So, Bush has come out with a new book of lies. Mostly, of course, they're the same old lies, told all over again. Sometimes, though, there's a bit of a special twist that makes one of them stand out. That's how I felt about this one, highlighted by TPM:
Bush: 'I Was A Dissenting Voice' On Iraq War
Rachel Slajda | November 3, 2010, 8:47AM
Former President George W. Bush considers himself "a dissenting voice" in the decision to go to war with Iraq.
In the first interview of the publicity tour for his new book, Decision Points, Bush told Matt Lauer that he didn't want to use force.
"Not everybody thought you should go to war, though," Lauer said. "There were dissenting voices."
"I was a dissenting voice. I didn't want to use force," Bush said. "I mean force is the last option for a President. And I think it's clear in the book that I gave diplomacy every chance to work. And I will also tell you the world's better off without Saddam in power. And so are 25 million Iraqis."
Well, at least the ones who aren't dead, wounded, widowed or orphaned by the torrent of violence begun by our invasion. Or in exile. Or driven from their homes by ethnic cleansing. Or... well, you get the idea. Read the WikiLeaks Iraq document dump for details.
But that's not the lie I wanted to focus on. It's the whole, "I was the dissenting voice. I didn't want to invade" canard. As if pulling out weapons inspectors so the invasion could begin weren't enough to put the kibosh on that load of crap. As if the Downing Street Memos had never been published. (In English, no less! On the Internets!) Forget all that. Less than two months ago, September 22, there was a new release of incriminating Bush Administration documents, via a Freedom of Information Act request, obtained by The National Security Archives. It showed that the Bush Administration began thinking about invading Iraq from very early on--it has a timeline with six entries in the first six weeks, and concludes, "September 11 was not the motivation for the U.S. invasion of Iraq - it was a distraction from it."
You may have missed it on network news, but Alternet covered the release with a story that began:
Perils of Dominance is the first completely new interpretation of how and why the United States went to war in Vietnam. It provides an authoritative challenge to the prevailing explanation that U.S. officials adhered blindly to a Cold War doctrine that loss of Vietnam would cause a "domino effect" leading to communist domination of the area. Gareth Porter presents compelling evidence that U.S. policy decisions on Vietnam from 1954 to mid-1965 were shaped by an overwhelming imbalance of military power favoring the United States over the Soviet Union and China. He demonstrates how the slide into war in Vietnam is relevant to understanding why the United States went to war in Iraq, and why such wars are likely as long as U.S. military power is overwhelmingly dominant in the world.
Challenging conventional wisdom about the origins of the war, Porter argues that the main impetus for military intervention in Vietnam came not from presidents Kennedy and Johnson but from high-ranking national security officials in their administrations who were heavily influenced by U.S. dominance over its Cold War foes.
It should be noted that US military dominance was an overwhelming fact, even though a frightened US public was constantly mislead about it, and while it's certainly true that Porter's perspective is influenced by the time he is writing in, and the concerns of the present, this was no loess true of earlier historians who failed to pay attention to US dominance. With this in mind, let's turn to Porter's diary:
In an interview on the PBS NewsHour last Wednesday, Joe Biden was unwilling to contradict the official narrative of the Iraq War that Gen. David Petraeus and the Bush surge had turned Iraq into a good war after all. That interview serves as a reminder of just how completely the Democratic Party foreign policy elite has adopted that narrative.
The Iraq War story line crafted by the Petraeus and the new counterinsurgency elite in Washington assures the public that U.S. military power in Iraq brought about the cooperation of the Sunnis in Anbar Province, ended sectarian violence in Baghdad and defeated Iranian-backed Shi'a insurgents.
In reality, of course, that's not what happened at all. It's time to review the relevant history and deconstruct the Petraeus narrative which the Obama administration now appears to have adopted.
The Sunni decision to cooperate in the suppression of al Qaeda in Iraq had nothing to do with the surge. The main Sunni armed resistance groups had actually turned against al Qaeda in 2005, when they began trying to make a deal with the United States to end the war.
