Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and the band are still delusionally beating the war drums. They just don't get it.
By Eric Alterman
June 20, 2014
| In a column entitled “Bush’s toxic legacy in Iraq,”
terrorism expert Peter Bergen writes about the origins of ISIS, “the
brutal insurgent/terrorist group formerly known as al Qaeda in Iraq.”
Bergen| In a column entitled “Bush’s toxic legacy in Iraq,”
terrorism expert Peter Bergen writes about the origins of ISIS, “the
brutal insurgent/terrorist group formerly known as al Qaeda in Iraq.”
notes that, “One of George W. Bush’s most toxic legacies is the
introduction of al Qaeda into Iraq, which is the ISIS mother ship. If
this wasn’t so tragic it would be supremely ironic, because before the
US invasion of Iraq in 2003, top Bush officials were insisting that
there was an al Qaeda-Iraq axis of evil. Their claims that Saddam
Hussein’s men were training members of al Qaeda how to make weapons of
mass destruction seemed to be one of the most compelling rationales for
the impending war.”
There was no al Qaeda-Iraq connection until
the war; our invasion made it so. We have known this for nearly a
decade, well before the murderous ISIS even appeared.
There was the war; our invasion made it so. We have known this for nearly a
decade, well before the murderous ISIS even appeared.
no al Qaeda-Iraq connection until the war; our invasion made it so. We
have known this for nearly a decade, well before the murderous ISIS even
appeared. In a September 2006 New York Times article headlined “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat,”
reporter Mark Mazetti informed readers of a classified National
Intelligence Estimate representing the consensus view of the 16
disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global
Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ the analysis cited the
Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology: “The Iraq war
has made the overall terrorism problem worse,’ said one American
intelligence official.”
The Bush Administration fought to quash
its conclusions during the two years that the report was in the works.
Mazetti reported, “Previous drafts described actions by the United
States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad
movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay
and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.” Apparently, these were dropped
from the final document, though the reference to jihadists using their
training for the purpose of “exacerbating domestic conflicts or
fomenting radical ideologies” as in say, Syria, remained.
At the
beginning of 2005, Mazetti notes, another official US government body,
the National Intelligence Council, “released a study concluding that
Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of
terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake
Al Qaeda’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad
leadership.”
beginning of 2005, Mazetti notes, another official US government body,
the National Intelligence Council, “released a study concluding that
Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of
terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake
Al Qaeda’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad
leadership.”
On the one
hand, it is impressive how well our intelligence agencies were able to
predict the likely outcome of the Bush Administration’s foolhardy
obsession with invading Iraq. On the other, it is beyond depressing how
little these assessments have come to matter in the discussion and
debate over US foreign policy.
we know, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the other architects of
the war did everything possible to intimidate, and when necessary, discredit those in the intelligence agencies who warned of the predictable consequences of war. Cheney
and his deputies made repeated trips to Langley to challenge
professional intelligence work and used pliant members of the media —
including Robert Novak of The Washington Post and Judith Miller of The
New York Times, among many, many others — to undermine the integrity of
people like Joseph P. Wilson and Valerie Plame lest the truth about the administration’s lies come out. Rather incredibly, they even went so far as to ignore the incredibly detailed planning documents, created over a period of a year at
a cost of $5 million by the State Department, that had a chance of
providing Iraq with a stable postwar environment. Instead, they insisted
on creating an occupation that generated nothing but chaos, mass murder
and the terrorist victories of today.
One of the many horrific
results was the decision to support Nouri al-Maliki as a potential
leader of the nation. Maliki’s sectarian attacks on Sunni Muslims on
behalf of his Shiite allies are the immediate cause of the current
murderous situation. And his placement in that job, as Fareed Zakaria aptly notes,
“was the product of a series of momentous decisions made by the Bush
administration. Having invaded Iraq with a small force — what the expert
Tom Ricks called ‘the worst war plan in American history’ — the
administration needed to find local allies.”
