These are the first and last paragraphs of the New York Times review (by Thomas Powers) of former spook Paul Pillar’s new book. Pillar worked for 28 years at the CIA and the National Intelligence Council, often on Middle East issues (link at bottom).
Every attentive reader of “Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy,” Paul R. Pillar’s long-needed examination of just what the Central Intelligence Agency got right or wrong before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, will find one observation or another that seems more disquieting than the rest. I haven’t quite decided which of two deserves pride of place on my own list: The fact that the Bush administration never formally debated whether it was “a good idea” to invade Iraq? Or that Pillar, who ran the National Intelligence Council’s shop for the Middle East during both events, cannot tell us “the true reasons the Bush administration invaded”?
…This brings us back to the troubling remarks Pillar makes early in this rich, useful and important book. First is the fact that the administration never formally debated “whether the war was a good idea.” The implication is clear: a small group of officials made the decision on their own, without leaving any record. “It was never on any meeting’s agenda,” Pillar notes. What, then, was the purpose of the war? What did President Bush and his advisers hope to achieve? Who did they think would benefit? I would say that I am about as interested in this question as anyone, but any answer I offered would be only a guess. Bush and his friends have never really been clear about their reasons, and the magnitude of their failure suggests they will carry the secret to their graves.
This is shocking, of course. It recalls Thomas Friedman’s commentary to Avi Shavit in Haaretz that if you had abducted 25 neocons to a desert island before the Iraq war it would never have happened. It recalls Colin Powell’s reported belief, in Karen DeYoung’s biography, that a “gang” from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs pushed the Iraq war as a means of guaranteeing Israel’s security. It recalls Jacob Heilbrunn’s use of the word “cabal” in his book on the neocons, They Knew They Were Right. It recalls Joe Klein’s statement, in a Time blog a couple years ago, that the neocons pushed the Iraq war to set off a “benign domino theory” across the Middle East to make Israel safe. It recalls George Packer’s keen report, in Assassin’s Gate, that the neocons harbored a “move over one” theory of the Iraq war: that Jordan would get Iraq, the Palestinians would get Jordan, and Israel would get greater Israel, that my father bought for two zuzim.
I just read this before coming over here. I was struck by this as well: “The implication is clear: a small group of officials made the decision on their own, without leaving any record. “It was never on any meeting’s agenda,” Pillar notes.”
They still can’t utter the words, the truth, can they? But I suppose it’s a start; everyone knows what the coded language means.
P.S. It’s not shocking. Instead, it’s about time.
In a court of law, a lawyer seeking a judicial agreement on a point of law gives reasons to support his contention. The judge, seeking to be sustained on appeal, as a rule, offers reasons to support his ruling.
The neocons conned Bush-Cheney who, of course, wanted to be conned, and together they conned the nation. Everything they offered the nation as “reasons” was a con. And the Congress, wanting to be conned, lapped it up like a cat drinking spilt milk.
One wonders at the alacrity with which everyone in this daisy-chain accepted the idea that going to (indefinite) war against an (indefinite and growing) enemy was a good idea? Pure Military-Industrial-Complex (reason: to enrich the war-profiteers) or something else?
Small group of apostate Jews will continue to push anti-Jewish conspiracy theory for the war largely attributed to John Mearsheimer, endorser of notorious antisemite Gilad Atzmon.
From Salon.com, 2005
http://entertainment.salon.com/2005/10/07/packer_3/
I highly recommend reading the whole article
“Packer describes how the first salvo in what was to become the Iraq war was fired by PNAC, whose members included Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, James Woolsey and William Bennett; “more than half of the founding members would go on to assume high positions in the administration of George W. Bush.” In 1998, PNAC sent an open letter to President Clinton, arguing that the policy of containment had failed and urging him to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Weakened by the Lewinsky scandal, Clinton reluctantly signed the Iraq Liberation Act. “Regime change in Iraq became official U.S. policy.”
“Why Iraq?” Packer asks. “Why did Iraq become the leading cause of the hawks?” He gives two reasons: Paul Wolfowitz’s desire to atone for America’s failure to topple Saddam at the end of the first Gulf War, and the neocons’ obsession with defending Israel.
