Former Bush strategist Karl Rove, on MSNBC last week:
It [was] a worldwide consensus. You can go back and try and rewrite history, but at that moment we as a nation were faced with the belief that [Iraq] had WMD.
The show's host, Matt Lauer, did not act simply as a promotional talking parrot for all of Rove's revisionism. Thus, the extreme far right "Media Research Center" described Lauer as having "assaulted" Rove. That is, pointing out discrepancies between specious claims and the facts, as a journalist actually asking questions, is, according to the Media Research Center "an assault." Here's the claim, and the actual interview.
Regarding Rove's claim: One of the main reasons why 3 out of the 5 permanent members of the U.N. Security Council explicitly voted no on authorization to use military force for the enforcement of U.N. Resolutions regarding potential Iraq WMDs, was because of the belief that Iraq may not in fact possess WMD's. In other words, no "world wide consensus," as Rove asserts.
Just prior to the October 9,2002 Senate Vote on the U.S. Resolution authorizing the use of force to rid Iraq of WMDs, Senator John Kerry said on the floor of the Senate:
“In order to force inspections, you need the [real] threat of force.”Kerry, then, verbatim, again just before said vote, clearly stated: “Let me be clear, the vote I will give to the President is for one reason and one reason only: To disarm Iraq of WMDs, if we can not [achieve this through] ….inspections in joint concert with our allies.”
Prior to Kerry's speech, it had been four years since weapons inspectors had been in Iraq. Moreover, inspections prior to that had for years been considered non probative because with no real threat of force Iraq had not cooperated. As a result, almost every single intelligence agency report noted that our beliefs about Iraq WMDs were assumptions rendered “in the absence of credible data.”
After Kerry argued that the resolution was necessary in order to force legitimate inspections, weapons inspectors, on November 27, 2002 went back in Iraq and were able to conduct real, viable inspections, for the first time in numerous years. And as reported (albeit very meekly) in both the Washington Post and the NY Times, inspectors were not finding anything, and were unequivocally saying to “wait" and let them finish their jobs.
There was some skepticism even before the inspectors went back in. England's leading newspaper, the Guardian, reported three days after the October 9, 2002 Senate vote on the U.S. resolution that Soviet President Vladimir Putin, for instance, "rejected Anglo-American claims that Saddam Hussein already possesses weapons of mass destruction and told Tony Blair [the day before] that the best way to resolve the conflict of evidence is not war, but the return of UN inspectors to Iraq." Putin:
Fears are one thing, hard facts are another.
Some inspectors, who had the best angle on this information, claimed after going back to Iraq that the Bush Administration was not sharing its alleged "intelligence information" on Iraq with the very people charged with finding proof of it. For example, as the conservative London Times reported on December 6, 2002, Demetrius Perrico (who later succeeded Hans Blix as head of the U.N. Inspection Commission), frustrated at not finding anything after more than a week in Iraq and lack of Bush Administration "information," stated:
What we’re getting and what President Bush may be getting is very different, to put it mildly.
On the most hyped up charges, there was even more doubt:
In a December 8, 2002 aired interview with Bob Simon of CBS's 60 Minutes, physicist David Albright, a leading weapons inspector in Iraq in the 1990s, had the following exchange with Simon:
SIMON: It seems that what you're suggesting is that the administration's leak to the New York Times, regarding aluminum tubes, was misleading?
ALBRIGHT: Oh, I think it was. I think -- I think it was very misleading.
SIMON: So basically what you're saying is that whatever nugget of information comes across, the Bush administration puts it in a box labeled 'nuclear threat,' whereas it could go many other places.
ALBRIGHT: That's how it looked, and that they were selectively picking information to bolster a case that the Iraqi nuclear threat was more imminent than it is, and in essence, scare people.
And as Joby Warrick reportedin a January 23, 2003 front page Washington Post story:
Moreover, there were clues from the beginning that should have raised doubts about claims that the tubes were part of a secret Iraqi nuclear weapons program, according to U.S. and international experts on uranium enrichment.
By the time of the last inspection report in early March, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency reported to the Security Council that there was no evidence encountered of renewed nuclear programs or that Iraq had attempted to import Uranium since 1990, while again noting "inspections in Iraq are moving forward."
Once inspectors were back in Iraq and with the credible threat of force backing up their actions were allowed to do their job for the first time in many years, the results were little short of remarkable in contrast with the almost old Soviet style revisionism being played out now (and that for the most part the media has mildly enabled, never covering the issue properly (see second half of this letter to Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald on the characterization and history of the run up to the Iraq war, for example), by far right wing elements in America. Inspectors simply were not finding evidence of any relevant WMDs, and were repeatedly saying "wait" on any military action and to let them finish their jobs.