One could go on and
on (and on and on and on) about the awful judgment — the arrogance, the
corruption, the ideological obsession and the purposeful ignorance — by
the Bush Administration that led to the current catastrophe. As Ezra
Klein recently noted, “All this cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives.”
And this is to say nothing of the destruction of our civil liberties
and poisoning of our political discourse at home and the hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis who died, the millions of refugees created, the
hatred inspired in the world toward the United States.
But to
focus exclusively on the administration begs an obvious question. How
did they get away with it? Where were the watchdogs of the press?
Much
has been written on this topic. No one denies that the truth was
available at the time. Not all of it, of course, but enough to know that
certain catastrophe lay down the road the administration chose to
travel at 100 miles per hour. Top journalists, like those who ran
the Times and The Washington Post, chose to ignore the reporting they
read in their own papers.
As the Post itself later reported, its
veteran intelligence reporter Walter Pincus authored a compelling story
that undermined the Bush administration’s claim to have proof that Iraq
was hiding weapons of mass destruction. It only made the paper at all
because Bob Woodward, who was researching a book, talked his editors
into it. And even then, it ran on page A17, where it was immediately
forgotten.
As former Post Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks later explained, “Administration
assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the
administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an
attitude among editors: ‘Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry
about all this contrary stuff?” The New York Times ran similarly
regretful stories and its editors noted to its readers that the paper
had been “perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper.” (Bill
Moyers’ documentary special “Buying the War: How Big Media Failed Us tells the story, and in conjunction with that Moyers report, you can find an Interactive Timeline as well as post-March 2003 coverage of Iraq.)
Many
in the mainstream media came clean, relatively speaking, about the
cause of their mistakes when it turned out that they had been conduits
for the Bush administration lies that led to catastrophe. But what they
haven’t done, apparently, is change their ways.
As my “Altercation” colleague Reed Richardson notes,
the very same people who sold us the war are today trying to resell us
the same damaged goods: “On MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ this past Monday,
there was Paul Bremer,
the man who summarily disbanded the Iraqi Army in 2003 in one of the
biggest strategic blunders of the war, happily holding court and
advocating for ‘boots on the ground.’” Not to be outdone, POLITICO had
the temerity to quote Doug Feith blithely lecturing Obama about how to execute foreign policy. Don’t forget the throwback stylings of torture apologist Marc Thiessen either,
who was writing speeches for Rumsfeld during the run-up to the Iraq
War. On Monday, he, too, weighed in with an op-ed in the Washington
Post unironically entitled “Obama’s Iraq Disaster.”
Among
the most egregious examples of this tendency has been rehabilitation of
neoconservative thinker Robert Kagan and his frequent writing partner,
the pundit and policy entrepreneur William Kristol. Back in April 2002,
the two argued that “the road that leads to real security and peace” is “the road that runs through Baghdad.” In an article entitled “What to Do About Iraq,”
they added that not only was it silly to believe that “American ground
forces in significant number are likely to be required for success in
Iraq” but also that they found it “almost impossible to imagine any
outcome for the world both plausible and worse than the disease of
Saddam with weapons of mass destruction. A fractured Iraq? An unsettled
Kurdish situation? A difficult transition in Baghdad? These may be
problems, but they are far preferable to leaving Saddam in power with
his nukes, VX, and anthrax.”
Recently, Kristol could be heard on
ABC’s idiotically named “Powerhouse Roundtable” explaining that the
problem in Iraq today was caused not by the lousy decisions for which he
argued so vociferously but “by our ridiculous and total withdrawal from
Iraq in 2011.”
Both men made this argument over and over, and especially in Kristol’s case, often in McCarthyite terms designed to cast aspersions on the motives and patriotism of their opponents and
those in the media. For his spectacular wrongness Kristol has been
punished by being given columns in The Washington Post, The New York
Times, andTime magazine, not to mention a regular slot on ABC’s “This
Week with George Stephanopoulos.” (These appointments came in addition
to a $250,000 award from the right-wing Lynde and Harry Bradley
Foundation; an occasion that inspired this collection of a just a few of his greatest hits.)
