The life of the American conservative is a perpetual crisis of cognitive dissonance, especially when it comes to the run-up to the Iraq war. So three new stories this week are certain to cause right-wing minds to explode, or at least to seek the safe harbor of denial.
First came word of a new book from Rumsfeld aide Douglas Feith revealing that President Bush declared "war is inevitable" in December 2002, months before UN weapons inspectors produced their report on Iraq's WMD. Later this week, the Pentagon will release the results of its massive study of pre-war intelligence confirming that Saddam and Al Qaeda had no operational relationship. Last, the Senate Intelligence Committee will soon publish its long-delayed critique of the Bush administration's claims in the buildup to war with Iraq.
Little in Feith's upcoming book, War and Decision, appears new. His revelation about Bush's December 18, 2002 ultimatum merely confirmed the President's use of the UN as a PR smokescreen for the conflict to come. Even less surprising is Feith's finger-pointing at others, especially Colin Powell's State Department, the CIA, General Tommy Franks and Iraq viceroy L. Paul Bremer, for the calamity his own manipulation of intelligence helped produce. (After all, Powell aide Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson said of Feith "seldom in my life have I met a dumber man," while Franks deemed him simply "the f**king stupidest guy on the face of the earth.") Given the devastating February 2007 Inspector General's report on undersecretary Feith's "inappropriate" briefings and "unreliable" intelligence regarding the Al Qaeda-Iraq link, his 900 page score-settling tome due next month was inevitable.
And just in case there were any lingering doubts about Feith's fraud on the Saddam-Al Qaeda nexus during his tenure as Donald Rumsfeld's defense policy chief, his former colleagues at the Pentagon lay them to rest this week. As McClatchy detailed yesterday, the DoD study will confirm the findings of the 9/11 Commission:
An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.
The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam's regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.
The new study of the Iraqi regime's archives found no documents indicating a "direct operational link" between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.
Finally, the Senate Intelligence Committee is set to release - at long last - its findings on the administration's manipulation of pre-war intelligence. Held up for four years by former committee chairman Pat Roberts (R-KS), the Senate panel will examine of pre-Iraq war claims by President Bush and his administration intentionally left out of its "Phase I" report released prior to the 2004 election. (Despite the Committee's insistence that an investigation of White House misuses of pre-war intelligence not be part of the scope of Phase I, Roberts joined other GOP watercarriers in continuing to proclaim, "we interviewed over 250 analysts and we specifically asked them: 'Was there any political manipulation or pressure?' Answer: 'No.'")
As the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday, while the upcoming report likely won't go far enough in its assessments for partisans on either the left or the right, the Intel Committee conclusions will present more bad news for the Bush administration and its amen corner:
The long-delayed document catalogs dozens of prewar assertions by President Bush and other administration officials that proved to be wildly inaccurate about Iraq's alleged stockpiles of banned weapons and pursuit of nuclear arms.
But officials say the report reaches a mixed verdict on the key question of whether the White House misused intelligence to make the case for war.
The document criticizes White House officials for making assertions that failed to reflect disagreements or uncertainties in the underlying intelligence on Iraq, officials said. But the report acknowledges that many claims were consistent with intelligence assessments in circulation at the time.
Because of the nuanced nature of the conclusions, one congressional official familiar with the document said: "The left is not going to be happy. The right is not going to be happy. Nobody is going to be happy."
Judging from initial reactions to this latest wave of pre-Iraq war revelations, the discomfort of the right will likely be greater.
Reacting to the McClatchy story, the conservative Gateway Pundit experienced a complete a cognitive shutdown. In denial over the Pentagon story confirming the absence of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link before the war, this blogger in the last throes of cognitive dissonance could only pretend instead that McClatchy was denying the presence of Al Qaeda in Iraq today:
"Just when you thought that the mainstream media had hit rock bottom...McClatchy Newspapers reported today that there is no Al-Qaeda in Iraq..."
The vast cottage industry of right-wing politicians, pundits and authors, too, will have to confront facts completely at odds with their unshakable (and irredeemably wrong) narratives. Saddam-9/11 conspiracy theorist and Paul Wolfowitz favorite Laurie Mylroie will have to reconsider her entire body of work (for example, here and here). And 9/11-Iraq fabulist and Cheney biographer Stephen F. Hayes, author of the thoroughly discredited screed, The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America, might want to take another look at his notes.
In Hayes' case, unfortunately, those notes are the source of the problem. As ThinkProgress detailed, Hayes' thesis relied on Feith's invented Al Qaeda-Saddam connection, fabrications rejected by the Pentagon at the time - and ever since:
In 2003, Hayes declared "case closed" in an article purporting to show the links between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Cheney recommeneded it to the Rocky Mountain news as the premier source of information on the issue. ("[Y]ou ought to go look is an article that Stephen Hayes did in the Weekly Standard here a few weeks ago...That's your best source of information.") Hayes relied on a classified Defense Department memo produced by Douglas Feith. The Defense Department shot down Hayes' article, stating the Feith memo was "not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions."
It's no wonder hardcover copies of Hayes' book are available at Amazon for the eminently affordable price of 1 cent.
In 2006, Stephen Colbert famously summed up the conservative intellectual dilemma in what might be deemed Colbert's Law: "Reality has a well-known liberal bias." Confronted with a flood of inconvenient facts, the right-wing instead resorts (as the endless Cheney-Hayes-Feith loop above illustrates) to its own brand of circular logic.
With the torrent of pre-Iraq retrospective stories, expect another public bout of conservative cognitive dissonance.
** Crossposted at Perrspectives **
UPDATE: Here's a look back at President Bush's false statements on the Al Qaeda-Iraq connection.