Iraq

Perpetual War Begins?

/ GW Bush Admin, Iraq, War

Eric Black in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 3/16/03, on neoconservative diplomatic ascendance in the Bush administration and resulting prospects of "perpetual war:"

In their vision, war with Iraq is followed by democratization of Iraq, then democratization -- by military means or otherwise -- of other Arab states, then a rolling of the momentum into Asia, with special emphasis on North Korea and China, [Carleton College Asia specialist Roy] Grow said.

[Foreign policy analyst John C.] Hulsman of the Heritage Foundation likened the group to a "drunken gambler, who keeps doubling down, betting his entire bankroll on every roll of the dice. The trouble is, they have to win every bet or they are wiped out."

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Covering the War Crisis

/ GW Bush Admin, Iraq, Media, War

David Greenberg on American vs. overseas press coverage of the war crisis in the Washington Post, 3/16/03:

American journalists tend to be more squeamish than their European counterparts about setting the news agenda. If the leading political players don't get worked up about a would-be scandal, the press (usually) balks at arrogating that role to itself. European papers, on the other hand, allow themselves more freedom in deciding what's news, independent of official say-so.

Yet we should be cautious about ascribing differing American and foreign assessments of news stories to national traits or institutions. After all, not long ago the U.S. media would have treated these recent episodes as huge scandals -- the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers or My Lai or the 18-minute gap in Richard Nixon's Watergate tapes.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a simmering American skepticism about the motives and morality of our leaders boiled over. . . . And then the mood of active distrust began to subside. It was as if Americans, having faced the darkest elements of their system, couldn't bear to see any more. . . . Ever since [9/11], the public, including the press, has ascribed to the president a degree of goodwill unprecedented in the post-1960s era.

Overseas, however, events since Sept. 11 have led people in the opposite direction. Suspicion of U.S. motives has escalated; willingness to cut the Bush administration some slack has plunged. Where Americans' trust in their leaders seems distressingly high, as if the Nixon years have been forgotten, foreigners' faith in us is troublingly low. In that divide lie the roots of our irreconcilable takes on the news, and our contrary fears for the future.

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Investigate Forged Weapons Evidence

/ GW Bush Admin, Iraq, War

Senator Jay Rockefeller calls for the FBI to investigate the Bush Administration's use of forged documents to support its claims that Iraq sought to purchase uranium. "An investigation should 'at a minimum help to allay any concerns' that the government was involved in the creation of the documents to build support for administration policies, Rockefeller wrote in a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller." (AP reporter Ken Guggenheim in the Kansas City Star, 3/14/03.)

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George Queeg

/ GW Bush Admin, Iraq, War

"George W. Queeg?" -- Paul Krugman in the New York Times, March 14, 2003:

Over the past few weeks there has been an epidemic of epiphanies. There's a long list of pundits who previously supported Bush's policy on Iraq but have publicly changed their minds. None of them quarrel with the goal; who wouldn't want to see Saddam Hussein overthrown? But they are finally realizing that Mr. Bush is the wrong man to do the job. And more people than you would think -- including a fair number of people in the Treasury Department, the State Department and, yes, the Pentagon -- don't just question the competence of Mr. Bush and his inner circle; they believe that America's leadership has lost touch with reality.

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Walzer: Still Alternatives to War

/ GW Bush Admin, Iraq, War

Michael Walzer on " The Right Way" to oppose war in Iraq (New York Review of Books, 3/13/03):

We say of war that it is the "last resort" because of the unpredictable, unexpected, unintended, and unavoidable horrors that it regularly brings. In fact, war isn't the last resort, for "lastness" is a metaphysical condition, which is never actually reached in real life: it is always possible to do something else, or to do it again, before doing whatever it is that comes last. The notion of lastness is cautionary??" but this is a necessary caution: look hard for alternatives before you "let loose the dogs of war."

Right now, even at this last minute, there still are alternatives, and that is the best argument against going to war. I think that it is a widely accepted argument, even though it isn't easy to march with. What do you write on the placards? What slogans do you shout? We need a complicated campaign against the war, whose participants are ready to acknowledge the difficulties and the costs of their politics.

Or, better, we need a campaign that isn't focused only on the war (and that might survive the war)??"a campaign for a strong international system, organized and designed to defeat aggression, to stop massacres and ethnic cleansing, to control weapons of mass destruction, and to guarantee the physical security of all the world's peoples.

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Josh Marshall on War Planning

/ GW Bush Admin, Iraq, Middle East, War

Josh Marshall, writing 3/14/03 at talkingpointsmemo.com :

Little more than a week ago, when the scope of the diplomatic train wreck wasn't quite so evident, the White House floated word that the whole Middle East peace process was on ice until we'd finished everything we were going to do in Iraq.

What's so sad and revealing and pathetic about this is that it's only at the eleventh hour and the fifty-ninth minute that the White House realizes that the Israeli-Palestinian situation is one of the moving parts involved in dealing with Iraq. On the whole world stage we're watching the president and his crew driving at eighty miles an hour into a brick wall called reality. Too bad we're in the car with them.

More from Josh Marshall, 3/13/03 (same link):

Speaking for myself, and perhaps for some other internationalists who feel as I do, part of our frustrated anger over the current impasse is watching the present administration traduce and plow under the work of half a century and seeing the administration's acolytes greet every new disaster and *&$#-up as a grand confirmation of their beliefs and principles. It's like we've been transported into some alternative reality where the debate about international relations is some awful mix of The McLaughlin Group and Lord of the Flies. As these folks should be starting to realize about now, months of this arrogant mumbo-jumbo eventually draws a response -- at home and abroad.

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FBI Examines Fake Intelligence

/ GW Bush Admin, Iraq

"FBI Probes Fake Evidence of Iraqi Nuclear Plans" (Washington Post, 3/13/03)

The FBI is looking into the forgery of a key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program, including the possibility that a foreign government is using a deception campaign to foster support for military action against Iraq.

"It's something we're just beginning to look at," a senior law enforcement official said yesterday. Officials are trying to determine whether the documents were forged to try to influence U.S. policy, or whether they may have been created as part of a disinformation campaign directed by a foreign intelligence service. . . .

The phony documents -- a series of letters between Iraqi and Niger officials showing Iraq's interest in equipment that could be used to make nuclear weapons -- came to British and U.S. intelligence officials from a third country. The identity of the third country could not be learned yesterday.

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