Michael Isikoff 10:59 AM on 03/22/2013 Hubris: The Selling of the Iraq War, a documentary special hosted by Rachel Maddow, re-airs Friday, March 22, 9 p.m. on MSNBC. (oops, it aired yesterday)
ANALYSIS: As the Obama White House vigorously defends its policy of using drone strikes to kill suspected terrorists—including in some cases American citizens—it invokes the findings of secret intelligence showing that the targets pose an “imminent” threat to the U.S.
But there’s a powerful reason to be perennially skeptical of such claims–and perhaps never more so than now, as the country approaches a sobering historic moment: the tenth anniversary of President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
The war that began March 19, 2003, was justified to the country by alarming claims that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and connections to al-Qaida terrorists—almost all of which turned out to be false. Some of the most senior officials in the U.S. government, including President Bush himself, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, asserted these claims in public with absolute confidence, even while privately, ranking U.S. military officers and intelligence professionals were voicing their doubts. Hubris: The Selling of the Iraq War, a documentary special hosted by Rachel Maddow (and based on a book I co-authored with David Corn), provides new evidence that the dissent within the administration and military was even more profound and widespread than anybody has known until now.
“It was a shock, it was a total shock–I couldn’t believe the vice president was saying this,” Gen. Anthony Zinni, the former commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, told me in an interview for the documentary. Zinni, who had access to the most sensitive U.S. intelligence on Iraq, was on a stage in Nashville, Tennessee, receiving an award from the Veteran of Foreign Wars on August 26, 2002, when he heard the vice president launch the opening salvo in the Bush administration’s campaign to generate public support for an invasion. “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” Cheney said. “There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.” Zinni, sitting right next to Cheney’s lectern, says he “literally bolted” when he heard the vice president’s comments. “In doing work with the CIA on Iraq WMD [weapons of mass destruction], through all the briefings I heard at Langley, I never saw one piece of credible evidence that there was an ongoing program.” He recounts going to one of those CIA briefings and being struck by how thin the agency’s actual knowledge of Iraqi weapons programs was. “What I was hearing [from Bush administration officials] and what I knew did not jive,” Zinni says.
In the documentary, many of those who were sources for the book “Hubris” appear on camera for the first time. One of them, Mark Rossini, was then an FBI counter-terrorism agent detailed to the CIA. He was assigned the task of evaluating a Czech intelligence report that Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, had met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague before the attack on the World Trade Towers. Cheney repeatedly invoked the report as evidence of Iraqi involvement in 9/11. “It’s been pretty well confirmed that he [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April,” Cheney said on Meet the Press on Dec. 9, 2001. But the evidence used to support the claim–a supposed photograph of Atta in Prague the day of the alleged meeting—had already been debunked by Rossini. He analyzed the photo and immediately saw it was bogus: the picture of the Czech “Atta” looked nothing like the real terrorist. It was a conclusion he relayed up the chain, assuming he had put the matter to rest. Then he heard Cheney endorsing the discredited report on national television. “I remember looking at the TV screen and saying, ‘What did I just hear?’ And I–first time in my life, I actually threw something at the television because I couldn’t believe what I just heard,” Rossini says.
Cheney, like most other senior Bush administration officials, declined to be interviewed for Hubris. One who did talk to the filmmakers was Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of the defense for policy under Donald Rumsfeld and an ardent defender of the war. Feith explains the strategic thinking that drove the administration decision to invade. “The idea was to take actions after 9/11 that would so shock state supporters of terrorism around the world that we might be able to get them to change their policies regarding support for terrorism and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction,” he says in the film.
But documents that have been declassified in recent years show that Bush administration officials weren’t interested in changing Saddam’s policies: they wanted him gone and were determined to launch a war to achieve that. The chronology also reveals that Saddam was in their crosshairs even before 9/11. The very afternoon of September 11, 2001, Rumsfeld met in the Pentagon with top aides. As his handwritten notes written by one of his aides at the meeting show, Rumsfeld asked for the “best info fast..judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] @ same time—not only UBL [Osama bin Laden].” Rumsfeld also tasked “Jim Haynes [the Pentagon's top lawyer] to talk w/ PW [Paul Wolfowitz] for additional support [for the] connection w/ UBL.” Before being presented with any evidence linking Saddam to al-Qaida, Rumsfeld was already looking for ways to use the World Trade Center attacks to justify taking out the Iraqi leader.
