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The Greatest Scandal
By Patrick J. Buchanan
10/24/05 "ICH
" -- -- While President Bush and his War
Cabinet bear full moral responsibility for Iraq, they could not have
taken us to war without the complicity of the "adversary press" and
"loyal opposition."
Today, this town is salivating over the prospect that Karl Rove and
"Scooter" Libby will be indicted for outing Joe Wilson's wife as a
CIA operative. Thirty months ago, many of those anxious to see the
White House brought down were hauling its water. Consider the role
played by our newspaper of record, the New York Times.
To stampede us into a war neoconseratives had been plotting for a
decade, Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's No. 3, set up an Office of
Special Plans. Its role: Cherry-pick the intel that Saddam was
acquiring weapons of mass destruction and hell-bent on using them on
the United States. Then, stovepipe the hot stuff to the White House
Iraq Group, and ignore the contradictory evidence.
A primary source of the hot intel about poison gas vans and nuclear
bomb programs was a tight-knit exile group led by Ahmed Chalabi,
head of the Iraqi National Congress and neocon-Pentagon favorite to
lead the new Iraq.
But once the hyped intel suggesting Saddam was an imminent and
mortal threat had been extracted, the WHIG needed to run it through
a media centrifuge to convert it into hard news.
Enter Judy Miller, self-styled "Ms. Run Amok" and the go-to girl for
the War Party. Miller took the cherry-picked intel and planted it on
Page 1, enabling War Party propagandists to hit the TV talk-show
circuit and reference ominous stories in the New York Times about
how imminent a threat Saddam had become.
These propagandists were parroting their own pre-cooked intel, but
it now had the imprimatur of the Times. The White House had seduced
the good Gray Lady of 43rd Street into turning tricks for war.
While the Times has played this role before, it was usually in
leftist causes. In the early 1930s, Walter Duranty got a Pulitzer
for covering up Stalin's starvation of the Ukrainians. In the late
1950s, Herbert Matthews used the Times' front page to introduce
Fidel Castro to the world as the "Robin Hood of the Sierra Maestre."
And who can forget the Times columnists who assured us how much
better off the Cambodian people would be under the benevolent rule
of Pol Pot?
But the indispensable enablers of war are the New Democrats and
potential presidential nominees, Sens. Kerry, Edwards, Clinton,
Biden and Bayh. Fearful that Bush and Rove would use their refusal
to authorize war in October 2002 to impeach Democrats' patriotism,
they voted to give him a blank check for war. Six months later, Bush
cashed it.
The Democratic Senate could have slowed the stampede. And if it
could not have stopped it, it might at least have gotten answers to
crucial questions. How many troops would be needed? What was the
probability of guerrilla war? What was our exit strategy? Instead,
the Senate surrendered the war powers the Founding Fathers reserved
for Congress to the president and abdicated its constitutional duty.
And what of the punditocracy that cheerled us into war? Did they
serve their country, or did they service the king and his courtiers
by reciting such fairytales as Muhammad Atta's secret meeting in
Prague with his Iraqi controllers?
In the run-up to war, from left, center and right, voices were
asking exactly what threat Saddam posed to America.
His nation had been crushed in six weeks and his army routed in 100
hours in Desert Storm. His weapons factories had been demolished.
Terrified of U.S. retaliation, he had not used one WMD. The United
Nations had rummaged through Iraq and destroyed other WMDs and their
factories. He had not imported a tank, plane or gun in 12 years.
Mohammad ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency had
scoured Iraq and found nothing. Saddam had invited the CIA in to
have a look.
Though 40,000 U.S.-British sorties had been flown over Iraq since
1991, he had been unable to shoot down a single plane. There was no
evidence he or his regime had any role in 9-11, any connection to
the anthrax attack, any tie to al-Qaida or committed any act of
terror against us.
Why, then, was it necessary to go to war?
Whatever the sins of the WHIG in savaging critics, however, at least
most of them believed in this war. But what is to be said for those
who transmitted to a trusting public what they had to know or at
least suspect were propaganda fabrications to dupe the people into
sending their sons and daughters to fight and die in an unnecessary
war? This is the greater scandal. This is the real scandal.
© 2005 Creators Syndicate Inc.
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