In Afghanistan and now in Iraq, it turns out that 'Regime Change' was a misnomer. Tales the Pentagon Told
Never mind the Jessica Lynch myth, is there a single Pentagon story that made it through the war intact?
Empire of Nothing
Do you remember it? In the weeks, the months before our most recent war it often seemed like the most used term in the media. I'm talking about "regime change," of course. Someday, someone will write its history for us. It seemed to arrive as if from the blue and colonize our news in an instant. It was clearly meant as a euphemism - "regimes" are such self-evidently brutal creatures and "change" is such a modest, benign, even pallid word -- for a violent act of state. It stood in for the overthrow of the government of another sovereign state, whether by "decapitation" (to use another of the new terms that our second Iraq War added to our vocabularies, this one stronger and more violent than the one it replaced, "assassination"), coup d'etat, or invasion, and its replacement by a more acceptable government. We're now in a lull between wars. Only recently has "regime change" popped up again, this time in reference, of course, to Iran. (See, for instance, the recent Financial Times piece which begins, "Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, is spearheading efforts to make 'regime change' in Iran the official policy goal of the Bush administration, but his campaign is meeting with considerable resistance from other senior figures, according to officials and analysts.") But I thought it might be worth taking a moment to consider the term in light of what the still brief postwar experience in Iraq might have to teach us.
It turns out, strangely enough, that "regime change" was not only a euphemism, but possibly a gross misnomer. If regime change implies anything, it's an exchange, however violent or forcible, of one regime for another, the governmental equivalent perhaps of flipping or juggling a ball from one hand to the other, or perhaps from one person to another. But, here's the odd thing, there turns out, so far, to be no other "regime." There turns out to be more or less nothing at all except a brutal descent from tyranny into anarchy. At every level in Iraq, nothing. In the meanwhile, all the explanations for why "regime change" should have happened (except for Saddam's brutality, which was never in question) have evaporated like so many puddles of water on a blistering highway. No weapons of mass destruction, no ties to Al Qaeda -- well, you know the litany on this one by now -- and perhaps most important, given all those prewar promises for the "reconstruction" of Iraq, no money.
David Teather of the British Guardian reports that "American officials are considering a plan to use Iraq's future oil and gas revenues as collateral to raise cash to rebuild the country. Several US companies, including Halliburton and Bechtel, which are jostling for the lucrative reconstruction contracts, are reportedly pushing the scheme to expedite the commissioning process." So, already the occupation administration, such as it is, is considering putting what future Iraq may have in hock in order to limp forward in the present because -- and here's a simple truth no one cares to write much about -- there is to be no Marshall Plan, no Japan-style rebuilding, no significant investment of US public funds into the actual reconstruction of Iraq. Such funds don't exist. Among all the things that we now know can be shoved through Congress with relative impunity, this is unlikely to be one. There is then a financial void that accompanies the regime void in today's Iraq.
In the meantime, the new occupation administration, the second since war's end, run by counter-terrorism expert L. Paul Bremer III, seems intent on recreating Iraq as a free trade zone for the United States and turning the country into a thoroughly privatized land, which means of course dismantling what's left of Iraq's protected economy. On this, Edmund L. Andrews of The New York Times was vivid indeed. This is familiar territory. We already know where this led our prize pupil of the 1990s, Argentina -- to a collapse of a sort we can't even begin to imagine.
What's clear now (if it wasn't before) is that our men in Baghdad arrived with a set of inside-the beltway, think-tank dreams which sounded expansive but were exceptionally limited, exceptionally focused on military power, bases, and oil, and precariously attached to each other like a house of cards. There was that glorious reception (you know, like in Paris in 1944), the instant revival of the decrepit Iraqi oil industry, the installation of our own Iraqis (Chalabi et. al.). These were nothing but dreams - and all of them were known to be dreams before the war even began. What could have been more striking than that we didn't even bother to arrive with more than a couple of Iraqis in tow, not even translators?
In a land where the AK-47 in the bedroom is now a given (one rare thing that Iraq seems to have in common with parts of the United States), it turns out that what we performed was not "regime change," but something far closer to a massive decapitation -- and unlike Dr. Frankenstein, we evidently have no idea at all how you should revive the body.
At the very least we need a new term for regime-change-without-the-regime-to-be-changed-to. As an empire, we are becoming increasingly used to balancing on only the military leg. There was, in this light, a fascinating piece by Joseph Galloway in The Philadelphia Inquirer, that begins, "President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and other top officials are spending hours coping with frequent, unsolicited attempts by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to make foreign policy, according to senior administration officials who are directly involved." Does nobody remember what tends to happen to economies when militaries dominate? Check out Brazil after 1964, for example. We're talking catastrophe and corruption at almost unimaginable levels.
All these guys dreaming about the Roman Empire, or the British Empire. Dream on. The question is, what are we an empire of? Perhaps this is, as Iraq seems to indicate, as Afghanistan does indicate, the empire of nothing at all. Or the empire of rubble.
Of course, let's face it, we do live in a mad and degraded world, where words often have little or no meaning whatsoever and the media air is so filled with lies that the public simply ceases to give a damn. Still, let me run through a little list of recent lies and oddities involving our own empire of nothing.
Weapons of Mass Destruction
Let's start with the fact that our president has now claimed that we found them -- those weapons of mass destruction; well not them exactly, but two trucks that maybe, coulda, woulda, hadda, sorta. As The Washington Post reports:
"President Bush, citing two trailers that U.S. intelligence agencies have said were probably used as mobile biological weapons labs, said U.S. forces in Iraq have 'found the weapons of mass destruction' that were the United States' primary justification for going to war. In remarks to Polish television at a time of mounting criticism at home and abroad that the more than two-month-old weapons hunt is turning up nothing, Bush said that claims of failure were 'wrong.' The remarks were released today.
'You remember when [Secretary of State] Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons,' Bush said in an interview before leaving today on a seven-day trip to Europe and the Middle East. 'They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on.'"