By late November, Rumsfeld was meeting with Gen. Tommy Franks, who succeeded Zinni as commander of the Centcom, to plot the “decapitation” of the Iraqi government, according to the now declassified talking points from the session (shown on television for the first time in the documentary). The talking points suggest Rumsfeld and his team were grappling with a tricky issue: “How [to] start?” the war. In other words, what would the pretext be? Various scenarios were outlined: “US discovers Saddam connection to Sept. 11 attack or to anthrax attacks?” reads one of them. “Dispute over WMD inspections?” reads another. “Start now thinking about inspection demands.”
These talking points make it clearer than ever that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others were determined–probably from the moment they came into office–to invade Iraq. Paul Pillar–then one of the CIA’s top terrorism analysts—says in the documentary that the 9/11 attacks “made it politically possible for the first time to persuade the American people to break a tradition of not launching offensive wars.” But to achieve the goal, secret intelligence was twisted, massaged, and wildly exaggerated. “It wasn’t a matter of lying about this or lying about that,” Pillar says. “But rather—through the artistry of speechwriters and case-presenters—conveying an impression to the American people that certain things were true.” But those things were not true. It’s worth watching to see how it was done.
America’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ Legacy to Iraq: Sectarian Violence Mounts with 95 Dead
Posted on 05/21/2013 by Juan Cole
Bombings killed at least 95 people on Monday .. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/20/iraq-car-bombings-kill-dozens .. in Iraq, with 10 car bombs going off in the capital of Baghdad alone. Two car bombs were detonated in the southern Shiite port city of Basra, and the mostly Sunni city of Samarra north of the capital was also attacked. Most of the violence seems to have been aimed at Shiites.
The Sunni-Shiite violence is a legacy of the way George W. Bush and the Neoconservatives governed Iraq in 2003-2008. They deliberately installed the Shiites in power, in an exclusivist sort of way. I remember Neoconservative strategist Marc Gerecht Reuel talking about the goal of putting the Shiites in power. His colleague James Woolsey, a former CIA head, upbraided me at a conference for pointing out that some Iraqi Shiite groups are closely tied to the ayatollahs in Iran. I read somewhere that the Neoconservatives were convinced that unlike the Sunni Iraqis under Saddam Hussein, who sympathized with the Palestinians, the Shiite Iraqis as a functional minority would sympathize with Israel’s Jews. The Neocons were real cut-ups, with all kinds of fancy theories unconnected to reality.
The Americans played strong favorites for years. They avoided having a truth and reconciliation process. They castigated the Sunni Arabs, many of whom had had ties to the Baath Party (r. 1968-2003), as little short of Nazis, and encouraged the Shiites to fire thousands of them from government employment. At the same time the Americans closed down state factories and created massive unemployment. A ‘Debaathification Commission’ fired thousands of Sunni schoolteachers and brought in Shiite cronies instead.
Whereas in South Africa the truth and reconciliation commission sought truth over punishment, in Iraq the ascendant Shiites marginalized and victimized Sunnis with ties to the old Baath (or even just ties to Sunnis who had ties to . . .)
Those Sunnis who formed cells to engage in bombings and sniping to get the Americans back out, bequeathed a legacy of such cells, which remain active, now aimed at preventing the Shiite establishment that inherited Iraq from enjoying its ascendancy.
In all of Iraqi history from the Sumerians until 2003 there had never been a suicide bombing in that country. The technique was adopted to fight Bush’s occupation, having been pioneered by the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.
And now, having screwed up Iraq royally over years, Americans can’t be bothered to even report on events there in more than a sentence on their television news.
I am sympathetic to attempts to contextualize such violence, but in fact such coordinated bombings have been a feature of Iraqi life for many years. The only remarkable thing about these bombings is that they came so closely on the heels of others– in recent years the big bombing campaigns have been divided by long periods of quiescence.
It is not clear that the violence is especially connected to Syria. Similar bombings were carried out before Syria slipped into civil war. And while the Iraqi military repression of Sunni Arab protesters at Hawija .. http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/05/iraq-judiciary-hawija-attacks-investigation.html .. about a month ago, in what some Sunnis called a massacre, has inflamed Sunni-Shiite tensions, the simple fact is that before Hawija there were coordinated bombings in several cities at once. The bombings don’t appear to have a specific political aim but rather an over-all strategic one, and to take place no matter what is happening politically.