Porter goes into details on the Sunni side, and then does the same on the Shia side, particularly explaining the dynamics of how Iran's interests were served. What Porter describes is not new--simply a very succinct and timely summary of what's already known to those not distracted by blizzards of official obfuscation. Particularly important is the fact that Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army were not subservient to Iran, and needed to be nuetralized once they'd played their role in crushing Sunni power:
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And Joy Gordon, what effect did the sanctions have on things like mortality, on public health, on education?
JOY GORDON: The sanctions--again, this is in combination with this initial devastation of all of Iraq's infrastructure--the impact was enormous. Child mortality spiked, increased by 250 percent. A country that had had negligible levels of things like cholera and typhoid, those were off the charts. There were epidemics of waterborne diseases that never really came down....
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: And the estimates that at least half-a-million children were killed as a result of these sanctions?
JOY GORDON: It's called the excess child mortality figure, which is-which means, really, how many children under five died during sanctions who would not have died without the sanctions. And that number is highly contested. The Iraqi government claimed one thing for a while; other groups claimed things for a while. But in the end, if you look at the best data and the most reliable data, it seems that it must in fact be over half-a-million children under five were dead as a result of sanctions.
Obama kept a major campaign promise, but didn't get much for his efforts. That seems to have been a fairly common theme from the Chris Matthews precincts of Versailles. To see just how myopic this narrative was, you only needed to tune in to Democracy Now! yesterday, which had two excellent pieces on the sham "end" of the Iraq War.
First was an interview with Nir Rosen, "Iraq Is a Shattered Country", dealing with the ignored reality on the ground that President Obama made no mention of whatsoever. Second was an interview with Joy Gordon, "Invisible War: How Thirteen Years of US-Imposed Economic Sanctions Devastated Iraq Before the 2003 Invasion", which has a great deal to say about how the Clinton Administration killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi childrens and infants. This is the true face of the Democratic Party foreign policy--almost indistinguishable from its Republican counterpart when it comes to the impact on dark-skinned people around the globe.
First, the beginning of the interview with Nir Rosen:
SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: For more, I'm joined on the line from Baghdad by independent journalist Nir Rosen. He's been covering the Iraq war since 2003. He's now a fellow at the NYU Center on Law and Security. His forthcoming book is called Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America's Wars in the Muslim World.
Nir Rosen, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you respond to what President Obama said last night in his Oval Office address and what you're seeing on the ground in Iraq right now?
NIR ROSEN: Well, I was offended by it. He spoke mostly about American soldiers and their suffering and their sacrifice, and the only time he came even close to mentioning that Iraqis had a hard time these last seven years is when he mentioned their resilience. He said that the US has paid a high price, a huge price. Not as huge as the Iraqis have paid. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed. Tens of thousands of Iraqis who were rendered in American detention, their lives ruined for years, children who didn't know where their fathers were. A couple of million displaced internally and abroad. Iraq is a shattered country. He said we persevered because we share a vision with the Iraqi people. Most of the Iraqi people, their vision has been, for the last seven years, that the Americans would withdraw.
Now, really, nothing has changed, obviously, from one day to the next. You have 50,000 troops who remain here. When Iraq occupied Kuwait, the Americans said that as long as there's one Iraqi soldier left in Kuwait, Kuwait remains occupied. So the presence of 50,000 troops in Iraq forecloses many options, precludes many options for the Iraqis, with the implied threat. At the same time, the Iraqi security forces, I think, would like to have a continued relationship. And while Iraq is sort of occupied, it's also sort of sovereign. You don't see--you haven't seen really for the last year in most parts of the country American soldiers on the ground. So, nothing changed today. The big change, you could say, was a year ago, when the Americans withdrew from cities and mainly stayed on bases. And we've had a test since then of the Iraqi security forces in their ability to handle the situation. And I'd say they, more or less, can handle it. It's not very pretty....
