Bush's counteroffensive on Iraqi WMD

Bush's counteroffensive on Iraqi WMD
A new wave of lies and intimidation

By Bill Van Auken
14 November 2005


The Bush administration has launched a "campaign-style"
counteroffensive against renewed charges that it deliberately
deceived the American people and the world about an alleged threat
from Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" to justify a war of
aggression that had long been in the making.

That official Washington is seized by this debate—more than three
and a half years after US ground troops invaded Iraq—is a measure of
the desperate crisis that the Iraqi quagmire has created for
America's ruling elite.

The immediate catalyst for the renewed controversy is the indictment
of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice-presidential chief of staff
for lying to a federal grand jury in the CIA leak case. What has
become obvious in this case is that Libby's perjury was aimed at
covering up the far more momentous lies told by Bush and Vice
President Dick Cheney in dragooning the country into war. But it is
hardly just the Libby case that is involved here.

We are passing through yet another period in American history
confirming Abraham Lincoln's wise old adage: "You can fool some of
the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time,
but you can not fool all of the people all of the time."

The torrent of lies and propaganda that poured out of the White
House has come back to haunt Washington. This is a product, in the
first instance, of the pressure of the brutal colonial war in Iraq,
with its more than 2,050 dead US soldiers and over 100,000 Iraqi
civilian dead. It is also, however, influenced by the deteriorating
social conditions for millions and the immense gulf between wealth
and poverty at home, exposed so nakedly in the Hurricane Katrina
disaster and its aftermath. As result, the truth has begun seeping
in.

A series of three extraordinary opinion polls released within the
last week have all shown the same thing: at least 6 out of every 10
Americans believe Bush is a liar—and better than 7 out of 10 think
that Cheney is one—and that the overriding reason for this belief is
the war in Iraq.

One of the polls, conducted by the Wall Street Journal and NBC News,
found that 57 percent of Americans—nearly 6 in 10—believe that the
Bush administration lied to the American public about the reasons
for war.

It is doubtful that "Honest Abe" himself could have ever imagined
anything so massive and blatant as the Bush administration's
campaign to fool the American people into accepting an illegal war,
much less the abject failure of any section of the political
establishment to refute it.

This latter aspect of the extraordinary weapons of mass destruction
propaganda campaign serves as the principal weapon in the White
House counteroffensive. Bush and his aides are pointing an
accusatory finger at the Democratic politicians demanding, "How can
you condemn the lies now, when you went along with them then?"

In the opening salvo of the administration's counteroffensive,
Bush's national security advisor Stephen Hadley was brought before
the White House press corps last Thursday to insist that the belief
that Iraq posed a grave threat "was shared by Republicans and
Democrats alike."

"Some of the critics today believed themselves in 2002 that Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," Hadley declared, "they
stated that belief, and they voted to authorize the use of force in
Iraq because they believed Saddam Hussein posed a dangerous threat
to the American people."

"The intelligence was clear in terms of weapons of mass
destruction," Hadley added, declaring that there was "a very strong
case" for concluding Iraq posed a serious threat.

It was only under reporters' questioning that the national security
advisor grudgingly acknowledged that this "clear" intelligence was
all wrong and the "strong case" utterly disproved by the failure to
find any Iraqi WMD in the wake of the US invasion.

Hadley's remarks were followed on Friday by Bush's own Veterans Day
speech. Standing next to a Humvee and in front of a banner
reading "Strategy for Victory," Bush delivered the speech to a safe
audience of uniformed soldiers and veterans groups assembled inside
a warehouse in Pennsylvania.

"When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, the
Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support," Bush declared.
He added, "While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision
or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the
history of how the war began. Some Democrats and anti-war critics
are now claiming we manipulated intelligence and misled the American
people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that
a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political
pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to
Iraq's weapons programs."

