Neocons to Americans:
Trust Us Again
Marching in lockstep with Israeli hardliners, American neocons are
aiming their heavy media artillery at the Iran nuclear deal as a
necessary first step toward another “regime change” war in the
Mideast – and they are furious when anyone mentions the Iraq War
disaster and the deceptions that surrounded it, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
August 16, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Consortiumnews"
- America’s neocons insist that their
only mistake was falling for some false intelligence about Iraq’s
WMD and that they shouldn’t be stripped of their powerful positions
of influence for just one little boo-boo. That’s the
point of view taken by Washington Post editorial page editor
Fred Hiatt as he whines about the unfairness of applying “a
single-interest litmus test,” i.e., the Iraq War debacle, to judge
him and his fellow war boosters.
After noting that many other important people were
on the same pro-war bandwagon with him, Hiatt criticizes President
Barack Obama for citing the Iraq War as an argument not to listen to
many of the same neocons who now are trying to sabotage the Iran
nuclear agreement. Hiatt thinks it’s the height of unfairness for
Obama or anyone else to suggest that people who want to kill the
Iran deal — and thus keep alive the option to bomb-bomb-bomb Iran —
“are lusting for another war.”
President George W. Bush pauses for applause during his State of
the Union Address on Jan. 28, 2003, when he made a fraudulent
case for invading Iraq. Seated behind him are Vice President
Dick Cheney and House Speaker Dennis Hastert. (White House
photo)
Hiatt also faults Obama for not issuing a serious
war threat to Iran, a missing ultimatum that explains why the
nuclear agreement falls “so far short.” Hiatt adds: “war is not
always avoidable, and the judicious use of force early in a crisis,
or even the threat of force, can sometimes forestall worse bloodshed
later.”
But it should be noted that the neocons – and
Hiatt in particular – did not simply make one mistake when they
joined President George W. Bush’s rush to war in 2002-03. They
continued with their warmongering in Iraq for years, often bashing
the handful of brave souls in Official Washington who dared
challenge the neocons’ pro-war enthusiasm. Hiatt and his fellow
“opinion leaders” were, in effect, the enforcers of the Iraq War
“group think” – and they have never sought to make amends for that
bullying.
The Destruction of Joe Wilson
Take, for instance, the case of CIA officer
Valerie Plame and her husband, former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
Hiatt’s editorial section waged a long vendetta against Wilson for
challenging one particularly egregious lie, Bush’s nationally
televised claim about Iraq seeking “yellowcake” uranium from Niger,
a suggestion that Iraq was working on a secret nuclear bomb. The
Post’s get-Wilson campaign included publishing a column that
identified Plame as a CIA officer, thus destroying her undercover
career.
At that point, you might have thought that Hiatt
would have stepped forward and tried to ameliorate the harm that he
and his editorial page had inflicted on this patriotic American
family, whose offense was to point out a false claim that Bush had
used to sell the Iraq War to the American people. But instead Hiatt
simply piled on the abuse, essentially driving Wilson and Plame out
of government circles and indeed out of Washington.
In effect, Hiatt applied a “a single-issue litmus
test” to disqualify the Wilson family from the ranks of those
Americans who should be listened to. Joe Wilson had failed the test
by being right about the Iraq War, so he obviously needed
to be drummed out of public life.
The fact that Hiatt remains the Post’s
editorial-page editor and that Wilson ended up decamping his family
to New Mexico speaks volumes about the upside-down world that
Official Washington has become. Be conspicuously, obstinately and
nastily wrong about possibly the biggest foreign-policy blunder in
U.S. history and you should be cut some slack, but dare be right and
off with your head.
And the Iraq War wasn’t just a minor error. In the
dozen years since Bush launched his war of aggression in Iraq, the
bloody folly has destabilized the entire Middle East, resulted in
hundreds of thousands of deaths (including nearly 4,500 U.S.
soldiers), wasted well over $1 trillion, spread the grotesque
violence of Sunni terrorism across the region, and sent a flood of
refugees into Europe threatening the Continent’s unity.
Yet, what is perhaps most remarkable is that
almost no one who aided and abetted the catastrophic and illegal
decision has been held accountable in any meaningful way. That
applies to Bush and his senior advisers who haven’t spent a single
day inside a jail cell; it applies to Official Washington’s
well-funded think tanks where neoconservatives still dominate; and
it applies to the national news media where almost no one who
disseminated pro-war propaganda was fired (with the possible
exception of Judith Miller who was dumped by The New York Times but
landed on her feet as a Fox News “on-air personality” and an op-ed
contributor to The Wall Street Journal).