Recently,
Kristol could be heard on ABC’s idiotically named “Powerhouse
Roundtable” explaining that the problem in Iraq today was caused not by
the lousy decisions for which he argued so vociferously but “by our ridiculous and total withdrawal from Iraq in 2011.”
(Surprise, surprise, he did not mention that our 2011 withdrawal from
Iraq was the product of the 2008 “Status of Forces” agreement negotiated
by none other than President George W. Bush.)
Similarly, last month, Kagan was given 12,700 words for a cover essay in the (still hawkish) New Republic entitled “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” which
he used to make many of the same sorts of unsupported assertions that
underlay his original misguided advice. As a result, he found himself
not only celebrated in a profile in The New York Times that all but glossed over his past record, but also called in for consultations by the current President of the United States.
One
often reads analyses these days that grant the no-longer ignorable fact
that American conservatives, especially those in control of the
Republican Party, have become so obsessed by right-wing ideology and
beholden to corporate cash that they have entirely lost touch both with
reality and with the views of most Americans. As the famed Brookings
Institution analyst Thomas Mann recently wrote in the Atlantic Monthly,
“Republicans have become a radical insurgency — ideologically extreme,
contemptuous of the inherited policy regime, scornful of compromise,
unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and
science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of their political
opposition.”
This tendency was the focus of the coverage of the
shocking defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in his local
primary by a man with no political experience and little money, who
attributed his victory to “God act[ing] through people on my behalf,”
and warns that unless more Americans heed the lessons of Jesus — as he
interprets them — a new Hitler could rise again “quite easily.” These
right-wing extremists have repeatedly demonstrated their contempt for
the views of most Americans whether it be on economic issues,
environmental issues, issues of personal, religious and sexual freedom
or immigration, to name just a few, and Americans are moving away from them as a result.
This
is no less true, it turns out, with regard to the proposed adventurism
in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East by those who sold us the first
false bill of goods back in 2003. A
strong majority of Americans now agree that removing Saddam Hussein
from power in Iraq was not worth the trillions of dollars and lives lost. Barely one in six want to go back in. There is also strong opposition to military intervention in neighboring Syria.
And yet not only do the same armchair warriors continue in their
demands for more blood and treasure to be sacrificed on the altar of
their ideological obsession with no regard whatever for Americans’
desire to do the exact opposite, they remain revered by the same
mainstream media that allowed them to get away with it the first time.
The
conservative foreign policy establishment, it needs to be said, is no
less out to touch with reality — and democracy — than the tea party
fanatics who control the Republican domestic agenda (and are fueled by
the cash of the Koch Brothers and other billionaires who stand to profit
from their victories). That so many in the media pretend otherwise,
after all this time, all this death and all this money wasted,
demonstrates not only contempt for their audience but utter disdain for
knowledge itself.
hand, it is impressive how well our intelligence agencies were able to
predict the likely outcome of the Bush Administration’s foolhardy
obsession with invading Iraq. On the other, it is beyond depressing how
little these assessments have come to matter in the discussion and
debate over US foreign policy.
As we know, Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the other architects of the war did everything
possible to intimidate, and when necessary, discredit those in the
intelligence agencies who warned of the predictable consequences of war.
AsRumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the other architects of the war did everything
possible to intimidate, and when necessary, discredit those in the
intelligence agencies who warned of the predictable consequences of war.
we know, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the other architects of
the war did everything possible to intimidate, and when necessary, discredit those in the intelligence agencies who warned of the predictable consequences of war. Cheney
and his deputies made repeated trips to Langley to challenge
professional intelligence work and used pliant members of the media —
including Robert Novak of The Washington Post and Judith Miller of The
New York Times, among many, many others — to undermine the integrity of
people like Joseph P. Wilson and Valerie Plame lest the truth about the administration’s lies come out. Rather incredibly, they even went so far as to ignore the incredibly detailed planning documents, created over a period of a year at
a cost of $5 million by the State Department, that had a chance of
providing Iraq with a stable postwar environment. Instead, they insisted
on creating an occupation that generated nothing but chaos, mass murder
and the terrorist victories of today.