In Packer’s account, Wolfowitz is a fascinating, fatally flawed figure, an idealist who failed to take actions in support of his ideals. As Dick Cheney’s undersecretary of defense for policy, Wolfowitz went along with Bush I’s decision not to oust Saddam at the end of the first Gulf War. But he was haunted by that choice, and determined to rectify it. “More than Perle, Feith, and the neoconservatives in his department — certainly more than Rumsfeld and Cheney — Wolfowitz cared,” Packer writes. “For him Iraq was personal.” Packer holds Wolfowitz largely responsible for the Bush administration’s failure to put enough troops into Iraq, and to plan for the aftermath.
The leading light of the neoconservatives was Richard Perle, whom Packer describes as the Iraq war’s “impresario, with one degree of separation from everyone who mattered.” A partisan of Israel’s hard-line Likud Party and a protégé of neocon Democrat Scoop Jackson, Perle recruited two other staunch advocates of Israel, Douglas Feith and Elliott Abrams, to work for Jackson and hawkish Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Packer writes, “When I half jokingly suggested that the Iraq War began in Scoop Jackson’s office, Perle said, ‘There’s an element of that.’” In 1985, Perle had met and become friends with an Iraqi exile named Ahmad Chalabi. “By the time of the PNAC letter in January 1998, Perle knew exactly how Saddam could be overthrown: Put Ahmad Chalabi at the head of an army of Iraqi insurgents and back him with American military power and cash.”
Almost all these figures, starting with Scoop Jackson, shared a key obsession: Israel. “In 1996, some of the people in Perle’s circle had begun to think about what it would mean for Saddam Hussein to be removed from the Middle East scene. “They concluded it would be very good for Israel,” Packer writes. “Perle chaired a study group of eight pro-Likud Americans, including Douglas Feith, who had worked under Perle in the Reagan administration, and David Wurmser, who was the author of the paper produced under the group’s auspices … Afterwards the group was pleased enough with its work to send the paper to the newly elected Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.” The paper, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” advocated smashing the Palestinians militarily, removing Saddam from power, and installing a Hashemite king on the Iraq throne.
The dangerous absurdity of this scheme (elements of which appeared in a later book by Perle and Bush speechwriter David Frum, modestly titled “An End to Evil”) did not prevent it from being accepted by high officials of the Bush administration. “A few weeks before the start of the Iraq War, a State Department official described for me what he called the ‘everybody move over one theory’: Israel would annex the occupied territories, the Palestinians would get Jordan, and the Jordanian Hashemites would be restored to the throne of Iraq,” Packer writes. The neocons were out-Likuding the Likud: Even Ariel Sharon had long abandoned his beloved “Jordan is Palestine” idea. That Douglas Feith, one of the ideologues who subscribed to such lunatic plans (the departing Colin Powell denounced Feith to President Bush as “a card-carrying member of the Likud”) was in charge of planning for Iraq is almost beyond belief.
“Does this mean that a pro-Likud cabal insinuated its way into the high councils of the U.S. government and took hold of the apparatus of American foreign policy to serve Israeli interests (as some critics of the war have charged, rather than addressing its merits head on?)” Packer asks. “Is neoconservative another word for Jewish (as some advocates of the war have complained, rather than addressing their critics head on)?” Packer does not answer the first question directly, but he makes it clear that the intellectual origins of the war were inseparably tied to neocon concerns about Israel. “For Feith and Wurmser, the security of Israel was probably the prime mover… The idea of realigning the Middle East by overthrowing Saddam Hussein was first proposed by a group of Jewish policy makers and intellectuals who were close to the Likud. And when the second President Bush looked around for a way to think about the uncharted era that began on September 11, 2001, there was one already available.”
