The NeoCons, Regret, News Agencies, and Impeachment: They All Go Together
By Chad A. B. Wilson
Published April 26, 2007, 3:33 pm in News, Military / Foreign policy, Rhetoric.
Bill Moyers's documentary on PBS, which aired last night, saddened and sickened me. It was the first of a new show called Bill Moyers Journal, and this one was called "Selling the War." It was about the lead-up to the Iraq war, and how the press refused to scrutinize the reasons for the war and instead helped sell the American public the entire bill of goods. How sad it was. It upset me because of the way the administration completely lied about its reasons and used to press to help them. It was also sad because any pressure against the war was met with even more pressure to stop that kind of unpatriotic reporting. Now the President didn't call the news agencies and tell them not to print these, of course not. But the American people just didn't want to hear it; anything anti-invasion was anti-patriotic. Ridiculous, it was.
On Moyers's website, he has a timeline leading up to the invasion, and it helped to refresh my memory about exactly what was included in the documentary last night. I won't rehash it here, for you can look it up yourselves, but it led me to David Rose's article in Vanity Fair called "Neo Culpa," about how the neoconservatives who pushed for Iraqi invasion blame the Bush administration for everything that went wrong. This article really upset me because, well, I have neoconservative tendencies. The basic idea is that democracy is good, and the U.S. should do everything in its power to help countries achieve democracy, including invading those countries and toppling their regimes. That's really why we went into Iraq. Forget all of the stuff about weapons of mass destruction: that was a load of hooey sold the public and the Congress to make us fall in line. What we were really trying to do was to create a democratic state in the Middle East that would hopefully cause a domino effect. If the other countries saw that democracy worked so well, then they would forgo their Islamic governments in favor of democracy. Perhaps armed uprisings would occur to establish these democracies. Whatever: the end result would be great. The tyrants would be gone, and democracies would be established, democracies that would use their oil wisely, be pro-American, and not sponsor or harbor terrorism.
It's a good vision, and I wish it had worked out. I wish the U.S. could use its military to help bring about democracies. We're a great nation, and I wish every other nation could share in our peace and prosperity. Yes, I want that for them.
So what happened? Everyone blames Bush. Richard Perle, one of the neocons who pushed the whole thing, said this about the war in retrospect: "Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, 'Go design the campaign to do that.' I had no responsibility for that." Ah, the blame game. In some ways, they're right. Kenneth Adelman goes on to say that perhaps the neocon dream wasn't really even militarily possible. Maybe it should have been scrapped as a good idea but not doable.
A few of these neocons even say that if they could look back, they would not invade. Not because Hussein wasn't dangerous but because the military solution just hasn't worked. And they blame the administration. Plenty of the people say that Bush just hasn't lived up to the neocon dream, that he doesn't really believe what he says in his speeches. But I have trouble believing it. I think he really does believe in it, but it still just won't work.
Isn't it obvious now that it just won't work? Isn't it obvious that Islamists will not just lie down and let their country become democratic? Or even better: let it become democratic and elect a non-democratic government! Isn't that what Iran did? They voted for the kind of government they have, and now they're stuck with it. The entire idea that these Islamic countries will adopt Western-style democracies is basically ridiculous. In hindsight we can all say that. Sure, there are still some, like Egypt, that are "mostly" democratic. But even this country still sanctions persecution against its Coptic minority. Democracy, maybe, but democracy isn't really freedom. Just ask a Palestinian. But that's another story and not one I can talk about right now.
What really gets me is the way they manipulated intelligence and seem to bask in their manipulation. Bush says that the members of Congress had the same intelligence that he did and they came to the same conclusions. How is that possible? Because the intelligence was provided by the Bush administration. They constantly tried to link Iraq to al Qaeda, which wasn't true. Then they tried to say that Iraq was building its weapons program by purchasing aluminum rods from Niger, which wasn't true. Then they tried to argue that they had mobile biological weapons facilities, which the U.N. reported was not the case. How did Iraq break its agreement with the U.N., anyway? That's what led up to this whole invasion business in the first place. They didn't provide "substantial" new material in the weapons inspector report, first of all. But couldn't that have been becuase there was nothing new to report? And then they had two missiles which were capable of going farther than allowed. Well, they destroyed those. When the U.N. came back that there was no proof of any weapons or nuclear program, how did Cheney respond? They're wrong. Yep, that's what he said on Meet the Press in March 2003: "I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong. And I think if you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency and this kind of issue, especially where Iraq's concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing." Sure, their track record may be true, but there can also be a very simple reason for it. If they come back without anything to report, it may be because Hussein hid it from them. But it may also be because there was nothing new to report. Sometimes the simple answer is the right one, as Occam would suggest.
Anyway, I don't understand why they won't come out and tell us that they were wrong. I thought Bush was close to doing that at one point last year, but then he found that his fight with the Democrats took all the pressure off of him and turned the attention to other silly matters.
What has this all led to? Well, besides a war in Iraq and a lot of death, it has led Dennis Kucinich to bring impeachment against Cheney. In a bizarre press conference this week, he said that Cheney should be impeached because of the lead-up to the Iraq war. Why not go after the President, himself? Well, because then Cheney would become president and you would just have to impeach another president. Wow, that's some craziness. In some ways, I think they have committed impeachable offenses, but it's ridiculous to try to pursue it. It's ridiculous because the Congress went along with the war and allowed it to happen. If they impeach the pres, then they have to impeach themselves.
So for the meantime, we just have to be outraged at both what the Bush administration did and how we all went along with it.
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