White House's Cynical Iraq Ploy: 'Misspeak'
First, 'Correct' It Later
September 16, 2003
latimes.com
Robert Scheer:
It's hard to believe that it was just a slip of the tongue
rather than a calculated lie when Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz sullied the memory of those
who died on 9/11 by exploiting their deaths for
propaganda purposes. The brainwashing of Americans,
two-thirds of whom believe that Saddam Hussein was
behind the attacks, is too effective a political ploy for the
Bush regime to suddenly let the truth get in the way.
"We know [Iraq] had a great deal to do with terrorism in
general and with Al Qaeda in particular and we know a
great many of [Osama] bin Laden's key lieutenants are
now trying to organize in cooperation with old loyalists
from the Saddam regime " Wolfowitz told ABC on this
year's 9/11 anniversary.
We know nothing of the sort, of course, and the next day
Wolfowitz was forced to admit it. He told Associated
Press that his remarks referred not to a "great many" of
Bin Laden's lieutenants but rather to a single Jordanian,
Abu Musab Zarqawi."[I] should have been more
precise," Wolfowitz admitted.
Even if the leaders of the Bush team were half as smart as they think they are, it
would be amazing that they "misspoke" as often as they have. As happened Sunday
when Tim Russert challenged Vice President Dick Cheney to defend his claim,
made on "Meet the Press" before the war, that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons.
"Yeah, I did misspeak," Cheney admitted. "We never had any evidence that
[Hussein] had acquired a nuclear weapon."
The pattern is clear: Say what you want people to believe for the front page and on
TV, then whisper a halfhearted correction or apology that slips under the radar. It is
really quite ingenious in its cynical effectiveness, and Wolfowitz's latest
performance is a classic example - even his correction needs correcting.
The Zarqawi connection has been a red herring since Colin Powell emphasized it in
his prewar presentation to the United Nations Security Council, telling the world
how Zarqawi was running a chemical weapons lab. Problem was, the site was not
in Iraqi control but was in the U.S.-patrolled no-fly zone, and when reporters visited
it in the days immediately after Powell's speech they found nothing that indicated
anything like a chemical weapons lab.
The fundamentalist militia known as Ansar al Islam that controlled the area,
meanwhile, was supported by Hussein's enemies in Iran.
Nor has any evidence of connections between Ansar al Islam and Hussein's regime
surfaced since the U.S invasion, as Wolfowitz conceded in congressional testimony
last Tuesday.
At that same Senate hearing, Vincent Cannistraro, formerly the CIA's director of
counter-terrorism operations and analysis, testified: "There was no substantive
intelligence information linking Saddam to international terrorism before the war.
Now we've created the conditions that have made Iraq the place to come to attack
Americans."
So, Wolfowitz and the administration might prove to be right after all. Not about
Iraq's ties with Bin Laden before the invasion. Nor about the nonexistent weapons
of mass destruction the president used to scare up support for war. But by turning
its claim that Iraq is the "central front" in the war on terrorism into a self-fulfilling
prophecy.
Without this claim, the president's men would be revealed as imperial adventurers
who wasted the lives and resources of this country to redraw the map of the world.
That scheme, including "preemptive military intervention," can be traced to a
"Defense Planning Guidance" document prepared by Wolfowitz in 1992 when he
was Cheney's undersecretary of Defense for policy.
Thus, it was not too surprising that the bodies recovered after the 9/11 attacks were
barely in the ground before Cheney and Wolfowitz were arguing that a proper
response to 9/11 was to go after Iraq - whether or not it had anything to do with
the plot. They were willing to say anything to convince us they were right, even
trying to sell this as a war without cost.
In March, one week into the war, Wolfowitz told Congress, "We're dealing with a
country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon." Now we
find that Iraq can't pay for its own reconstruction and since we went to war
unilaterally, defying world opinion, we are unlikely to convince anybody else to chip
in.
Last week, a Washington Post poll showed that 60% of the American people
opposed the president's plan to throw $87 billion more into this quagmire, on top of
the $79 billion budgeted already. Perhaps, like people blinking in the sun after a long
hibernation, Americans are finally awakening to the stupid and craven things being
done in the name of protecting us. |