While Bush and his Cold War hardliners Cheney and Rumsfeld were preparing to implement the neocons’ grand vision of remaking the Middle East so that it would be friendlier to the United States and Israel, what were liberals doing? In Packer’s view, those who did not support the war were either naive ditherers or excessively cautious, unwilling to fight for the noble causes that had once drawn liberals. Packer notes the tension between the dovish legacy of Vietnam and the impetus to hawkishness given by the humanitarian wars of the ’80s. He writes that he, like most liberals, was a dove, but that the first Gulf War changed his thinking. “[T]he footage of grateful Kuwaitis waving at columns of American troops streaming through the liberated capital knocked something ajar in my worldview. American soldiers were the heroes … The decade that followed the Gulf War scrambled everything and turned many of the old truths on their heads. The combination of the Cold War’s end, the outbreak of genocidal wars and ethnic conflicts in Europe and Africa, and a Democratic presidency made it possible for liberals to contemplate and even advocate the use of force for the first time since the Kennedy years.” The drive behind this new, muscular liberalism came from what Packer rightly lauds as “one of the twentieth century’s greatest movements, the movement for human rights.”
Packer describes how the Bush administration began taking steps to invade Iraq almost immediately after 9/11. (Packer notes that, as former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill recounted, Bush officials were talking about removing Saddam almost as soon as Bush took office in January 2001.) This is familiar territory, but as usual Packer provides some unusual insights. He notes that Bush and Wolfowitz, in particular, bonded: “They believed in the existence of evil, and they had messianic notions of what America should do about it.” In March 2002, Bush interrupted a meeting between Condoleezza Rice and three senators to say, “Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out.”
As plans for war raced ahead, a secret new unit was being set up in the Pentagon, overseen by Douglas Feith and his deputy, William Luti, who was such a maniacal hawk that his colleagues called him “Uber-Luti.” (At a staff meeting, Luti once called retired Gen. Anthony Zinni a traitor for questioning the Iraq war.) The secret unit was called the Office of Special Plans, and it was charged with planning for Iraq. Packer’s account of this office is chilling. Its main purpose was to cook up intelligence to justify the war, which was then “stovepiped” directly to Dick Cheney’s neocon chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby (who has now been linked to the Valerie Plame scandal). Its cryptic name as well as its opposition to the traditional intelligence agencies, which had failed to deliver the goods on Saddam, reflected the views of its director, Abram Shulsky, a former Perle aide, housemate of Wolfowitz’s at Cornell, and student of the Chicago classics professor Leo Strauss. Strauss, around whom a virtual cult had gathered, had famously discussed esoteric and hidden meanings in great works, and Shulsky wrapped himself in the lofty mantle of his former professor to justify the secret and “innovative” approach of the OSP.
In fact, besides feeding bogus intelligence from Iraqi exile sources into the rapacious craw of the White House, the OSP was nothing but a spin machine to prepare the way to war: No actual “planning” was done. According to Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, the “crafting and approval of the exact words to use when discussing Iraq, WMD, and terrorism were, for most of us, the only known functions of OSP and Mr. Shulsky.” (Kwiatkowski later recalled a bit of advice she got from a high-level civil servant: “If I wanted to be successful here,” she wrote, “I’d better remember not to say anything positive about the Palestinians.” “
Sweet Jesus, what it’s going to take with this?
Can’t say the reasons why? As in don’t know? Or as in afraid to say publicly? I expect better from Pillar.
Really, when representatives of Big Oil weasel into, er, excuse me, are appointed to gov’t positions which allow them to “regulate” the very industry which has enriched them to no end, no one has a problem seeing that there is a conflict. Likewise, reps from Big Pharma, Agribiz, the Big 3 Automakers, etc…regulating the various industries from which they hail [and no doubt plabn to return] you name it. conflicts are spotted with more frequency than Elvis, UFOs, bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster.
But when loyal and dedicated servants of Israel and Likudism and Zionist expansionism, who have tireslessly advocated all manner of pillage and plunder and rapinge [yes, it’s archaic] on behalf of The Light Unto The Nations are appointed to positions of authority formulating and executing US foreign policy, and suddenly the US finds itself engaged in a war with Iraq, a war which the Solomon-like authors of “A Clean Break” tirelessly advocated with every Jabotinskyite breath, suddenly we don’t see a conflict? Or are afraid to see a conflict?
Come on, what are we, children?
If we can’t see this conflict, we may as well slash our wrists nad our throats with Occam’s Razor