Dishonest,
Reprehensible, Corrupt ...
By FRANK RICH, Op-Ed
Columnist, NYTimes on the Web, November 27, 2005
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Photo: Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Frank Rich |
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GEORGE W. BUSH is so desperate for
allies that his hapless Asian tour took him to Ulan Bator, a first for an
American president, so he could mingle with the yaks and give personal thanks
for Mongolia's contribution of some 160 soldiers to "the coalition of the
willing." Dick Cheney, whose honest-and-ethical poll number hit 29 percent
in Newsweek's latest survey, is so radioactive that he vanished into his bunker
for weeks at a time during the storms Katrina and Scootergate.
The whole world can see that both men are on the run. Just how much so
became clear in the brace of nasty broadsides each delivered this month about
Iraq. Neither man engaged the national debate ignited by John Murtha about
how our troops might be best redeployed in a recalibrated battle against Islamic
radicalism. Neither offered a plan for "victory." Instead, both
impugned their critics' patriotism and retreated into the past to defend the
origins of the war. In a seasonally appropriate impersonation of the
misanthropic Mr. Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life," the vice president went so
far as to label critics of the administration's prewar smoke screen both
"dishonest and reprehensible" and "corrupt and shameless." He sounded but
one epithet away from a defibrillator.
The Washington line has it that the motivation for the Bush-Cheney rage is the
need to push back against opponents who have bloodied the White House in the
polls. But, Mr. Murtha notwithstanding, the Democrats are too feeble to
merit that strong a response. There is more going on here than politics.
Much more: each day brings slam-dunk evidence that the doomsday threats
marshaled by the administration to sell the war weren't, in Cheney-speak, just
dishonest and reprehensible but also corrupt and shameless. The more the
president and vice president tell us that their mistakes were merely innocent
byproducts of the same bad intelligence seen by everyone else in the world, the
more we learn that this was not so. The web of half-truths and falsehoods
used to sell the war did not happen by accident; it was woven by design and then
foisted on the public by a P.R. operation built expressly for that purpose in
the White House. The real point of the Bush-Cheney verbal fisticuffs this
month, like the earlier campaign to take down Joseph Wilson, is less to smite
Democrats than to cover up wrongdoing in the executive branch between 9/11 and
shock and awe.
The cover-up is failing, however. No matter how much the president and
vice president raise their decibel levels, the truth keeps roaring out. A
nearly 7,000-word investigation in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times found that
Mr. Bush and his aides had "issued increasingly dire warnings" about Iraq's
mobile biological weapons labs long after U.S. intelligence authorities were
told by Germany's Federal Intelligence Service that the principal source for
these warnings, an Iraqi defector in German custody code-named Curveball, "never
claimed to produce germ weapons and never saw anyone else do so." The five
senior German intelligence officials who spoke to The Times said they were
aghast that such long-discredited misinformation from a suspected fabricator
turned up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and in the
president's 2003 State of the Union address (where it shared billing with the
equally bogus 16 words about Saddam's fictitious African uranium).
Right after the L.A. Times scoop, Murray Waas filled in another piece of the
prewar propaganda puzzle. He reported in the nonpartisan National Journal
that 10 days after 9/11, "President Bush was told in a highly classified
briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi
regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible
evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda."
The information was delivered in the President's Daily Brief, a C.I.A.
assessment also given to the vice president and other top administration
officials. Nonetheless Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney repeatedly pounded in an
implicit (and at times specific) link between Saddam and Al Qaeda until
Americans even started to believe that the 9/11 attacks had been carried out by
Iraqis. More damning still, Mr. Waas finds that the "few credible reports"
of Iraq-Al Qaeda contacts actually involved efforts by Saddam to monitor or
infiltrate Islamic terrorist groups, which he regarded as adversaries of his
secular regime. Thus Saddam's antipathy to Islamic radicals was the same
in 2001 as it had been in 1983, when Donald Rumsfeld, then a Reagan
administration emissary, embraced the dictator as a secular fascist ally in the
American struggle against the theocratic fascist rulers in Iran.
What these revelations also tell us is that Mr. Bush was wrong when he said in
his Veterans Day speech that more than 100 Congressional Democrats who voted for
the Iraqi war resolution "had access to the same intelligence" he did.
They didn't have access to the President's Daily Brief that Mr. Waas uncovered.
They didn't have access to the information that German intelligence officials
spoke about to The Los Angeles Times. Nor did they have access to material
from a Defense Intelligence Agency report, released by Senator Carl Levin of
Michigan this month, which as early as February 2002 demolished the reliability
of another major source that the administration had persistently used for its
false claims about Iraqi-Al Qaeda collaboration.
The more we learn about the road to Iraq, the more we realize that it's a losing
game to ask what lies the White House told along the way. A simpler
question might be: What was not a lie? The situation recalls Mary
McCarthy's explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian Hellman was
a dishonest writer: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and
'the.' "
If Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney believe they were truthful in the run-up to the war,
it's easy for them to make their case. Instead of falsely claiming that
they've been exonerated by two commissions that looked into prewar intelligence
-- neither of which addressed possible White House misuse and
mischaracterization of that intelligence -- they should just release the rest of
the President's Daily Briefs and other prewar documents that are now trickling
out. Instead, incriminatingly enough, they are fighting the release of any
such information, including unclassified documents found in post-invasion Iraq
requested from the Pentagon by the pro-war, neocon Weekly Standard. As
Scott Shane reported in The New York Times last month, Vietnam documents are now
off limits, too: the National Security Agency won't make public a 2001
historical report on how American officials distorted intelligence in 1964 about
the Gulf of Tonkin incident for fear it might "prompt uncomfortable comparisons"
between the games White Houses played then and now to gin up wars.
SOONER or later -- probably sooner, given the accelerating pace of recent
revelations -- this embarrassing information will leak out anyway. But the
administration's deliberate efforts to suppress or ignore intelligence that
contradicted its Iraq crusade are only part of the prewar story. There
were other shadowy stations on the disinformation assembly line. Among
them were the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, a two-man Pentagon
operation specifically created to cherry-pick intelligence for Mr. Cheney's
apocalyptic Iraqi scenarios, and the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), in which
Karl Rove, Karen Hughes and the Cheney hands Lewis Libby and Mary Matalin, among
others, plotted to mainline this propaganda into the veins of the press and
public. These murky aspects of the narrative -- like the role played by a
private P.R. contractor, the Rendon Group, examined by James Bamford in the
current Rolling Stone -- have yet to be recounted in full.
No debate about the past, of course, can undo the mess that the administration
made in Iraq. But the past remains important because it is a road map to
both the present and the future. Leaders who dissembled then are still
doing so. Indeed, they do so even in the same speeches in which they
vehemently deny having misled us then -- witness Mr. Bush's false claims about
what prewar intelligence was seen by Congress and Mr. Cheney's effort last
Monday to again conflate the terrorists of 9/11 with those "making a stand in
Iraq." (Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for Centcom, says
the Iraqi insurgency is 90 percent homegrown.) These days Mr. Bush and Mr.
Cheney routinely exaggerate the readiness of Iraqi troops, much as they once
inflated Saddam's W.M.D.'s.
"We're not going to sit by and let them rewrite history," the vice president
said of his critics. "We're going to continue throwing their own words
back at them." But according to a Harris poll released by The Wall Street
Journal last Wednesday, 64 percent of Americans now believe that the Bush
administration "generally misleads the American public on current issues to
achieve its own ends." That's why it's Mr. Cheney's and the president's
own words that are being thrown back now -- not to rewrite history but to reveal
it for the first time to an angry country that has learned the hard way that it
can no longer afford to be without the truth.
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