A Whole School of Trout in the Milk: What We Already Know About Iraq From the People Who Launched the War

We have further confirmation of the administration’s intentions from Paul O’Neill, another witness to history, who served as Bush’s first Treasury Secretary. O’Neill reports that "From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go", and that this was true from the very first day, well before 9/11. "From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime. Day one, these things were laid and sealed." O’Neill was surprised that no one in the administration ever questioned ‘why?’ or ‘why now?’ when considering this policy. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this’." Ron Suskind, the author to whom O’Neill revealed all this, also obtained a Pentagon document from March 5, 2001, titled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts" (including a map of potential areas for exploration), which he said "talks about contractors around the world from, you know, 30-40 countries. And which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq."

Then there’s this, from Philip Zelikow, who served on Bush’s transition team, drafted the administration’s in-your-face national security policy built around preemptive war, was called in to shill as executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and was sitting on the more-secret-than-top-secret President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board when he made these remarks at the University of Virginia on Sep. 10, 2002: "Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 – it's the threat against Israel. And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell."

No doubt, Phil. Actually, it has long appeared that Israel was only one of multiple reasons neoconservatives had for invading Iraq. Of course, Alan Greenspan wrote that the war was transparently for oil, but he wasn’t inside the administration, and provided no evidence fo that conclusion. However, the very architect of the war himself, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, explained to Vanity Fair, only two months into the war that, "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction, as the core reason". Of course that also means that, whatever they actually believed about the quantity of WMD possessed by Iraq, they didn’t really care that much about it. It was simply the agreed-upon mutual talking point for marketing purposes.

And marketing was certainly the game. Sorry, Dick Cheney, that you found the notion that the war was being politicized "reprehensible". Cheney somehow forgets to mention that the war resolution suddenly became so urgent that it had to be voted on the month before the election of 2002, putting Democrats in an acute bind just one year after 9/11. No wonder they did that. People forget that the Bush administration was already tanking in its eight months in office before that day. And even after. Dick Morris wrote, as the 2002 election approached, "Polls show that only one issue works in Bush's favor: terrorism". Of course, we accidentally found out that this had long been part of Karl Rove’s agenda, as he briefed Republicans in Congress on the coming election, back in January 2002: "We can also go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military and thereby protecting America".

When Chief of Staff Andrew Card was asked why Iraq had all of a sudden become such an urgent issue out of the blue, he famously said, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August". That horrified a lot of people, and for good reason. But the real truth is far more cynical than the notion that they made strategic decisions about how to market their war. All presidents will do that, and should as well, if they’re selling a genuinely beneficial policy. The far deeper sin here was that this war was (meant to be) genuinely beneficial to Bush’s political career, his fragile ego, to oil companies, Israel, neoconservatives, Halliburton and Blackwater. Thus the whole marketing campaign was not about convincing people of the wisdom of a wise idea, but rather selling them on an abhorrent lie.

Then of course there are the Downing Street Memos and related revelations from the other side of the Pond, which expose emphatically – and have never been repudiated by either government – that the Bush administration had already decided on war by the time of the meetings the memos describe in July 2002, and indeed, had already even begun secret attacks by that moment. This is, of course, well before the Congressional resolution, well before the UN Security Council resolution that failed (despite, the memos reveal, Bush administration use of threats to Council member-states), and well before Bush was telling the American public how much he hoped to avoid war, if only the evil Saddam would just cooperate. The memos also reveal, crucially, that once the war policy was in place, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy". Why doctor the facts? Because the architects of the war knew that "the case was thin". Further, the documents show that Bush was contemplating schemes by which he could create a false pretext for war, since no WMD had been found by the weapons inspectors. These included painting a US surveillance plane in UN colors and hoping it would be attacked, or assassinating Saddam.

So now comes ol’ Scott McClellan, Bush’s former press secretary, telling us that the president employed a "political propaganda campaign" instead of telling the truth, in order to sell his "unnecessary war", which he describes as a "serious strategic blunder" and a "grave mistake" sold on lies, "manipulating sources of public opinion" and "downplaying the major reason for going to war". According to McClellan, "Over that summer of 2002, top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war", "in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option". He also tells us that Bush admitted to him that he had personally authorized the leak of Valerie Plame’s secret CIA identity, a clear act of treason intended to silence critics of the war.

Further, McClellan explains one of the reasons for the invasion: "The president had promised himself that he would accomplish what his father had failed to do by winning a second term in office. And that meant operating continually in campaign mode: never explaining, never apologizing, never retreating. Unfortunately, that strategy also had less justifiable repercussions: never reflecting, never reconsidering, never compromising. Especially not where Iraq was concerned."

Never mind that McClellan apparently thinks that "never explaining, never apologizing, never retreating" somehow has a ‘more justifiable’ rationale if you’re a president going to war for the purposes of convincing yourself that you’re better than your father. And never mind that McClellan did so much to help sell this war. And never mind that his explanation for his change of heart rings completely bogus, or that, as press secretary, he savaged people like Richard Clarke who did what he himself did, only four years earlier, using almost exactly the same smear language that the White House and its marionettes trained on him. What ultimately matters is that he finally got it right and told the truth. Sure, many of us have been saying all these things for a long time, while people like Scott McClellan dismissed us as radical, America-hating, French-loving, treasonous underminers of the brave troops in Iraq. What matters now is that Scott McClellan was there, and adds proof positive of what happened.

So, imagine you’re a member of a jury. You can never know for sure about anything – only what the evidence tells you – but you have to make a decision one way or the other. We now have confirming evidence, all saying the same thing, in one form or another, from the president’s own Chief of Staff, Secretary of Defense, Deputy Secretary of Defense, Terrorism Czar, Press Secretary, Treasury Secretary, all the PNAC crowd, a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, his chief political strategist, along with documentary evidence from inside the administration. And then, of course, there are the President and the Vice President themselves, speaking candidly about their plans and the reasons for them.

Against that mountain of evidence we have Bush and Cheney, who have everything to lose by admitting these crimes, offering their fervent denials (at least when Mickey Herskowitz is not around) that they did anything untoward in invading Iraq. (Whew. For a minute there it looked like this might have been an overwhelmingly clear case.)