War Without End

U.S. Marines occupy Baghdad, in March 2003, in front of the Al Fanar hotel that housed Voices activists throughout the Shock and Awe bombing.
U.S. Marines occupy Baghdad, in March 2003, in front of the Al Fanar hotel that housed Voices activists throughout the Shock and Awe bombing.

Ten years ago, in March of 2003, Iraqis braced themselves for the anticipated “Shock and Awe” attacks that the U.S. was planning to launch against them.  The media buildup for the attack assured Iraqis that barbarous assaults were looming. I was living in Baghdad at the time, along with other Voices in the Wilderness activists determined to remain in Iraq, come what may.  We didn’t want U.S. – led military and economic war to sever bonds that had grown between ourselves and Iraqis who had befriended us over the past seven years.  Since 1996, we had traveled to Iraq numerous times, carrying medicines for children and families there, in open violation of the economic sanctions which directly targeted the most vulnerable people in Iraqi society, the poor, the elderly, and the children.

I still feel haunted by children and their heartbroken mothers and fathers whom we met in Iraqi hospitals.

“I think I understand,” murmured my friend Martin Thomas, a nurse from the U.K., as he sat in a pediatric ward in a Baghdad hospital in 1997, trying to comprehend the horrifying reality. “It’s a death row for infants.”  Nearly all of the children were condemned to death, some after many days of writhing in pain on bloodstained mats, without pain relievers. Some died quickly, wasted by water-borne diseases. As the fluids ran out of their bodies, they appeared like withered, spoiled fruits. They could have lived, certainly should have lived – and laughed and danced, and run and played- but instead they were brutally and lethally punished by economic sanctions supposedly intended to punish a dictatorship over which civilians had no control.

The war ended for those children, but it has never ended for survivors who carry memories of them.

Likewise, the effects of the U.S. bombings continue, immeasurably and indefensibly.

Upon arrival in Baghdad, we would always head to the Al Fanar hotel which had housed scores of previous delegations.

Often, internationals like us were the hotel’s only clients during the long years when economic sanctions choked Iraq’s economy and erased their infrastructure. But in early March of 2003, rooms were filling quickly at the Al Fanar. The owner invited his family members and some of his neighbors and their children to move in, perhaps hoping that the U.S. wouldn’t attack a residence known to house internationals.

Parents in Iraq name themselves after their oldest child. Abu Miladah, the father of two small girls, Miladah and Zainab, was the hotel’s night desk clerk. He arranged for his wife, Umm Miladah, to move with their two small daughters into the hotel. Umm Miladah warmly welcomed us to befriend her children.  It was a blessed release to laugh and play with the children, and somehow our antics and games seemed at least to distract Umm Miladah from her rising anxiety as we waited for the U.S. to rain bombs and missiles down on us.

Continue reading “War Without End”

Mainstream Lookback at Iraq: Yes, You Can Scream Now

Twitter has been on fire today with myriad quips, snarks, I told you sos and above all, honest lamentations on the 10th anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq. There’s also something else — blowback on the mainstream punditocracy and media sheeplesphere, not so much for getting it all wrong on Iraq — we’ve flogged that one enough over the years. No, it’s a visceral reaction to the offhand way that hacks and so-called “experts” admit to mistakes in judgement without really taking responsibility for their mistakes in judgement. You know, like that old mealymouthed meme, “well, we were wrong, everyone was wrong, we just didn’t know then what we know now,” or my personal favorite, “we in the media weren’t asking the right questions, and we should have asked more.”  Anyone who says those things is a Grade A boob, a real fleeb. It at once shakes off any personal responsibility for laziness and lack of professional integrity, while insisting that the entirety of the journalistic world begins in the White House press gallery and ends at the bar at the National Press Club. Welcome to reality, you’re a little late to the party.

This is why I know exactly what Jeremy Scahill, one of the most dogged investigators in the war-reporting business, who had to write a fabulous book about Blackwater, win a few awards and pound out reams of GWOT exposés before he got a mere whiff of attention from media insider claque, was feeling when he tweeted that he had thrown his shoe at the television this morning.