If you want another view of these two trucks (and other wmd developments), take a look at Slate's Fred Kaplan in "Vanishing Agents, Did Iraq really have weapons of mass destruction?":
"Read closely, though, the CIA report [on those two trucks] reveals considerable ambiguity about the nature of these vehicles. For example, it notes that Iraqi officials-presumably those currently being interrogated-say the trailers were used to produce hydrogen for artillery weather-balloons. (Many Army units float balloons to monitor the accuracy of artillery fire.) ...
The report also notes that, in order to produce biological weapons, each trailer would have to be accompanied by a second and possibly a third trailer, specially designed to grow, process, sterilize, and dry the bacteria. Such trailers would "have equipment such as mixing tanks, centrifuges, and spray dryers"-none of which were spotted in the trailers that were found. The problem, the CIA acknowledges, is that "we have not yet found" these post-production trailers. Question: Is it that they haven't been found-or that they don't exist?"
In the meantime, yesterday's New York Times had a piece by James Dao and Thom Shanker that began:
"Secretary of State Colin L. Powell today fiercely defended the intelligence used by the Bush administration to justify war against Iraq, saying he spent several late nights poring over the Central Intelligence Agency's reports because he knew the credibility of the country and the president were at stake. Another top official, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, insisted today that his agency's work had not been compromised by politics. 'I'm enormously proud of the work of our analysts,' he said in a statement. 'The integrity of our process has been maintained throughout, and any suggestion to the contrary is simply wrong.'"
But across the Atlantic, where both the weather and the news seem different, Dan Plesch and Richard Norton-Taylor, defense experts for The Guardian, report on quite another Powell, drawing on a secret transcript of a meeting between his British counterpart and him just before his UN performance. The document has been circulating in NATO diplomatic circles, possibly leaked by diplomats who felt betrayed by post-war WMD developments.
"Jack Straw and his US counterpart, Colin Powell, privately expressed serious doubts about the quality of intelligence on Iraq's banned weapons programme at the very time they were publicly trumpeting it to get UN support for a war on Iraq ... Their deep concerns ... emerged at a private meeting between the two men shortly before a crucial UN security council session on February 5. ...
Mr Powell shared the concern about intelligence assessments, especially those being presented by the Pentagon's office of special plans set up by the US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz. ... he told Mr Straw he had come away from the meetings [with US intelligence] 'apprehensive' about what he called, at best, circumstantial evidence highly tilted in favour of assessments drawn from them, rather than any actual raw intelligence. Mr Powell told the foreign secretary he hoped the facts, when they came out, would not 'explode in their faces'."
Treatment of Prisoners, or what are tabloids for, anyway
There have been numerous reports, in the British press anyway, of less than liberation-style behavior toward Iraqi military prisoners by both the Americans and the British. The British have gotten a good press here for being better at empire than Americans are. Perhaps this is what is meant. Here may be the grimmest story of the weekend from a Murdoch tabloid, The Sun, in England. But fair warning, this stuff is stomach-turning and in my hometown paper it -- along with the more general charges about prisoner mistreatment -- rated only a quiet piece tucked way inside the Saturday paper. The Sun piece begins:
"The young mum who uncovered the Iraqi PoW sex snaps scandal said last night: 'I felt sick to the stomach at those pictures.' Kelly Tilford, 22, called police after developing a film in her photo shop.
The shocking pictures -- revealed by The Sun yesterday -- showed male Iraqis apparently forced into sexual positions by their British captors. In another a prisoner was suspended by rope from a fork-lift truck driven by a laughing Brit."
No Collateral Damage
The "precision" of our weaponry and so the resulting lack of "collateral damage" (dead civilians) are among the greatest myths of our new frontier wars. The long-term casualty counts from such wars will prove large and plenty collateral, as Kamal Ahmed reveals in Sunday's Observer. But who even bothers to think about the "precision weaponry" which landed in the right spot but simply failed to explode. Ahmed informs us that "landmine experts say that up to 10,000 separate [unexploded] cluster bombs and bomblets could be lying in cities, farmland and on the main road arteries across the country." His piece begins:
"The shocking extent of unexploded cluster bombs dropped by American and British planes, which litter Iraq eight weeks after the conflict, is revealed in detail for the first time today. The first map based on military intelligence to show the exact location of unexploded anti-personnel mines, cluster bombs and anti-tank mines, obtained by The Observer, shows the vast area of the country which is at danger from live munitions.
Experts in clearing conflict zones of unexploded bombs say that millions of Iraqi adults and children are at risk, along with humanitarian aid workers, United Nations personnel, civilian staff and military officials.
Its revelation raises fresh questions for Tony Blair and George Bush, who insisted that post-conflict Iraq would be a safer place than it was under Saddam Hussein."
The Real Scandal at the New York Times
While the journalistic misdeeds of Jayson Blair have gotten endless copy -- talk about weapons of mass distraction -- the journalistic scandal at the Times that should have mattered, Judith Miller's scare reports on Saddam Hussein's WMD, based on the most self-interested and tattered of non-sources, the U.S. military and Chalabi, have gone largely unnoticed. Fortunately, Nation columnist Katha Pollitt puts Blair and Miller nicely into context.
Tales the Pentagon Told
Okay, so let's start with the Jessica Lynch story. On May 15, John Kampfner reported in the British Guardian on a BBC investigation he had conducted of the Lynch story in which he had discovered that almost every element in the instant patriotic myth of her rescue was phony or highly exaggerated. As the subhead for the piece put it, "Her Iraqi guards had long fled, she was being well cared for -- and doctors had already tried to free her."
And that was only half the sordid tale of instant Pentagon myth-making. Lynch had received no gunshots or stabs wounds, and her mistreatment at the hands of her captors hadn't happened. But somehow this story -- except on a couple of op-ed pages and in the Chicago Tribune -- seemed barely to dogpaddle across the Atlantic until late last week, two weeks after it broke in Britain, when the Associated Press repeated the BBC's investigation. They went to the hospital where she was rescued and again interviewed her "captors." In a piece over-stuffed with Pentagon denials of various sorts, reporter Scheherezade Faramarzi nonetheless found Kampfner's story to be accurate. (The Brits were our allies, but you wouldn't want to take their reporting, when at variance with our government's myth-making, at face value.) Faramarzi adds one delectable detail to this already tattering tale of heroism:
"The U.S. commandos refused a key and instead broke down doors and went in with guns drawn. They carried away the prisoner in the dead of night with helicopter and armored vehicle backup -- even though there was no Iraqi military presence and the hospital staff didn't resist. In the tale of Pfc. Jessica Lynch's rescue, this is the Iraqi side."