On February 20, 2003, in a followup to Perricos' claim that the Bush administration was asserting one thing and repeatedly sharing another, CBS reported that:
So frustrated have the inspectors become that one source has referred to the U.S. intelligence they've been getting as "garbage after garbage after garbage." [In fact, the CBS article notes that the source used another, cruder word, in addition to "garbage."]
The CBS story also reported that while only the votes of the 5 permanent members of the Security Council matter (3 of whom ultimately voted against authorization on precisely these grounds), that a "majority of the 15 council members are opposed to war at least until U.N. weapons inspectors report in mid-March." (After the March 7 report -- the last of five reports to the UN Security Council between December 19 and the initiation of military action -- which offered nothing new in the way of new information or evidence of relevant weapons programs and noted the need to continue the process, the status did not change.)
On March 16, 3 days before the U.S. under the Bush Administration initiated military action, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post reported:
.....Senior intelligence analysts say they feel caught between the demands from White House, Pentagon and other government policymakers for intelligence that would make the administration's case "and what they say is a lack of hard facts," one official said. ...
As Hans Blix, the head of the Inspections team in Iraq, later noted:
In January 2003, we had performed quite a lot of inspections to sites which were given by intelligence and they had not shown any weapons of mass destruction, so we began to be doubtful. And among the 700 inspections that we performed, none brought us any evidence of weapons of mass destruction.
Weapons inspectors who are criticizing U.S. leads as "garbage," who are repeatedly saying to "wait," who are stating that while they can not be certain of everything yet they can not find much of significance to support the claim of WMD programs, multiple member contries of the U.N. Security Council who were skeptical, including three of five members who voted no against military action to enforce resolution 1441 (which had passed by a 15-0 vote) on the grounds that it was not clear that Iraq even had WMD's, hardly sounds like a "worldwide" consensus.
After botching the real story -- including most notably that of falsely alleged John "Iraq flip flopping" Kerry for years (again, see second half here); is the main stream media going to stand by now and allow leading national spin that approaches pure pre-Soviet collapse revisionism right here in our own country?
Frank Rich, in Saturday's New York Times, comments on the dismal state of affairs that has far right wing elements now trying to literally rewrite American history based upon not upon the facts, but upon pure, unadulterated and highly misleading political spin and propaganda:
Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove’s memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine invented by Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz and the inevitable William Kristol. This gang’s rewriting of history knows few bounds. To hear them tell it, 9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton’s fault that it retroactively happened while he was still in office.
For more on how militant Keep America Safe is, consider their ad impugning Department of Justice officials as terrorist sympathizers, only one step removed from the wacky, radical theories of years yore that accused the Bush Administration of knowing about, if not being complicit in, the 9-11 attacks before hand. Obama Green Jobs advisor Van Jones was forced to resign from office for allegedly signing a petition (that he later disavowed) that was not nearly so radical as that.
Also consider the false propaganda like argument that the incoming administration was without blame with respect to the the events of September 11, 2001, while the prior administration (along with their top counter terrorism expert holdover -- which severely and repeatedly tried to warn the new, incoming administration about the threat (to, of course, repeatedly deaf ears), bears of course all the responsibility. But the reality is:
September 11 did not come out of the blue, but came less a year after the bombing of the USS Cole killing 17 America Sailors; less than 10 months after the outgoing National Security Advisor personally met with incoming NSA head Condi Rice to tell her that the Bush Administration would be spending “more time specifically…on al-Qaeda, than any other subject;” less than eight months after Richard Clarke urgently requested a principals level meeting to discuss the al-Qaeda threat (which never met, despite subsequent requests); less than two months after a President’s Daily Briefwarning of the severe and growing threat of Al-Qaeda; and less than eight months after Paul Bremer (later Bush’s Ambassador to Iraq) actually warned:
The new administration seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism. What they will do is stagger along until there’s a major incident and then suddenly say, ‘Oh, my God, shouldn’t we be organized to deal with this?
In fact, not only did September 11 not come “out of the blue,” it came on the heels of an absolutely startling record of issue avoidance and lack of relevant awareness.
Rich suggests; "the old regime’s attack squads are relentless and shameless," and correctly concludes, "History will be repeated not only if we forget it, but also if we let it be rewritten by those whose ideological zealotry and boneheaded decisions have made America less safe to this day."
Whatever one thinks about the multitude of strategic international decisions and statements by the Bush Administration, one thing is certain. Just as "secrecy, and a free, democratic government don't mix," as former President Harry Truman once put it, abject revisionism history, and free democracies, ultimately don't either.
(Cross posted at NewsAffair.Org)