How the White House sold a pointless war
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The Iraq war was a marketing exercise to help President George W. Bush and his Republicans politically, Frank Rich says in a new book.
theaustralian.news.com.au
March 03, 2007
ON Christmas Day 2001, Karl Rove, George W. Bush's long-time political guru, told a newspaper reporter about a conversation he'd had with the US President just after 9/11. In Rove's recollection, Bush set the bipartisan tone for political behaviour during a national emergency.
"He just said, 'Politics has no role in this. Don't anybody talk to me about politics for a while,"' Rove told Richard L. Berke of The New York Times.
But that - if it ever happened - was then and this was now. The new year - a mid-term election year - was at hand. So was the annual State of the Union address. This would be Bush's first speech to the nation since his appearance before a joint session of Congress on the eve of the war in Afghanistan.
Now that the war was fast receding in the public consciousness, Berke reported, the White House was having "extensive discussions about how long Mr Bush can sustain his impressive popularity ratings".
One strategist working with the administration explained the game plan: "They're not manipulating the military operations. But there's a manipulation of the environment. They take advantage of the situation to achieve some political objectives."
War would be the theme of the 2002 political campaign and this was laid out explicitly by Rove in a speech for Bush's Republican Party in Austin on January 18, 2002, as the annual State of the Union address to Congress approached.
"Americans trust the Republicans to do a better job of keeping our communities and our families safe," Rove told the winter meeting of the Republican national committee. "We can also go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America." The President's post-9/11 directive - "Don't anybody talk to me about politics for a while" - was from that moment defunct. "For a while" had turned out to mean all of four months.
The State of the Union, presented to a cheering Congress still aglow with the post-
9/11 bipartisanship that had uncharacteristically suffused the capital, was more explicit about how Rove's "issue" might be sustained. The President larded the audience with heroes and widows from 9/11. He made a rare, explicit, if non-binding, appeal for sacrifice, asking Americans to devote two years (or 4000 hours) to a new and vaguely defined USA Freedom Corps and proposing an expanded Peace Corps. But what most grabbed the world's attention was Bush's vow to take on any "regimes that sponsor terror"; specifically, Iraq, Iran and North Korea, which he collectively branded the "axis of evil". This embryonic statement of Bush's novel doctrine of pre-emptive war would be remembered long after the call for volunteerism was completely forgotten (as it was by the following morning). Rather pointedly, for a speech that was going to sustain the idea of a nation at war, there was also no mention of public enemy No.1, the man wanted dead or alive, the one we were at war with: Osama bin Laden.
THE White House was so accomplished at managing the press that it couldn't resist boasting about its own slick moves in much the way a Hollywood producer might brag about his cynical marketing plans for a can't-miss summer blockbuster. Thus, as the northern summer of 2002 ended, the President's handlers laid out their merchandising campaign for a war in Iraq. The kick-off event would be a short prime-time speech delivered by Bush from New York to commemorate the first anniversary of 9/11, the day before he was to make a longer address to the UN General Assembly. Much deliberation went into choosing the setting. The winning site, Ellis Island in New York Harbour, beat out the competing alternative of Governors Island because from Ellis Island the camera angle could include the Statue of Liberty ablaze with light in the background behind Bush.
"We had made a decision that this would be a compelling story either place," Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, told Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times. "We sent a team out to go and look andthey said, 'This is a better shot,' and we said OK."
For Americans in 2002, no date could lend more emotional weight to a speech about war than the first anniversary of 9/11. And besides, the country was just back from vacation, ready to focus on big-ticket items. "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August," explained Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff who, after a gig in the first Bush White House, had headed the trade association for the big three automakers in Detroit.
The looming mid-term election figured in the calendar calculus as well. The White House's goal was to rush a resolution approving the use of force in Iraq in four to five weeks, a senior administration official told the Times's Bumiller; in other words, when the pressure on congressmen facing re-election to prove their war-waging machismo would be at its nastiest.
But in reality the roll-out of the product had begun, if somewhat subliminally, just two months after 9/11, in November 2001. That was when Bush first specifically said that Iraq would be held responsible for harbouring any "weapons of mass destruction", a declaration followed up by Vice-President Dick Cheney's assertion on Meet the Press that it was "pretty well confirmed" that there was a pre-9/11 meeting between the lead hijacker Mohammed Atta and a Saddam Hussein intelligence operative in Prague. The message was steadily stepped up thereafter, reaching a crescendo just before the Bush oration from Ellis Island began the official introduction of the product.