I believe this represents a new Pentagon policy in action: "Don't knock, don't tell."
Robert Scheer, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, has been writing about this story (which, given the attention the Lynch rescue got at the time, should have been instant headlines on newspages around the country) and he's been roundly assaulted by the Pentagon for his effort.
In fact, if you think about it, is there any American story from the prewar or war period that actually made it through the war intact? How wrong were our boys in the Bush administration anyway? Remember in those distant prewar days when Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki was roundly hooted out of town for claiming it might take "hundreds of thousands" of troops to police occupied Iraq? Rumsfeld and his cronies claimed only 100,000 to begin with and those numbers were sure to drop fast.
Well, lo and behold, The New York Times now reports that "the total number of allied forces [British and American] involved directly and indirectly in securing Iraq is 200,000 or more, American military officials estimate." And troops expected to be sent home aren't going. I assume that it's just a matter of days before official apologies go out to General Shinseki.
Additional contributions from Tom Engelhardt can be found throughout the week at TomDispatch.com, a weblog of The Nation Institute. {publish-page-break}
The War in London
Post-war questions, an annoyance in Washington, are fast becoming a crisis for Britain's Tony Blair. An Occupation By Any Other Name...
No matter what you call it, it's hard to turn a war of occupation into a battle of liberation.
The War in London
The ongoing questions about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- or, rather, the lack thereof -- are becoming a political annoyance in Washington, requiring an awkward shift in rhetoric and tactics. Across the Atlantic, however, such questions have blossomed into an ugly crisis for the Bush administration's staunchest European ally. Prime Minister Tony Blair will arrive back in London to face a rebellion in his party, increasingly nasty attacks from former members of his own cabinet, and claims that intelligence information about Iraq's weapons programs was exaggerated or fabricated to meet political demands. As Nigel Morris and Andy McSmith of The Independent report, the loudest criticisms are coming from former members of Blair's government -- former cabinet ministers Robin Cook and Clare Short.
"Mr Cook said it now appeared that the Government had made a 'monumental blunder' over Iraq. 'In the real world, governments make mistakes but what they must never do is try to deny and cover up these mistakes,' he said. 'The Government should admit it was wrong and it needs to set up a thorough independent inquiry into how it got it wrong, so it never happens again and we never again send British troops into action on the basis of a mistake.' ...
Ms Short said the country needed to get to the truth over Iraq because it was 'such a big historical issue'. She claimed the 'War Cabinet' barely met, with all the crucial decisions taken by Mr Blair and Mr Bush and their advisers. She said: 'Because all this was done secretly, the preparations for post-conflict were poor, and we have got the chaos and suffering that we have got now.'"
Cook also makes his own case in the opinion pages of The Independent. In a lengthy column, the former minister argues that "Britain was conned into a war to disarm a phantom threat in which not even our major ally really believed."
"The truth is that the US chose to attack Iraq not because it posed a threat, but because they knew it was weak and expected its military to collapse. It is a truth that leaves the British government in an uncomfortable position. This week Tony Blair was pleading for everyone to show patience and to wait for weapons to be found. There is an historic problem with this plea. The war only took place because the coalition powers lost patience with Hans Blix and refused his plea for a few more months to complete his disarmament tasks.
There is also a growing problem of transatlantic politics with the British Prime Minister's plea for more time. The US administration wanted the war to achieve regime change and now they have got it they do not see why they need to keep up the pretence that they fought it to deliver disarmament."
Short has been even more strident in her criticism, accusing Blair of reaching a secret deal with President Bush last September to go to war. In a BBC interview, Short also asserts that Blair misled the cabinet both about Iraq's weapons capability and France's diplomatic intentions.
"Ms Short, who was widely criticised after she failed to carry out a threat to resign on the eve of war, accused the prime minister of riding roughshod over the conventions of cabinet. 'It was all done in Tony Blair's study ... The normal Whitehall systems to make big decisions like this broke down and were very personalised in No 10.' Warning that civil servants and troops were ready to disobey an order to go to war, Ms Short said that the prime minister swung round the Whitehall machinery at the last moment when the attorney general declared that military action would be legal. But she added: 'I think, given the attorney's advice, it was legal. But I think the route we got there didn't honour the legality questions.'"
Compare such fraternal criticism with the solid -- and largely unchallenged -- wall of spin and obfuscation being built in Washington. While Blair seeks to defend his pre-war weapons claims, US officials -- led by Pentagon Boss Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz -- are quietly backing away from the weapons claims while suggesting that the WMD threat was only one of several important justifications for war. Even Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose pre-war ambivalence about the weapons claims was made public in a series of memos published over the weekend, is now keeping to the party line, and only a few Democrats have dared question the administration's pre-war claims. But Washington's change-the-topic approach is proving a liability for Blair, who has promised to produce convincing evidence of Iraq's WMD menace. As The Scotsman asserts, the allies can't seem to get their stories straight, and Blair is paying for that confusion.
"When Mr Rumsfeld changed his tune it was just in time to clash with a toned-down message from No 10, while the admission by Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, that the WMD argument was a 'bureaucratic' one didn't help transatlantic relations. The impression of mismanagement and confusion was underscored yesterday in the States with the publication of reports that Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, had written off some US intelligence reports on Iraq as 'bull****' -- all of which must lead to the quiet satisfaction of the French and the rest of Europe's 'told you so' brigade."
Blair's problems are visible outside of Parliament and beyond the opinion pages. In a new poll published by The Daily Telegraph, the number of Britons believing that Iraq actually had weapons of mass destruction has dropped dramatically. Moreover, the paper declares, "a large majority of Britons now reckon that 'regime change' rather than disarming Iraq was the Anglo-American coalition's main aim all along." Blair can find some reason for optimism in the poll, which finds that his personal approval ratings have not dropped significantly.