The administration appears to have a default position: when previous
lies unravel, prop them up with more lies. Neither the Senate
investigation into Iraqi WMD intelligence nor the commission
appointed by Bush and headed by Judge Laurence Silberman dealt with
how the administration "manipulated intelligence and misled the
American people," but only the nature of the intelligence itself.

On this score, the Silberman panel concluded that the intelligence
was "dead wrong" and constituted one of the "most damaging
intelligence failures in American history." A failure, it should be
added, for which no one was ever held accountable, precisely because
false intelligence is what the administration wanted.

It is technically true that the administration did not attempt
to "change the intelligence community's judgments"; the CIA could
think whatever it liked so long as it served up purported evidence
to substantiate the administration's charges against Iraq. It wasn't
the CIA's or even Congress's judgment that the White House was
interested in manipulating, but rather that of the American people.


Fear-mongering over 9/11

How was this done? Bush talks about rewriting history, but what was
the history of how the war was prepared and sold? It is above all
one of grotesque falsifications and fear-mongering centered on
exploiting fears surrounding the September 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks on New York and Washington to promote a war against Iraq,
which had nothing to do with these attacks.

The right-wing cabal in the leadership of the White House and the
Pentagon welcomed September 11 as a pretext for launching a war of
aggression against Iraq that they had been advocating since the end
of the first Persian Gulf War under Bush senior. While both they and
the Clinton administration had invoked Saddam Hussein's non-existent
weapons as justification for military attacks and sanctions against
Iraq, now they made the case that a US war to change Iraq's
government was unpostponable.

This involved a barrage of propaganda falsely linking the Saddam
Hussein regime in Iraq to the Al Qaeda Islamist terrorist network
and the September 11 attacks themselves.

This was combined with equally false claims that Iraq was on the
verge of acquiring nuclear weapons, which it could then hand off to
its supposed "ally," Osama bin Laden.

Both assertions were made again and again in the run-up to the war,
long after US and other intelligence agencies had informed the
administration that these claims were demonstratively false.

On the alleged Al Qaeda ties, Bush and Cheney repeatedly
invoked "intelligence" concerning a supposed April 2001 meeting
between Mohammed Atta, identified by Washington as the lead 9/11
hijacker, and an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague.

This charge was repeated months after the Czech government as well
as the CIA and the FBI offered firm conclusions that no such meeting
ever took place.

Just this week, Newsweek cited a January 2003 CIA report sent to
Congress and obtained by the magazine showing that "even before
Colin Powell and George W. Bush asserted that Saddam had provided
WMD training to Qaeda terrorists, the agency had reported that the
captured Qaeda leader used as the source for the allegation lacked
firsthand knowledge of the matter." Newsweek added, "A newly
declassified Pentagon intel report, circulated more than a year
before the US invasion, said it was `likely' the source made up the
story to please his interrogators."

The report also made the rather obvious point that the Iraqi regime
was "intensely secular" and therefore an enemy of the Islamist Al
Qaeda movement, making any such collaboration highly improbable to
say the least.

This was a key part of the "clear intelligence" and "very strong
case" cited by Hadley.

On the nuclear weapons threat, there was the report of an Iraqi
purchase of aluminum tubes combined with the claim that Iraqi
officials had attempted to buy enriched uranium in Niger. Both
claims were also debunked by US intelligence, yet the administration
continued to make them, knowing they were false.

It was the Niger story, included in Bush's 2003 State of the Union
speech, that led to a public denunciation of the administration's
lies by former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had been sent to the
African country months earlier and reported back that the claim was
bogus. This in turn provoked the retaliation campaign by the
administration—exposing Wilson's wife as a covert CIA agent—which
has landed Libby in the defendant's dock on felony perjury charges.

No one is revising any history; it is rather a matter of these old
lies disintegrating in the consciousness of millions of people.

The administration's response to this turn of events is to launch a
frenzied attack on its Democratic Party critics.

"More than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access
to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein
from power," Bush declared in his speech. He went on to quote his
2004 Democratic presidential challenger John Kerry as declaring in
2002 of Saddam Hussein that "a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass
destruction in his hands is a threat and a grave threat to our
country."