As early as March 2002, Cheney said of Saddam on CNN that "he is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time", and the Vice-President reiterated on Meet the Press in May that "we know he's working on nuclear". In August, the Vice-President kept providing previews of coming attractions for the next show, just audibly enough to leave an impression on the vacationing American psyche. "What we know now, from various sources," he told the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco during a question and answer session on August 7, was that Saddam "continues to pursue a nuclear weapon". On August 26, in Nashville, he addressed the Veterans of Foreign Wars: "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us." He added that a return of UN weapons inspectors would lead to pointless delay in the face of imminent peril. "Time is not on our side," he said.
On September 8, 2002, Cheney was again on Meet the Press, this time to offer one-stop shopping for both his Iraq themes: the pre-9/11 connection between Saddam and al-Qa'ida and the zeal of Saddam to acquire not just chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction but in particular the scariest of them all, nuclear weapons. "I'm not here today to make a specific allegation that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11," Cheney said. "I can't say that." Then he made unspecific allegations suggesting exactly that. "On the other hand," he continued, "new information has come to light" revealing that Atta, "did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Centre." Was there a direct link between Saddam and al-Qa'ida, anchor Tim Russert asked after the Vice-President ran through a list of other possible links between the two "going back many years". Cheney replied, "I don't want to go beyond that. I've tried to be cautious and restrained in my comments, and I hope that everybody will recognise that." Few did.
The Vice-President was one of four top administration officials introducing the new product on the network shows that back-to-school Sunday after Labor Day. Then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared on CNN's Late Edition. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," she said, a nearly exact reiteration of a sentence in the Times's front-page story, in which unnamed hardliners said "the first sign of a 'smoking gun' ... may be a mushroom cloud". Donald Rumsfeld was on CBS's Face the Nation and Colin Powell on Fox News Sunday, both delivering the same message, with Powell also citing the "reporting just this morning" on aluminium tubes that Sunday as evidence for the Saddam nuclear threat.
The unofficial motto of the 9/11 anniversary may have been "never forget", but the war on al-Qa'ida was already fading from memory as the world was invited to test-drive a new war in Iraq. Public opinion was consistently ambivalent about the wisdom of fighting a war in Iraq, so the sales pitch became more fevered, with Bush leading the charge.
He told the UN that Iraq had made "several attempts to buy high-strength aluminium tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon" and that "should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year". In a weekly radio address in late September, Bush warned that al-Qa'ida terrorists were "inside Iraq". On October 7, he addressed a cheering crowd in Cincinnati, joining the others in his administration in recycling the image that had first been floated on the front page of The New York Times a month earlier: "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." The President also finetuned the specificity about the Saddam-al-Qa'ida bond: "We know that Iraq and al-Qa'ida have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al-Qa'ida leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al-Qa'ida leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year, and who has been associated with planning for chemical and biological attacks. We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qa'ida members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases."
Within the next week, both the US House of Representatives and Senate passed a resolution authorising the use of force in Iraq. The victory for the administration was huge. In 1991 the resolution authorising George H.W. Bush to use "all necessary means" to drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait passed by 52 to 47 in the Senate and 250 to 183 in the house. In 2002, with the Iraqi army invading no one, the margins were 77 to 23 in the Senate and 296 to 133 in the house. The mid-term election for Congress was but three weeks away.
Democrats, as ineffectual and timid in challenging a popular president on Iraq as they were in preventing his tax cuts from speeding through Congress, kept calling for a debate on the war.
The mid-term election was an unambiguous Bush victory. In a rare coup for a party holding the White House, Republicans expanded their majority in the house and regained control of the Senate. As the reigning cliche had it, 2002 was the "Seinfeld election", an election about nothing. But how could an election in the midst of one war and on the eve of another be about nothing? To make it so was the Democrats' sole significant, if self-annihilating, achievement of the entire campaign.
All that was left now was a completion of the niceties needed to pave the way to America's inevitable new war.
SO, what really did trigger the war in Iraq? The likely answer to this question, like so much else, can be found in the entrails of the Valerie Plame Wilson leak case. It was not an accident that men as different as Scooter Libby and Rove - one a Washington policy intellectual, the other a down-and-dirty political operative - would collide before special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury. They were very different men playing very different White House roles, but they were bound together by the shared past that the Wilson affair exposed. That past had everything to do with protecting the real "why" of why America went to war.
But there were unspoken impediments to Rove's plan, of which he was well aware: Afghanistan was slipping off the radar screen of American voters and the President's most grandiose objective, to capture bin Laden "dead or alive", had capsized in Tora Bora. How do you run as a vainglorious war president if the war looks as if it's winding down and the No.1 evildoer has escaped?
