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| Volume XI, Spring 2004, Number 1 |
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| Editor's Note |
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Now begins the most dangerous game for the Bush administration -- even more risky for their political future than the botched aftermath of the Iraq war: trying to explain why pre-emption was necessary. Chief arms inspector David Kay, unable to find any weapons of mass destruction in postwar Iraq, has expressed shock and blamed the Central Intelligence Agency for over-interpreting the clues that had provided a casus belli. It remains to be seen whether those inside the Agency and the rest of the intelligence community who know what really happened will sit still for this. It seems unlikely. Many retired intelligence analysts from the CIA and the Pentagon have already put out their versions of how the Defense Department civilians and the Office of the Vice President cherry picked data to build a plausible rationale for war. They knew Iraq was weak; that was part of its attraction as a target. With their end in mind, they sought a means -- any means -- to justify it.
Google and other search engines will find the damning information for you on the Internet in a few seconds. It is also available in print: Robert Dreyfuss in Mother Jones ("The Lie Factory") and Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker ("The Stovepipe") being two of the most insightful analyses. Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski has also provided The American Conservative with a memoir of her final weeks at the Pentagon, when she compiled a brief on the actions and attitudes of the operatives at the Office of Special Plans. They were the un-CIA, working to spin a case for the invasion of Iraq. Former chief U.N. arms inspector Scott Ritter and retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern have also weighed in on the misuse of American intelligence assets.
A noteworthy mea culpa can be read in the February Atlantic: former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack explains that people inside the Bush administration "considered the CIA left-leaning cultural relativists" and were determined to "correct this bias." According to Pollack, whose 2002 book The Threatening Storm made persuasive (to those eager to believe) arguments for taking down the regime of Saddam Hussein, sources were the key. The administration's preconceptions -- their desire to go to war no matter what, that is -- led them to want to believe the testimony of defectors who offered the most gory details of Saddam's regime. According to Pollack, CIA analysts were also forced to spend a great deal of time on historical analysis as well as -- get this -- to provide detailed exegesis of sacred texts: the op-ed columns of Jim Hoagland, William Safire and George Will! Hoagland, by the way, who wrote before the war that the Bush people had to lean on the CIA to get what they wanted from reluctant analysts, was quick to second David Kay's judgment that the CIA had led the administration astray.
The credibility of the Agency has been compromised. This is an inversion of the stuff of spy novels, in which an enemy mole surreptitiously gains entry to the inner sanctum and tampers with information or manipulates personnel. This particular subversive enterprise has led to the death and maiming of a great many American and allied soldiers and Iraqi civilians, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and squandered U.S. political and moral capital. National-security assets have been undermined by a group of people who had their own separate political agenda, "disaggregated from the American context," as Georgie Anne Geyer put it in her American Conservative cover story on Cheney as Cardinal Richelieu, gatekeeper to the court of Louis XIV.
Neoconservative ideologues have taken over the foreign-policy apparatus that used to be in the hands of statesmen. Bent on remaking the Middle East, they needed to convince the public-opinion molders that it was the right thing to do. It might have been more difficult, except for the fear-and-loathing factor that curdled the atmosphere after 9/11. The American public wanted an explanation of the motives of the Arab Muslim terrorists, and the neocons had their answer ready, conflating al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. This loaded Israel and the United States into the same boat, facing the implacable "militant Islam" (see Zunes inside for the neocon plan for Syria).
In An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, the recent screed by neocons David Frum and Richard Perle, the authors argue that Muslim terrorism is unique: "The Islamic world has lagged further and further behind the Christian West. . . . These defeats and disasters have been more than a wound to Muslims: They directly challenge the truth of Islam itself" (see Gary Kamiya's daring review essay in Salon magazine). According to this view, propounded by Princeton Professor Bernard Lewis and a raft of others he has influenced, the humiliation and anger of Muslim youth have no connection with Palestine or the behavior of Israel and the United States. "The Arab-Israeli quarrel is a manifestation of the underlying cultural malaise from which Islamic extremism emerges," claim Frum and Perle. They seem to have conveniently forgotten that Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation was secular until the Israeli-facilitated birth of Hamas in the late 1980s.
Merging real grievances against U.S. policy with fanatical extremist delusions, the authors diagnose the Palestinians and other Arab Muslims as sick. Frum and Perle realize how biased this may sound, and they try to ward off accusations by going on the offensive, suggesting that those who disagree with them are antisemites. Fellow neocon David Brooks, now of The New York Times op-ed page, was quick to support this line of attack, actually charging that anyone who uses the term "neocon" is committing an antisemitic slur, since everyone knows that "neo means Jewish." As Kamiya says, "They protest too much."
The neoconservative view of the Middle East is not a conspiracy; it is rather the conventional wisdom shared by Cheney and others in the administration. While the intractable problems of the Arab/Muslim world cannot be denied, this one-sided interpretation is untenable. Yet it is almost never challenged in the major media. The hint of the antisemitism slur aborts debate. Fortunately, the avalanche of negative reader reaction that fell on the Times the day after the Brooks column appeared is a sign that the protective facade may be cracking. Brooks had to backpedal, claiming, somewhat implausibly, that his subtle tongue-in-cheek humor had been misconstrued.
This subject offers little to laugh about. Most of the rest of the world now hates and fears the United States and no longer believes the pronouncements of our leaders. The insecurity this has bred may actually accelerate a race for nuclear deterrence among vulnerable states in the developing world, the very danger that provided the casus belli for a pre-emptive war in Iraq. Credibility so severely damaged will take a long time to rebuild, though our legitimacy demands it. It will not be easy, especially in this freighted political year. As yet it is unclear whether the American people will punish or forgive the administration for compromising major institutions of government and running up an astronomical bill in Iraq. Whether Republican or Democrat, however, the next administration will have its work cut out for it.
Anne Joyce
February 2004
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