But the broader view has to encompass a much longer time-frame:
If you felt that the "end" of Iraq War was a bit of an anti-climax, don't worry. You weren't alone. It's not just that tens of thousands of American troops remain in Afghanistan Iraq. Nor is it that--with a few scattered notable exceptions such as Rachel Maddow--the dominant discourse can't even dream of ackhnowledging that it was all based on fakery, deception and lies. Nor is it that (as a result) we have made nothing close to a reorientation of our international strategy, much less our self-understanding as a nation.
It's not that we've learned nothing, changed nothing. It's worse. For as one war "ends" we don't even know how to begin counting how many more wars we continue. It's simply no longer possible. War has become our continual state of being. It's not just an indefinite "long war", but a total one, in which, now, any American citizen can be killed by their government without any semblance of the rule of law. And this new state of total war was brought to you by... the "pease" candidate!
So, yes. If the "end" of the Iraq War feels anti-climatic, there's a good reason for it: Berack Obama has managed to find a way to make that ending meaningless. If Bush & Cheney had achieved this result, millions of people would have been outraged. Perhaps we would have been a minority, but we would have been.
Now? Now we are only told how much worse it could have been. Now we are told that the big question ahead of us is whether we go to war with Iran sooner... or later. Now war is our default condidition. Of course we're at war. The only question is where and how. Or perhaps the only question is "Where aren't we at war?"
Now we have an erstwhile "peace" candidate who "ends" the war by using a deceitful language of false unity that blinds us from any possibility of learning any lesson at all from our past folly:
As we do, I'm mindful that the Iraq war has been a contentious issue at home. Here, too, it's time to turn the page. This afternoon, I spoke to former President George W. Bush. It's well-known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset. Yet no one can doubt President Bush's support for our troops or his love of country and commitment to our security.
As I've said, there were patriots who supported this war and patriots who opposed it. And all of us are united in appreciation for our servicemen and women and our hopes for Iraqis' future.
Oh, really? It's time to "turn the page" on the fact that the entire war was a war crime? That it was a grievous violation of international law, which cost the lives of up to a million Iraqis--whose suffering did not even merit a passing mention in the President's speech?
Oh, really? No one can doubt President Bush's support for our troops, thousands of whom died because of his lies? Tens of thousands of whom were gravely injured physically, many for life? Hundreds of thousands of whom were psychologically injured, many then cast aside with a cynically false diagnosis of a personality disorder? That's support? What rubbish!
"Support the troops" is mere Orwellian rhetoric meaning, "Don't even think of criticizing the President. Don't even think of criticizing him."
No, it's worse than that. "Support the troops" is part of a transformation of language, a transformation that's intended to make it impossible to even conceive of criticizing the President--whichever party he may be fron.
And Bush's "love of country"? And "commitment to security"?
Does anyone notice that Obama is speaking like a blithering idiot? That he's trying to erase any possible meaningful distinction? And that this is the way he vainly seeks to achieve "bipartisanship? By making all differences meaningless?
"War is peace." We knew that was the slogan of the enemy deceivers. Who knew that the enemy deceivers were us?
Unless, of course, we dare to dissent. And mark ourselves forever as the "professional left" in need of drug testing.
Thank God! At least we've got an identity to claim, after all.
As the Associated Press reports, there was lots of happy talk about the end of combat in Iraq last week throughout the national media, as various media outlets stumbled all over themselves in a desperate (and rather blatant) attempt to pitch the news as a reprise of the famous Vietnam withdrawal imagery. The problem, of course, is that there are still tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Iraq - and, according to the New York Times, the Obama administration is "planning to more than double its private security guards" there (Blackwater anyone?).
That's the story cable news doesn't want you knowing, because it gets in the way of reporters efforts to pretend to be documenting some sort of iconic military history - when, at least at this moment, it looks like they may be promoting a new version of George W. Bush's infamously misleading Mission Accomplished/"end of major combat operations" declaration back in 2003 - a typical form of spin that simultaneously reassures a war-weary public and obscures a permament-war reality.
