It has long been known that the Bush White House plunged Iraq into bloody chaos for reasons that were no more than a tissue of lies. These ranged from allegations that Saddam was trying to source uranium from Niger to the existence of WMD capable of almost immediate deployment. What has until now not been apparent is how these falsehoods were created and by whom. This week, however, a report by the Pentagon’s watchdog, its inspector general, has been published. It shows that former US defense policy chief, Douglas Feith, manipulated already dubious intelligence in order to bolster the US case against Saddam. Specifically, Feith focused on an alleged meeting in Prague between a top Al-Qaeda operative and one of Saddam’s senior aides. This, he maintained, was proof positive of Saddam Hussein’s involvement with Osama Bin Laden and therefore by extension in the 9/11 attacks.
Other US intelligence sources, including the CIA, were at the time unsure that the Prague meeting had in fact ever taken place. Exhaustive checks have since turned those doubts into certainty. This point is made clear by the Pentagon watchdog. Yet the report goes no further than saying that Feith’s conclusions were “inappropriate.” In the restrained verbiage of Washington, and more particularly the Pentagon, those five-syllables could very well mean exactly the same as the simple monosyllable “lie.” The Big Bush Lie was that Saddam’s Iraq was a legitimate target in Washington’s war on terror. There was no real evidence against Iraq, so it was manufactured and Feith indeed appears to have been a key manufacturer.
It is probably significant that America’s generals have chosen this moment to reveal Feith’s dishonest contribution to the disastrous war into which they were plunged. It is no longer unpatriotic even for soldiers to declare the US involvement to be an ill-planned debacle. Control of Iraq’s oil, the lucrative rebuilding contracts, the once-heralded democracy and the luckless Iraqis themselves — none of them matters more now than being able to escape from America’s biggest blunder since Vietnam.
There is also a sense of rising anger among top Washington professionals, particularly in the State Department and the Pentagon, at the mendacity and arrogant incompetence of the Bush White House. The Feith revelations may prompt a drive to unmask more of those whose fabrications about Iraq and international terror actually came true — but only after the US invasion they falsely justified. We might well wonder if the trail of fabrications will extend all the way into the Oval Office and so produce cries for impeachment. Bush was surrounded by such individuals as Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. So much destruction, so many lives lost, so much fresh evil unleashed, so much waste and all because men such as Douglas Feith were prepared to make a case for invading Iraq where no genuine case existed.
