- WASHINGTON (UPI) --
Former White House Press secretary Scott McClellan is excoriated for stating
the obvious. The Iraq War, he writes in his memoirs titled "What Happened
in the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception," was
sold to the American people with a sophisticated "political propaganda
campaign." This, in turn, was designed to "manipulate public
opinion" in such a way as to downplay "the major reason for going
to war." Disinformation was an integral part of the process.
-
- How else does one explain that at one point 60 percent
of Americans believed the palpably fraudulent nonsense that Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein was behind Sept. 11? A gullible, manipulated public also
became convinced that Iraq was a mortal danger to the United States at
a time when two no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq , at a cost
of $11 billion a year, kept Saddam confined to his dirty little sandbox.
None of his neighbors was afraid of him. Nor were our European allies.
But the neocons kept beating the drums of war on U.S. television networks
with the fiction we were locked in an existential struggle with Iraq .
-
- As for the invasion of Iraq being the biggest strategic
blunder in U.S. history, as McClellan belatedly states, the same judgment
was rendered years ago by many prominent foreign policy experts, both Republican
and Democrat, namely John Whitehead, a Republican and former deputy secretary
of state; Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter;
Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Presidents Ford and Bush
41; and even former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had been hoodwinked
by fatally flawed intelligence provided by a pseudo Iraqi intelligence
operative who would only talk to Germans.
-
- Codenamed "Curveball," he was distrusted by
German interrogators when he told them about Saddam's WMD capabilities.
When the intelligence was passed on to U.S. counterparts, they shared German
skepticism. But it was handed to Powell by the CIA director, who had not
read the addendum on Curveball's dubious credentials. Thus, what was described
as "incontrovertible evidence" became the piece de resistance
in Powell's infamous U.N. speech of Feb. 5, 2003, six weeks before the
invasion.
-
- This reporter first heard about the inevitability of
war a year before the invasion at a party given by Dick Cheney -- "the
magic man," writes McClellan -- and his wife, Lynne, to celebrate
the publication of Chief of Staff Scooter Libby's paperback edition of
his book "The Apprentice."
-
- The capital's top neocons were on hand and convinced
dubious listeners war with Iraq was now inevitable. They were persuasive
when they corrected me for saying, "If there is a war " The
decision had been made for a shock-and-awe blitz against Saddam's Republican
Guard divisions, they said. "What about the U.N.?" I asked. That,
I was told, was the obligatory charade we had to go through for world public
opinion.
-
- So McClellan is correct when he writes senior administration
officials began a campaign in 2002 to "aggressively sell the war,"
even as he and other officials insisted all options were on the table.
Of course, it was a war of choice, not of necessity, as he writes. The
Bush administration's main motive for invading Iraq was to introduce "coercive
democracy."
-
- This motive originated in a controversial 1996 White
Paper titled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,"
which referred to Israel . It advised incoming Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu to repeal the Oslo agreements for a Palestinian solution, keep
Gaza and the West Bank under Israeli control, and establish democracy in
Iraq by overthrowing Saddam Hussein. Democracy in Iraq , said "Clean
Break," would be followed by similar regime changes in Syria and Iran
. Thus, Israel could begin to relax and look forward to real security for
the indefinite future.
-
- Among its principal authors were neocon theoreticians
Richard Perle, soon to be chairman of the Defense Policy Board; Douglas
Feith, who became undersecretary of defense for policy and was also in
charge of post-Iraq invasion planning; ad David Wurmser, who later joined
Feith's Pentagon team before his elevation to deputy assistant to Dick
Cheney for national security -- all superhawks on Iran as well.
-
- Feith also had a big bone to pick with President Bush.
His recently published memoir -- "War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon
at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism" -- charges Bush with confusing
and conflicting signals following the embarrassment of not finding any
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Bush then focused "almost exclusively
on the larger aim of promoting democracy." This new pitch, says Feith
in a Wall Street Journal op-ed adaptation of his book, "compounded
the damage to the president's credibility, (as he was seen) distancing
himself from the case he had made for removing (Saddam) from power."
-
- Feith points out that, beginning with his first major
Iraq speech before the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002, Bush delivered
nine major Iraq talks with 14 paragraphs per speech on Saddam's record
as an enemy, aggressor, tyrant and imminent danger, and only three paragraphs
on promoting Iraqi democracy. But from September 2003 to September 2004,
Feith says Bush gave 15 major speeches with an average of 11 paragraphs
per talk on democracy.
-
- "The stunning change," Feith added, "appeared
to confirm his critics' argument that the security rationale for the war
was at best an error, and at worst a lie."
-
- Scott McClellan's former White House colleagues feigned
sadness rather than anger on the tube and asked why he didn't speak up
when he was still on the government payroll. This lament studiously ignored
the fact that McClellan was not a policymaker and was in no position to
question what he was told to say at the daily White House press briefing.
His job was to take orders, not question them.
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- http://NEOCONZIONISTTHREAT.BLOGSPOT.COM
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- http://www.washtimes.com/news/2008/may/30/a-move-to-curb-capitalism/
-
- COMMENTARY: A move to curb capitalism?
