{"id":310,"date":"2006-02-24T00:06:40","date_gmt":"2006-02-24T05:06:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=310"},"modified":"2011-01-17T22:03:32","modified_gmt":"2011-01-18T03:03:32","slug":"war-powers-war-lies-part-12-not-gwot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=310","title":{"rendered":"War Powers, War Lies: Part 12: Not GWOT"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Big Picture Home Page<\/a>\u00a0| Previous Big Picture Column<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0 Next Big Picture Column\u00a0<\/a><\/address>\n
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<\/address>\n

War Powers, War Lies: A Series<\/h2>\n

Part 12: Not GWOT<\/h2>\n

Published in the Maryland Daily Record February 24, 2006\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As we saw last time, George W. Bush brought to office with him a group of advisors dedicated to deposing Saddam Hussein militarily.\u00a0 The rationale for their policy was somewhat obscure, but was closely tied to a strategic vision of the United States as a superpower willing to use proactive force to promote American interests and spread American values.\u00a0 Iraq was to be the template for deployments of this type.\u00a0 A blunt admission that this was the whole explanation for the invasion of a sovereign nation that had not attacked the United States, however, would have provoked politically undesirable, or even unwithstandable, outrage at home and abroad.\u00a0 And thus the project of selling war on Iraq was born.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The sales pitch included the assertion that attacking Iraq was part of what they called the \u201cGlobal War On Terror,\u201d often abbreviated to the infelicitous syllable GWOT.\u00a0 (The BBC reported in July 2005<\/a> that White House was trying to replace \u201cGWOT\u201d with \u201ca global struggle against the enemies of freedom.\u201d\u00a0 But the buzzword proved durable and has so far defied replacement.<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Probably the first explanation — and it was not much of an explanation \u2013 for the intended invasion of Iraq was the 2002 State of the Union Message<\/a>.\u00a0 There Bush memorably linked three countries (Iran, North Korea, and Iraq) as forming an \u201cAxis of Evil.\u201d\u00a0 Of itself, the metaphor was stunningly inapt.\u00a0 The original Axis powers, our World War II adversaries, were actual allies.\u00a0 Iran and Iraq by contrast, had fought an 8-year war with each other<\/a> in recent memory.\u00a0 North Korea, one of the world\u2019s most isolated regimes, had no evident connection with the other two.\u00a0 The case for Iraq being generally evil lay in its development of weapons of mass destruction, its use of them against its own people, and in its resistance to international inspections.\u00a0 As far as international terrorism went, however, Bush stated only this: \u201cIraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror.\u201d\u00a0 He cited no evidence that Iraq was supporting terrorism against the West, slipping instead into a weird form of future subjunctive: \u201cThey could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There never was much more meat on these bones, as Eric Alterman and Mark Green demonstrate in their 2004 book, The Book on Bush<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Administration was able to find proof that in the early 1990s the Jordanian Sunni terrorist now widely known under the pseudonym Abu Musab Zarqawi was staying in Baghdad.\u00a0 The Administration at various times spoke of this period as giving rise to \u201chigh-level ties\u201d between Iraq and Al Qaeda.\u00a0 But there is absolutely no credible proof of any contact at all. Even if there had been contact, it would have occurred before Zarqawi[1] had affiliated with Al Qaeda.[2]\u00a0 (Then as now, Zarqawi\u2019s primary war was with Shiites; the West was only second in line.)\u00a0 Later, as the Administration pointed out, Zarqawi ran training camps in Iraq.\u00a0 The Administration ignored that the camps were in Kurdish-controlled areas where Saddam\u2019s writ did not run.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There was also a story that Mohamed Atta, the leader of the September 11 plot, had met in Prague in April 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence official.[3]\u00a0 Although the matter is not beyond all dispute (see a very objective September 3, 2002 posting in Slate<\/em> by Kate Taylor<\/a> summarizing the evidence pro and con), it appears likely that this story was either a hoax or a mistake. Vaclav Havel, the Czech president, told the White House<\/a> personally that the contact was impossible.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And, as Alterman and Green point out, when a high-ranking Al Qaeda operative, Abu Zubaydah, was captured in Pakistan in March 2002, he told his interrogators that Osama bin Laden had expressly rejected the notion of cooperation with Hussein, whom bin Laden viewed as an infidel.\u00a0 This was corroborated by a number of captured Al Quaeda agents later that year.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We now know that the Administration chose instead to believe the one captured informant who contradicted them.\u00a0 Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, described by the Washington Post as \u201conce in bin Laden’s inner circle and a senior operative who ran the Khaldan paramilitary camp in Afghanistan,\u201d was captured in Pakistan in November 2001<\/a>.\u00a0 The U.S. turned him over to Eqyptian intelligence, which tortured him.\u00a0 Under torture, al-Libi claimed Iraq had trained Al Quaeda in the use of explosives and chemical weapons.\u00a0 Upon being sent on to U.S. custody in Guantanamo, al-Libi recanted<\/a>.\u00a0 Not until December 9, 2005 did American officials admit that the statements made under torture were false.<\/p>\n

