The Fringe Fires at Bush on Iraq
Max Boot
Excerpt - LA Times
Ted Kennedy delivered another stemwinder last week, accusing the Bush administration of lying its way into Iraq for political gain. Ho-hum. Nothing new there. But one paragraph caught my attention.
In trying to buttress his charge that the president twisted intelligence about Saddam Hussein, Kennedy cited "Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a recently retired Air Force intelligence officer who served in the Pentagon during the buildup to the war." He quoted her as follows: "It wasn't intelligence — it was propaganda … they'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, usually by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together."
Sounds pretty damning, doesn't it? Those aren't the words of a political opponent; that's the judgment of a presumably disinterested military professional. Except that Kwiatkowski's judgment doesn't look so disinterested when you examine her views more closely.
Since her retirement in March 2003, she has become a prolific contributor to isolationist publications like the American Conservative, Pat Buchanan's magazine, and lewrockwell.com, an ultra-libertarian website. Pretty much all her work is devoted to uncovering "neoconservative warmongers" who have supposedly taken over U.S. foreign policy.
She is not subtle in denouncing "Dickie Cheney, Richie Perle and Dougie Feith" (as well as, occasionally, "my pal, Max Boot"), whose "neoconservative philosophy is hateful to humanity, anti-American, statist and anti-free trade." (Anti-free trade?) She thinks the United States is a "maturing fascist state." And she predicts a dire fate for those who led us into the Iraq war: "Some folks on the Pentagon's E-ring may be sitting beside Hussein in the war crimes tribunals."
Kennedy's speechwriters must have been familiar with Kwiatkowski's oeuvre — how else could they have dredged up that quote? — but it did not stop them from holding her up as a trustworthy source. This isn't unusual. Many retired national security bureaucrats claiming President Bush lied about Iraq have a not-so-hidden agenda.
REST AT latimes.com |
