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 (WHIG), 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 one, 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 Grey 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, which 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.