So what is the point? The Democratic Party was complicit. It knew
Bush was lying and went along with the administration's war policy.
This was based on the cowardly—and woefully misguided—political
calculations that it could best fight the 2002 midterm election by
bowing to the Republican right on the war and campaigning solely on
economic issues. It was also, however, a matter of the war against
Iraq being a consensus policy within the American financial elite
that controls both parties.

The decision was taken that US could use its overwhelming military
force to conquer Iraq, which possesses the second-largest oil
reserves in the world, and thereby advance its geo-strategic
position both in the Middle East and internationally. Unable to
publicly defend a war waged for such naked class interests, the
political establishment as a whole embraced the fraud of Iraqi WMD.

No prominent Democrat had any interest in challenging or probing
Bush's case for war. As the Washington Post reported
Sunday, "Congress was entitled to view the 92-page National
Intelligence Estimate about Iraq [which included a finding that the
Iraqi regime would neither use weapons of mass destruction or hand
them over to terrorists, unless backed into a corner by US military
aggression] before the October 2002 vote. But...no more than six
senators and a handful of House members went beyond the five-page
executive summary."

Without even a cursory look at the evidence, the Democratic
leadership in Congress ceded its constitutional power to declare
war, supporting a resolution granting Bush blank-check authority to
launch unprovoked aggression against Iraq whenever he saw fit. Even
today, the Democrats' belated criticisms of the administration's
lies before the war ring hollow as the party leadership continues to
support the war, in some cases even having called for more troops to
be deployed in Iraq.

But the administration's problem is not with the Democrats. Rather,
it is with the American people, which has a well-earned distrust of
both major parties. It is not a matter of what the Democratic
politicians knew and were told, but what the masses of working
people in the US knew and were told. Both parties deliberately
deceived them in order to get the war the ruling elite wanted.

In the face of this mass opposition, Bush delivered a speech that
consisted not of arguments meant to convince anyone, but rather of
rhetoric intended to intimidate all those questioning the
administration's policy.

"These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to
an enemy that is questioning America's will," he declared. "As our
troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life,
they deserve to know that our elected leaders who voted to send them
to war continue to stand behind them. Our troops deserve to know
this support will remain firm when the going gets tough. And our
troops deserve to know that whatever our differences in Washington,
our will is strong, our nation is united, and we will settle for
nothing less than victory."

Bush's remarks—a large portion of them having been lifted verbatim
from the speech he delivered last month to the right-wing think
tank, the American Enterprise Institute—were also intended for his
extreme right-wing base.

Recycled here is the old "stab-in-the-back" theme, a staple of
extreme right-wing politics going back to Adolf Hitler. The
conception is that the troops are prepared to fight to victory, but
they are being held back and betrayed by craven politicians at home.
The logic of such denunciations is that all opposition to the war
should be suppressed and those who persist arrested.

Bush's speech is symptomatic of the deep crisis that the policy in
Iraq has created for the whole political class. The mutual
recriminations now roiling Washington are a result of that policy
having engendered a catastrophe. Through invading and occupying
Iraq, killing, imprisoning and torturing countless thousands in the
process, Washington has managed to create something that never
existed before—a mass base of support for actions carried out in the
name of Al Qaeda.

The Bush administration and its Democratic accomplices have emerged
as the recruiting sergeants for Islamist terrorism and are
ultimately responsible for whatever horrors it unleashes.

From the start, what drove the war in Iraq were the predatory
geopolitical interests of America's ruling oligarchy. This ruling
circle was convinced that these aims could be achieved exclusively
by means of military force, and as a result rejected all negotiation
and compromise. Now the brutal methods it favored have blown up in
its face.

The awakening of millions of people in the US to the lies they were
told to justify the war in Iraq is creating the political conditions
for the emergence of a genuine mass base for a movement against this
war and the capitalist system that gave rise to it.