Tomgram

And a happy Watergate to you…

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Quote of the day (five Americans having died in ambushes in Iraq and more having been wounded in the last 24-hours): “‘Things are worse now,’ said Staff Sergeant Kenneth Maxwell, nervously fingering the trigger of his machinegun on an armored vehicle in Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit on Saturday. ‘They used to just attack us, mostly at night. But now they are attacking us during the day with AK-47s and RPGs (rocket- propelled grenades), at any American soldiers they can find,’ Maxwell said, eyes alert under the baking sun.” (Andrew Marshall, U.S. Troops Jumpy After Fresh Attacks in Iraq, Reuters)

And a happy Watergate to you:Thirty years after the Senate select committee hearings on Watergate riveted the nation and doomed the Nixon presidency, a key figure in the scandal says he has a fresh and explosive revelation: Richard M. Nixon personally ordered the burglary of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate complex.

“Jeb Stuart Magruder — then a ‘callow’ campaign aide, now a retired Presbyterian minister in Ohio — says in a new documentary for PBS that he heard Nixon’s voice on a telephone as the president instructed then-Attorney General John N. Mitchell to go ahead with the break-in. ‘John . . . you need to do that,’ Magruder said he heard Nixon say at the end of a phone call in which Mitchell discussed the matter with his boss.

“If true, the allegation could significantly sharpen history’s answer to one of the most famous questions of modern America: What did the president know, and when did he know it?”
(David Von Drehle, 30 Years Later, a Watergate Allegation, Washington Post)

Watergate isn’t a bad place to start this Sunday, though somewhere down the distant line were there to be a Watergate-style ending (like those “home-style” fries at fast food restaurants) to this administration, the president would probably depart polluted Washington not by helicopter a la Nixon but — just his luck — by Rapture (funded undoubtedly by his wealthier friends).

But let’s not jump the gun here. We’re still at a far more modest, if thoroughly interesting spot — with George Tenet possibly teetering at the edge of departure (at least in the rising media “departure sweepstakes”) and now, because once that finger of accusation starts moving it becomes as uncontrollable as anything else, National Security Adviser Condi Rice may be joining what could become a crowd at the departure gate. Assumedly, her deputy Stephen J. Hadley, who took a partial fall for the team the other day, is already somewhere in the vicinity.

Paul Bedard’s Washington Whispers in U.S. News just had a hot tip on the subject:

“Jeb Stuart Magruder — then a ‘callow’ campaign aide, now a retired Presbyterian minister in Ohio — says in a new documentary for PBS that he heard Nixon’s voice on a telephone as the president instructed then-Attorney General John N. Mitchell to go ahead with the break-in. ‘John . . . you need to do that,’ Magruder said he heard Nixon say at the end of a phone call in which Mitchell discussed the matter with his boss.

“If true, the allegation could significantly sharpen history’s answer to one of the most famous questions of modern America: What did the president know, and when did he know it?”
(David Von Drehle, 30 Years Later, a Watergate Allegation, Washington Post)

Watergate isn’t a bad place to start this Sunday, though somewhere down the distant line were there to be a Watergate-style ending (like those “home-style” fries at fast food restaurants) to this administration, the president would probably depart polluted Washington not by helicopter a la Nixon but — just his luck — by Rapture (funded undoubtedly by his wealthier friends).

But let’s not jump the gun here. We’re still at a far more modest, if thoroughly interesting spot — with George Tenet possibly teetering at the edge of departure (at least in the rising media “departure sweepstakes”) and now, because once that finger of accusation starts moving it becomes as uncontrollable as anything else, National Security Adviser Condi Rice may be joining what could become a crowd at the departure gate. Assumedly, her deputy Stephen J. Hadley, who took a partial fall for the team the other day, is already somewhere in the vicinity.

