading the president into
going to war. That position was always weak, and it is now revealed as
laughable. President Bush was not misled by shoddy intelligence.
Rather, he insisted on getting the intelligence that would support the
war on which he had already decided. A good half of Americans, opinion
polls show, now believe that the president actively lied to them about
Iraq. In another, less cynical, flag-waving and intimidated age, this
conclusion would provoke a scandal. The question would be, What did
George W. Bush decide about Iraq, and when did he decide it?
The leaked British document demonstrates that the moment of decision
was far earlier than the Bush administration publicly admitted. On Aug.
7, just weeks after the Dearlove visit to Washington, Cheney said in
California that no decision had been made on Iraq. When Bush met with
Saudi ambassador Bandar bin Sultan on Aug. 26, 2002, CNN reported that
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told the press, "The president
stressed that he has made no decisions, that he will continue to engage
in consultations with Saudi Arabia and other nations about steps in the
Middle East, steps in Iraq." On Sept. 8, 2002, Cheney was interviewed
by Tim Russert on "Meet the Press." Russert asked, "Will militarily
this be a cakewalk? Two, how long would we be there and how much would
it cost?" Cheney replied, "First of all, no decision's been made yet to
launch a military operation."
The administration continued the charade that no decision had been
taken through the end of 2002 and into 2003. In a White House press
conference on Dec. 17, 2002, a questioner asked Fleischer, "The L.A.
Times today published a poll that found that 72 percent of Americans,
including 60 percent of Republicans, said the president has not
provided enough evidence to justify starting a war with Iraq. Is the
president losing the public relations battle here in the United
States?"
"Well, one, I think that I'll just state what is well known," Fleischer
replied. "The president will not make any decision about war and peace
and the possibility of putting some of our nation's best men and women
in harm's way on the basis of a poll. He will do it on the basis of his
judgment as commander in chief and what it will take to save and
protect American lives in the event that he reaches the conclusion
Saddam Hussein will indeed engage in war against the United States or
provide terrorists with weapons to engage in war against the United
States, just like on September 11th with the attack. And if he reaches
that judgment, he will do so because the information he has and the
judgment he makes suggest that, not because of a poll."
The British memo is only the most decisive in a long list of documents
that make it inescapably clear that Bush had decided to go to war long
before. Indeed, Bush had decided as early as his presidential campaign
in the year 2000 that he would find a way to fight an Iraq war to
unseat Saddam. I was in the studio with Arab-American journalist Osama
Siblani on Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now" program on March 11, 2005,
when Siblani reported a May 2000 encounter he had with then-candidate
Bush in a hotel in Troy, Mich. "He told me just straight to my face,
among 12 or maybe 13 Republicans at that time here in Michigan at the
hotel. I think it was on May 17, 2000, even before he became the
nominee for the Republicans. He told me that he was going to take him
out, when we talked about Saddam Hussein in Iraq." According to
Siblani, Bush added that "he wanted to go to Iraq to search for weapons
of mass destruction, and he considered the regime an imminent and
gathering threat against the United States." Siblani points out that
Bush at that point was privy to no classified intelligence on Iraqi
weapons programs and had already made up his mind on the issue.
Siblani's account of Bush's stance is virtually identical to the
impressions Dearlove brought back from Washington a little over two
years later: "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action,
justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD." Iraq had long
played the great white whale to W.'s Ahab, and the chance to move
decisively against Saddam was intrinsic to his presidential ambitions.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill described to Ron Susskind in
"The Price of Loyalty" the first Bush national security meeting of
principals on Jan. 30, 2001. He writes that after Bush announced he
would simply disengage from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and
"unleash Sharon," he made it clear that Iraq would be a priority. "The
hour almost up, Bush had assignments for everyone ... Rumsfeld and
[Joint Chiefs chair Gen. H. Hugh] Shelton, he said, 'should examine our
military options.' That included rebuilding the military coalition from
the 1991 Gulf War, examining 'how it might look' to use U.S. ground
forces in the north and the south of Iraq ... Ten days in, and it was
about Iraq." Bush hit the ground running with regard to Iraq, shunting
aside key U.S. foreign-policy goals -- such as a resolution of the
Arab-Israeli conflict -- in favor of exploring military options against
Saddam Hussein. O'Neill reports a sense at the meeting that the
reluctance to commit ground forces to an Asian war, a legacy of the
Vietnam War, had ended with the advent of the Bush presidency.