"Nevertheless, worms of doubt are evidently eating away at more and more people's trust in his government. YouGov's monthly survey for The Daily Telegraph, published last week, showed that 62 per cent of voters believed that the Government had not shown itself to be 'honest and trustworthy' and doubts are increasingly widespread about ministers' motives for going to war.
The figures ... demonstrate the full extent of public dubiety. Whereas before the war nearly three quarters of YouGov's respondents, 71 per cent, believed that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, that figure has now fallen to 51 per cent."
The Telegraph's editors see dire risks in those numbers, asserting that Blair now faces "the gravest accusation that can be made in politics."
"Tony Blair stands charged, in effect, with committing British troops on the basis of a lie. Intelligence sources are reported to be unhappy about the way in which their briefings were politicised. Clare Short says that the Prime Minister 'duped' the nation over Saddam Hussein's weapons. Robin Cook wants an independent inquiry into the whole business. The Government has responded by promising us yet another dossier.
...
Mr Blair had good reasons to be worried about the menace posed by Saddam; but his obsession with presentation has gravely damaged that case. Even if our forces were now to unearth evidence of a major chemical or biological weapons programme in Iraq, many people in this country - let alone in the Arab world - would assume it had been planted. Such are the wages of spin."
Tim Hames, writing in The Times of London, wonders that Blair doesn't simply embrace the new spin coming from the Pentagon. While Blair "placed enormous weight" on the WMD threat, Hames writes, he has also shown a willingness to intervene elsewhere fo purely humanitarian reasons. But Hames, ultimately, is less concerned about what the current crisis means for Blair than about what it means for the war-making alliance.
"What is interesting about the whole WMD saga is the different way in which varying parts of the pro-war coalition have reacted to it. Some of the belligerents have been so horrified about the failure to find evidence that they have recanted their previous support; others have changed tack and adopted mass graves located as a surrogate for mass destruction unlocated; some are still (like me) sticking with their original position and fiddling with their thumbs while waiting for the barrels full of bubonic plague to emerge. There are plenty of people who do not care; victory, to them, is all that matters. What this indicates is that while the anti-war lobby may have looked a diverse and rum lot (stretching from pop stars such as Miss Dynamite to Charles Kennedy -- Mr Not Dynamite -- to Matthew Parris), the pro-war faction was no less anarchic in its composition.
It included neo-conservatives committed to the promotion of American values everywhere, liberal internationalists devoted to universal principles of human rights, anti-proliferationists who focused on WMD, new-orderists who believe the world was fundamentally changed by the attacks on September 11, old-score opportunists who thought Saddam should have been brought down in 1991 and wanted a second bite at the cherry, and restraining influence types who were none too sure that the war was a fabulous idea but wanted to be involved to stop the United States running riot."
Discuss this article.
An Occupation By Any Other Name
"We thank the coalition for liberating Iraq...but are we occupied or liberated? I swear to God, if this is occupation, all our children, women and men, young and old, will die rather than accept occupation."
-- Sheikh Fsal al-Kaoud, a clan leader in Iraq, at a meeting with Coalition Provisional Authority officials.
At first, President Bush called the conflict in Iraq a war of liberation. Now, President Bush wants the world to call the military operation in Iraq a "battle," in the war on terrorism. But regardless of what spin Bush puts on the original military operation, it's getting increasingly difficult to avoid the "o" word -- occupation. After all, if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck...
Bush's semantic shift to the word "battle" is an election-minded political ploy. He wants to keep the electorate focused on national security and his ongoing war on terrorism. The alternative, of course, is that voters will notice things like the ailing state of our economy, the 2 million jobs lost since Bush took office, or even such niceties as the Bush administration's ongoing attempts to roll back environmental protections. None of these developments is particularly popular with voters. In fact, while most Americans still support Bush as commander-in-chief, they are increasingly tepid about his performance back home. As Roy Hutcheson writes for Knight-Ridder news:
"The 'battle' strategy isn't without risk. So far, the U.S.-led attempt to restore order in Iraq isn't going nearly as well as the war went. The Army's 3rd Infantry Division has been told it can't come home as planned, thousands more U.S. soldiers may have to be sent to Iraq and so far American troops haven't found any of the links between Iraq and al-Qaida or the weapons of mass destruction that the administration used to justify the war. In fact, some U.S. intelligence officials say the Iraq invasion diverted resources from the search for Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders, and new evidence suggests that Iran has much closer ties to terrorists than Iraq did.
But given a choice between running on national security and running on the economy, national security is the clear choice."
Of course, back when American soldiers were on TV every night risking their lives, Bush was still calling the invasion of Iraq a war. The use of "battle" seems to have begun on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, after the "war" was over. Turning the reality of an occupation into liberation, however, is not proving as easy as switching a buzz word. On Monday, thousands of laid-off Iraqi soldiers marched in protest against the U.S., demanding their wages. Meanwhile tribal leaders met with Ambassador Hume Horan of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Horan himself admitted to the tribesmen that although "occupation is not a nice word, what we have now is occupation." The tribesmen were not keen on that reality, as Reuters reports:
"'The entire Iraqi people is a time bomb that will blow up in the Americans' face if they don't end their occupation. We refuse to deal with the occupation,' tribal leader Riyadh al- Asadi told Reuters after meeting a senior U.S. official for talks on the future of Iraq after Saddam Hussein. 'The Iraqi people did not fight the Americans during the war, only Saddam's people did. But if the people decide to fight them now, they are in big trouble.'"
The Brits, as occupiers, aren't having much better luck. Thousands of people gathered in Basra to protest the appointment of a British commander as head of the city. The protesters carried banners that read "No to British rule over Basra," and "We can rule ourselves" -- signs which sound suspiciously like signs of protest against an occupation. But just in case there existed any real doubt about the nature of the American presence in Iraq, the U.S. has given up on the original plan to have a representative body of Iraqis choose the next government. Instead of having an Iraqi national congress elect Iraq's interim government, which would be similar to, say, a democracy, the occupiers will hand pick a council of amenable leaders, the Telegraph reports:
"[T]he US will appoint a council of 25 to 30 senior figures from across the religious and ethnic spectrum who will shadow the current administration in preparation for taking power. Officials said the council would be in place within six weeks. The group will begin drafting an Iraqi constitution that will be put to the people in a referendum.
