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How Do Americans Prevent an Invasion of Iran, Given Iraq?

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
by Walter C. Uhler

Lord Acton asserted: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." It's an adage to keep in mind as America and the world assesses the recent words of our reelected President, George W. Bush.

Mr. Bush construes his reelection as "an accountability moment" that absolves him and his administration of responsibility for the incompetence, mistakes, deceptions and war crimes associated with his invasion of Iraq.

Worse, soon after refusing to rule out an attack on Iran, Mr. Bush gave an inaugural address that not only aimed America's might at terrorism, but also embraced "the great objective of ending tyranny" around the world.

Predictably, his "great objective" received extremely negative reviews from most of the world. Having seen Mr. Bush's recklessness in Iraq, the world correctly understood that when Mr. Bush asserted, "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands," he intended to use military force to compel people to be free - a logical impossibility.

It's remotely possible that Mr. Bush's inaugural speech was simply another part of the massive bait and switch that his administration has foisted upon Americans since its failure to find WMD in Iraq. Yet, American presidents often overreach during their second terms. If that is the case, Americans have genuine cause to worry. After all, when the U.S. Supreme Court gave George W. Bush the keys to the White House in December 2000, he already had decided to take America to war against Iraq if the opportunity presented itself.

Opportunity? Yes, war was a first resort, according to Bush's former ghostwriter, Mickey Herskowitz. Bush "was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999." [Russ Baker, "Bush Wanted to Invade Iraq if Elected in 2000," www.guerillanews.com 27 October 2004]

As Herskowitz told journalist Russ Baker: "Bush and his advisers were sold on the idea that it was difficult for a president to accomplish an electoral agenda without the record-high approval numbers that accompany successful if modest wars." [Ibid] Thus, for the purpose of achieving their political agenda, the Bush administration followed Vice President Richard Cheney's maxim: "Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade." [Ibid]

Unfortunately for America, because the Bush administration was despicably obsessed with plans that might sacrifice American lives in Iraq for high approval ratings, it deliberately de-emphasized frantic warnings by the CIA's George Tenet and America's counter terrorism expert, Richard A. Clarke, about the threat posed by Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorists. Thus, the Bush administration's willful negligence guaranteed that America was less prepared than it could have been when al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

The Bush administration's contribution to America's 9/11 catastrophe had its origins in a "secrets brief" that the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, gave President-elect Bush in mid-January 2001. Tenet warned Bush that the most serious threat facing America was the prospect of an attack or attacks by Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorists. The threat was "tremendous" and "immediate" (Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, p. 12).

Nevertheless, when President Bush held his first "principals" meeting of the National Security Council (NSC) just two weeks later, plans for Iraq trumped genuine national security. Al Qaeda's tremendous and immediate threat was not even discussed.

According to national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who directed that meeting, "Iraq might be the key to reshaping the entire region" (Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, p. 72). But "reshape" it to accomplish what? President Bush made one goal clear when he told the principals that the U.S. would tilt toward Israel and "disengage" from the Arab-Israeli conflict. When Secretary of State Colin Powell objected that such a disengagement "would unleash [Ariel] Sharon and the Israeli army," Bush responded: "Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things" (Suskind, p. 72).

Another goal was oil. As one of the principals, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, subsequently revealed: By late February 2001, "documents were being prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency... mapping Iraq's oil fields and exploration areas and listing companies that might be interested in leveraging this precious asset" (Suskind, p. 96). What better way to exert economic leverage over Europe, China, Japan and other Middle East oil producers?

Consequently, Cheney's maxim, oil, and Israel explain why Iraq was the focus of many of the 32 principals meetings held prior to September 11. Unfortunately for America, just one of those 32 meetings was devoted to bin Laden and al Qaeda, notwithstanding "blinking red" intelligence during the summer of 2001 about an impending al Qaeda attack. (Could one ask for better proof demonstrating that the Bush administration knew that Iraq and al Qaeda were unrelated?)

