The Emperor has no uniform...
Gene Lyons, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: One aspect of Michael Moore’s documentary film, "Fahrenheit 9/11," that you won’t hear Republicans denouncing is a 2001 video clip of Colin Powell calling Saddam Hussein no threat. Audiences react with shocked murmurs...
Almost 1,000 American and an estimated 10,000 Iraqi deaths and a strategic nightmare later, we have come full circle. But Michael Moore had to tell you. So how come nobody important in what Eric Alterman calls the "so-called liberal media" pressed the secretary of state to explain himself before the war, when it might have made some difference? Good question.
Actually, the U.S. military’s low opinion of Iraqi
martial prowess was obvious to anybody with a modicum
of the skepticism that’s supposed to be a virtue among
journalists. As this column noted, even as the Bush
White House began its pre-war war sales campaign, U.S.
forces mobilized openly along the Iraqi border as if
Saddam’s army had no capacity to defend itself. Had
the Pentagon truly believed Iraq possessed nuclear
weapons, its actions would have been the equivalent of
notifying Adolf Hitler in advance about the D-Day
landings. A nuclear bomb smuggled into the U.S.
encampment could have caused an unimaginable
catastrophe.
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Administration stampeded nation into war
Gene Lyons
Posted on Wednesday, July 14, 2004
One aspect of Michael Moore’s documentary film,
"Fahrenheit 9/11," that you won’t hear Republicans
denouncing is a 2001 video clip of Colin Powell
calling Saddam Hussein no threat. Audiences react with
shocked murmurs. The film doesn’t explain the context,
a Feb. 24, 2001, diplomatic meeting in Cairo. Pressed
by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak about the Iraqi
people’s suffering under U.S. economic sanctions,
Powell reminded his audience that they existed to
check Saddam’s ambitions. "And frankly," he added,
"they have worked. He has not developed any
significant capability with respect to weapons of mass
destruction. He is unable to project conventional
power against his neighbors." Not only was Iraq no
danger to the U.S., it had no capacity to menace such
powerhouses as Jordan and Kuwait. So why are we
reading news accounts like this in July 2004:
"Saddam’s army posed little threat, Senate panel
says." That’s how the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette—a
Republican newspaper, for those keeping score at
home—headlined a summary of the Senate’s report on
prewar intelligence failures. The New York Times’
version read: "Panel Describes Long Weakening of
Hussein Army."
Almost 1,000 American and an estimated 10,000 Iraqi
deaths and a strategic nightmare later, we have come
full circle. But Michael Moore had to tell you. So how
come nobody important in what Eric Alterman calls the
"so-called liberal media" pressed the secretary of
state to explain himself before the war, when it might
have made some difference? Good question.
Actually, the U.S. military’s low opinion of Iraqi
martial prowess was obvious to anybody with a modicum
of the skepticism that’s supposed to be a virtue among
journalists. As this column noted, even as the Bush
White House began its pre-war war sales campaign, U.S.
forces mobilized openly along the Iraqi border as if
Saddam’s army had no capacity to defend itself. Had
the Pentagon truly believed Iraq possessed nuclear
weapons, its actions would have been the equivalent of
notifying Adolf Hitler in advance about the D-Day
landings. A nuclear bomb smuggled into the U.S.
encampment could have caused an unimaginable
catastrophe.
So no, I’m not buying the oft-repeated anecdote from
Bob Woodward’s book, "Plan of Attack," in which a
skeptical President Bush tells CIA director George
Tenet in December 2002 that his "slamdunk" case for
Iraqi WMDs wasn’t good enough to sell "Joe Public" on
war. By that time, White House spokesmen, Bush
emphatically among them, had been scaring Americans
for months with talk about "mushroom clouds" (Condi
Rice) and "bulletproof" evidence (Donald Rumsfeld) of
what both the Senate and the 9/11 Commission have
concluded were nonexistent links between Iraq and
al-Qa’ida. The administration had stampeded Bush’s war
resolution through Congress two months earlier. As the
Senate report demonstrates to me, the CIA had long
since cooked the books according to the
administration’s recipe. Assuming he actually made the
"slam-dunk" remark, Bush must have wanted them
parboiled.
The Republican majority on the Senate Intelligence
Committee should be commended for its patriotic
diligence in bringing its scathing report to public
attention shortly before the most crucial presidential
election of our times. Its attempts to shield Bush
from political consequences by denying that White
House pressure helped cause the intelligence debacle,
however, shouldn’t fool an inquisitive child.
Not every American news organization ignored the
obvious. As early as Oct. 8, 2002, Warren P. Strobel
and Jonathan S. Landay of the Knight-Ridder newspapers
reported that "a growing number of military officers,
intelligence professionals and diplomats in [Bush’s]
own government privately have deep misgivings about
the administration’s double-time march toward war....
They charge that the administration squelches
dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are
under intense pressure to produce reports supporting
the White House’s argument that Saddam poses such an
immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive
military action is necessary."
Among a dozen anonymous sources, they emphasized, "no
one who was interviewed disagreed."
Meanwhile, an annex to the Senate report reveals that
Pentagon civilian appointees secretly gave
intelligence "counter-briefings" to White House
officials without the CIA director’s knowledge. Headed
by Douglas Feith, a neo-conservative hawk who’d
advocated war with Iraq since long before 9/11, they
evidently filled Bush’s eager ears with tales of
Saddam’s imaginary alliance with Osama bin Laden.
Everybody who’s ever worked in a large organization
knows the difficulty of moving unwelcome information
up the chain of command inside hierarchical
bureaucracies. Nobody’s eager to tell his boss’ boss
something that person doesn’t want to hear. The
stronger the command structure, i. e. military and
quasi-military bureaucracies, the harder it gets to
push bad news to the top. It’s one big reason
communism never worked.
The only known antidote for such organized folly is
democracy. And the question is whether voters will
punish our callow, cocksure president for the terrible
strategic debacle into which he has led the country.
Note: Contrary to a Voices letter published Monday, I
did not write the screenplay for the documentary film,
"The Hunting of the President." Nor could I be
accurately described as an FOB. Apart from attending
the same dinner party one time in 1981, I have no
private social relationship with former President Bill
Clinton.
Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock
author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.