American administrators have admitted finding it difficult to co-ordinate the diverse ambitions of such a big group as the proposed 300-member congress."
Meanwhile, a recent call for a gun amnesty has so far failed to convince any Iraqis who own the forbidden guns to voluntarily hand their weapons over to the occupiers. The U.S. military seems to be wondering why, despite clues such as dangerous cities where lawlessness still prevails, and continual complaints from Iraqis that the U.S. has not provided enough security The president who shunned the idea of nation-building in the last elections and ran on a promise of a "humble" foreign policy is now discovering that bringing democracy to a shattered, war-torn (or battle-scarred) land is not as easy dropping bombs on it. Call it what you will: The U.S. invaded Iraq, won the war, and is now grappling with the occupation. Discuss this article. {publish-page-break}
Liar, Liar?
What makes a lie a lie? Neoconservative nabobs, rushing to the president's defense, have some interesting answers. Settling for Less
In the Middle East, the "road map" summit is underway. And the first likely roadblock? Israeli settlements.
Liar, Liar?
The military's failure to find any trace of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq may yet become a liability for the Bush administration, but not if the nation's neoconservative opinion-makers have anything to do with it. A small but growing chorus of left-leaning pundits and politicians are suggesting that the administration may, just possibly, have misled the nation a tad by claiming that Iraq's WMD arsenal posed a distinct threat to American security. Accordingly, those same pundits and politicians are boldly wondering whether the war -- sold by the president and his cohorts as a campaign to disarm Iraq -- may, just possibly, have been launched under a false flag.
The neocon nabobs, naturally, are hustling to defend the president and his war-planners. And, as is often the case when the new right's hawkish ideologues get involved, that defensive is taking the form of a stridently nasty and increasingly personal offensive.
Predictably, the most moderate (and monotonous) defense comes from The Wall Street Journal. In an editorial, the neocons' paper of record attacks the administration's critics (few and muted though they remain) for "trying to make a war crime out of the fact that the allies haven't yet found caches of weapons of mass destruction." Hitting a rhetorical note repeated by war party pundits everywhere, the Journal suggests that the lack of WMD evidence is simply unimportant. The war was justified, the Journal reasons, because Saddam Hussein was deposed.
"What seems to be going on here is an attempt to damage the credibility of Mr. Blair, President Bush and other war supporters. If their backing for the war is morally vindicated, they will emerge as even larger forces on the world stage, and so they must be tarnished after the fact as dissemblers. ...
Whether or not WMD is found takes nothing away from the Iraq war victory. The allies liberated a country of 22 million people, rid the world of a terrorist ally and have begun a process that may well create a more stable and prosperous Arab world. The credibility gap lies with those who were opposed to achieving all of that."
The Journal editorial is positively mild, however, compared to the broadsides being fired by other neocon stalwarts. The debate over the lack of WMD evidence has been growing for weeks. But while the issue has been tackled vigorously in the British press and the British Parliament, it has been handled remarkably tenderly by American editors and elected officials. That may have changed, however, thanks to items published in The New York Times and Vanity Fair.
In the Times, columnist Paul Krugman approvingly notes that the British media "have not been shy about drawing the obvious implications" about the as-yet unsupported WMD claims. Moreover, Krugman writes, "the outrage has not been limited to war opponents."
"The Times of London was ardently pro-war; nonetheless, it ran an analysis under the headline 'Lie Another Day.' The paper drew parallels between the selling of the war and other misleading claims: 'The government is seen as having 'spun' the threat from Saddam's weapons just as it spins everything else.' Yet few have made the same argument in this country, even though 'spin' is far too mild a word for what the Bush administration does, all the time. Suggestions that the public was manipulated into supporting an Iraq war gain credibility from the fact that misrepresentation and deception are standard operating procedure for this administration, which -- to an extent never before seen in U.S. history -- systematically and brazenly distorts the facts."
So, how is Krugman's missive playing among the neocons? James Taranto, the man behind the Journal's Best of the Web 'blog, tears into the Times columnist in typically unrestrained and vindictive fashion, calling the column "unusually deranged" and "addlebrained beyond belief." Amazingly enough, though, Taranto essentially ignores the central issue. Bush is being accused of misleading the nation on the issue of Iraq's arms, Taranto seems to reason, because the president "doesn't agree with liberal ideas." And, in a final logical leap of fancy, Taranto declares that Krugman and other critics are being deceptive and evasive.
"Rather than grapple with the president's arguments and offer alternatives of their own, the Democratic left -- of which Krugman is only the most embarrassing example -- is reduced to name-calling: Anyone who disagrees with me is a liar."
War Watch can't help but wonder if Taranto is actually immune to both self-reflection and irony. In fact, Krugman never once calls Bush a "liar." Nor, of course, does he call the president "deranged," "addlebrained," or "embarrassing."
The National Review's William F. Buckley Jr. -- the intellectual antithesis of the vituperative Taranto -- indulges in a bit of name-calling, too, calling Krugman "hysterical" and dismissing the possibility that Bush and other members of the administration have simply lied. Unlike Taranto, though, Buckley at least acknowledges that the White House and its allies have a credibility gap to close.
"Those who reasonably doubt that George Bush and Dick Cheney would consciously lie to Congress and the American people and Tony Blair and for that matter the entire world, are, again reasonably, asked to look for other explanations. We do need to have a much better explanation than any we have had. Going to war to abort Husseinism is justified. But we are nevertheless entitled to know: How was intelligence information, presented as conclusive, so apparently illusory? Who was it, on the assembly line between the first man who spotted what he took to be WMD activity in Iraq, and the Defense Intelligence Agency and the President of the United States who beamed out to the world, not suspicions of WMD activity, but affirmations of it, who screwed up? Who deceived, or was carried away? And what vaccines have our leaders taken to guard against other deceptions of like character?"
Buckley, it seems, anticipates an explanation that will exonerate the White House and lay the blame somewhere else, far down on the intelligence food-chain. Of course, Krugman has offered a pre-emptive answer for such thinking:
"The problem lay not with intelligence professionals, but with the Bush and Blair administrations. They wanted a war, so they demanded reports supporting their case, while dismissing contrary evidence."