An Iraq war might have been a hard sell, even for the skilled and
highly manipulative Bush team. But Sept. 11 ensured that they could get
congressional approval and public support for a war. Americans were
angry and willing to lash out in any direction specified by the
president. Former terrorism czar Richard Clarke related that on the
evening of Sept. 12, 2001, Bush "grabbed a few of us and closed the
door to the conference room. 'Look,' he told us, 'I know you have a lot
to do and all ... but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over
everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in
any way...'" When Clarke protested that it was clearly an al-Qaida
operation, Bush insisted, "Just look. I want to know any shred ... Look
into Iraq, Saddam." According to Clarke, Bush said it "testily."
Clarke reveals that Rumsfeld was already, on the afternoon of Sept. 12,
"talking about broadening the objectives of our response and 'getting
Iraq.'" Although early accounts of National Security Council meetings
after the attacks highlighted the role of Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz in pressing for an immediate war on Iraq, it has become
increasingly clear that he was only one such voice, and hardly the most
senior.
Astonishingly, the Bush administration almost took the United States to
war against Iraq in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. We know about
this episode from the public account of Sir Christopher Meyer, then the
U.K. ambassador in Washington. Meyer reported that in the two weeks
after Sept. 11, the Bush national security team argued back and forth
over whether to attack Iraq or Afghanistan. It appears from his account
that Bush was leaning toward the Iraq option.
Meyer spoke again about the matter to Vanity Fair for its May 2004
report, "The Path to War." Soon after Sept. 11, Meyer went to a dinner
at the White House, "attended also by Colin Powell, [and] Condi Rice,"
where "Bush made clear that he was determined to topple Saddam. 'Rumors
were already flying that Bush would use 9/11 as a pretext to attack
Iraq,' Meyer remembers." When British Prime Minister Tony Blair arrived
in Washington on Sept. 20, 2001, he was alarmed. If Blair had consulted
MI6 about the relative merits of the Afghanistan and Iraq options, we
can only imagine what well-informed British intelligence officers in
Pakistan were cabling London about the dangers of leaving bin Laden and
al-Qaida in place while plunging into a potential quagmire in Iraq.
Fears that London was a major al-Qaida target would have underlined the
risks to the United Kingdom of an "Iraq first" policy in Washington.
Meyer told Vanity Fair, "Blair came with a very strong message -- don't
get distracted; the priorities were al-Qaida, Afghanistan, the
Taliban." He must have been terrified that the Bush administration
would abandon London to al-Qaida while pursuing the great white whale
of Iraq. But he managed to help persuade Bush. Meyer reports, "Bush
said, 'I agree with you, Tony. We must deal with this first. But when
we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.'" Meyer also
said, in spring 2004, that it was clear "that when we did come back to
Iraq it wouldn't be to discuss smarter sanctions." In short, Meyer
strongly implies that Blair persuaded Bush to make war on al-Qaida in
Afghanistan first by promising him British support for a later Iraq
campaign.
That the Afghanistan war went so well quickly enabled Bush to begin
planning for an attack on Iraq. Bob Woodward reports in "Plan of
Attack" that Bush asked Cheney for an Iraq war plan on Nov. 21. On Nov.
26 the Independent reported that Bush had called Saddam Hussein "evil"
and demanded that he accept U.N. weapons inspectors. On Nov. 27 Howard
Fineman of Newsweek reported a conversation with Bush aboard Air Force
One in the wake of the successful Afghanistan campaign. "He wants to
avoid the more profound mistakes his dad made...: his failure, at the
end of the Gulf War, to stop -- once and for all -- Saddam Hussein in
Iraq from threatening the world with weapons of mass destruction."