Such pre-9/11 negligence by the Bush administration supports former Senator Bob Graham's conclusion that 9/11 was "an avoidable tragedy." The Florida democrat should know, because he served as co-chairman of the "Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11," which released its report on July 24, 2003.

In his recent book, Intelligence Matters, Graham specifically blames the Bush administration for ignoring bin Laden and al Qaeda and for failing to act when intelligence in the August 6, 2001 President's Daily Brief screamed: "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S." In addition, Graham provides evidence indicating that Saudi Arabia's government assisted the September 11 terrorists - which he alleges the pro-Saudi Bush administration has covered up.

Nevertheless, the first catastrophe on Bush's watch provided his administration with the perfect pretext (i.e., the global war on terrorism) for publicly applying Cheney's maxim to Iraq. Thus, as Harlan K. Ullman writes in his recent book, Finishing Business: "[T]he issue was never whether to go to war against Iraq. The issue was to go to war as quickly as the political process would permit so that this strategic opportunity would not be lost." [Ullman p. 67]

But, writes Ullman, "to achieve that goal... Saddam had to be seen as a clear and present danger and his weapons of mass destruction as a source of immediate threat, either from him or from those he might provide with these agents." [Ullman, p.69]

Consequently, while General Tommy Franks (acting on orders given by Bush to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld) spent much of 2002 secretly developing and refining the military's plans to invade Iraq, the Bush administration unleashed a massive two-part campaign to mobilize American support for the invasion of Iraq.

Part one of the public's mobilization commenced with Bush's "axis of evil" speech in January. In April he gave a "regime change" speech, which was followed by a "preemption" speech in June and a "preemptive" National Security Strategy in September.

Such policy initiatives can only be described as radical. Thus, as Anatol Lieven observes in his exceptional book, America Right or Wrong, the National Security Strategy is "megalomaniac" because it demands that American sovereignty remain "absolute and unqualified" while "the sovereignty of other countries ... was to be heavily qualified by America." [Lieven, p. 13]

In August, Vice President Cheney kicked off part two - a plan to deliberately frighten Americans into supporting its invasion of Iraq by conflating the dire threat posed by its improbable nuclear weapons with the much smaller threat posed by its more probable chemical and biological weapons.

Part two coincided with the August 29, 2002 signing by President Bush of a top secret National Security Presidential Directive that formally committed America to an invasion of Iraq. Thus, on August 26, Cheney falsely asserted: "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons."

In September, Rice falsely claimed that aluminum tubes sought by Iraq could "only" be used in uranium centrifuges. Rice then compounded her exaggeration by warning Americans that they couldn't wait for "smoking gun" proof of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD), lest it come in the form of a "mushroom cloud." Bush repeated the "mushroom cloud" propaganda in October.

But the Bush administration did something worse. It diverted resources from Afghanistan -- where the war against terrorism was being waged against bin Laden and al Qaeda -- in order to support the impending invasion of Iraq. On February 19, 2002 General Franks admitted as much when he confidentially told Graham: "Senator, we are not engaged in a war in Afghanistan" because "military and intelligence personnel are being redeployed to prepare for an action in Iraq." [Graham, p. 125]

According to Graham, the cost of that decision was tremendous: "[O]nce America turned to Iraq, al Qaeda was able to regroup, refocus, and begin carrying out attacks again. From September 2002 until the train bombings in Spain in 2004, al Qaeda carried out twelve attacks that took, in all, more than 600 lives." [Graham, p. 218]

Nevertheless, the propaganda campaign was a stunning success. Just a month prior to Mr. Bush's reelection - and months after the news that no WMD were found in Iraq -- a brainwashed 49 percent of the American population still believed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (or a major weapons program) prior to America's invasion.

Possessing widespread American support, the Bush administration commenced an illegal invasion of Iraq (probably a war crime) that compounded the evil unleashed on September 11. It "shocked and awed" the world into bitter resentment, put more than 10,000 American soldiers into hospitals or graves, murdered up to 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians, led to the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere, provoked an increasingly powerful and sophisticated Iraqi insurgency (of suicide car bombings, kidnappings and beheadings), moved Iraq closer to civil war than democracy and freedom, and enabled a metastasizing al Qaeda to recruit thousands of new America-hating Muslims into it ranks.