The Plame-Gate Affair
While the overall performance of the Post’s
editorial page during the Iraq War was one of the most shameful
examples of journalistic malfeasance in modern U.S. history,
arguably the ugliest part was the Post’s years-long assault on
Wilson and Plame. The so-called “Plame-gate Affair” began in early
2002 when the CIA recruited ex-Ambassador Wilson to investigate what
turned out to be a forged document indicating a possible Iraqi
yellowcake purchase in Niger. The document had aroused Vice
President Dick Cheney’s interest.
Having served in Africa, Wilson accepted the CIA’s
assignment and returned with a conclusion that Iraq had almost
surely not obtained any uranium from Niger, an assessment shared by
other U.S. officials who checked out the story. However, the bogus
allegation was not so easily quashed.
Wilson was stunned when Bush included the Niger
allegations in his State of the Union Address in January 2003.
Initially, Wilson began alerting a few journalists about the
discredited claim while trying to keep his name out of the
newspapers. However, in July 2003 – after the U.S. invasion in March
2003 had failed to turn up any WMD stockpiles – Wilson penned an
op-ed article for The New York Times describing what he didn’t find
in Africa and saying the White House had “twisted” pre-war
intelligence.
Though Wilson’s article focused on his own
investigation, it represented the first time a Washington insider
had gone public with evidence regarding the Bush administration’s
fraudulent case for war. Thus, Wilson became a major target for
retribution from the White House and particularly Cheney’s office.
As part of the campaign to destroy Wilson’s
credibility, senior Bush administration officials leaked to
journalists that Wilson’s wife worked in the CIA office that had
dispatched him to Niger, a suggestion that the trip might have been
some kind of junket. When right-wing columnist Robert Novak
published Plame’s covert identity in The Washington Post’s op-ed
section, Plame’s CIA career was destroyed.
Accusations of Lying
However, instead of showing any remorse for the
harm his editorial section had done, Hiatt simply enlisted in the
Bush administration’s war against Wilson, promoting every
anti-Wilson talking point that the White House could dream up. The
Post’s assault on Wilson went on for years.
For instance, in a Sept. 1, 2006, editorial, Hiatt
accused Wilson of lying when he had claimed the White House had
leaked his wife’s name. The context of Hiatt’s broadside was the
disclosure that Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was the
first administration official to tell Novak that Plame was a CIA
officer and had played a small role in Wilson’s Niger trip.
Because Armitage was considered a reluctant
supporter of the Iraq War, the Post editorial jumped to the
conclusion that “it follows that one of the most sensational charges
leveled against the Bush White House – that it orchestrated the leak
of Ms. Plame’s identity – is untrue.”
But Hiatt’s logic was faulty for several reasons.
First, Armitage may have been cozier with some senior officials in
Bush’s White House than was generally understood. And, just because
Armitage may have been the first to share the classified information
with Novak didn’t mean that there was no parallel White House
operation to peddle Plame’s identity to reporters.
In fact, evidence uncovered by special prosecutor
Patrick Fitzgerald, who examined the Plame leak, supported a
conclusion that White House officials, under the direction of Vice
President Cheney and including Cheney aide Lewis Libby and Bush
political adviser Karl Rove, approached a number of reporters with
this information.
Indeed, Rove appears to have confirmed Plame’s
identity for Novak and also leaked the information to Time
magazine’s Matthew Cooper. Meanwhile, Libby, who was indicted on
perjury and obstruction charges in the case, had pitched the
information to The New York Times’ Judith Miller. The Post’s
editorial acknowledged that Libby and other White House officials
were not “blameless,” since they allegedly released Plame’s identity
while “trying to discredit Mr. Wilson.” But the Post reserved its
harshest condemnation for Wilson.
“It now appears that the person most responsible
for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson,” the editorial
said. “Mr. Wilson chose to go public with an explosive charge,
claiming – falsely, as it turned out – that he had debunked reports
of Iraqi uranium-shopping in Niger and that his report had
circulated to senior administration officials.
“He ought to have expected that both those
officials and journalists such as Mr. Novak would ask why a retired
ambassador would have been sent on such a mission and that the
answer would point to his wife. He diverted responsibility from
himself and his false charges by claiming that President Bush’s
closest aides had engaged in an illegal conspiracy. It’s unfortunate
that so many people took him seriously.”
A Smear or a Lie
The Post’s editorial, however, was at best an
argumentative smear and most likely a willful lie. By then, the
evidence was clear that Wilson, along with other government
investigators, had debunked the reports of Iraq acquiring yellowcake
in Niger and that those findings did circulate to senior levels,
explaining why CIA Director George Tenet struck the yellowcake
claims from other Bush speeches.