The second catalyst for the neocon reaction has come in the form of an article by Sam Tanenhaus, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair (and, it should be noted, the author of an upcoming biography of Buckley). Tanenhaus interviewed Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in early May, and recounts that interview in the current issue of Vanity Fair (sadly, the article is not available online).
Now, the article -- particularly Wolfowitz's suggestion that the WMD justification was chosen for "bureaucratic" reasons -- is being cited by many critics of Washington's war as proof that the administration won support for its war under false pretenses. Robert Scheer, in a column on Working for Change, writes that Wolfowitz "certainly seems unconcerned with the implications of making arguments for war based on convenience rather than facts."
"Of course, the marketing of policy -- spin -- is an established, albeit unfortunate, part of politics. However, it is unacceptable to misinform your troops going into battle or mislead your citizens about why you are putting their sons and daughters in harm's way. Bush and his band of hawks seem to believe the ends justify the means. Thus, the terror of 9/11 and the boogeyman of Iraq's supposed WMD stash became the key to pushing an ambitious plan to redraw the map of the Middle East. That was the pet project of a band of neocon missionaries who had failed to convince either the first Bush administration or the Clinton administration that such a campaign was plausible or desirable."
The neocon response to such suggestions? William Kristol of The Weekly Standard, dismisses the journalistic coverage of the Vanity Fair article as the work of "lazy reporters." What's more, Kristol attacks Tanenhaus, accusing him mischaracterizing Wolfowitz's remarks. (In making that accusation, Kristol cites the Pentagon's published transcript of Wolfowitz's discussion with Tanenhaus).
Having accused dozens of journalists of being lazy, and having accused Tanenhaus of being dishonest, Kristol does his best to deflect the questions about the administration's WMD claims. Like Buckley, he muses that the entire affair is nothing more than a matter of poor intelligence. But, as for the administration's use of that intelligence...
"The failure so far to discover "stocks" of WMD material in post-Saddam Iraq raises legitimate questions about the quality of U.S. and allied intelligence--though no one doubts that Saddam's regime had weapons of mass destruction, used weapons of mass destruction, and had an ongoing program to develop more such weapons. Furthermore, people of good will are entitled to disagree, even in retrospect, about the wisdom and probable effects of Saddam's forcible removal. But distorting an on-the-record interview with a Bush administration official in order to create a quasi-conspiratorial narrative of deceit and deception at the highest levels of the U.S. government is a disgrace."
Robert Lane Greene, writing in The New Republic, takes a remarkably similar approach. Like Kristol, Greene claims that Wolfowitz's comments have been misrepresented and taken out of context by some reporters and columnists. Like Buckley, he implies that the "intelligence apparatus" has failed. But, rather than deflect the inevitable criticism, Greene suggests that there is nothing worth of criticism.
"Wolfowitz said that the focus on WMD came about because it was the only issue that members of the administration could all support as a casus belli. Far from being sinister, that's actually quite reassuring. If, as Wolfowitz suggests, the only thing the various squabbling members of the American foreign policy establishment could agree on about Iraq was that it possessed WMD, then the evidence they saw must have been pretty compelling. The State and Defense Departments, it is widely known, are locked in a fairly constant struggle with one another. Yet according to Wolfowitz, they were both ready to concede the fact that Iraq's WMD programs posed a threat large enough to justify war."
So, are Greene, Kristol, Buckley, Taranto and their ilk likely to convince many who were already convinced by Krugman, Tanenhaus, Scheer, and other war plan critics? Unlikely. The lack of evidence -- and the administration's transparent attempts to deflect questions about that absence -- are too glaring to be hidden behind neocon nastiness or plain old ends-justify-the-means logic.
More importantly, War Watch wonders how the neocons will react to the latest apparent 'admission' by a member of their own inner circle. In a column for The Jerusalem Post, Daniel Pipes, one of the administration's favorite neoconservative foreign policy pundits (and Bush's choice for a seat on a prestigious US peace commission), writes that "WMD were never the basic reason for the war."
"Nor was it the horrid repression in Iraq. Or the danger Saddam posed to his neighbors. Rather, the basic reason was Saddam's having signed a contract with the United States, then breaking his promise."
Pipes' reasoning? Saddam Hussein flouted the conditions of the UN Security Council resolution which required the Baghdad regime to unconditionally disarm and accept international arms inspections. So, defying a UN directive is breaking a deal with the US? Pipes says it is.
"The Bush administration rejected the pretense of UN inspections and insisted on real disarmament or a change in regime. When the former did not occur, the latter did. The moral of this story: Uncle Sam enforces his contracts even if a few years late. Keep your promises or you are gone. It's a powerful precedent that US leaders should make the most of.
The campaign in Iraq is ultimately not about weapons. It's not about the United Nations. And it's not about Iraqi freedom.
It is about keeping promises to the United States or paying the consequences."
Rejoinder, anyone? Discuss this article.
Settling for Less
For George W. Bush, it was another great photo-op. Yesterday, cameras caught the president at the wheel of a golf cart filled with Arab leaders, tooling around the Red Sea resort of Sharm Al-Sheikh. It was the first day of the long-awaited " road map" summit aimed at ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the intended message was obvious: Bush, despite his initial reluctance to enter the fray, was firmly in control.
In a talk with Arab leaders, Bush urged the Palestinians to renounce violence and Arab countries to cut off all funding for groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad; to their Israeli counterparts, he insisted that the Palestinians be given a state of their own.
So far, so good, right?
Well, while calling on newly-installed Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas to work with him in implementing the road map, Bush also insisted that "Israel must deal with the settlements. Israel must make sure there's a continuous (*contiguous) territory that the Palestinians can call home."
Therein lies the rub. The road map defers hot-button issues such as ultimate control of Jerusalem and the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes in pre-1948 Israel. But it mandates immediate Israeli action on settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, which are illegal under international law. Specifically, the new plan calls for a freeze on all further settlement construction and the dismantling of all so-called settlement "outposts" erected since prime minister Ariel Sharon came to power two years ago. Though the Israeli government has accepted the road map, albeit in a conditional, half-hearted way, the settlements appear to be the first obstacle in the road. It's far from clear that anyone in Sharon's government -- least of all Ariel Sharon, an architect of the settler movement -- is willing to part with any but the most marginal settlements.
