Well, let’s start today with our Leader. George the Younger has just denounced his critics: “This nation acted to a threat from the dictator of Iraq,” he told a crowd of small-business owners yesterday. “Now there are some who would like to rewrite history — revisionist historians is what I like to call them.”
Actually, it was Condi Rice (as quoted in a recent dispatch) who first called the administration’s critics “revisionist historians.” So think of the president’s liking less as a long-term thing and more like a sudden urge, as, for instance, for Tootsie Rolls. Whether the “revisionist” historians he’s referring to are all those folks from the era of the culture wars who, VP Cheney’s wife Lynne and others of her ilk, believe destroyed the “canon” of American history (you know, who swore Paul Revere couldn’t ride a horse), or — another use of the term — holocaust deniers I don’t know. But let’s leave that for the time being. If his critics are “revisionist historians,” then perhaps we should think of the president and his cohorts as “previsionists.” That term accurately describes what was behind our invasion of Iraq — not any of the explanations offered, of course, but a “prevision” of how things should be in the Middle East, and of how a claim to American dominance in the strategically central oil lands of the globe should be staked.
The rest was largely winging it as a piece in USA Today reminds us (Weak spy network hurt hunt for arms). It turns out the CIA essentially had no “assets” in Iraq — they had largely been wiped out by Saddam Hussein’s brutes — and so no knowledge of any significance about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs.
“Despite the commitment of substantial resources, however, the CIA had only modest success in reconstituting its organization inside Iraq. By the end of 2002, Iraqis working for the CIA had begun providing helpful information about Iraq’s conventional weapons and other matters relating to the looming U.S. invasion. But the agents had provided no incontrovertible evidence of chemical or biological weapons, the officials said.
“The difficulty the CIA had keeping its Iraqi agents alive underscores the challenges U.S. intelligence faced in locating the banned weapons U.S. officials claimed Iraq had.”
But, of course, that didn’t matter to the previsionists who saw all they needed to see before anything happened and were flying confident but blind on the rest anyway.
Oh, by the way, calling Doc Freud. Calling Doc Freud. Take another look at that presidential quote. If rendered accurately (by CNN), then the President did speak truth. “We acted” — not reacted — “to a threat,” according to George. The very doctrine of “preventive” war translated into presidential mangle-speak.
“The difficulty the CIA had keeping its Iraqi agents alive underscores the challenges U.S. intelligence faced in locating the banned weapons U.S. officials claimed Iraq had.”
But, of course, that didn’t matter to the previsionists who saw all they needed to see before anything happened and were flying confident but blind on the rest anyway.
Oh, by the way, calling Doc Freud. Calling Doc Freud. Take another look at that presidential quote. If rendered accurately (by CNN), then the President did speak truth. “We acted” — not reacted — “to a threat,” according to George. The very doctrine of “preventive” war translated into presidential mangle-speak.
And then, there was our president only two days back praising pro-democracy demonstrators in Iran. Their protests, he said, were a “positive step” toward freedom. “This is the beginning of people expressing themselves toward a free Iran which I think is positive.” True indeed. It is inspiring to see young, unarmed students bravely confronting the fundamentalists and their thugs in Iran (as they have done several times in the past). It is remarkable, historically, what people will do in the face of what may seem like hopeless oppression. But there is a certain irony in this presidential nod to protestors. The goodness of protestors, it seems, grows as we move ever farther from our own shores. Fortunately, the Iranian protestors are evidently not “revisionists.”
Jim Carroll, the eloquent columnist for the Boston Globe, has been nearly unique in the American mainstream media for consistently asking the tough questions, the ones all of us have trouble answering, and then for being brave enough to grope for answers himself. (If only I could grope for answers in such elegant prose!) Today (see below), he asks one of the questions none of us can quite answer and few have had the nerve to confront — why, exactly, once the very public explanations for the Iraqi War have fallen away, do the American people continue to support the war, the president, and possibly similar future wars and invasions. In a sense, the novelist Margaret Atwood approaches something like the same conundrum, if a bit more obliquely, in a piece on George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 that recently appeared in the British Guardian, approaches something like the same conundrum and offers some splendid thoughts on Orwell, dystopia, her childhood, and her dystopian efforts while she’s at it.
But first, let me just mention a couple of more developments. Perhaps the most interesting in recent days was revealed in a Washington Post piece yesterday (Former Aide Takes Aim at War on Terror). The news is: a (political) weapon of mass destruction has just been uncovered in Washington. Rand Beers, special assistant to the president for combating terrorism, quit in quiet protest five days before the Iraq War began and then:
“Eight weeks after leaving the Bush White House, he volunteered as national security adviser for Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) in a campaign to oust his former boss. All of which points to a question: What does this intelligence insider know?