Paul Bedard’s Washington Whispers in U.S. News just had a hot tip on the subject:

“As White House officials try to control the latest fallout over President Bush’s flawed suggestion in the State of the Union address that Iraq was buying nuclear bomb materials, there’s growing talk by insiders that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice may take the blame and resign. For most insiders, it’s inconceivable that Rice, touted as a future secretary of state, California governor, and even vice president, would go, but the latest revelations that her shop and deputy Stephen Hadley mishandled CIA warnings have put the NSC in the bull’s eye of controversy.

“While it’s unclear how serious the talk is inside the administration about the future of Rice or Hadley with the NSC, a few top aides are already suggesting replacements for Rice. They include former Bush administration National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, NASA chief and former Navy Secretary Sean O’Keefe, and Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator in Iraq.”

(Note, by the way, Scowcroft’s name to which I’ll return below.)

From political gossip column to Washington news reality turns out to be a trip of less than 24 hours these days. A version of the story popped up in the Washington Post today full-blown — and with attitude. Dana Milbank and Mike Allen (Iraq Flap Shakes Rice’s Image) point out that “Rice was the first administration official to place responsibility on CIA Director Tenet for the inclusion in Bush’s State of the Union address of the Africa uranium charge. The White House now concedes that pinning responsibility on Tenet was a costly mistake.” Like Beddard, they add that Rice was being touted as a future Secretary of State or even California governor, and then focus on her claim that she couldn’t remember or hadn’t read crucial material relating to the Niger uranium claim and the Iraqi nuclear program in an “annex” to the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). “Footnotes,” her spokesman said, to which Milbank and Allen none too politely reply, “The annex was boxed and in regular type”

At the heart of the piece is this paragraph: “The remarks by Rice and her associates raise two uncomfortable possibilities for the national security adviser. Either she missed or overlooked numerous warnings from intelligence agencies seeking to put caveats on claims about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program, or she made public claims that she knew to be false.” Followed by numerous devastating comments like this one: “Another official called it highly unlikely that Rice did not read a memo addressed to her from the CIA. ‘I don’t buy the bit that she didn’t see it,” said this person, who is generally sympathetic to Rice.'” (Ah, “sympathy” in Washington, it’s usually stored with the steak knives.)

Believe me, this is damaging stuff. So the CIA director is wobbly (and the agency fighting back furiously), the national security adviser and her assistant possibly soon on life support, and from the nearer fringes of Washington politics, the attacks on the vice president’s office are mounting. Two months ago, the distance from the fringes to the center was oceanic. Now, it’s more like a modest river.

The VP, give the guy credit, came out nuclear-armed the other day, spouting passages from the cooked NIE, giving not an inch of ground, and blasting away at “critics.” (“In the N.I.E. on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the [intelligence] community had high confidence in the conclusion that Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to U.N. resolutions . Ladies and gentlemen, this is some of what we knew. Knowing these things, how could we, I ask, have allowed that threat to stand. These judgments were not lightly arrived at, and all who were aware of them bore a heavy responsibility for the security of America.”)

On the Democracy Now radio show, Melvin Goodman, former CIA analyst, responded thusly:

“Well, this is the longest statement of disinformation that I think the American government has distributed to the American people. And for Dick Cheney just to recite these charges that we all know now not to be true, adds to the terrible politicization of intelligence that’s created a scandal in the intelligence community unlike anything I ever saw in my 24 years in the C.I.A. That includes the period of Vietnam, the period of the intelligence failure on the Soviet union, and the incredibly contentious disputes over arms control.”

In the meantime, three Democratic congressional representatives, Bernie Sanders, presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, and Carolyn Maloney, all members of the Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations, sent a letter to the Veep with ten pointed questions to answer. (“Dear Mr. Vice President: While it has been widely reported that the President made a false assertion in his State of the Union address concerning unsubstantiated intelligence that Iraq purchased uranium from Niger, your own role in the dissemination of that disinformation has not been explained by you or the White House. Yet, you reportedly paid direct personal visits to CIA’s Iraq analysts; your request for investigation of the Niger uranium claim resulted in an investigation by a former U.S. ambassador, and you made several high-profile public assertions about Iraq’s alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. We hope that you will take the opportunity to provide responses to the following ten questions”)

All this offers something like the coming attractions for the Bush administration in Winter — as it becomes embroiled in resignations, investigations, hearings, and who knows what else.