-
- Arnaud de Borchgrave
- Friday, May 30, 2008
-
- Predatory lending in the housing market with two sets
of books coupled with oil speculators who buy black gold by the hundreds
of thousands of barrels a day (minimum buy on the Rotterdam spot market
is 1,000 barrels) and sit on it until they've made a pile, and many other
sleights of hand, are forcing America's airlines, once the envy of the
world, to look at Chapters 7, 11 or 12 of bankruptcy laws.
-
- Casualties are mounting as airlines face fuel bills $89
billion larger than last year. Airlines reckon they may lose $40 billion
this year, thrice the deficit recorded in 2001 after the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks. In less than a month, Australia 's Qantas twice announced
across-the-board fare increases, each time plus 4 percent, to pay for fuel.
American Airlines plans to reduce its U.S. flight capacity more than 10
percent in the fourth quarter. Passengers are already being charged from
$15 to $25 per bag and thousands of airline personnel are already laid
off.
-
- Republican oil billionaire Boone Pickens sees oil continuing
its upward climb to $150. Other handicappers put the ceiling at $200, and
double that again if hostilities break out between the U.S. and Iran .
-
- Outlandish executive compensation packages, a housing
bubble with some 57 varieties of spellbinding mortgages, ethanol and the
global food crisis, the erosion of the middle classes into the ranks of
the poor, all are driving mammon capitalism into bankruptcy. A paradigm
shift from bandit capitalism to democratic capitalism is in the making
with the objective of getting naked greed under control. Cassandras and
Pollyannas are battling it out with wet fingers to the wind over a full-blown
or mild recession.
-
- A few years ago, liberal philanthropist George Soros
dropped a bomb at the annual shindig of movers and shakers in Davos when
he said unfettered capitalism is the greatest danger to democracy. He should
know. On Black Wednesday, Sept. 16, 1992, Mr. Soros broke the Bank of England
by shorting more than $10 billion worth of pounds, cashing in on the Bank
of England's reluctance to either raise its interest rates or to float
sterling, and netted for himself $1.1 billion.
-
- Franklin D. Roosevelt's bogeyman was Big Business. Ronald
Reagan had Big Labor. And the 44th president is almost bound to have Big
Finance. A paradigm shift from unfettered to fettered appears to be in
the making. Democratic control of the White House and both houses of Congress
would quickly translate into more regulation.
-
- In Kevin Phillips' new book, "Bad Money: Reckless
Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis in American Capitalism,"
the former Republican Party strategist deals with the reckless expansion
of private debt as well as the federal budget deficit.
-
-
- Mr. Phillips is not alone these days when he sees U.S.
financial capitalism "at a pivotal period in the nation's history,
cavalierly ventured a multiple gamble: first, financializing a hitherto
more diversified U.S. economy; second, using massive quantities of debt
and leverage to do so; third, following up a stock market bubble with an
even larger housing and mortgage credit bubble; fourth, roughly quadrupling
U.S. credit market debt between 1987 and 2007, a scale of excess that historically
unwinds; and fifth, consummating these events with a mixed fireworks of
dishonesty, incompetence and quantitative negligence."
-
- This upheaval is probably the greatest story never told
and covers two decades from 1986 to 2006. The number of billionaires in
the world jumped from 350 before Sept. 11 to more than 1,000 today.
-
- The Republican renegade describes today's financial services
sector as "a grasping, gargantuan combination of banks, stockbrokers,
insurancemen, loan sharks, credit card issuers, hedge fund speculators,
securitization mavens and mortgage operators."
-
- Over the last five years, financial services have reached
a swollen 21 percent of U.S. GDP - the largest sector of the private economy.
With twin-war costs now well more than half a trillion dollars, and "Happy
Motoring" utopia running on empty, no one seemed to notice.
-
- Science may yet come to the rescue of democratic capitalism
- or make things worse. In South Korea , the RNL Bio company received the
first-ever commercial order for cloning. An American woman paid the company
$50,000 to clone her dead pit-bull terrier, Booger.
-
- In the United States, the world's most prominent scientists
and futurists met to assess how science could improve the human race over
the next two decades.
-
- Ray Kurzweil, America 's leading scientist-futurist ("The
Singularity is Near"), sees nanotechnology over the next 20 years
transmogrifying Homo sapiens with an upgrade. Mr. Kurzweil told the BBC,
"We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries
and interact directly with our biological neurons." The next level
up for Homo connect-us is known as transhumanism, first coined by Julian
Huxley (brother of Aldous who wrote "Brave New World"), who described
it as "man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new
possibilities of and for human nature."
-
- Nanotech scientist Eric Drexler agrees with Mr. Kurzweil
that we are on the brink of a new technological breakthrough, similar in
scope and significance to man's breakthrough to the industrial age.
-
- Soon, they say, nanotech will enable humankind to get
all the energy we need from solar power, and make 99 percent of illnesses
easily curable by specially designed nanobot antibodies that will hunt
down specific viruses in our blood and kill them, also to augment our reflexes,
our concentration, even our intelligence, with nano-implants in our bodies
and brains.
-
- The blog Global Dashboard, which is often ahead of the
scientific news curve, reports Francis Fukuyama is not writing about the
Future of History because he believes transhumanism "is the most dangerous
idea facing humanity." The new technology, he believes, would be more
available to rich individuals or rich societies, and thus might create
a "genetic overclass." And greed galore.
-
- Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington
Times and of United Press International.
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