\u00a0 But by that time, the Administration had repeatedly apparently relied upon al-Libi as a source to prove its otherwise untenable point.\u00a0 For instance, in an October 2002 speech in Cincinnati, Bush stated: \u201cWe\u2019ve learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and gases.\u201d\u00a0 When Secretary of State Powell addressed the U.N. on the eve of the invasion, he too cited Libi\u2019s intelligence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And, as Porky Pig says: That\u2019s all, folks.\u00a0 That\u2019s all the public has ever been told about reasons for linking Iraq with Al Qaeda.\u00a0 Even going into the war, this scintilla of data never convinced our allies the British.\u00a0 As the now-famous Downing Street Memo<\/a> (minutes of a July 23, 2002 meeting of Prime Minister Blair and his defense ministers) summed it up: \u201cBush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the March\/April 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs<\/em>,[4] Paul Pilar, who was National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, in other words, the intelligence community\u2019s chief analyst for those areas, from 2000 to 2005, issued a scathing indictment of the \u201cinverted\u201d use of intelligence on several issues in selling Iraq, but especially on this point.\u00a0 The intelligence community always agreed that there was no Iraq-Al Qaeda connection worthy the name.\u00a0 The Bush Administration kept sending intelligence officials back again and again to try to establish what they knew they could not.\u00a0 Pilar observed:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The issue of possible ties between Saddam and al Qaeda was especially prone to the selective use of raw intelligence to make a public case for war. In the shadowy world of international terrorism, almost anyone can be “linked” to almost anyone else if enough effort is made to find evidence of casual contacts, the mentioning of names in the same breath, or indications of common travels or experiences. Even the most minimal and circumstantial data can be adduced as evidence of a \u201crelationship,\u201d ignoring the important question of whether a given regime actually supports a given terrorist group and the fact that relationships can be competitive or distrustful rather than cooperative.<\/address>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Undeterred by the lack of substantial evidence to support its chimerical Saddam-Osama tie, the White House and Pentagon pushed harder:<\/p>\n

