BUSH TRIES TO OUTDO ABBOTT AND COSTELLO -- Who's On First?
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Bush's Independent Commission and the Finding the Missing Pretext for War
by Tom Engelhardt
Published by Tom Dispatch
Here's what the President said yesterday -- a paragraph of "explication" while introducing his panel to investigate WMD intelligence that even Abbott and Costello's famed Who's on First? routine couldn't match):
"Last week, our former chief weapons inspector, David Kay, reported that Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons programs and activities in violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions and was a gathering threat to the world. Dr. Kay also stated that some prewar intelligence assessments by America and other nations about Iraq's weapon stockpiles have not been confirmed. We are determined to figure out why."
That "independent" panel is easy enough to deal with -- and in short order. No, ex-CIA director James (World-War-IV) Woolsey is not on it (not yet, anyway -- there are still two spaces to be filled). But yes, Judge Laurence H. Silberman, co-chair of the panel with former Democratic Senator Charles S. Robb, is a (right)wingnut. Talk about chucking a little red meat to your base! Woolsey only thought we were already fighting World War IV, while the good judge, buddy to Ken Starr, tried to launch World War IV himself -- against former President Clinton.
And yes, Senator McCain, the straight talker appointed by the President, talked straight to the press -- it took about 30 seconds -- assuring everyone in sight that not this president, or any president, would manipulate intelligence for his own ends. (But how about his cronies? How about the vice president?) And yes, Patricia Wald is a liberal; and Lloyd Cutler, an old insider Democratic warhorse. And yes, as ABC TV news reported last night, the committee is tasked with the more general subject of WMD intelligence, and only "secondarily" with Iraqi intelligence "failures." And yes, as ABC also noted, there's nothing in the fine print to assure us that the report, in whole or part, need be made public. But let's face it, none of this matters. Least of all to the President and his men (and one woman).
The only thing that matters to them, I suspect, is the date: March 2005. In political terms, March of next year is the equivalent of Endtime. Either George is reelected by then and no one gives a damn, or he isn't and who cares. But here's the irony -- this may well turn out to be the best of all possible solutions not for the President but for his opponents. The date -- an obvious attempt to avoid election year embarrassments -- is an issue to pound at without the least fear of some muddy, censored report appearing, no less a Lord Hutton-style whitewash. Well done, George!
As David Sanger reports in Saturday's New York Times, our President, reluctant to face the issue of the missing arguments for war or to appoint a panel that might delve into how we actually got into that war, finds himself suddenly harried as if by so many guerrillas and feeling uncomfortable indeed (Administration's Message on Iraq Now Strikes Discordant Notes):
"People close to Mr. Bush say he has been frustrated that Mr. Kay's assessment rekindled all the arguments that dominated the news over the summer, when the White House had to pull back from the president's State of the Union claim of last year that Mr. Hussein had sought uranium in Africa.
"Mr. Bush certainly was in no mood Friday to entertain many questions on the issue of intelligence. He announced the commission's formation in a five-minute statement. He barely introduced its co-chairmen… He left the room without taking questions. More to the point, Mr. Bush never explained whether the charter of the commission would extend beyond intelligence gathering to the politically crucial question of how the White House had used the intelligence it received. Democrats seized on the omission."
Lessons of proliferation
So, for a minute, let's try to sum up the present situation in a global context by first noting last week's public admission by Dr. A. Q. Khan, the "father" of the Pakistani nuclear bomb, that our ally in the war against terrorism, Pakistan, was practically radioactive in the field of global proliferation. Citing an imminent fear of weapons of mass destruction, of actual mushroom clouds rising over American cities, and of deadly toxins being sprayed from light observation planes over parts of the East coast, the Bush administration invaded a country without a significant nuclear program, no less an imminent bomb, and no stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, no less the ability to deliver them anywhere near the United States, and no provable or even likely links to al Qaeda.
In the meantime, our ally Pakistan, a country where it's likely Osama bin Laden has taken up residence, whose intelligence service more or less created Afghanistan's Taliban (and parts of which have until recently offered Taliban remnants continued support), was sending nuclear help, nuclear plans, nuclear parts, sometimes on military planes, to Libya, Iran, North Korea and who knows where else as part of what the head of the IAEA, Mohammed Elbaradei, has now termed a global nuclear "supermarket." Moreover, as Pervez Hoodbhoy pointed out in the Washington Post recently, "Khan widely and openly advertised his wares over the past decade" and his program was "squarely under army supervision." (Though only the "father" of the bomb confessed to an intent to proliferate, it's an open secret that the Pakistani military at the highest levels were involved in this.)
As with those drawings from my childhood which showed five-legged cows (in those days undoubtedly quite sane) sailing through clouds and asked you to find anything "wrong" in the scene, I ask: What's wrong with this global picture? As the following exchange from the White House indicates, spokesman Scott McClellan swears not a thing. Those five-legged cows (now stark, raving mad) were obviously meant to be exactly where we see them and nowhere else:
"QUESTION: I guess what I'm asking here is how long has the United States known of the nuclear weapons fire sale being run out of Pakistan and --
MR. McCLELLAN: Terry, like I said, there's a lot of -- there are a number of success stories in the intelligence community that often go unseen or unreported or are not reported until quite some time after the fact. You heard from Director Tenet --
QUESTION: Well, tell us.
MR. McCLELLAN: -- you heard from Director Tenet, in terms of what he said on Pakistan. And you've seen, by the actions of the government of Pakistan, that they are committed to stopping proliferation. QUESTION: It just raises a question. The United States went to war against a leader that we said had these weapons, turned out not to. We're confronting North Korea over what we think are their weapons. Libya is an issue. And, yet, on Pakistan, it sounds as if we've known for a while that they were running this black market on nuclear weapons and haven't done anything.
MR. McCLELLAN: Terry, I don't think it raises the question you are asking. I think it shows that we're confronting threats around the world in a number of different ways. And weapons of mass destruction and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is a high priority for this administration. That's one reason why the President is going to be announcing this commission, to do a broad assessment of our intelligence capabilities related to weapons of mass destruction."
But Iraq, remember -- we pointed out -- was unique, given Saddam Hussein's history and given the events of September 11th."
Saddam's history and the events of September 11th. At the White House, they remain part of the same drawing and nothing's wrong with the world. Ah life, ain't it great? |
