No history left behind
boo-radley
being thrown back now - not to rewrite history but to reveal it for the
first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it
can no longer afford to be without the truth. "
And let's hope they show them in 11 months just how they feel.
November 27, 2005 NYT
Op-Ed Columnist
Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt ...
By FRANK RICH
GEORGE W. BUSH is so desperate for allies that his hapless Asian tour
took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an American president, so he could
mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks for Mongolia's
contribution of some 160 soldiers to "the coalition of the willing."
Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent in
Newsweek's latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his
bunker for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate.
The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so
became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month
about Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John
Murtha about how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated
battle against Islamic radicalism. Neither offered a plan for
"victory." Instead, both impugned their critics' patriotism and
retreated into the past to defend the origins of the war. In a
seasonally appropriate impersonation of the misanthropic Mr. Potter
from "It's a Wonderful Life," the vice president went so far as to
label critics of the administration's prewar smoke screen both
"dishonest and reprehensible" and "corrupt and shameless." He sounded
but one epithet away from a defibrillator.
The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage
is the need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White
House in the polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are
too feeble to merit that strong a response. There is more going on here
than politics.
Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats
marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in
Cheney-speak, just dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and
shameless. The more the president and vice president tell us that their
mistakes were merely innocent byproducts of the same bad intelligence
seen by everyone else in the world, the more we learn that this was not
so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods used to sell the war did not
happen by accident; it was woven by design and then foisted on the
public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in the
White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this
month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to
smite Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch
between 9/11 and shock and awe.
The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and
vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out.
A nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times
found that Mr. Bush and his aides had "issued increasingly dire
warnings" about Iraq's mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S.
intelligence authorities were told by Germany's Federal Intelligence
Service that the principal source for these warnings, an Iraqi defector
in German custody code-named Curveball, "never claimed to produce germ
weapons and never saw anyone else do so." The five senior German
intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were aghast
that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator
turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and in
the president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared
billing with the equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious
African uranium).
Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece
of the prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan
National Journal that 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush was told in a
highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no
evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and
that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant
collaborative ties with Al Qaeda."
The information was delivered in the President's Daily Brief, a C.I.A.
assessment also given to the vice president and other top
administration officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney
repeatedly pounded in an implicit (and at times specific) link between
Saddam and Al Qaeda until Americans even started to believe that the
9/11 attacks had been carried out by Iraqis. More damning still, Mr.
Waas finds that the "few credible reports" of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts
actually involved efforts by Saddam to monitor or infiltrate Islamic
terrorist groups, which he regarded as adversaries of his secular
regime. Thus Saddam's antipathy to Islamic radicals was the same in
2001 as it had been in 1983, when Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan
administration emissary, embraced the dictator as a secular fascist
ally in the American struggle against the theocratic fascist rulers in
Iran.
What these revelations also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he
said in his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional
Democrats who voted for the Iraqi war resolution "had access to the
same intelligence" he did. They didn't have access to the President's
Daily Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered. They didn't have access to the
information that German intelligence officials spoke about to The Los
Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to material from a Defense
Intelligence Agency report, released by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan
this month, which as early as February 2002 demolished the reliability
of another major source that the administration had persistently used
for its false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda collaboration.
The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it's
a losing game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A
simpler question might be: What was not a lie? The situation recalls
Mary McCarthy's explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought
Lillian Hellman was a dishonest writer: "Every word she writes is a
lie, including 'and' and 'the.' "
If Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney believe they were truthful in the run-up to
the war, it's easy for them to make their case. Instead of falsely
claiming that they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked
into prewar intelligence - neither of which addressed possible White
House misuse and mischaracterization of that intelligence - they should
just release the rest of the President's Daily Briefs and other prewar
documents that are now trickling out. Instead, incriminatingly enough,
they are fighting the release of any such information, including
unclassified documents found in post-invasion Iraq requested from the
Pentagon by the pro-war, neocon Weekly Standard. As Scott Shane
reported in The New York Times last month, Vietnam documents are now
off limits, too: the National Security Agency won't make public a 2001
historical report on how American officials distorted intelligence in
1964 about the Gulf of Tonkin incident for fear it might "prompt
uncomfortable comparisons" between the games White Houses played then
and now to gin up wars.
SOONER or later - probably sooner, given the accelerating pace of
recent revelations - this embarrassing information will leak out
anyway. But the administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or
ignore intelligence that contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of
the prewar story. There were other shadowy stations on the
disinformation assembly line. Among them were the Policy
Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon operation
specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's
apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in
which Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary
Matalin, among others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the
veins of the press and public. These murky aspects of the narrative -
like the role played by a private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group,
examined by James Bamford in the current Rolling Stone - have yet to be
recounted in full.
No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the
administration made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it
is a road map to both the present and the future. Leaders who
dissembled then are still doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same
speeches in which they vehemently deny having misled us then - witness
Mr. Bush's false claims about what prewar intelligence was seen by
Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort last Monday to again conflate the
terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in Iraq." (Maj. Gen.
Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom, says the Iraqi
insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney
routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once
inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s.
"We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," the vice
president said of his critics. "We're going to continue throwing their
own words back at them." But according to a Harris poll released by The
Wall Street Journal last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe
that the Bush administration "generally misleads the American public on
current issues to achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr. Cheney's
and the president's own words that are being thrown back now - not to
rewrite history but to reveal it for the first time to an angry country
that has learned the hard way that it can no longer afford to be
without the truth.