Matt Yglesias has a very admirable little post trying to get at why he was wrong about invading Iraq, "Four Reasons for a Mistake":
1. Erroneous views of foreign policy in general: At the time, I adhered to the school of thought (popular at the time) which held that one major problem in the world was that the US government was unduly constrained in the use of force abroad by domestic politics. More forceful intervention in Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo had all been called for. This led to a general predisposition in favor of military adventurism.
Pattern recognition is hard. Computer scientists in the 1950s didn't know this. We do. But this is ridiculous! All the more kudos for fessing up now.
2. Elite signaling: When Hillary Clinton, Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, John Kerry, Joe Biden, John Edwards, etc. told me they thought invading Iraq was a good idea I took them very seriously....
Bob Dylan: "Don't follow leaders."
Addendum: Especially leaders who are listening to Democratic campaign consultants.
3. Misreading the politics: It seemed to me that the political consequences to George W Bush of invading Iraq to disrupt a nuclear weapons program and then discovering that there was no such program would be disastrous....
The very first thing Bush did in early September 2002 was lie about a non-existent IAEA report. That lie caused him zero problems. Pattern recognition is hard. But this is ridiculous!
4. Kenneth Pollack: The formal case for war that I found compelling was Kenneth Pollack's "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq." ....
"The Threatening Storm" turned out to be Ed Wood sound effects. Ooops!
Kudos all around for Matt's willingness to admit mistakes and more than that, to try to understand why.
What worries me, though, is the limited nature of the lessons he seems to have learned. I'd like to be proven wrong.
Or at the very least, I'd like to hear Matt reflect on how he'd do things differently going forward.
What I especially like is his willingness to conclude that his mistake in judgment on a specific issue was a product not merely of idiosyncratic circumstances, but of a structurally flawed way of thinking about the world, and specifically an over-willingness to trust elite opinion (this is especially impressive for for someone from Yglesias' background, i.e. upper class Harvard grad etc.).
The most massive and brutal crime committed on this planet during the past decade has been the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And we're seeking to wash the blood off our hands without so much as an "Out, damn spot!" Nowadays "looking forward, not backward" is supposed to take care of everything, even as the crimes continue. What that takes care of is the leading perpetrators who begin to sense that the coast is clear and creep out of their holes to declare, as did Karl Rove this week, that their biggest mistake was not more aggressively attacking those who pointed out their crimes.
If you've been paying attention this past decade, it won't surprise you to learn that the country's policy elites are in the midst of a destructive, well-nigh unhinged discussion about the future of the nation. But even by the degraded standards of the Washington establishment, the growing panic over government debt is shocking....
....we face a joblessness crisis that threatens to pitch us into a long, ugly period of low growth, the kind of lost decade that will cause tremendous misery, degrade the nation's human capital, undermine an entire cohort of young workers for years and blow a hole in the government's bank sheet. The best chance we have to stave off this scenario is more government spending to nurse the economy back to health. The economy may be alive, but that doesn't mean it's healthy. There's a reason you keep taking antibiotics even after you start to feel better.
And yet: the drumbeat of deficit hysterics thumping in self-righteous panic grows louder by the day....
This all seems eerily familiar. The conversation--if it can be called that--about deficits recalls the national conversation about war in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. From one day to the next, what was once accepted by the establishment as tolerable--Saddam Hussein--became intolerable, a crisis of such pressing urgency that "serious people" were required to present their ideas about how to deal with it. Once the burden of proof shifted from those who favored war to those who opposed it, the argument was lost....
Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the selling of the Iraq War was its false pretext. It never really was about weapons of mass destruction, as Paul Wolfowitz admitted. WMDs were just "what everyone could agree on." So it is with deficits. Conservatives and their neoliberal allies don't really care about deficits; they care about austerity-about gutting the welfare state and redistributing wealth upward. That's the objective. Deficits are just what they can all agree on, the WMDs of this manufactured crisis. Senator John Kyl of Arizona, speaking on Fox, has come out and admitted as much. All new spending increases must be offset, he said, but "you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans." So there you have it.