 Russert is the 27-year-old son of the late Meet the Press legend Tim Russert. Russert now works as a correspondent for NBC and was 17 and attending the prestigious St. Albans School when the Iraq War broke out. I’m sure Scahill’s ire wasn’t fully trained on Russert, but rather for what he symbolized at that moment: the whole of the corporate infotainment craptastrophe, whose only “deep diving” over the last 10 years has invariably involved several celebrity overdoses, marrying monarchs and sordid murder trials we hardly remember anymore.

I like to save my ire for the foreign policy/national security hive dwellers who consistently get asked by the lobotomized mainstream media what they think went wrong with Iraq. We know what went wrong with Iraq, it was the very people who are now being asked to pontificate on it today. If they weren’t being a) honest b) unafraid c) critical d) self-correcting then, what in tarnation do you expect from them now, aside from their so-called Washington credentials, which to me aren’t worth a stick if they couldn’t even be right about the most obvious foreign policy disaster this side of Vietnam.

Today, Foreign Policy online presents to us the most frustrating of all anniversary  retrospectives: Washington navel-gazing. It does this by “teaming up” with the Rand Corporation “to bring together many of the key players who launched, fought, analyzed, and executed the (Iraq) war.” Which means, in essence, a lot of dodging, deflecting, elaborate excuse making, a little peevishness, and a lot of minutiae about nothing. What you won’t find in this ponderous, nearly 8,000-word “conversation,” are the words “sectarian,” “torture,” “abuse,” “Abu Ghraib,” “night raids,” “occupation,” “interrogation,” “WMD,” or even “IED,” the most effective weapon against our troops during the war (and for which, by the way, we will be paying billions in veterans’ health care costs for decades to come).

What you also won’t find, aside from sanctioned critic Paul Pillar, are the contrarians, the folks who braved the ridicule and the rebukes to stand against the war policies when it wasn’t so popular to do so. No Andrew Bacevich or Gian Gentile or Patrick Cockburn. Certainly no one from this stalwart arena, nor anyone from The American Conservative, though there are plenty of scholars and great journalists there too, whose prescient writing always seems to get lost during these fatuous ivory tower rituals.

Instead, we get John Nagl, Douglas Feith, Gen. George Allen, Eliot Cohen, Stephen Hadley, Peter Mansoor, Peter Feaver, Kenneth Pollack … need I go on? I won’t bore you with what the establishment had to say, I’ll let you treat yourself. I’ll just say there seems to be a fine line between tedious and infuriating. Largely a giant waste of space. Not even worth throwing a shoe at — though you may want to scream.

Go ahead, we’ve earned it.

My Time in the Tower of London

Musing how Bush’s war on terror and invasion of Iraq ten years ago changed the world… Here’s one of my old fav pieces first published in 2006 by the Future of Freedom Foundation, supplemented with a few photos I took. When I visited the Tower of London, I was mesmerized by Traitor’s Gate. I wondered how broadly that governments would define “traitor” in the following years….

My Time in the Tower of London

by James Bovard

I visited the Tower of London in May [2006] on an overcast, dreary Friday afternoon. The home of so many famous executions and king-approved murders is kept in spiffy shape. The tour guide — a former British sergeant-military wearing a large “Beefeater”-style hat — regaled listeners with tales of beheadings gone wrong, drunks with axes hacking away at half-dead corpses, never quite getting a clean cut. Some of the lines of stone near the castle were remnants of the Roman conquest of England. The castle itself was begun in earnest in 1066, just after the Norman conquest of England. Within a few centuries, the castle went from being a symbol of foreign occupation to a symbol of legitimacy. By overshadowing the London landscape, the Tower put fear into the heart of anyone who considered resisting royal authority — no matter how murderous the king’s henchmen became.

The tour guide pointed to Traitor’s Gate — where he said the most notorious criminals were brought directly from the Thames River into the Tower. The Traitor’s Gate was an easy way to secretly bring detainees into the Tower, unseen by anyone nearby. But looking at English history, it is difficult to detect a bright moral line separating those who were crowned at Westminster Abbey and those beheaded in the Tower of London. As usual, politically defined morality teaches that the good guys kept their heads. … Continue reading “My Time in the Tower of London”

The Lie That Got Us In: The Bush Administration Knew There Were No WMDs in Iraq

Charles Duelfer, who led the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group in 2004, argues a stunning yet popularly held belief in Foreign Policy magazine, that the Bush administration did not lie about Iraq’s alleged WMD program; they were just wrong about it.

