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The
New Pentagon Papers |
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by
Karen Kwiatkowski |
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In July of last year,
after just over 20 years of service, I retired as a lieutenant colonel in the
U.S. Air Force. I had served as a communications officer in the field and in
acquisition programs, as a speechwriter for the National Security Agency
director, and on the Headquarters Air Force and the office of the secretary
of defense staffs covering African affairs. I had completed Air Command and
Staff College and Navy War College seminar programs, two master's degrees,
and everything but my Ph.D. dissertation in world politics at Catholic
University. I regarded my military vocation as interesting, rewarding and
apolitical. My career started in 1978 with the smooth seduction of a full
four-year ROTC scholarship. It ended with 10 months of duty in a strange new
country, observing up close and personal a process of decision making for war
not sanctioned by the Constitution we had all sworn to uphold. Ben Franklin's
comment that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia had
delivered "a republic, madam, if you can keep it" would come to
have special meaning. In the spring of 2002, I
was a cynical but willing staff officer, almost two years into my three-year
tour at the office of the secretary of defense, undersecretary for policy,
sub-Saharan Africa. In April, a call for volunteers went out for the Near East
South Asia directorate (NESA). None materialized. By May, the call
transmogrified into a posthaste demand for any staff officer, and I was
"volunteered" to enter what would be a well-appointed den of
iniquity. The education I would
receive there was like an M. Night Shyamalan movie -- intense, fascinating
and frightening. While the people were very much alive, I saw a dead
philosophy -- Cold War anti-communism and neo-imperialism -- walking the
corridors of the Pentagon. It wore the clothing of counterterrorism and spoke
the language of a holy war between good and evil. The evil was recognized by
the leadership to be resident mainly in the Middle East and articulated by
Islamic clerics and radicals. But there were other enemies within, anyone who
dared voice any skepticism about their grand plans, including Secretary of
State Colin Powell and Gen. Anthony Zinni. From May 2002 until
February 2003, I observed firsthand the formation of the Pentagon's Office of
Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the neoconservative capture of
the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This
seizure of the reins of U.S. Middle East policy was directly visible to many
of us working in the Near East South Asia policy office, and yet there seemed
to be little any of us could do about it. I saw a narrow and deeply
flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in the Pentagon used to
manipulate and pressurize the traditional relationship between policymakers
in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies. I witnessed
neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully
considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of
intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both
Congress and the executive office of the president. While this commandeering
of a narrow segment of both intelligence production and American foreign
policy matched closely with the well-published desires of the neoconservative
wing of the Republican Party, many of us in the Pentagon, conservatives and
liberals alike, felt that this agenda, whatever its flaws or merits, had
never been openly presented to the American people. Instead, the public story
line was a fear-peddling and confusing set of messages, designed to take Congress
and the country into a war of executive choice, a war based on false
pretenses, and a war one year later Americans do not really understand. That
is why I have gone public with my account. To begin with, I was
introduced to Bill Luti, assistant secretary of defense for NESA. A tall,
thin, nervously intelligent man, he welcomed me into the fold. I knew little
about him. Because he was a recently retired naval captain and now high-level
Bush appointee, the common assumption was that he had connections, if not
capability. I would later find out that when Dick Cheney was secretary of
defense over a decade earlier, Luti was his aide. He had also been a military
aide to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich during the Clinton years and had
completed his Ph.D. at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. While his
Navy career had not granted him flag rank, he had it now and was not shy
about comparing his place in the pecking order with various three- and
four-star generals and admirals in and out of the Pentagon. Name dropping
included references to getting this or that document over to Scooter, or
responding to one of Scooter's requests right away. Scooter, I would find out
later, was I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the vice president's chief of
staff. Co-workers who had
watched the transition from Clintonista to Bushite shared conversations and
stories indicating that something deliberate and manipulative was happening
to NESA. Key professional personnel, longtime civilian professionals holding
the important billets in NESA, were replaced early on during the transition.
Longtime officer director Joe McMillan was reassigned to the National Defense
University. The director's job in the time of transition was to help bring
the newly appointed deputy assistant secretary up to speed, ensure office
continuity, act as a resource relating to regional histories and policies,
and help identify the best ways to maintain course or to implement change.