The Post’s accusation about Wilson “falsely”
claiming to have debunked the yellowcake reports apparently was
based on Wilson’s inclusion in his report of speculation from one
Niger official who suspected that Iraq might have been interested in
buying yellowcake, although the Iraqi officials never mentioned
yellowcake and made no effort to buy any. This irrelevant point had
become a centerpiece of Republican attacks on Wilson and was
recycled by the Post.
Plus, contrary to the Post’s assertion that Wilson
“ought to have expected” that the White House and Novak would zero
in on Wilson’s wife, a reasonable expectation in a normal world
would have been just the opposite. Even amid the ugly partisanship
of modern Washington, it was shocking to many longtime observers of
government that any administration official or an experienced
journalist would disclose the name of a covert CIA officer for such
a flimsy reason as trying to discredit her husband.
Hiatt also bought into the Republican argument
that Plame really wasn’t “covert” at all – and thus there was
nothing wrong in exposing her counter-proliferation work for the
CIA. The Post was among the U.S. media outlets that gave a podium
for right-wing lawyer Victoria Toensing to make this bogus argument
in defense of Cheney’s chief of staff Lewis Libby.
On Feb. 18, 2007, as jurors were about to begin
deliberations in Libby’s obstruction case, the Post ran a prominent
Outlook article by Toensing, who had been buzzing around the TV
pundit shows decrying Libby’s prosecution. In the Post article, she
wrote that “Plame was not covert. She worked at CIA headquarters and
had not been stationed abroad within five years of the date of
Novak’s column.”
A Tendentious Argument
Though it might not have been clear to a reader,
Toensing was hanging her claim about Plame not being “covert” on a
contention that Plame didn’t meet the coverage standards of the
Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Toensing’s claim was
legalistic at best since it obscured the larger point that Plame was
working undercover in a classified CIA position and was running
agents abroad whose safety would be put at risk by an unauthorized
disclosure of Plame’s identity.
But Toensing, who promoted herself as an author of
the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, wasn’t even right about
the legal details. The law doesn’t require that a CIA officer be
“stationed” abroad in the preceding five years; it simply refers to
an officer who “has served within the last five years outside the
United States.”
That would cover someone who – while based in the
United States – went abroad on official CIA business, as Plame
testified under oath in a congressional hearing that she had done
within the five-year period. Toensing, who appeared as a Republican
witness at the same congressional hearing on March 16, 2007, was
asked about her bald assertion that “Plame was not covert.”
“Not under the law,” Toensing responded. “I’m
giving you the legal interpretation under the law and I helped draft
the law. The person is supposed to reside outside the United
States.” But that’s not what the law says, either. It says “served”
abroad, not “reside.”
At the hearing, Toensing was reduced to looking
like a quibbling kook who missed the forest of damage – done to U.S.
national security, to Plame and possibly to the lives of foreign
agents – for the trees of how a definition in a law was phrased, and
then getting that wrong, too.
After watching Toensing’s bizarre testimony, one
had to wonder why the Post would have granted her space on the
widely read Outlook section’s front page to issue what she called
“indictments” of Joe Wilson, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and
others who had played a role in exposing the White House hand behind
the Plame leak.
Despite Toensing’s high-profile smear of Wilson
and Fitzgerald, Libby still was convicted of four felony counts. In
response to the conviction, the Post reacted with another dose of
its false history of the Plame case and a final insult directed at
Wilson, declaring that he “will be remembered as a blowhard.”
With Plame’s CIA career destroyed and Wilson’s
reputation battered by Hiatt and his Post colleagues, the Wilsons
moved away from Washington. Their ordeal was later recounted in the
2010 movie, “Fair Game,” starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. Though
Libby was sentenced to 30 months in prison, his sentence was
commuted by President Bush to eliminate any jail time.
A Pattern of Dishonesty
While perhaps Hiatt’s vendetta against Joe Wilson
was the meanest personal attack in the Post’s multi-year pro-war
advocacy, it was just part of a larger picture of complicity and
intimidation. Post readers often learned about voices of dissent
only by reading Post columnists denouncing the dissenters, a scene
reminiscent of a totalitarian society where dissidents never get
space to express their opinions but are still excoriated in the
official media.
For instance, on Sept. 23, 2002, when former Vice
President Al Gore gave a speech criticizing Bush’s “preemptive war”
doctrine and Bush’s push for the Iraq invasion, Gore’s talk got
scant media coverage, but still elicited a round of Gore-bashing on
the TV talk shows and on the Post’s op-ed page.
Post columnist Michael Kelly called Gore’s speech
“dishonest, cheap, low” before labeling it “wretched. It was vile.
