by
Juan Cole
I teach
a lot of 18-year-olds, so I am keenly aware that a whole generation
has come up that did not live through the Bush propaganda campaign
against Iraq of 2002-2003. And, of course, a lot of people who did
live through it have forgotten its details or how complicit corporate
media were in amplifying the campaign. That is, the charge against
social media today that it reinforces extremism by its algorithms
could be equally well laid against elements of the U.S. press
throughout history. Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst may
have not said things like, “You supply the photos, I’ll supply
the war,” but they certainly behaved that way in propagandizing for
the shameless Spanish-American War. Bill Keller at The New York Times
was their 21st century successor.
Here is
how the 2003 war was gotten up against Iraq.
1)
Conspiratorial groups were formed, like the Project for a New
American Century (PNAC), which included then Halliburton CEO Dick
Cheney and Israel lobby uber-hawks like Bill Kristol, Bob Kagan, Paul
Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams and Frank Gaffney, who were known as
neoconservatives because they had been Blue Dog Democrats but
switched to Reaganism when they assessed that there were no
Democratic jobs in government to be had for a long time after 1981.
The Project for a New American Century and other cells began trying
to put pressure on the Clinton administration to take a belligerent
stand against Iraq, in hopes of provoking an Iraqi counterstrike that
could then escalate. They used their contacts among billionaires like
Rupert Murdoch, to enlist his media, and worked their people in
Congress against the president. Kristol is now trying out for
Conscience of the Nation because he dislikes Trump.
2) Other
governments were enlisted. A 1996 white paper, “A Clean Break,”
was prepared by neoconservatives for incoming Israeli prime minister
Binyamin Netanyahu that urged getting up a war on Iraq, re-installing
the Hashemite monarchy there, and then using the Hashemites to
influence Lebanon’s Shiites toward a more pro-Israeli stance.
Completely weird and unbalanced proposals are not the exclusive
province of Trump.
3)
Expatriate Iraqis were enlisted for dirty tricks and disinformation
campaigns. Someone called “Curveball” was given to German
intelligence, who appear to have fallen for him. Ahmad Chalabi,
angling to come back to Iraq as its U.S.-installed supreme leader,
misled journalists, intelligence officials, State Department
officials, Congress and virtually anyone he could get hold of.
Chalabi once made doggerel verse to insult me, which means I did my
job in exposing him. Multiple disinformation modes were established
for various Western intel agencies, so that they all reported these
sketchy allegations about an Iraqi nuclear and biological weapons
program that did not exist.
4) Once
Bush came to power, members of the cell like Douglas Feith (someone
with ties to Israeli settlers and ideologically aligned with the
Israeli Likud Party) were put in positions of power in the government
and used their position to establish intragovernmental black ops
units like the Office of Special Plans. Since the CIA and State
Department often filtered out the wilder intel reports they were
being fed by the expatriate operatives, Feith had his people go back
through the raw intelligence and cherry-pick the planted reports,
then illegally briefed them to the rest of the U.S. government. I was
widely attacked by the neocons for saying that having a Likudnik as
the third man at the Pentagon was a nightmare for U.S. national
security, and for pointing out that an acolyte of Slobodan Milosevic
being given such a position would likewise be troubling. Not sure, in
light of all we know, why that should have been a controversial
statement.
5) PNAC
and other hawks pressured Clinton to bomb Iraq in 1998. Clinton told
U.N. weapons inspectors to withdraw before the strikes. They were
never sent back in. The U.S, press, whether from incompetence or
malice or being secretly bribed, continually thereafter said that
Saddam “kicked out” the inspectors, which was an unadorned
falsehood. Having deprived Iraq of active inspectors who could serve
as on-the-ground eyewitnesses that there were no weapons programs,
the Iraq war hawks were in a much better position to do propaganda.
6) The
Iraq War clique glommed on to George W. Bush, especially once the
latter unwisely made Cheney vice president, and inserted themselves
into the 10 key political positions in his government, then gradually
pushed him toward a war.
7) The
neoconservatives and others who wanted to break Iraq’s legs blamed
the al-Qaida attacks of Sept. 11 on the secular socialist
anti-fundamentalist government of the Iraqi Baath Party, and managed
to convince most Americans of the completely ridiculous charge.
8) They
made a case for regime change over Iraq’s human rights record or
its regional role, though countries like Saudi Arabia or Israel with
similar profiles were exempted from criticism.
9) Bush,
Condi Rice, Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld tried to scare Americans [by
saying] that Saddam was two years or less from having an atomic bomb
(he had no program). This campaign convinced Congress to vote for a
war.
Why
these networks were so invested in an attack on Iraq isn’t clear.
The neoconservatives were probably just acting as capos for the Likud
Party, breaking the legs of a rival gang in the Middle East. Cheney
and his oil circles likely wanted to lift congressional sanctions on
Iraqi petroleum and do bids on Iraqi fields (this was before
fracking). Evangelicals wanted to open Iraq as a mission field,
fondly imagining that the Shiites of Najaf had been yearning to
return to the Christianity Iraqis largely abandoned during the first
four centuries of Muslim rule, from the seventh through the 11th
centuries. The military-industrial complex wanted to make and sell
large numbers of weapons and bombs. Various groups had their own
motives and they all came together around Cheney.
I
probably don’t need to say that people like John Bolton who were
part of the original plot have reemerged, or that the People’s
Jihadi Organization (MEK) is an Iranian cell that is playing the role
of Chalabi and has Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Rudy Giuliani and others in
its back pocket. It has strong connections to Israeli intelligence. I
don’t need to point out that Iran is being maneuvered into
expelling U.N. inspectors so that a propaganda campaign can be waged.
The United Arab Emirates, part of the current plot, even had its
house organ Alarabiya do a “documentary” monstrously alleging
that Iran was behind 9/11.
The
stage is set.
Source,
links:
Comments
Post a Comment