Nov. 27, 2001, was a significant date. Gen. Tommy Franks in his memoirs
reveals that he received an unexpected call from Rumsfeld. "General
Franks, the president wants us to look at options for Iraq." Franks
knew exactly what the call portended. "Son of a bitch, I thought. No
rest for the weary." There would be another war. The die had already
been cast.
On Dec. 31 Newsweek reported, "In principle, Bush and his
national-security team have decided that Saddam has to go, U.S.
officials say. 'The question is not if the United States is going to
hit Iraq; the question is when,' says a senior American envoy in the
Middle East." The article notes Bush's oft-stated caution that no final
decision had been made, but dismisses it on the basis of insider
information. The main credit for this article was given to Christopher
Dickey and John Barry, but Sami Kohen is listed as reporting from
Turkey. Since a U.S. ambassador is quoted, and Kohen was the only one
of the coauthors in the Middle East, he is likely the one who got the
quote. Was his source Ambassador W. Robert Pearson?
Former Sen. Bob Graham of Florida says in his memoirs, "Intelligence
Matters," that on Feb. 19, 2002, he visited the U.S. Central Command.
Franks revealed to him that the command was no longer engaged in a war
in Afghanistan. Graham was taken aback. Franks told the stunned
senator, "Military and intelligence personnel are being re-deployed to
prepare for an action in Iraq." The implementation phase had already
begun.
In April 2002, Tony Blair went to see Bush at his Crawford, Texas,
ranch. Vanity Fair reports that Blair stressed the need to get the
backing of the United Nations for an Iraq war if he was going to swing
Parliament behind it.
This long-term obsession of George W. Bush, then, was the background of
the meeting in Washington with Dearlove in July 2002. Although Dearlove
reported on a change of mood, such that the Iraq war was now a sure
thing, he was probably actually observing that Bush had moved it to the
front burner. By late July or very early August 2002, according to
Vanity Fair, Blair had called Bush. A senior White House official who
saw the transcript remarked, "The way it read was that, come what may,
Saddam was going to go; they said they were going forward, they were
going to take out the regime, and they were doing the right thing."
Blair, he said, did not need any convincing. Both Blair and Bush would
go on telling the public for months afterward that no final decision
had been made about going to war.
It was also in midsummer 2002 that Franks asked Rumsfeld for $750
million to begin making preparations in Kuwait toward an Iraq war. The
request, reported in Woodward's "Plan of Attack," provoked a good deal
of controversy. Many in Congress felt that no specific appropriation
had been made for such preparations, and the money was essentially
taken from Afghanistan appropriations without congressional approval.
>From Bush's meeting in May 2000 with Osama Siblani and 12 Republicans
in a hotel room in Troy, Mich., until July 2002, his obsession with
attacking Iraq never wavered. His first national security meeting was
all about Iraq. He seriously considered attacking Iraq before
Afghanistan after Sept. 11, and Blair had to argue him into the
Afghanistan war. He had Rumsfeld ask Gen. Franks for an Iraq war plan
on Nov. 27, 2001. The sense that Dearlove had, that the die had been
inexorably cast by July 2002, was entirely correct.
But it is no positive reflection on the head of MI6 that he had not
been able to discern that the die had been cast long before. The
Downing Street memo is remarkable only for the frankness with which it
acknowledges the illegality of the planned war and Bush's policy of
"fixing" the intelligence around the policy. That the decision was made
first, and various pretexts advanced for it in the aftermath, is now
clear to the public.
Why has there not been more outrage in the United States at these
revelations? Many Americans may have chosen to overlook the lies and
deceptions the Bush administration used to justify the war because they
still believe the Iraq war might have made them at least somewhat
safer. When they realize that this hope, too, is unfounded, and that in
fact the war has greatly increased the threat of another terrorist
attack on U.S. soil, their wrath may be visited on the president and
the political party that has brought America the biggest foreign-policy
disaster since Vietnam.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Juan Cole is a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian
history at the University of Michigan and the author of "Sacred Space
and Holy War" (IB Tauris, 2002). | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