One of the many horrific
results was the decision to support Nouri al-Maliki as a potential
leader of the nation. Maliki’s sectarian attacks on Sunni Muslims on
behalf of his Shiite allies are the immediate cause of the current
murderous situation. And his placement in that job, as Fareed Zakaria aptly notes,
“was the product of a series of momentous decisions made by the Bush
administration. Having invaded Iraq with a small force — what the expert
Tom Ricks called ‘the worst war plan in American history’ — the
administration needed to find local allies.”
One could go on and
on (and on and on and on) about the awful judgment — the arrogance, the
corruption, the ideological obsession and the purposeful ignorance — by
the Bush Administration that led to the current catastrophe. As Ezra
Klein recently noted, “All this cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives.”
And this is to say nothing of the destruction of our civil liberties
and poisoning of our political discourse at home and the hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis who died, the millions of refugees created, the
hatred inspired in the world toward the United States.
But to
focus exclusively on the administration begs an obvious question. How
did they get away with it? Where were the watchdogs of the press?
Much
has been written on this topic. No one denies that the truth was
available at the time. Not all of it, of course, but enough to know that
certain catastrophe lay down the road the administration chose to
travel at 100 miles per hour. Top journalists, like those who ran
the Times and The Washington Post, chose to ignore the reporting they
read in their own papers.
As the Post itself later reported, its
veteran intelligence reporter Walter Pincus authored a compelling story
that undermined the Bush administration’s claim to have proof that Iraq
was hiding weapons of mass destruction. It only made the paper at all
because Bob Woodward, who was researching a book, talked his editors
into it. And even then, it ran on page A17, where it was immediately
forgotten.
As former Post Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks later explained, “Administration
assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the
administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an
attitude among editors: ‘Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry
about all this contrary stuff?” The New York Times ran similarly
regretful stories and its editors noted to its readers that the paper
had been “perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper.” (Bill
Moyers’ documentary special “Buying the War: How Big Media Failed Us tells the story, and in conjunction with that Moyers report, you can find an Interactive Timeline as well as post-March 2003 coverage of Iraq.)
Many
in the mainstream media came clean, relatively speaking, about the
cause of their mistakes when it turned out that they had been conduits
for the Bush administration lies that led to catastrophe. But what they
haven’t done, apparently, is change their ways.
As my “Altercation” colleague Reed Richardson notes,
the very same people who sold us the war are today trying to resell us
the same damaged goods: “On MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ this past Monday,
there was Paul Bremer,
the man who summarily disbanded the Iraqi Army in 2003 in one of the
biggest strategic blunders of the war, happily holding court and
advocating for ‘boots on the ground.’” Not to be outdone, POLITICO had
the temerity to quote Doug Feith blithely lecturing Obama about how to execute foreign policy. Don’t forget the throwback stylings of torture apologist Marc Thiessen either,
who was writing speeches for Rumsfeld during the run-up to the Iraq
War. On Monday, he, too, weighed in with an op-ed in the Washington
Post unironically entitled “Obama’s Iraq Disaster.”
Among
the most egregious examples of this tendency has been rehabilitation of
neoconservative thinker Robert Kagan and his frequent writing partner,
the pundit and policy entrepreneur William Kristol. Back in April 2002,
the two argued that “the road that leads to real security and peace” is “the road that runs through Baghdad.” In an article entitled “What to Do About Iraq,”
they added that not only was it silly to believe that “American ground
forces in significant number are likely to be required for success in
Iraq” but also that they found it “almost impossible to imagine any
outcome for the world both plausible and worse than the disease of
Saddam with weapons of mass destruction. A fractured Iraq? An unsettled
Kurdish situation? A difficult transition in Baghdad? These may be
problems, but they are far preferable to leaving Saddam in power with
his nukes, VX, and anthrax.”