Due to its scarcity, safety may be the most precious commodity of all in a warzone. And since scarcity raises prices, it's the rich and well connected who can afford the most security -- or at least the perception of it. No one knows this as well as Fidelis Cloer, a salesman who has spent nearly twenty years selling high-priced, German-made luxury armored cars to kings, presidents, dictators and officials in some of the world's most unstable and dangerous regions. Cloer is the subject of the documentary Bulletproof Salesman, co-directed by Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker, the duo behind the documentaries Gunner Palace and The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair. The film follows Cloer as he enters Iraq shortly after the fall of Baghdad, confident that he'll find plenty of eager customers for his cars amidst the chaos. But as the war grinds on and the insurgent weapon of choice switches from guns to increasingly powerful IEDs, Cloer realizes that he can't do business in an environment where he's being both outmatched by insurgents and undercut by low-cost competitors.
Watch my ReThink Review of Bulletproof Salesman and my discussion with Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks about the defense industry and its political influence below.
Bart Stupak is supposed to be holding a press conference at 11 AM, and Chris will be blogging about it (afterwards, he said last night, but that could change, I suppose). Details are murky and confusing, but it now seems that Stupak is the only person in the world who can get a bill through the Senate with neither a fillibuster blocking him, nor recourse to reconciliation. Who knew?
This could, of course, blow everything up. If Stupak language really could become law, I don't think they'll be able to hold enough pro-choice votes in the House to pass the bill. And if they do, the damage to the party will make it one of the most costly "victories" in a very long time.
I don't mean to diminish the importance of this. To the contrary, I want to use this occassion to underscore a point I've made before, but haven't pounded on repeatedly the way I maybe should have: My problem with much of how people have related to health care reform is the way they've focused on it as if it were the be-all and end-all of progressive politics. To extend my metaphor of the last diary, they've not only assumed a can-opener with respect to health care reform, but they've also assumed it was part of a Swiss Army Knife for dealing with all our other ills as well.
Obviously not.
There are major demonstrations today marking the 7th Anniversary of invasion of Iraq (United for Peace and Justice, Cindy Sheehan/Peace of the Action, ANSWER March on Washington) and the immigration reform "March for America" tomorrow. These issues have been largely invisible here at Open Left, and we're not alone in that. Neither has figured prominently on progressive blogosphere's radar screen over the past several months, and that narrowing of focus is not a sign of health on our part. Whatever happens this weekend, let us hope that one thing comes out of this: an end to the period in which we have looked to Washington and taken our cues from what is happening there. That is not how the left blogosphere was born and built, and it is not how it can best serve the common good of our nation today. We need to be bigger than that... much, much bigger.
On Friday afternoon, I posted the following announcment online:
CONTEST: Obama Calls War on Iraq "A New Dawn" -- What Do You Call It? (Limit 8 Words)
I'll start the entries:
Operation Funnel Unlimited Cash to Killing (OFUCK)
The winner will be announced on an aircraft carrier with a banner! Plus job offer possible for video editing work to insert "rename" in place of "end" in campaign speeches.
Winner gets signed copy of Daybreak, latest issue of Humanist magazine, a bucket of snow, and anything else I can find.
**
Perhaps not the most tempting offer ever, but here it is Saturday afternoon and I'm scrolling through hundreds of creative and provocative contest entries, and I'm keeping the contest open and hunting for more prizes, so that more people can enter. I'd also like to encourage people to post comments on their choices thus far for winning entries.