Hardly had Rove given his speech than his fears were confirmed by polls registering the first erosion of the initial near-universal endorsement of the administration's response to 9/11. A USA Today/CNN/Gallup survey in March 2002 found that while nine out of 10 Americans still backed the war on terrorism at the six-month anniversary of the attacks, support for an expanded, long-term war had fallen to 52 per cent. Next to come was the run of bad news: the public revelations that bin Laden had escaped, that Bush had apparently ignored worrisome intelligence about al-Qa'ida in August 2001 and that the FBI had blown its chance to press the jailed Zacarias Moussaoui for valuable leads in the weeks before 9/11. By Memorial Day 2002, a USA Today poll found that just four out of 10 Americans believed that the US was winning the war on terrorism, a steep drop from the roughly two-thirds holding that conviction in January. Rove could see that an untelevised and largely underground war - the "lengthy campaign" that might be "secret even in success", as Bush had formulated it in his measured post-9/11 address to Congress - might not nail election victories without a jolt of shock and awe. It was a propitious moment to wag the dog.
Enter Scooter, stage right. Libby had been joined at the hip with Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz since their service in the Defence Department of the first president Bush's administration, where in its waning days in 1992 they conceived a controversial manifesto preaching the importance of asserting unilateral American military power after the Cold War. Well before the next Bush took office, these and other neo-cons fated to join his camp had become fixated on Iraq, though for reasons having much to do with their own ideas about exerting American force to jump-start a realignment of the Middle East and little or nothing to do with the stateless terrorism of al-Qa'ida or with nation-building. Here, ready and waiting on the shelf in-house, were the grounds for a grand new battle that would be showy, not secret, in its success; just the political Viagra that Rove needed for an election year.
But abstract and highly debatable theories on how to assert superpower machismo and alter the political balance in the Middle East would never fly with American voters as a trigger for war or convince them that such a war was relevant to the fight against the enemy of 9/11. And though Americans knew that Saddam was a despot and mass murderer, that in itself was also insufficient to ignite a popular groundswell for regime change. Polls in the summer of 2002 showed steadily declining support among Americans for going to war in Iraq, especially if America were to go it alone.
For Rove and Bush to get what they wanted most, slam-dunk mid-term election victories, and for Libby and Cheney to get what they wanted most, a war in Iraq for ideological reasons predating 9/11, their real whys for going to war had to be replaced by more saleable fictional ones. We'd go to war instead because there was a direct connection between Saddam and al-Qa'ida and because Saddam was on the verge of attacking America with nuclear weapons. Both these casus belli were a stretch from the get-go. Not a single one of the thousands of documents found after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan substantiated an Iraq-al-Qa'ida alliance.
Iraq was just the vehicle to ride to victory in the mid-terms, particularly if it could be folded into the proven brand of 9/11. A cakewalk in Iraq was the easy way, the lazy way, the arrogant way, the telegenic way, the Top Gun way to hold on to power. It was of a piece with every other shortcut in Bush's career and it was a hand-me-down from Dad drenched in oil to boot.
WHILE the Bush administration's toboggan ride into Iraq was facilitated by an easily cowed press and a timid and often disingenuous political opposition, the news culture that predated 9/11 and this presidency also played a big role. It was in the mid-1990s that the American electronic news media jumped the shark. That was when CNN was joined by even more boisterous rival 24/7 cable networks, when the internet became a mass medium and when television news operations, by far the main source of news for Americans, were gobbled up by entertainment giants such as Disney, Viacom, and Time Warner. While there had always been a strong entertainment component to TV news, that packaging was now omnipresent, shaping the coverage of stories from Washington scandals to Wall Street bubbles to child abductions to war, and around the clock, not just on the evening news, the morning shows and the occasional network news magazine. In this new mediathon environment, drama counted more than judicious journalism; clear-cut evildoers and patriots were prized over ambiguous characters who didn't wear black or white hats.
Once definable distinctions between truth and fiction were blurred more than ever, as reality was redefined in news and prime-time entertainment alike.
The Bush White House certainly did not invent this culture. It has been years in the making and it is bipartisan. But this administration was the first to take office after it was fully online and was brilliant at exploiting it to serve its own selfish reality-remaking ends. The TV maw needs to be fed 24/7 and Bush's producers supplied a non-stop progression of compelling shows to do so. If this White House knew anything, it knew how to roll out a slick product by the yard. History tells us that politics is cyclical in America, and the Bush cycle may well be in its last throes.
But the culture in which it thrived still rides high, waiting to be exploited by another master manipulator from either political party if Americans don't start to take it back.
-This is an edited extract from The Greatest Story Ever Sold by Frank Rich (Viking, Penguin Australia, $35). |