In an interview with Haaretz's Ari Shavit, Likud politician and Knesset member Reuven Rivlin said that 17 settlements are set for evacuation in the event of a new agreement. It's worth noting, however, that there are close to 150 settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, with 100 more outposts (which generally consist of a few trailers, or simply a flag, set up on a hilltop adjacent to an existing settlement to claim the land) established in the last two years. At the summit, Sharon is widely expected to offer to tear down some of these ad hoc outposts. As IsraelInsider's Ellis Shuman reports, though, even this tiny concession has sparked outrage from settlers, who see any retrenchment as tantamount to surrender. As a result, settler leaders have threatened "civil war," and repeats of the near-riots that have thwarted past Israeli army attempts to take down isolated outposts in the West Bank.
"Representatives of the settlers emphasized that their protests would be non-violent, but added, 'Our red line is the evacuation of inhabited outposts. There, things could get out of hand.'"
Sharon's own cabinet, of course, has hardly adopted the official line. Bragging that the West Bank's settler population grew five percent last year, housing minister Effi Eitam pledged to continue building, road map or no road map, according to Al Bawaba. Nor have Israeli right-wing pundits sat by quietly. Arlene Peck, writing on the settler network Arutz Sheva, offers a typically full-throated denunciation of Sharon.
"Where has the Arik Sharon we once knew, and the Israelis voted for, gone? How did he suddenly become George Bush's water boy? And, why is Israel being set up as a sacrificial lamb for the appeasement of Arab 'sensibilities'? ...
Call me old-fashioned, call me radical, but I think these so-called 'Jewish settlers' are the brave, modern-day pioneers of Israel. But, once again, as it was during the reign of Daddy Bush, they are now an 'obstacle to peace'."
Clearly, it will be very difficult for Ariel Sharon to take on the settlers. Few observers, though, think he has any such intention. Given Bush's sudden interest in resolving the conflict, Hassan A. Barari writes in the Jordan Times, Sharon is required to at least go through the motions. Barari guesses that Sharon will wait for Palestinian militants to sabotage the process, rather than monkeywrenching it himself.
"In short, Sharon's blessing for the roadmap does not present a sea change in his long-standing convictions. Sharon's learning curve is impressive and therefore his strategy is to appear as the one who accepts the roadmap and maintains the good relations with the Bush administration, while at the same time relying on the Palestinians to let him off the hook. Sharon will be waiting with baited breath for Palestinian violence to kick the ball into the Palestinian court."
As Graham Usher notes in Egypt's Al-Ahram, while Sharon might not be serious about evacuating settlements, he is dead serious about a Palestinian state -- or at least his version of one.
"According to the roadmap the provisional state is due to come into being in 2004 but more likely at the end of Sharon's watch in 2006. Nor is Sharon's commitment to Palestinian statehood rhetorical; it is practical and being built. In early March -- when the world was distracted by Iraq -- Sharon quietly announced that the security barrier currently carving out chunks of Palestinian farmland near the northern West Bank border will go east, severing the central West Bank region from its Jordan Valley hinterland. In April he mused that mammoth Jewish settlements like Ariel that lie 20 kilometres within the West Bank would eventually be 'on our side of the fence'.
If so, these walls would cage the emerging 'Palestinian entity' into three disconnected cantons in the north, centre and south of the West Bank, covering about 42 percent of its territory but hosting most of its two million or so denizens. This is the 'occupation' Sharon wants to end: Israel's occupation of the Palestinian 'people', not the occupation of the land and resources that is their patrimony."
That may be, writes Hazem Saghieh in Al-Hayat, but the Palestinians can't afford to be picky.
"A partial Palestinian state? Yes. A state that falls short of Palestinian aspirations? Yes. But it remains better than what the balance of forces allows. Also, it is the only thing being debated."
Ultimately, Haaretz's Shmuel Rosner writes, the road map's success or failure may come down to George Bush, and his commitment to pushing the two sides toward a fair deal. The likelihood of that, however, is anyone's guess.
"The decisive question, of course, is whether he will choose, as his father did, to fight with the Israeli prime minister over the settlements. There are those on his team who have their reservations about that, like Douglas Feith, from the Defense Department, who said at a meeting a few months ago that the U.S. should stop talking about the settlements 'in negative terms.' And, of course, there are many others who hold the more traditional view: the settlements must come down. A person who knows the president's position said this week that he's a bit 'naive' about the settlements. It's clear to him that they will be taken down, 'but he doesn't fully understand why such a big deal has to be made about them now.'"
Discuss this article. {publish-page-break}
Intelligence Test
While British pols grill Tony Blair about his pre-war claims, will Congress take the soft way out? Immigrant? Terrorist? Eh, What's the Difference?
How pesky principles like presumption of innocence got lost on the path to homeland security.
Intelligence Test
Do the British drink more milk? Eat more cheese? Do they take more calcium supplements? Or is there another reason why the UK's politicians -- and journalists -- are showing so much more backbone than their American counterparts? Prime Minister Tony Blair, still defending pre-war claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, endured a tumultuous half-hour in Parliament, as opposition leaders and even former members of his own cabinet accused him of misleading the nation. And, while Blair again denied allegations that his government altered WMD intelligence to exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq, one opposition leader promised that those allegations aren't going away.
In Washington, by comparison, they seem to have barely arrived. Two separate parlaimentary committees are preparing to probe the British government's claims. Not so in Congress, where leaders have decided such a bold step would be "premature." Still, there are some striking similarities in the statements being heard in Washington and London. While the opposition party in London is displaying a vigor apparently beyond the capacity of Washington's Democrats, the war party defenders on both sides of the Atlantic are becoming shrill and desperate.
In England, a senior Blair aide launched a staggering attack on the country's intelligence community. John Reid, in an interview with the Times of London, blamed the allegations dogging Blair on "a potentially rogue element or indeed rogue elements in the intelligence services." He followed that accusation with a similar claim on a BBC news talk show.