“‘The administration wasn’t matching its deeds to its words in the war on terrorism. They’re making us less secure, not more secure,'” said Beers, who until now has remained largely silent ‘As an insider, I saw the things that weren’t being done. And the longer I sat and watched, the more concerned I became, until I got up and walked out.’
“No single issue has defined the Bush presidency more than fighting terrorism. And no issue has both animated and intimidated Democrats. Into this tricky intersection of terrorism, policy and politics steps Beers, a lifelong bureaucrat, unassuming and tight-lipped until now. He is an unlikely insurgent”
What’s significant here is that Beers and other angry bureaucrats from the bowels of the “intelligence community” offer patriotic cover to the Kerrys of the Democratic Party (who, of course, supported the war) and are potential conduits for information from those still toiling inside that world. You can count on one thing — there’s news inside that world, real, devastating news. We just don’t yet know what it is and we still await our 21st century Daniel Ellsberg.
In the meantime, in the wake of the first round of Operation Desert Scorpion, American troops again got stung. (One dead and nine wounded in the last day.) And here’s a familiar sounding blast from the past also reported by the Washington Post:
“In Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad, suspected anti-American insurgents fired shots into the mayor’s office and the courthouse. In the nearby town of Khaldiyah, gunmen fired into a police station overnight Tuesday. There were no injuries reported. U.S. forces have restored the authority of local government agencies in the area, working closely with mayors to coordinate aid, paying judges’ salaries and rearming local police. The shootings were the first known attacks directed against Iraqi officials for cooperating with U.S. forces and represented a possible new front for the insurgents, American officials said.”
Finally, here’s a flash from the Washington front, a fascinating piece by Michael Hirsh of Newsweek (The Mideast: Neocons on the Line), who lets us know that the “Q word” (and we’re not speaking quasar here) is beginning to be mentioned in official circles in Washington as Paul Wolfowitz and the neocons go on are you ready for this? the defensive. It’s remarkable to realize that elements of more than half of all our Army divisions are tied down for unknown periods of time to come in Iraq. Soon I may be launching a contest called, “Who will be the first to go?” (prizes still to be determined). I had been guessing CIA director Tenet, but “crying Wolfowitz” already seems to be Washington’s newest sport. Could he be the first? Here’s a little excerpt from Hirsh, but it’s well worth reading the whole piece.
“Now the deputy defense secretary [Wolfowitz] and his fellow neoconservatives are on the defensive. They are battling a growing crowd of critics on Capitol Hill as the Bush administration’s credibility-and its assumptions-are tested as never before. In Iraq elements of more than half of America’s Army divisions are tied down. Some U.S. officials have begun muttering the dreaded Q word-quagmire, a term Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had mocked on a visit to Baghdad in the days just after the three-week war. In the Mideast, the hard-liners’ move to replace Yasir Arafat with the moderate Mahmoud Abbashas touched off a new cycle of violence that stunned even the White House in its savagery. It seems increasingly difficult to argue that “the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad.” In the face of a possible congressional probetwo Pentagon neocons, Doug Feith and Bill Luti, sought earlier this month to identify themselves with, of all people, Bill Clinton.”
Tom
Millennial war
By James Carroll
The Boston Globe
June 17, 2003Now that Americans have begun facing the fact that, in the absence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the stated purpose of the war was false, a new question presents itself: Why, actually, did the United States go to war? And why, even now, do citizens of the United States apparently feel so little compunction about having waged war without justification?
A prominent US senator and candidate for president can ask tough questions about the Bush administration’s falsification of WMD intelligence data even while still affirming his own vote in favor of the war that data supposedly made necessary. What is going on here?
Many forms of human behavior can involve stated purposes and hidden purposes. When the former are debunked, attention necessarily shifts to the latter.
To read more Carroll click here
Orwell and me
By Margaret Atwood
The Guardian
June 16, 2003I grew up with George Orwell. I was born in 1939, and Animal Farm was published in 1945. Thus, I was able to read it at the age of nine. It was lying around the house, and I mistook it for a book about talking animals, sort of like Wind in the Willows. I knew nothing about the kind of politics in the book – the child’s version of politics then, just after the war, consisted of the simple notion that Hitler was bad but dead.
So I gobbled up the adventures of Napoleon and Snowball, the smart, greedy, upwardly mobile pigs, and Squealer the spin-doctor, and Boxer the noble but thick-witted horse, and the easily led, slogan-chanting sheep, without making any connection with historical events.
To say that I was horrified by this book is an understatement. The fate of the farm animals was so grim, the pigs so mean and mendacious and treacherous, the sheep so stupid.
This is an edited extract from Margaret Atwood’s contribution to BBC Radio 3’s Twenty Minutes: The Orwell Essays series, broadcast tonight at 8.05pm. Roy Hattersley’s and John Carey’s essays will be broadcast at the same time on Tuesday and Wednesday respectively. Margaret Atwood’s latest novel, Oryx and Crake, is published by Bloomsbury.