On any given subject, the intelligence community faces what is in effect a field of rocks, and it lacks the resources to turn over every one to see what threats to national security may lurk underneath. In an unpoliticized environment, intelligence officers decide which rocks to turn over based on past patterns and their own judgments. But when policymakers repeatedly urge the intelligence community to turn over only certain rocks, the process becomes biased. The community responds by concentrating its resources on those rocks, eventually producing a body of reporting and analysis that, thanks to quantity and emphasis, leaves the impression that what lies under those same rocks is a bigger part of the problem than it really is.<\/address>\n
\u00a0<\/address>\n
That is what happened when the Bush administration repeatedly called on the intelligence community to uncover more material that would contribute to the case for war. The Bush team approached the community again and again and pushed it to look harder at the supposed Saddam-al Qaeda relationship — calling on analysts not only to turn over additional Iraqi rocks, but also to turn over ones already examined and to scratch the dirt to see if there might be something there after all. The result was an intelligence output that — because the question being investigated was never put in context — obscured rather than enhanced understanding of al Qaeda’s actual sources of strength and support.<\/address>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It may have been lousy intelligence.\u00a0 It was effective public relations, however.\u00a0 In February 2003, 72 percent of Americans polled answered yes<\/a> to the question: \u201cWas Saddam Hussein personally involved in the September 11 attacks?”\u00a0 And this result was in line with poll after poll.[5]<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This was not a trivial misunderstanding; it bore great legal significance.\u00a0 Whatever color of authorization the Bush invasion of Iraq may have taken from United Nations resolutions (and that color was indistinct at best), the principal legal justification for our involvement, from the standpoint of U.S. law, was that the attack on Iraq was part of our \u201cwar against terror.\u201d\u00a0 The critical three paragraphs of the Congressional authorization, H.J. Res. 114, 107th<\/sup> Cong. (2002),<\/a> specifically invoke that supposed war as the enterprise of which the projected war on Iraq was to be a part.\u00a0 I quote a part:<\/p>\n

… the United States is determined to prosecute the war on terrorism and Iraq\u2019s ongoing support for international terrorist groups … make[s] clear that it is in the national security interests of the United States and in furtherance of the war on terrorism that all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions be enforced, including through the use of force if necessary …<\/address>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Nothing else carried the justifying power of the \u201cwar on terror.\u201d\u00a0 Iraq\u2019s supposed WMD program and its flouting of the inspection regime (to be discussed soon) did not in themselves justify attacking Iraq under international law, even under the aggressive Bush Administration interpretations, though they might have meant a little more if Saddam could have been shown to intend momentarily to use his hypothetical WMDs. But preemptive war remains fundamentally illegal in the eyes of most of the world.\u00a0 On the other hand, once a nation has been attacked, it has a universally recognized right to defend itself.\u00a0 And while the Bush Administration\u2019s views of a \u201cglobal war\u201d theater in which all the world\u2019s a stage and the curtain never falls could in theory justify any actions taken against anyone under any conditions, a response to a very specific attack on the U.S. was legitimate as nothing else in the Administration\u2019s legal and political case for war could be.\u00a0 And so the attack on Saddam was both sold and legally justified as part of a \u201cglobal war on terror.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This was a double lie.\u00a0 There was no proof that any sane and reasonable intelligence analyst could take seriously that Saddam had had anything to do with the September 11 attacks of Al Qaeda. But even if he had, this would not have rendered the attack on Saddam part of the War on Terror.\u00a0 And that is because there never was, and could not in the nature of things be a \u201cwar on terror\u201d of which the war on Iraq could be a part.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the nature of things it could not be a war because war almost always means a struggle between sovereign nations using military forces. Terrorism is a weapon or tactic used mostly by those who are not sovereign nations and who lack armies.\u00a0 To speak of a war on terror is like speaking of a war on land mines or a war on siegecraft.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Nor is terrorism a tactic we categorically oppose.\u00a0 People that we have supported recently \u2013 some very recently (Salvadorian death squads, Muslim fundamentalists when we paid them to lay waste to the Russians in Afghanistan, Egyptian torturers, CIA torturers for that matter) use terroristic tactics, and we are not attacking them.\u00a0 People that we do not necessarily support also use terroristic tactics (Russians in Chechnya, Sudanese genocidalists, Hutus in Rwanda) and we\u2019re not about stopping them either. Terror may not be a legitimate tactic of war but it certainly is a widespread one, and we are not really trying to stop it as such.\u00a0 As Noam Chomsky pointed out long ago<\/a>, to go by the definition of \u201cact of terrorism\u201d found repeatedly in the U.S. Code (e.g. 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 2331<\/a>), we ourselves are a terrorist nation.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But to call the claim that we are waging war on terror a lie articulates a disagreement that is far deeper than a mere matter of semantics.\u00a0 Even as a figurative term, meaning a semi-defensive struggle against terrorists who would attack the West, even as a euphemism for a struggle against armed Islamic fundamentalism, the phrase \u201cwar on terror\u201d was a fraud.\u00a0 Before September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration\u2019s attention to the task of defending us against Islamic terrorists was disjointed, insincere, underfunded and basically laughable.\u00a0 After September 11, the rhetoric changed far more than the reality.\u00a0 As we shall see next time, we have hardly been fighting terror at all.\u00a0 But even if we had been, our attack on Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with it.\u00a0 That much is certain.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 GWOT it was not.<\/p>\n