And here’s the remarkable thing. So far, we’re still largely dealing with nothing more than those sixteen words behind which sits Iraq’s nonexistent nuclear program (though indeed it had once existed) for which Saddam’s agents were assumedly buying what would have been completely useless uranium. We haven’t made it to the seven other “facts” that made up the underpinning of Bush’s call to war and that John Dean, Watergate confessor par excellence, methodically took apart in a recent column at the online legal site Findlaw. Having dismantled the president’s facts by comparing them to what we know of the president’s sources, he points out that giving false information to Congress is a crime (as Eliot Abrams and John Poindexter, both rehabilitated by this administration, found out in the Reagan era) and he calls for the president to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate — himself. (I’ve included the piece below.)

On what has yet to surface, we only need to note, for instance, that the recently released 9/11 report had twenty-eight pages blacked out — all relating to Saudi relations with al Qaeda. As far as I can tell not a significant word about Iraq, al Qaeda, and the 9/11 attacks is to be found in its 900 pages. Now, there’s a shock.

As military analyst William Arkin points out on today’s Los Angeles Times Sunday opinion page (A Thin Basis for War),”The real revelation in the released [NIE] document is that a preemptive war was justified on very weak evidence. The Bush administration decided Hussein had to go, but it hid behind flimsy intelligence to pretend that the imminent threat of weapons of mass destruction was a justification for war.”

And even that is weakly put. Since we now know that the air war against Iraq actually started in 2002 (see previous dispatch), we have striking confirmation that most of the justifications for war — including the speeches and statements now being argued about — not only didn’t precede the decision for war, they didn’t precede the war itself!

In the meantime, the desperate Busheviks may already be calling in the third team in Iraq (and before long the second team at home). Rupert Cornwell of the British Independent put the matter this way:

“Last week Paul Bremer, the chief US civilian administrator in Iraq, was in Washington to give a progress report. Outwardly he was all optimism, claiming that rebuilding was running ahead of schedule. Privately however, the message was very different, as he pleaded for more money and more personnel.”

Mike Allen and Glenn Kessler (Bush Considers New Overhaul of Postwar Iraq Administration, Washington Post) report that “the White House is considering asking several major figures, including former secretary of state James A. Baker III, to help with specific tasks like seeking funds from other countries or helping restructure Iraq’s debt.” It seems now that Paul Bremer is likely to have several figures, including, if Baker says no, a “Baker-like” one standing beside him (as perhaps he not so long ago stood beside Jay Garner) in Iraq and in Washington. In the same context, the surfacing of Scowcroft’s name in that US News column is interesting. Baker, of course, was called in to salvage the Florida election for Bush. He is something like the Bush family Mr. Fixit, while Scowcroft is reputedly the elder Bush’s alter ego. Rumor has it that Bush the Father is deeply unhappy with the Iraq policies of Bush the Son (as who wouldn’t be).

Iraq is indeed a mess, though with the killing of Saddam’s sons, our guys in Washington were claiming we had finally “turned a corner” in Iraq (a phrase I hadn’t heard since the Vietnam era and thought I might never hear again). Personally, I wouldn’t be so eager to see what’s around that corner or the next one after that.

Despite the still low-level if evidently growing American casualties in Iraq, the situation there seems to be verging on desperation — for neither the money, nor the foreign troops are forthcoming to make such an operation a success (though, for reasons of their own, as part of their attempt to break their country’s “peace constitution,” the Japanese government is now readying the way to send 1,000 troops there, a move much welcomed by the administration).