Recently, Kristol could be heard on
ABC’s idiotically named “Powerhouse Roundtable” explaining that the
problem in Iraq today was caused not by the lousy decisions for which he
argued so vociferously but “by our ridiculous and total withdrawal from
Iraq in 2011.”
Both men made this argument over and over, and especially in Kristol’s case, often in McCarthyite terms designed to cast aspersions on the motives and patriotism of their opponents and
those in the media. For his spectacular wrongness Kristol has been
punished by being given columns in The Washington Post, The New York
Times, andTime magazine, not to mention a regular slot on ABC’s “This
Week with George Stephanopoulos.” (These appointments came in addition
to a $250,000 award from the right-wing Lynde and Harry Bradley
Foundation; an occasion that inspired this collection of a just a few of his greatest hits.)
Recently,
Kristol could be heard on ABC’s idiotically named “Powerhouse
Roundtable” explaining that the problem in Iraq today was caused not by
the lousy decisions for which he argued so vociferously but “by our ridiculous and total withdrawal from Iraq in 2011.”
(Surprise, surprise, he did not mention that our 2011 withdrawal from
Iraq was the product of the 2008 “Status of Forces” agreement negotiated
by none other than President George W. Bush.)
Similarly, last month, Kagan was given 12,700 words for a cover essay in the (still hawkish) New Republic entitled “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” which
he used to make many of the same sorts of unsupported assertions that
underlay his original misguided advice. As a result, he found himself
not only celebrated in a profile in The New York Times that all but glossed over his past record, but also called in for consultations by the current President of the United States.
One
often reads analyses these days that grant the no-longer ignorable fact
that American conservatives, especially those in control of the
Republican Party, have become so obsessed by right-wing ideology and
beholden to corporate cash that they have entirely lost touch both with
reality and with the views of most Americans. As the famed Brookings
Institution analyst Thomas Mann recently wrote in the Atlantic Monthly,
“Republicans have become a radical insurgency — ideologically extreme,
contemptuous of the inherited policy regime, scornful of compromise,
unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and
science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of their political
opposition.”
This tendency was the focus of the coverage of the
shocking defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in his local
primary by a man with no political experience and little money, who
attributed his victory to “God act[ing] through people on my behalf,”
and warns that unless more Americans heed the lessons of Jesus — as he
interprets them — a new Hitler could rise again “quite easily.” These
right-wing extremists have repeatedly demonstrated their contempt for
the views of most Americans whether it be on economic issues,
environmental issues, issues of personal, religious and sexual freedom
or immigration, to name just a few, and Americans are moving away from them as a result.
This
is no less true, it turns out, with regard to the proposed adventurism
in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East by those who sold us the first
false bill of goods back in 2003. A
strong majority of Americans now agree that removing Saddam Hussein
from power in Iraq was not worth the trillions of dollars and lives lost. Barely one in six want to go back in. There is also strong opposition to military intervention in neighboring Syria.
And yet not only do the same armchair warriors continue in their
demands for more blood and treasure to be sacrificed on the altar of
their ideological obsession with no regard whatever for Americans’
desire to do the exact opposite, they remain revered by the same
mainstream media that allowed them to get away with it the first time.
The
conservative foreign policy establishment, it needs to be said, is no
less out to touch with reality — and democracy — than the tea party
fanatics who control the Republican domestic agenda (and are fueled by
the cash of the Koch Brothers and other billionaires who stand to profit
from their victories). That so many in the media pretend otherwise,
after all this time, all this death and all this money wasted,
demonstrates not only contempt for their audience but utter disdain for
knowledge itself.
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