W's MD

The May 9 edition of The New Yorker features Jeffrey Goldberg's profile of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. The article focuses on the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq and Feith's assertions that, while all did not go according to plan, things aren't as disastrous as they seem. When asked directly if "the Administration was too enamored of the idea that Iraqis would greet American troops with flowers," Feith made an astounding proclamation: "They had flowers in their minds."

How Feith is able to know this is anyone's guess. I certainly don't presume to know what the Iraqis "had in their minds" but I suspect it was a mixture of things far less concrete than flowers--confusion, fear and uncertainty, for starters. Add that slurry to Feith's probably accurate observation that many Iraqis "were still too intimidated by [Baath Party remnants]" and it becomes pretty hard to justify his gee-whiz-war-is-bad dismissal of people who say his office failed and Iraq is, in fact, a fearful, uncertain and confused mess. One should also note that the very intimidation factor Feith mentions was not only predictable but quite possibly quantifiable. Of course, that's assuming the Administration gave two figs whether Iraq was stablized at all, let alone quickly. As it has become abundantly clear in the past two weeks, BushCo and his British allies seemed less concerned with any threat posed by Iraq than with how soon they could accelerate the timetable for invading under any pretense:

"The top-level government memo marked "SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL," dated eight months before Bush sent us into Iraq, following a closed meeting with the President, reads, "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." (Greg Palast, writing for Buzzflash)

Back to Feith's comments in the New Yorker:

"The main rationale was not based on intelligence. It was known to anyone who read newspapers and knew history. Saddam had used nerve gas, he had invaded his neighbors more than once, he had attacked other neighbors, he was hostile to us, he supported numerous terrorist groups. It's true that he didn't have a link that we know of to 9/11.... But he did give safe haven to terrorists....

I don't think the rationale hinged on the existence of stockpiles.... There's a certain revisionism in people looking back and identifying the main intelligence error and then saying our entire policy was built on error."

Feith's logic is completely circular. It doesn't matter so much that the intelligence was in error. It's that it was presented as fact--yellow cake, aluminum tubes, mobile bioweapons labs--and sutured with egregious fearmongering--condi rice's famous "smoking gun/mushroom cloud", powell's speech to the UN Security Council, Judith Miller's precious, unsubstantiated reporting for the NY Times.

Palast: "The memo, uncovered this week by the Times, goes on to describe an elaborate plan by George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to hoodwink the planet into supporting an attack on Iraq knowing full well the evidence for war was a phony....

Here's more. 'Bush had made up his mind to take military action. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.'

Really? But Mr. Bush told us, 'Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.'"

It seems Mr. Feith is the one doing the revising. Goldberg writes: "The case against Iraq, [Feith] argues today, was only partly about WMD."

Chillingly, it would appear that the invasion of Iraq hinged not on oil alone, or spreading democracy, or removing a brutal dictator. Not WMD, but W's MD. Making war for the sake of war. And it seems it's the Bush administration who sleep peacefully at night, with flowers in their minds.

With no end in sight, the draining Iraq War has already trumped much of the rest of the Bush administration's aggressive foreign policy (especially in Asia) and has left the administration thoroughly distracted when it comes to whole regions of the world. As Chris Nelson of the Washington-insider Nelson Report put matters this week:

"All this by way of saying that we can now see even more clearly than before the import of Secretary of State Condi Rice's extraordinary interview last week in the Wall Street Journal. The former Soviet expert repeatedly made clear that the entire focus of Bush Administration policy is and will continue to be on the Middle East. All responsibility for coming up with a solution to the North Korea problem Rice cheerfully consigned to China."

The war in Iraq has also left the Middle East increasingly destabilized; oil prices on the rise; the dollar undermined; and the U.S. military desperately overstretched, if not incapable of dealing with other major global challenges. No wonder the President clutched the hand of Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah the other day down in Crawford. He needs whatever help he can get.

Tom Dispatch