"'What has happened over the past week has been as big an attack on the leadership of those security services and intelligence services as it has on the Prime Minister,' he said. 'We have now had five days during which the allegation is made that not only has the Prime Minister and people like myself and the Cabinet been dishonest and duplicitous in deceiving our Cabinet colleagues or Parliament ... but also that the chairman of the joint intelligence committee, and the joint intelligence committee itself ... allowed their integrity to be impeached, allowed evidence to be misrepresented ... these are scurrilous attacks on people who have served this country.'"
In Washington, the official defense was only slightly less frenzied. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay attacked the growing call for congressional hearings by attacking those doing the calling.
"'They just can't accept the fact that the president through his moral leadership is right in the war on terror, and he was right going into Iraq,' the Texas legislator said. 'They pick at every little thing they can to try to undermine this president and where he is taking us on this war on terror ... They do it for their own political gain.'"
That line of reasoning -- that questions about pre-war weapons claims are the result of partisan jealousy -- seems to have transatlantic appeal. Blair made a similar claim during a hot-tempered exchange in Parliament. As The Associated Press reports, the prime minister "let his exasperation show."
"'The truth is, some people resent the fact it was right to go to conflict. We won the conflict thanks to the magnificent contribution of the British troops, and Iraq is now free and we should be proud of that.'"
Discuss this article.
Immigrant? Terrorist? Eh, What's the Difference?
After two years of detaining Muslim and South Asian immigrants on no particular charges (besides immigration infractions), the Justice Department finally decided to do a little in-house investigation.
Monday's report from the Inspector General's office confirmed what people who have been following the news about the detainees may already have suspected: that while we didn't catch any terrorists, we dealt due process and civil rights a real blow.
The report asserted that hundreds of foreigners-- 762 to be precise -- were subjected to "unduly harsh" conditions while being held in federal prisons on minor immigration violations. Although Department representatives claim they aimed to process inmates quickly, most detainees were held for months before being informed of the charges against them. Inmates in the federal pens were allegedly slammed against walls by guards, confined to their cells for 23 hours at a time and exposed day and night to bright lights. They were repeatedly denied bond and forced to wear leg shackles.
The Justice Dept. defended the practices, citing the fact that all 762 detainees were illegal aliens, and that their actions were protecting Americans from terrorist attacks. Justice Department spokeswoman Barbara Comstock said in a press release that the report was "We make no apologies for finding every legal way possible to protect the American public from further terrorist attacks," -- despite the fact that so far, the American public hasn't seen any evidence that the detentions actually provided the DOJ with any useful information about terrorists.
Only one illegal immigrant -- Zacarias Moussaoui -- has been charged with any terrorism-related crime. Five hundred and five have already been deported, while others await deportation or have been charged with non-terrorism-related crimes. The names of the remaining detainees are still being held from the public.
Civil rights activists are now crowing that they have been right all along about the nature of the detentions. The American Civil Liberties Union came out swinging, calling the report a "major scandal for the Bush Administration."
"'Immigrants weren't the enemy,' said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union. 'But, the war on terror quickly became a war on immigrants. The Inspector General's findings confirm our long-held view that civil liberties and the rights of immigrants were trampled in the aftermath of 9/11.'"
Other activists are using the report to draw attention to pesky human rights principles, like innocent until proven guilty, that seem to have gotten lost along the path to homeland security. Jeanne Butterfly, the Executive Director of the American Immigrants Lawyers Association, echoed Romero's concerns in a recent press release.
"'America is a nation of laws for a reason: to ensure that the passions of the moment do not overrun the rights and freedoms that are the bedrock of our nation. This report's findings reaffirm the need for the rule of law. The IG's report concludes that even taking into consideration the events of September 11th, the actions taken by the DOJ cannot be fully explained.'"
A handful of politicians are also calling for further investigation. On Wednesday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch praised the FBI and Justice for "scrupulously" following the law while investigating the detainees, but announced that he will nonetheless conduct an oversight hearing on the department's findings.
Meanwhile, now that most of them have been deported to their respective home countries, the detainees can exercise their all-American right to sue the DOJ. As Seth Stern reports in the Christian Science Monitor, the Department of Justice may have helped build its own case against itselfwith this report by providing additional fuel for former detainees to sue the Department.
It may be easier for them to find a lawyer from abroad -- evidently, prison authorities were less than helpful. As the New York Times reports:
"People detained on immigration charges are not entitled to lawyers paid for by the government, and the authorities did not make it easy for them to retain paid or volunteer lawyers. At the Brooklyn center, they were allowed one "legal call" per week. The prison authorities contended that detainees were alerted to this limited right when they were periodically asked, "Are you O.K.?" This was, the authorities said, shorthand for, "Do you want to place a legal telephone call this week?" [The ACLU's Simon] Romero said the report captured the mood of a nation in transition. 'The further we have come from Sept. 11,' he said, 'the more the American public has been willing to ask the tough questions.'"
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Road Map Blues
Was the first Israeli-Palestinian summit in years anything more than a US-produced photo op? The Director's Cut
Will the Pe
Policy Watch: 
Axis Watch: US Considers Enlisting Terror Group to Scuttle Iran's Nuclear Program (The Telegraph); Iran Invites US to Bid on Nuclear Contract (Associated Press); The Iran Countdown Begins (The Scotsman); Running Circles Around Iran (Asia Times)
Oil Watch: Russia's Lukoil Returning to Iraq (Dow Jones); Iraq's Oil Chief Courts Foreign Investors (Associated Press); Invited, Oil Giants Line Up at the Iraqi Pump (The New York Times); The Geopolitics of Pipelines (Asia Times)
Occupation Watch: Basra Still a Nightmare (Human Rights Watch);US to Lay Off 500,000 in Iraq (Los Angeles Times)
Saddam Watch: For Saddam's Daughters, No Safe Haven (Associated Press);CIA: Saddam Still Alive, in Baghdad (United Press International / Al Bawaba)
Weapons Watch: INC Denies Feeding Pentagon Phony Intelligence (Agence France-Presse); UN Nuclear Agency Shut Out in Iraq (Reuters)