Here are some that have caught my eye (not a list of finalists, just a sampling):
It's October 23, 2002, and you're Jay Bybee, the man in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel in the United States Department of Justice. John Yoo and a bunch of other lawyers willing to claim that absolutely anything is legal work for you. But you'd much rather be a judge. That would be a cushy job, a lifetime job, a job with a book of the Bible named for it, a job where you would get to decide which crimes to legalize rather than being told by someone else, a job where you might eventually even get to rule on the legality of some of the crimes you were presently engaged in committing. At the moment, however, if you want to become a judge you're going to have to follow instructions, and that means legalizing the greatest crime of them all. Millions may die in the process, but you will get that nomination and you will become a judge.
This week, hearings began in the official UK inquiry into Britain's role in promoting the Iraq War, chaired by Sir John Chilcot, hence known as the Chilcot inquiry. It's a weird feeling following them, since they take for granted a framework of facts that utterly demolishes the Versailles picture of the last 8 or 9 years--beginning with the fact that Bush was keen to overthrow Saddam well before 9/11--but at the same time (at lest so far) they're a form of damage control for the British, apparently calculated to air all the dirty linen that's already been seen, plus only a tiny bit more that's traceable to those at the top. Above all, Tony Blair's conduct must remain unwise, but nothing worse, no matter what the facts may be.
The chief result so far has simply been to confirm, somewhat clarify and fill out some of the information released over four years ago in the Downing Street Memos. At the same time, it's very much an establishment affair. So however embarrassing the basic facts may be, the proverbial stiff upper lip is preventing the mouthing of certain basic truths too uncomfortable for official Britain to bear, even as it nonchalantly skewers the official Versailles line with almost every breath. As a result, so far at least, one might well subtitle the Chilcot inquiry "Where the Poodles Wasn't." Thus, on Thursday, Julian Borger reported for the Guardian:
Chilcot inquiry: Tony Blair decided on Iraq war a year before invasion - envoy Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 November 2009 20.25 GMT
Tony Blair's government decided up to a year before the Iraq invasion that it was "a complete waste of time" to resist the US drive to oust Saddam Hussein, opting instead to offer advice on how it should be done, the former British ambassador to Washington said today.
Sir Christopher Meyer, testifying to the Chilcot inquiry into Britain's role in the war, made it clear that once the Bush administration decided to take military action, the Blair government never considered opting out or opposing it.
He said that the timing of the invasion was dictated by the "unforgiving nature" of the military build-up rather than the outcome of diplomacy or UN weapons inspections, which had not been given sufficient time. British officials were left "scrabbling for the smoking gun" - evidence for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction - as preparations continued.
Meyer, ambassador to Washington from 1997 to 2003, described a critical moment in March 2002, as Blair was preparing a visit to George Bush's Texas ranch.
New instructions were brought to the embassy by the prime minister's foreign affairs adviser, Sir David Manning.
The message from Downing Street was that the 11 September attacks and the subsequent US determination to oust Saddam were established facts, "and it was a complete waste of time ... if we were going to work with the Americans, to come to them and bang away about regime change and say: 'We can't support it'."
He rejected the suggestion that British policy changed to stay in line with Washington. "I wouldn't say it was as extremely poodle-ish as that," Meyer said, arguing Blair had long been a "true believer about the wickedness of Saddam Hussein".
Of course, believing that Saddam Hussein was wicked is like believing that the Sun rises in the East: (A) Neither belief is the least bit controversial or unusual. (B). Neither belief is justification for war under international law. And thus we are treated to the spectacle of discussing Tony Blair and his minister's long train of dissembling while struggling alternatively with, against, and in support of George Bush and his administration's long train of dissembling, all the while laying down fresh layers of further dissembling simultaneous with revealing unavoidable scattered bits of truth.
In short, they are all poodles now, for in order not to be, they would inevitably have to call for Bush and Blair's indictment as war criminals at the Hague.
In other non-news from the Chilcot inquiry, we learn that Bush wanted to overthrow Saddam well before 9/11, and we get further fleshing out how things changed after 9/11, until Britain finally agreed. Still, what's non-news for the rest of the world is still forbidden knowledge in Versailles, so it's worth taking note of, if for no other reason.
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