It was contemptible.” [Washington Post, Sept. 25, 2002] Post
columnist Charles Krauthammer added that the speech was “a series of
cheap shots strung together without logic or coherence.” [Washington
Post, Sept. 27, 2002]
While the Post’s wrongheadedness on the Iraq War
extended into its news pages – with the rare skeptical article
either buried or spiked – Hiatt’s editorial section was like a
chorus with virtually every columnist singing from the same
pro-invasion song book and Hiatt’s editorials serving as lead
vocalist. A study by Columbia University journalism professor Todd
Gitlin noted, “The [Post] editorials during December [2002] and
January [2003] numbered nine, and all were hawkish.” [American
Prospect, April 1, 2003]
The Post’s martial harmony reached its crescendo
after Secretary of State Colin Powell made his bogus presentation to
the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, accusing Iraq of hiding vast
stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. The next day, Hiatt’s
lead editorial hailed Powell’s evidence as “irrefutable” and
chastised any remaining skeptics.
“It is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that
Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction,” the editorial said.
Hiatt’s judgment was echoed across the Post’s op-ed page, with Post
columnists from Right to Left singing the same note of misguided
consensus.
After the U.S. invasion of Iraq on March 19-20,
2003, and months of fruitless searching for the promised WMD caches,
Hiatt finally acknowledged that the Post should have been more
circumspect in its confident claims about the WMD.
“If you look at the editorials we write running up
[to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Saddam Hussein] has
weapons of mass destruction,” Hiatt said in an interview with the
Columbia Journalism Review. “If that’s not true, it would have been
better not to say it.” [CJR, March/April 2004]
Concealing the Truth
But Hiatt’s supposed remorse didn’t stop him and
the Post editorial page from continuing its single-minded support
for the Iraq War. Hiatt was especially hostile when evidence emerged
that revealed how thoroughly he and his colleagues had been gulled.
In June 2005, for instance, The Washington Post
decided to ignore the leak of the “Downing Street Memo” in the
British press. The “memo” – actually minutes of a meeting of British
Prime Minister Tony Blair and his national security team on July 23,
2002 – recounted the words of MI6 chief Richard Dearlove who had
just returned from discussions with his intelligence counterparts in
Washington.
“Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military
action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the
intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” Dearlove
said.
Though the Downing Street Memo amounted to a
smoking gun regarding how Bush had set his goal first – overthrowing
Saddam Hussein – and then searched for a sellable rationalization,
the Post’s senior editors deemed the document unworthy to share with
their readers.
Only after thousands of Post readers complained
did the newspaper deign to give its reasoning. On June 15, 2005, the
Post’s lead editorial asserted that “the memos add not a single fact
to what was previously known about the administration’s prewar
deliberations. Not only that: They add nothing to what was publicly
known in July 2002.”
But Hiatt was simply wrong in that assertion.
Looking back to 2002 and early 2003, it would be hard to find any
commentary in the Post or any other mainstream U.S. news outlet
calling Bush’s actions fraudulent, which is what the “Downing Street
Memo” and other British evidence revealed Bush’s actions to be.
The British documents also proved that much of the
pre-war debate inside the U.S. and British governments was how best
to manipulate public opinion by playing games with the intelligence.
Further, official documents of this nature are
almost always regarded as front-page news, even if they confirm
long-held suspicions. By Hiatt’s and the Post’s reasoning, the
Pentagon Papers wouldn’t have been news since some people had
previously alleged that U.S. officials had lied about the Vietnam
War.
Not a One-Off
In other words, Hiatt’s Iraq War failure wasn’t a
one-off affair. It was a long-running campaign to keep the truth
from the American people and to silence and even destroy critics of
the war. The overall impact of this strategy was to ensure that war
was the only option.
And, in that sense, Hiatt’s history as a neocon
war propagandist belies his current defense of fellow neocon pundits
who are rallying opposition to the Iran nuclear deal. While Hiatt
claims that his colleagues shouldn’t be accused of “lusting for
another war,” that could well be the consequence if their
obstructionism succeeds.
It has long been part of the neocon playbook to
pretend that, of course, they don’t want war but then put the United
States on a path that leads inevitably to war. Before the Iraq War,
for instance, neocons argued that U.S. troops should be deployed to
the region to compel Saddam Hussein to let in United Nations weapons
inspectors – yet once the soldiers got there and the inspectors
inside Iraq were finding no WMD, the neocons argued that the
invasion had to proceed because the troops couldn’t just sit there
indefinitely while the inspectors raced around futilely searching
for the WMD.
Similarly, you could expect that if the neocons
succeed in torpedoing the Iran deal, the next move would be to
demand that the United States deliver an ultimatum to Iran:
capitulate or get bombed. Then, if Iran balked at surrender, the
neocons would say that war and “regime change” were the only options
to maintain American “credibility.” The neocons are experts at
leading the U.S. media, politicians and public by the nose – to
precisely the war outcome that the neocons wanted from the
beginning. Hiatt is doing his part.
Investigative
reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The
Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest
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