Iraq remains the petard upon which this administration is hoisting itself. The Guardian‘s Jonathan Steele ( Resistance has its roots in the present) suggests that even the death of Saddam himself — for many administration officials have suggested that fear of his return is holding back an outpouring of support for the occupation — is not likely to quiet the situation:

“In other quarters there has been a contrary suggestion that resistance might increase with the Hussein family’s deaths… Both positions are predicated on the assumption that resistance is linked to the fate of Saddam Hussein and his closest followers.

“Occasional comments by Iraqis that ‘things were better under Saddam’ are not an indication that they want to restore his regime. They are more a rhetorical way of highlighting disappointment at the lack of security, the collapse of public order, problems with water and electricity, fear of unemployment, as well as the daily indignity of seeing foreign troops on their streets. US officials seem unwilling to accept or admit this in public.

“Before the war critics argued that invading Iraq would encourage fundamentalism throughout the Islamic world. This seems to be happening, as al-Qaida elements and other antiwestern groups see the American presence in Iraq as a new source of easy targets.”

In a piece in the Asia Times (A country in search of a vision), Syed Saleem Shahzad quotes American-educated Kasim Jamal, a leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, thusly:

“You can see that 5 million people [in Saddam’s time] were associated with different armed groups, whether it was civil defense, the main army, paramilitary troops or volunteer forces. Those people were given something to make their ends meet. Suddenly, these people became jobless. Now, you have to reckon with those jobless peoples’ sentiments, certainly they could go on the rampage

“The US forces have already made too many mistakes. To start with, they took over all the affairs [of the country] directly in their hands although they do not have the knowledge to handle Iraq. Now it is very high time for them and for us to discuss a formula on a free Iraq, a federation where everybody will have a respected and autonomous area with no centralized dictatorships, but in the last four months there has been no mentionable development in this regard.”

Even the American-picked, 80 year-old Adnan Pachachi of the Governing Council has recently begun to put some distance between himself and the forces of occupation, the Scotsman reports (Future Iraqi Leader Spurns US):

“Unlike the Americans and the British, who refer to their military presence in Iraq as the ‘Coalition Authority’, Pachachi talks about the occupation of his native country. One of the first acts of the council was to declare April 9, the anniversary of the day that Saddam’s statue was toppled, a national holiday. But Pachachi said he already regretted this ‘possibly hasty decision’.

“He added: ‘The occupation of Iraq started on March 20 when the coalition forces crossed the border, not on April 9. So it’s not a national holiday for the occupation, it’s a national holiday for the fall of the regime. In any case, there needs to be a law before the new national day becomes official and such a law has not been enacted yet.'”

Amidst all the analogies that have been mustered to explain American policy and Iraq in recent months (of which Vietnam is only the most recent), perhaps the most chilling comes in a piece by Susan Williams, Chechnya and Iraq: imperial echoes, militant warnings at www.openDemocracy.net website):

“It was late at night and I must have dozed off for a moment in the stuffy cinema. I woke to a hand-held shot onscreen of pale, nervous soldiers being harangued by headscarved women and children, while through the door terrified young men were being led away with guns in their backs. I saw the scene as Iraq today. Then the soldiers started speaking Russian, and I was awake again, watching a rare, documentary film about Russia’s protracted war against the breakaway republic of Chechnya.

“The confusion of sleep lasted seconds, but the thought remains, wedged in my brain. Could Iraq become America’s Chechnya?… True, America’s war is in its early stages, while Russia’s has lasted on and off for the best part of a decade. But seen from another angle, the US has been at war with Iraq since 1991 – and it is perhaps here to the south of Russia, rather than Vietnam, that we should be looking for a warning of what might await America. [T]he parallels are a warning: a ‘Christian’ country, bogged down in a smaller one which its occupation makes more ‘Muslim’, encouraging further terrorism and brutalising the invader’s troops, with disastrous results at home.”