[1]\u00a0\u00a0 For background on Zarqawi see http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Abu_Musab_al-Zarqawi<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

[2]\u00a0\u00a0 Alterman and Green at 277.<\/p>\n

[3]\u00a0\u00a0 Alterman and Green at 279.<\/p>\n

[4]\u00a0 Now partly hidden behind a pay wall.\u00a0 You can start the viewing here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[5]\u00a0\u00a0 See Alterman and Green at 282.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn<\/p>\n

The Big Picture Home Page<\/a>\u00a0| Previous Big Picture Column<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0 Next Big Picture Column\u00a0<\/a><\/address>\n
War Powers Page<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Previous War Powers Column<\/a> |\u00a0Next War Powers Column<\/a><\/address>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It may have been lousy intelligence. It was effective public relations, however. In February 2003, 72 percent of Americans polled answered yes to the question: \u201cWas Saddam Hussein personally involved in the September 11 attacks?\u201d And this result was in line with poll after poll.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2147,2157,666,2182,585,2152,2144,2145,2178,2177,2149,2159,2140,2146,577,2167,2170,2166,377,2172,2174,136,2139,5,1741,2181,2164,2150,2153,1478,1770,2162,2165,2154,2161,2175,2151,594,467,2173,2168,401,2171,2143,2176,2179,413,1765,2160,2148,2141,2180,2156,2142,2169,2155,19,2163,1467,2158],"class_list":["post-310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bigpicture","tag-2002-state-of-the-union-messge","tag-abu-musab-zarqawi","tag-abu-zubaydah","tag-act-of-terrorism","tag-afghanistan","tag-aix-powers","tag-american-interests","tag-american-values","tag-aumf","tag-authorization-for-the-use-of-military-force","tag-axis-of-evil","tag-baghdad","tag-bush-cabinet","tag-buzzword","tag-cia","tag-cincinnati","tag-downing-street-memo","tag-egyptian-intelligence","tag-eric-alterman","tag-eric-blair","tag-foreign-affairs","tag-george-w-bush","tag-global-war-on-terrorism","tag-guantanamo","tag-gwot","tag-hutus","tag-ibn-al-sheikh-al-libi","tag-iran","tag-iran-iraq-war","tag-iraq","tag-jordan","tag-kate-taylor","tag-khaldan","tag-mark-green","tag-mohamed-atta","tag-national-intelligence-officer","tag-north-korea","tag-osama-bin-laden","tag-pakistan","tag-paul-pilar","tag-porky-pig","tag-president-george-w-bush","tag-prime-minister-eric-blair","tag-proactive-force","tag-public-opinion-polls","tag-russians","tag-rwanda","tag-saddam-hussein","tag-shiites","tag-state-of-the-union-message","tag-strategic-vision","tag-sudanese-genocide","tag-sunni","tag-superpower","tag-thats-all-folks","tag-the-book-on-bush","tag-torture","tag-vaclav-havel","tag-world-war-ii","tag-zarqawi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=310"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":312,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions\/312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}