Powell-anthrax-vial“The intelligence wasn’t cooked or slanted to make policymakers happy,” Duelfer writes. “It was just wrong. That made Bush mistaken — but it doesn’t make him a liar.”

The first clause in that argument is one that many on the inside disagree with. The Bush administration exerted significant pressure on the intelligence community to provide justification for the Iraq War. According to John Brennan, who was Deputy Director of the CIA at the time, “we were being asked to do things and to make sure that that justification was out there.”

“At the time there were a lot of concerns that it was being politicized by certain individuals within the administration that wanted to get that intelligence base that would justify going forward with the war,” Brennan told PBS. When asked who was exerting this pressure, Brennan said “Some of the neocons” in the administration “were determined to make sure that the intelligence was going to support the ultimate decision.”

And Paul Pillar, the CIA officer who led the hurried effort to provide Congress with a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s WMD programs – an estimate that ultimately contained falsities that the administration retroactively used to justify their incorrect assessments – said, “The atmosphere in which they were working, in which a policy decision clearly had already been made, in which intelligence was being looked to to support that decision rather to inform decisions yet to be made, was a very important part of the atmosphere.”

According to Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, in the lead up to the invasion Powell himself said, “I wonder what will happen when we put 500,000 troops into Iraq and comb the country from one end of the other and find nothing.”

In addition to widespread assessments like these from people on the inside, it’s clear from the historical record that the Bush administration did not base their decision to go to war in Iraq on intelligence assessing Iraq had WMDs. As CBS News reported in 2009, “barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq.”

The hodgepodge of justifications sputtering out from the administration in the lead up to the war also undercuts the argument that anyone was truly concerned about an actual WMD threat. Officials justified war on the basis of everything from an unsubstantiated connection to al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks to Saddam’s own human rights violations to spreading democracy, among others.

“Given Saddam’s history,” Duelfer writes in defense of his theory, “it wasn’t crazy for the intelligence community to believe that he would reconstitute his WMD programs.”

Indeed, it wasn’t. What would have been crazy is if Saddam never planned to reconstitute his WMD programs. The most amateur observer of international relations knows such programs provide a valuable deterrent that discourages rampaging military superpowers like the United States from attacking. Given the obvious target Saddam had become in the eyes of Washington, it would have been rather self-destructive of him to completely forswear WMDs.

This is an analysis that was included in the infamous intelligence estimate that bolstered the conclusion that Saddam had WMDs. As Paul Pillar himself explains:

Even that estimate did not support the war-making case. Among other things it contained the judgment that if Saddam did have any of those feared weapons of mass destruction he was unlikely to use them against U.S. interests or to give them to terrorists—except in the extreme case in which his country was invaded and his regime about to be overthrown. If this judgment had a policy implication it was not to launch the war. The judgment directly contradicted—but did nothing to slow down—the administration’s steady stream of scary rhetoric about how in the absence of a war Saddam could give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups.

So even if Duelfer is correct and the Bush administration truly believed their own assessments of Iraqi WMDs, the most authoritative intelligence concluded they were not an imminent threat to the United States. The administration went to war anyways. That makes the war a preventive war, which falls into the category of war crimes and incriminates the Bush administration regardless of what they truly believed about Iraq’s WMDs.

My argument is not just the opposite of Duelfer’s. I do believe the Bush administration lied about Iraqi WMD. But I think the truth goes far beyond that: if the Bush administration really did believe Saddam had WMDs, they never would have invaded. That is to say, it was the fact that Iraq had no WMDs that was crucial to the decision to go to war.

In his 2003 book Hegemony or Survival, Noam Chomsky pointed to three prerequisites for preventive war. “The target of preventive war must have several characteristics,” he wrote.

  1. It must be virtually defenseless.
  2. It must be important enough to be worth the trouble
  3. There must be a way to portray it as the ultimate evil and an imminent threat to our survival.

“Iraq qualified on all counts,” Chomsky concluded.

Update: I regretfully did not include the leaked minutes of a conversation between British intelligence officials and Prime Minister at the time Tony Blair, referred to as the Downing Street memo, which proves the point I made above.

“Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD,” the secret memo reads. “But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

The head of Britain’s spy service at the time, Richard Dearlove, had met with CIA Director at the time George Tenet days before the memo was written. From that meeting, Dearlove concluded: “It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.”

Bush’s Forgotten Fabrications on Iraq

Following up on John Glaser’s excellent post on 9/11 & the Iraq war, here are a couple pieces I wrote shortly before and after Bush attacked Iraq. I had thought that Bush’s rascalities would evoke a much stronger backlash than actually occurred. The mainstream media was occasionally willing to print pieces opposing the war or calling out the administration. But sporadically-published criticism could not stem the pro-war tidal war the Bush administration engineered.

USA TODAY
August 14, 2003

By accident or design, Bush hyped case for war
BYLINE: James Bovard

President Bush, in his July 30 press conference, declared: “I take personal responsibility for everything I say, of course. Absolutely.” Bush made this declaration in response to a question about wrong information regarding Iraq’s attempt to purchase uranium in Niger. He hoped it would end a controversy that is eating away like an acid drip on his administration’s credibility. But the “16 words” — as Bush defenders characterize his reference to the attempted uranium purchases in his State of the Union address — were not the most brazen example of trampling the truth on the road to war.

From January onward, Bush constantly portrayed the United States as an innocent victim of Saddam Hussein’s imminent aggression. His repeated claims that war was being “forced upon us” was the biggest, most consistent scam Bush used to convince the American people that their government had no alternative but to invade another nation. Examples:

Continue reading “Bush’s Forgotten Fabrications on Iraq”

Tenth Anniversary of Iraq Invasion: Lessons & Warnings for an Illegal War on Iran

March 19 is the tenth anniversary of invasion of Iraq by the United States, Britain and their allies. George W. Bush declared that the goals of the invasion were "to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people." Bush’s poodle, British Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed that Iraq was invaded due to its failure to take a “final opportunity” to disarm itself of its arsenal of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons that it presented an immediate and intolerable threat to world peace. Both lied and deceived the public, and did so intentionally. Bush’s infamous sixteen words, "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," turned out to be a lie. The CIA had actually warned Bush’s national security adviser Condoleezza Rice about it, but she had ignored it. The speech in the United Nations Security Council by Bush’s Secretary of State Colin Powell on February 5, 2003 became a "blot" in his record. In his speech Powell declared that "there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more," but the "evidence" that he presented for his claims turned out to be utterly wrong. The devastation to Iraq, its infrastructure, and its people have been documented and enumerated by many, including the author, and need not be repeated here. Toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime was supposed to bring peace to the Middle East, but the region is currently in complete turmoil.

According to former NATO and the U.S. Southern Command commander General Wesley Clark, after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. the Bush administration was to invade seven countries in the Middle East and Africa and topple their regimes. In addition to Iraq, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran were also the target. But, despite huge setbacks, the plan has been more or less implemented. The war between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah during summer of 2006 was supposed to represent the beginning of a "new Middle East" and remaking of Lebanon, but failed. The so-called "humanitarian intervention" in Libya by the U.S., NATO, and Saudi Arabia was nothing but naked military aggression, with the carnage there continuing. Washington is involved in a "secret" war in Somalia, and has also been deeply involved in South Sudan for years due to the region’s significant oil reserves. Needless to say, the bloody sectarian war in Syria has been raging for two years, with U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar arming the Salafi-Wahabi extremist and terrorist forces in Syria, the worst possible mistake that any nation can make.

This leaves only Iran, the prime target of the War Party in the U.S. and its Israeli allies. In May 2003, only two months after the invasion when Bush made the foolish declaration "mission accomplished," a senior official in his administration said, "Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran." Ever since then the War Party and Israel lobby have been trying to send the American youth to war with Iran, spill the American blood, and waste trillions of dollars for another war, just so that Israel can feel "safe." The current situation regarding Iran is eerily similar to the run-up to the war with Iraq.

Just as Hans Blix, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) , warned the U.S. not to rush a war with Iraq, he is doing the same now regarding Iran.

Continue reading “Tenth Anniversary of Iraq Invasion: Lessons & Warnings for an Illegal War on Iran”