One of the grimmer warnings I’ve seen comes from a Pacific News Service piece by William O. Beeman (After Saddam, the Deluge: U.S. Misjudges What Dictator’s Downfall Will Bring) where he writes in part:

“Ironically, President Bush’s father, President George Herbert Walker Bush, knew that the United States was ill-prepared to deal with a post-Saddam regime. This was one of the main reasons he decided not to remove Saddam during the first Gulf War.

“Now the United States has utterly obliterated the only force that held the nation together, with not a clue how to put it back together again. The Bush administration has done well to rid the world of a villain, but with no plan for the future, this act is a flirtation with complete chaos. Our soldiers are being shot every day. We have put corporate America in charge of reconstruction, but these oil-field construction companies are woefully unprepared. To fill the urgent demand for expert positions, Bechtel and other highly paid U.S. contractors have had to grab the first inexperienced people they could find to do the work of seasoned professionals.

“In short, the United States is setting Iraq on a path to civil war.”

Below, in addition to the piece by John Dean, you’ll find a mordant “Devil’s Dictionary” of the latest Washington-speak (with translation) from Toronto Sun columnist Eric Margolis and a strong piece by Christopher Dickey of Newsweek on the meaning of the latest body count of two in Iraq, Saddam’s two sons. Tom

Terms of engagement
Herewith, definitions to keep on top of current events

By Eric Margolis, Contributing Foreign Editor
The Toronto Sun
July 27, 2003

It’s very difficult keeping up with Mideast news due to the Orwellian newspeak coming from Washington.

So here’s a handy list of key terms, translated into simple English.

* Liberation – Invasion.

* Coalition – The U.S. and British invaders, plus some troops from rent-a-nations like Romania and Poland. In the past, “the coalition” would have been called imperial forces and mercenary auxiliaries.

* Dictator – A ruler you don’t like, or who does not cooperate.

* Statesman – A cooperative dictator.

* Stability – when things go the way Uncle Sam likes, ie., the status quo.

* Instability – when things don’t go the way Unc Sam wants, ie., when trouble-makers try to change the status quo.

* Iraq reconstruction – a process whereby big firms that contribute to the president’s re-election campaign obtain contracts to rebuild the damage caused by U.S. bombing.

To read more Margolis click here

Body Counts
Uday and Qusay’s deaths will not stop the guerrilla war. Why Iraq could be worse than Vietnam

By Christopher Dickey
Newsweek
July 24, 2003

Those of us who’ve covered the Third World’s wars are used to looking at mugshots of the dead, whole photo albums of corpses.

Some human-rights organizations collect them to show the brutally murdered victims of evil dictators. Some generals collect them (I’m thinking of a Turkish general in particular) to show, body by body, their victories over elusive guerrillas. And sometimes the victims in one collection and the guerrillas in the other are the same. That’s the problem with counterinsurgency: separating “the innocent” from “the enemy.”

The new photographs of Saddam Hussein’s sons-close-ups of bearded faces on bloody plastic-look pretty much like any other cadavers dragged out of a firefight, and better than many. Uday’s face was twisted from a wound slashing across the nose, but not imploded beyond recognition, as such faces often are. Qusay’s was unscarred, grimacing.

To read more Dickey click here

Why A Special Prosecutor’s Investigation Is Needed To Sort Out the Niger Uranium And Related WMDs Mess
By John W. Dean
Findlaw
July 18, 2003

The heart of President Bush’s January 28 State of the Union address was his case for going to war against Saddam Hussein. In making his case, the President laid out fact after fact about Saddam’s alleged unconventional weapons. Indeed, the claim that these WMDs posed an imminent threat was his primary argument in favor of war.

Now, as more and more time passes with WMDs still not found, it seems that some of those facts may not have been true. In particular, recent controversy has focused on the President’s citations to British intelligence purportedly showing that Saddam was seeking “significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

To read more Dean click here