Stovepipin' Down The Potomac

Interesting reporting (as usual) from Seymour Hersh. This time, a New Yorker piece and concurrent online Q&A concerning the Bush Administration's "stovepiping" (the relaying of "raw" data to the White House before proper vetting by the CIA) of pre-war intelligence.

The specific data concern (what else?) the infamous Niger uranium claims -- which have already spawned the scandal of the "sixteen words", and the scandal of the White House leaker.

Both pieces items well worth reading, especially for the glimpse offered of a White House completely given over to corruption and (what we might call) the politicisation of reality. But it seems, to this blogger, that Hersh is missing (or more accurately, not giving enough attention to) the larger point. Namely, that the "sixteen words" in no way, shape, or form impacted the Bush Administration's decision to go to war. Its mind was made up long before the "discovery" of Iraq's alleged attempts to purchase the African uranium.

Hersh himself writes that, "By early March, 2002, a former White House official told me, it was understood by many in the White House that the President had decided, in his own mind, to go to war."

But in point of fact, former Reagan Administration officials -- who were later to become Bush II Administration officials -- had been planning for the war since the mid-'90s.

They lamented that such a war would be politically unpopular in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalysing event, like a new Pearl Harbor". So, September 11 gave the Administration the political cover it needed to set loose the dogs of war -- to "sweep it all up. Things related and not," in the words of Donald H. Rumsfeld's infamous "attack memo", penned on the afternoon of September 11.

All that was needed to win over an ambivalent public -- still thirsting for the blood of Osama, but reluctant to "sweep it all up" without good cause -- was to link Saddam to bin Laden. Indeed, Congress' granting of permission for the Administration to have its miserable war was contingent upon the Administration's ability to demonstrate this link. Try as it might (and desperately return to the well as it might following the tepid public reactions of every other supposed justification for war), it was never able to do so. But with the help of its mainstream media allies, it was able to convince 70% of the American public that it had done so. (The Bush Administration's recent attempts at incredulity with regards to the public's "misperceptions" played out like a sick joke. These fuckers are very poor liars.) Q.E.D. -- and good enough for Congress, which never raised a peep.

WMD were a red herring. Essentially, they were the Administration's hard-right elements' concession to the more "reasonable" wing of the Administration -- led by Colin Powell -- to get some allies on board, and to try to gain Security Council authorisation. (The United States had not, after all, even attempted to win authorisation for the blitzing of either Yugoslavia or Afghanistan). Thus the decision to have, for "bureacratic reasons", according to Paul Wolfowitz, "settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction" as the principle justification for war.

Alas, Powell's February 5 dog-and-pony show -- now wholly debunked -- went over like a lead balloon: China, Russia, and France vowed to veto a Security Council resolution authorising war; 90% of the world's people were opposed to the war; and the resolution was withdrawn because even the ostensibly easy-to-push-around non-permanent members of the Security Council were strongly opposed -- despite massive pressure and overt attempts at bribery.

(Coverage of this last was an especially sickening trick, played by a media corps fully aware that thousands of people were about to be slaughtered, and that the "coalition" was planning to deploy radiological munitions and cluster bombs. The "reporting" of the President's plaintive last-hour phone calls to recalcitrant Security Council members as some kind of fucking game -- "'Today is a very busy day of phone diplomacy at the White House,' says Ari Fleischer. Nyuk, nyuk. And now, here's Tom with some incredible footage of four hang-gliding gophers!" -- was possibly the mainstream media's lowest hour: imagine an Iraqi citizen, days away from being bombarded by the greatest military machine in history, viewing this ignominious spectacle on satellite television.)

But the Administration, which, anyway, had by that time decided (presumably for "bureaucratic reasons") that it was not planning its invasion to save the United States from "imminent" danger but instead to "liberate" the Iraqi people (and/or to create a "model" democracy in the Middle East), went ahead with its war despite the opposition of essentially the entire world community -- a distressing proportion of which (primarily those sitting upon gigantic banned-weapons piles of their own), it should be noted, would have been rabidly on board with even the slightest evidence of an Iraqi WMD programme.

At any rate, the Bush Administration was well aware that Iraq had long since been purged of its WMD. It's worth reading to the bottom of Hersh's article, in fact, to get at the testimony given to the CIA by Iraqi defector Jafar Dhia Jafar:

Up until the '91 Gulf War, our adversaries were regional. ... But after the war, when it was clear that we were up against the United States, Saddam understood that these weapons were redundant. "No way we could escape the United States." Therefore, the WMD warheads did Iraq little strategic good.

So:

Jafar insisted that there was not only no bomb, but no WMD, period. "The answer was none." ... Jafar explained that the Iraqi leadership had set up a new committee after the '91 Gulf War, and after the UNSCOM inspection process was set up...and the following instructions [were sent] from the Top Man [Saddam]: "give them everything".

Just one example among many of defectors, scientists, and weapons inspectors all strongly avowing that Iraq's WMD had all been destroyed by 1998 at the latest -- but more likely by 1995.

The point being, in other words, that WMD -- including the piddling "sixteen word" subset of the WMD equation -- were never the real issue. The real issue was and is the Administration's "pre-determination" to capture Iraq's oil fields ("...a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the great material prizes in world history"); and (perhaps more importantly) the mainstream media's willingness to function as a the propaganda arm of the National Warfare State.

The path to war may have been engraved in stone even before the second aeroplane rammed into the World Trade Center. This blogger has argued before now, if for no other reason that the Administration's reaction doesn't otherwise make any logical sense, that the White House was probably complicit in the events of September 11. But even if this reading of events is in error (and even if the events of September 11 had not occured), it's patently clear that Iraq was destined to be taken down some time during Dubya's reign.

This much was engraved in stone the second Dick Cheney and his gaggle of deranged accomplices -- Perle, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Feith, Rumsfeld -- ascended to the throne. September 11 was a particularly effective (because so deadly, shocking, and spectacular) ace-in-the-hole.

But if the history of U.S. foreign policy should teach us anything, it should teach us that the American public is maddeningly gullible when it comes to swallowing whole the supposed "threats" to our "way of life" posed by the nefarious schemings of this, that, or the other member of the Pentagon's demon-of-the-month club.

Cuba, anyone? Vietnamese communists preparing to overrun San Francisco, anyone? Sandanistas two days' march from Texas, anyone? Noriega and Qaddafi, anyone? Kuwaiti incubators, anyone? Grenada, for god's sake?

The Bush Gang would have got its war one way or the other.

Hell, even The Onion knew that much. "America's Finest News Source" despatched an eerily prescient "report" just a few days before the inauguration: "'You better believe we're going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration,' said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. 'Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?'"

Here's hoping that Hersh -- or somebody else with similar contacts, ambition, and integrity -- can turn his attentions to exposing how it came to be that the mainstream media (which has since the war -- et voila! -- begun to question the war's premises, if only timidly) would, in the run-up to war, uncritically regurgitate every single one of the Bush Administration's flaming lies -- especially the obssessive linking of Saddam and Osama which ultimately sold the American public on the war -- as gospel truth.

Perhaps the answer is as simple as the knowledge that a major war portended a ratings and circulation bonanza. But if so, these decisions were, in the final analysis, made editorially -- and it is these decisions which an author of Hersh's stature could bring to light.

For therein lies the real key to unlocking Washington's grisly safe-deposit box of deceit-fueled wars of conquest and empire.

Posted by Eddie Tews at October 26, 2003 08:20 PM