How Chalabi helped us go to war

In response to the discussion in the 9:30 ANG class, on 10/8.

The Key story, with links.

1. A group of “Hawks” (those who project US military strength, as opposed to “Doves” who work more toward diplomacy) had the goal of overthrowing Hussein for more than a decade. For instance, Robert Kagan wrote about this in 1998 for the Weekly Standard, a conservative news and opinion magazine, republished here on the pages of the PNAC.
   
2. Sometimes called “neocons”, for neoconservatives (a name they gave themselves two decades ago; neo=new), many of these Hawks have had high level appointed positions in Reagan, Bush I and Bush II administrations. Others have worked through think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, and the Project for a New American Century.
3. To achieve their goal, they helped to establish the Iraqi National Congress, or INC. This Iraqi news website indicates the INC's funding largely came from the CIA. And read too, about the INC's goals and attempts to achieve those goals. And who is their leader?
4. The desire of the Bush II Administration to topple Hussein is clear from the get-go. CBS reported on former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's take on the Bush Administration. O'Neill's book is "The Price of Loyalty:"
   

   And what happened at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting is one of O'Neill's most startling revelations.
   
   “From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.

5. Similar stories are told by former Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke, also to CBS, in talking about his book Against All enemies:

   Clarke says that as early as the day after the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for retaliatory strikes on Iraq, even though al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan.
   
   Clarke suggests the idea took him so aback, he initally thought Rumsfeld was joking.

6. [edit: Sunday 10/10: In Friday night's debate, President Bush was asked to identify three mistakes. Largely he sidestepped the question, although he did indicate that he regretted a couple of appointments. "Conventional wisdom" is that he means Clarke, O'Neill, and John DiIulio, who briefly ran the Faith Based Initiative project. DiIulio later gave an interview to Ron Suskind for Esquire magazine, indicating that he left the administration frudtrated that it was all about politics, not policy. President Bush very much values loyalty, and a sense of betrayal will lead to public attack. Google any of these three appointees, or Joseph Wilson]
   
7. Sept 11 provides the opportunity to put the plan into action. One condensed version of the story is found at philly.com.
8. The “oil connection” in the photographs accompanying the philly.com article are mostly irrelevant: for the Neo cons, the real goal is utopian: establish a democracy in the Arab world – using force to do so sends a message to others that we mean business (read PNAC’s principles on their website, and listen for President Bush to tout Libya's cooperation) and to encourage oppressed people in neighboring countries to take action, at least in the long term. The oil thing will then solve itself as a byproduct of this new flowering of democracy and stability, and Washington friendly nations, and also we will have aided our good friend Israel.
9. So Michael Moore’s linking Bush to the Saudis is a wrong, and a distraction. these people do not care about oil, directly. As utopians, these people want a new democratic ally, which would actually allow us to sever our dependence on the Saudis, who have terror problems of their own (OBL came from there; 13 hijackers came from there).

If that's the story why, the question of how still remains. Here, we shift to our friend Chalabi and to the misreporting of the press.

1. This article in Slate gives a pretty good overview. This Washington Post article tells of Chalabi’s likely involvement in leading (some) to believe trailers were mobile weapons labs; In fact, in May 2003 President Bush claimed we had found the weapons, based on these trailers. There was skepticism at the time, but today there is no skepticism.
2. Still, one might ask, how could all this happen, and we not hear about it? Ah, now we are getting to the payoff, the role of the media. Read chapter 8, especially 8-4. 8-4a addresses “what is news?” and 8-4b discusses “telling the story.” Together these two parts tell us a lot about what will get covered, and how it will get covered. So for instance, reliance on ‘responsible sources’: who would believe, me, or a government official? And what will not get covered? – can you imagine the TV news trying to tell this complicated story?

Some of the best criticism of the NYT has come from Slate, a site I have referenced throughout the semester. According to them, the big problem with the reporting of Judith Miller, the head reporter for the Times in the buildup to the war, is that She relied on Chalbi. A good example is this story she wrote in January 2003. To read the whole story, you have to pay, or search through lexis, but let me reprint the abstract:

THREATS AND RESPONSES: INTELLIGENCE; Defectors Bolster U.S. Case Against Iraq, Officials Say

By JUDITH MILLER (NYT) 1123 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 11 , Column 5

DISPLAYING FIRST 50 OF 1123 WORDS - Having concluded that international inspectors are unlikely to find tangible and irrefutable evidence that Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration is preparing its own assessment that will rely heavily on evidence from Iraqi defectors, according to senior administration ... Former Iraqi scientists, military officers and contractors...

This, I take it, is the kind of news report that Lindee asked about. Yes, Chalabi is the one who linked us to these "defectors."

A Washington Post article in May of 2003 reports the problems Miller’s reporting was having for the Times:

Intra-Times Battle Over Iraqi Weapons

By Howard Kurtz

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 26, 2003; Page C01

A dustup between two New York Times reporters over a story on an Iraqi exile leader raises some intriguing questions about the paper's coverage of the search for dangerous weapons thought to be hidden by Saddam Hussein.

An internal e-mail by Judith Miller, the paper's top reporter on bioterrorism, acknowledges that her main source for such articles has been Ahmad Chalabi, a controversial exile leader who is close to top Pentagon officials. Could Chalabi have been using the Times to build a drumbeat that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction?

Both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran articles this summer criticizing their own prewar coverage of why go to war, and postwar covereage of the weapons hunt. The NYT is important because while the media might set the agenda (ch6), the NYT sets the agenda for many of the media: with readership down, most newspapers are undergoing staff cutbacks, and less money goes into beat-journalism. This parallels the decline of hard news and rise of soft news, 1977-2001, as reported in Article 9, The Unloved Trumpet. So only a few major newspapers spend serious money on reporting these days: NYT, Wa Post, LATimes, Wall Street Journal, and to some degree Knight Ridder and Reuters agencies (the last two had some of the best reporting on the war, and the KC Star is a Knight Ridder paper). And how might ‘pack journalism’ show up here?

So, adding it up: Some people's long term goal of overthrowing Saddam Hussein was made possible by having the right people in power, and the right "information" passed to a press corp that was less than skeptical.

What else do you want to know? That is, what is left out, what is not clear? Well, one thing is left out so far: why did Congress allow this? A couple quick answers:

• the President has far more power in foreign than domestic affairs.
  
• A congress of the same party as the president has very little incentive to question the president (compare impeachment over Monicagate verses virtually no hearings over Abu Graib, or the revealing of a CIA spy Valerie Plame. Instead, let me quote USA Today story about the confirmation hearing of Bush's nominee to head the CIA, House Intelligence Committee Chair Porter Goss:

Goss's past colorful remarks came back to haunt him Tuesday. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked Goss about a statement in which he said he had seen no evidence that the Bush administration leaked the identity of an undercover CIA officer for political purposes and that he would look into it only "if somebody sends me a blue dress and some DNA," a reference to Monica Lewinsky's dress that became a central prop in President Clinton's impeachment drama.

"I don't think it was my best comment ever," Goss conceded.

• Further, consider that the vote "for the war" was held in Congress just before the 2002 election; few members in that situation would care to vote against it (parallel: in 1964, the Senate voted 90-2 and the House voted 416-0 to authorize more involvement in Viet Nam based on very limited information: this was the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution).
• And finally, consider the rhetoric Mr. Bush used when asking for the authorization:
  

"If you want to keep the peace, you've got to have the authorization to use force," Bush said in September 2002. "It's a chance for Congress to say, 'we support the administration's ability to keep the peace.' That's what this is all about.''

or not. Please email for further clarifications or questions.