And matters are unlikely to improve if the Bush administration carries out its plan to build 14 permanent American bases in Iraq.

According to Lieven, were most Americans not so ignorant of the "radically different Muslim states, traditions and ideologies," it would have been far more difficult for the Bush administration "to mix up Iraq and al Qaeda in the minds of a majority of Americans." [p. 27]

And were most Americans not so ignorant and dismissive of international law, they would realize that no sovereign state is permitted to attack another, except under three specific conditions: (1) after it has suffered an attack, (2) to preempt an imminent attack and (3) when authorized by the United Nations. Thus, as presumably moral people, it would matter to them that the invasion proved that Iraq posed no imminent threat. Thus, it would matter to them that the Bush administration committed the country to war before even attempting to obtain UN approval.

But, unfortunately, these are the same Americans who believe that the U.S. spends 20 percent of its budget on foreign aid, when it actually spends less than 1 percent. As Robert S. Erikson and Kent L. Tedlin have written in their highly regarded textbook, American Public Opinion: "Since the 1930s, more than 2,000 factual 'pop-quiz' political knowledge questions were asked of the American public. An analysis of these questions...[in 1996] documents that only 13 percent of the adult public could correctly answer 75 percent or more of the questions, and only 41 percent of the public could correctly answer 50 percent or more of the items. [p. 54]

Such massive ignorance of the world is, in part, the product of a pervasive, stupefying religious faith -- unique in the Western world - that has as many as 69 percent of Americans believing in the personal existence of the devil. During his first presidential campaign Mr. Bush pandered to them when he smugly asserted: "Nobody needs to tell me what I believe. But I do need somebody to tell me where Kosovo is." [Mark Crispin Miller, The Bush Dyslexicon, p. 200]

Although polls have suggested that many Americans rely on their faith to successfully manage their problems in life, Walter Lippmann knew that democracy couldn't rest on faith alone. "No moral code, as such, will enable [a person] to know whether he is exercising his moral faculties on a real and an important event. For effective virtue, as Socrates pointed out long ago, is knowledge; and a code of right and wrong must wait upon a perception of the true and false." (Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public, p. 20)

Beyond faith-based ignorance, and the general ignorance of Americans who never made it to college, America also is afflicted by the political and social ignorance of most of its college educated specialists. In 1932, the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset faulted such specialization for creating the "learned ignoramus." According to Ortega, "he is not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his specialty; but neither is he ignorant, because he is a 'scientist,' and knows very well his own tiny portion of the universe." Consequently, "he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with all the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line." [p.112]

Television and talk radio -- not the reading of serious books, newspapers and magazines - supply such Americans with most of their news, which perpetuates their political and civic retardation.

Even worse, as Lewis Lapham suggests in the February issue of Harpers (and as any reader of Mark Twain's Gilded Age already knows), Americans are debased by "the habits of mind fundamental to the retail trade ('suppressio veri, suggestio falsi') and "appreciate, perhaps better than any other people on the face of the earth, the art of the con game and they take for granted the slippages (carried on the books as a tax-deductible business expense) between the face and the mask." Thus, Bush's smirk.

In May 2004, an expert on Iran who had recently returned from that country, confidentially told me that his sources there spoke about U.S. operations inside that country. Thus, I believe Seymour M. Hersh (writing in the Jan. 24/31, 2005 issue of The New Yorker) when he quotes a high-level intelligence official who says: It's not if we're going to do anything against Iran. They're doing it."

Thus, given the ignorance of the faith-based, the specialists and the businessman and their "malignant and hate-filled fantasies about the outside world;" [Lieven, p. 221] how does one convince them that an invasion of Iran, even if couched in the fine rhetoric of fighting terrorism and expanding liberty, will produce even more evil than what the Bush administration has wrought thus far -- and further weaken America's moral standing and national security?

A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION

Walter C. Uhler has written about national security and Russian history for numerous periodicals. He lives in Philadelphia.