Nor is the violence of the past week (or really the last month and a half) like that during the Iraqi Civil War of 2006-2007. Then, most of those killed were victims of neighborhood faction-fighting, and most victims were shot, not killed by bombs. The neighborhood fighting declined when they were ethnically cleansed. It is not likely that that sort of civil war will start back up again now, since there has been so much movement of populations.
What can be said is that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of the Shiite Islamic Mission Party (al-Da`wa) has not exactly been very good about reaching out to Sunni Iraqis and bringing them into his State of Law Coalition.
To be fair, large numbers of Sunni Arab Iraqis seem unreconciled to the rise to power of the majority Shiites, who are more or less allied with the minority Kurds. Small terrorist groups among them carry out these bombings in hopes of deterring foreign investment and of keeping the new order from congealing. They cannot really change the political situation with such bombings, but they can stop nice new buildings from being built or the kind of big increase in prosperity from being achieved that make al-Maliki truly popular.
They are having some success in this strategy. When I was in Baghdad a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that there were not many new buildings or construction sites and the city seemed in some ways frozen in 1991. Although Iraq is an oil state, it hasn’t been able to kickstart Abu Dhabi style building. (A developer has started work on a nice big new mall).
The bombers are, then, spoilers rather than revolutionaries, and they appear to have no coherent plan beyond disruption. It is a little surprising that they manage to keep at it despite having had no political impact at all for many years.
It is also surprising that al-Maliki has not been able to mount an effective counter-terrorism policy. How hard could it be to infiltrate the cells and bust them? Of course, even better would be to so mollify the general Sunni Arab population that they become willing to turn in the people making car bombs (you can’t make car bombs on an industrial scale without the neighbors noticing).
A little over ten years ago, George W. Bush gave his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech about how permanent warfare could now be deployed in a humanitarian fashion and without substantial loss of life to build up and maintain an global American empire. Wow.
Conservatives blame Iraq for Obamacare and Bush 2nd term woes and
.. "conservatism is never to blame" .. my blue below ..
If It Hadn’t Been For Iraq!
March 26, 2013 3:59 PM By Ed Kilgore
One of the more interesting byproducts of Tenth Anniversary reflections on the Iraq War has been the effort of many conservatives to blame it for all the problems of the Bush administration’s second term, and then for the rise of Democrats before and during Barack Obama’s election in 2008. I wrote last week .. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2013_03/no_paul_wolfowitz_and_dick_che043712.php# .. about Phillip Klein’s argument that Iraq made Obamacare possible. On Sunday Ross Douthat made a broader argument .. http://tiny.cc/wesgxw .. that the war (or more specifically, the failure of the war) ruined Bush’s second-term agenda, united a previously divided Democratic Party, and created the netroots-fueled “energy” that fed Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008.
As with many revisionist arguments, Douthat’s suffers from a habit of telescoping events. Bush’s Social Security “reform” proposal wasn’t wrecked by Iraq; it never commanded significant public support, and certainly wasn’t something his narrow 2004 re-election gave him any mandate to pursue. Conservatives didn’t abandon “compassionate conservatism” because Bush’s approval ratings were collapsing; they never much liked it to begin with, and argued, with some justice, that it hadn’t brought him major inroads into “swing” constituencies in 2004. And while the war was indeed a major factor in the rise of the “netroots,” so, too, were the Supreme Court’s hijacking of the 2000 presidential election, the enactment of the Bush tax cuts, an intensification of financial and industrial deregulation under Bush, a stagnant economy characterized by growing inequality, and war-related violations of civil liberties that did not particularly depend on whether the war “succeeded” or “failed.” And then there was this little thing called technology, which would have created a “netroots” with or without the provocation of the war.
The more you read Douthat’s piece, the more it sounds like one of those “if I had some ham, I’d make a ham sandwich, if I had some bread” arguments that if absolutely everything had been different, well, everything would have been different.
------- To blame the Iraq war for the ascent of liberalism is to suggest that the public hasn’t really repudiated conservatism: Americans’ judgment was simply clouded by a single, albeit enormous, Republican-led misstep. -------
Here Douthat’s attitude converges with that of many of his intra—party, Tea Folk rivals: whatever the problem is, conservatism is never to blame .. http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_11/conservative_reaction_to_elect_1041059.php# . It’s always some heresy, perversion, or accident afflicting the True Faith that’s at fault, and the answer is to reconstitute the Ancient Creed of Reagan or Goldwater or The Founders.
Ed Kilgore is a contributing writer to the Washington Monthly. He is managing editor for The Democratic Strategist and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. Find him on Twitter: @ed_kilgore.
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