Removing such a critical continuity factor was not only unusual but also seemed
like willful handicapping. It was the first signal of radical change. At the time, I didn't
realize that the expertise on Middle East policy was not only being removed,
but was also being exchanged for that from various agenda-bearing think
tanks, including the Middle East Media Research Institute, the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy, and the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs. Interestingly, the office director billet stayed vacant the
whole time I was there. That vacancy and the long-term absence of real
regional understanding to inform defense policymakers in the Pentagon
explains a great deal about the neoconservative approach on the Middle East
and the disastrous mistakes made in Washington and in Iraq in the past two
years. I soon saw the modus
operandi of "instant policy" unhampered by debate or experience
with the early Bush administration replacement of the civilian head of the
Israel, Lebanon and Syria desk office with a young political appointee from
the Washington Institute, David Schenker. Word was that the former
experienced civilian desk officer tended to be evenhanded toward the policies
of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, but there were complaints and he
was gone. I met David and chatted with him frequently. He was a smart,
serious, hardworking guy, and the proud author of a book on the chances for
Palestinian democracy. Country desk officers were rarely political
appointees. In my years at the Pentagon, this was the only
"political" I knew doing that type of high-stress and
low-recognition duty. So eager was the office to have Schenker at the Israel
desk, he served for many months as a defense contractor of sorts and only
received his "Schedule C" political appointee status months after I
arrived. I learned that there was
indeed a preferred ideology for NESA. My first day in the office, a GS-15
career civil servant rather unhappily advised me that if I wanted to be
successful here, I'd better remember not to say anything positive about the
Palestinians. This belied official U.S. policy of serving as an honest broker
for resolution of Israeli and Palestinian security concerns. At that time,
there was a great deal of talk about Bush's possible support for a
Palestinian state. That the Pentagon could have implemented and, worse, was
implementing its own foreign policy had not yet occurred to me. Throughout the summer,
the NESA spaces in one long office on the fourth floor, between the 7th and
8th corridors of D Ring, became more and more crowded. With war talk and planning
about Iraq, all kinds of new people were brought in. A politically savvy
civilian-clothes-wearing lieutenant colonel named Bill Bruner served as the
Iraq desk officer, and he had apparently joined NESA about the time Bill Luti
did. I discovered that Bruner, like Luti, had served as a military aide to
Speaker Gingrich. Gingrich himself was now conveniently an active member of
Bush's Defense Policy Board, which had space immediately below ours on the
third floor. I asked why Bruner wore
civilian attire, and was told by others, "He's Chalabi's handler."
Chalabi, of course, was Ahmad Chalabi, the president of the Iraqi National
Congress, who was the favored exile of the neoconservatives and the source of
much of their "intelligence." Bruner himself said he had to attend
a lot of meetings downtown in hotels and that explained his suits. Soon, in
July, he was joined by another Air Force pilot, a colonel with no discernible
political connections, Kevin Jones. I thought of it as a military-civilian
partnership, although both were commissioned officers. Among the other people
arriving over the summer of 2002 was Michael Makovsky, a recent MIT graduate
who had written his dissertation on Winston Churchill and was going to work
on "Iraqi oil issues." He was David Makovsky's younger brother.
David was at the time a senior fellow at the Washington Institute and had
formerly been an editor of the Jerusalem Post, a pro-Likud newspaper. Mike
was quiet and seemed a bit uncomfortable sharing space with us. He soon disappeared
into some other part of the operation and I rarely saw him after that. In late summer, new space
was found upstairs on the fifth floor, and the "expanded Iraq
desk," now dubbed the "Office of Special Plans," began moving
there. And OSP kept expanding. Another person I observed
to appear suddenly was Michael Rubin, another Washington Institute fellow
working on Iraq policy. He and Chris Straub, a retired Army officer who had
been a Republican staffer for the Senate Intelligence Committee, were eventually
assigned to OSP. John Trigilio, a Defense
Intelligence Agency analyst, was assigned to handle Iraq intelligence for
Luti. Trigilio had been on a one-year career-enhancement tour with the office
of the secretary of defense that was to end in August 2002. DIA had offered
him routine intelligence positions upon his return from his OSD sabbatical,
but none was as interesting as working in August 2002 for Luti. John asked
Luti for help in gaining an extension for another year, effectively removing
him from the DIA bureaucracy and its professional constraints. Trigilio and I had
hallway debates, as friends. The one I remember most clearly was shortly
after President Bush gave his famous "mushroom cloud" speech in
Cincinnati in October 2002, asserting that Saddam had weapons of mass
destruction as well as ties to "international terrorists," and was
working feverishly to develop nuclear weapons with "nuclear holy
warriors." I asked John who was feeding the president all the bull about
Saddam and the threat he posed us in terms of WMD delivery and his links to
terrorists, as none of this was in secret intelligence I had seen in the past
years. John insisted that it wasn't an exaggeration, but when pressed to say
which actual intelligence reports made these claims, he would only say,
"Karen, we have sources that you don't have access to." It was
widely felt by those of us in the office not in the neoconservatives' inner
circle that these "sources" related to the chummy relationship that
Ahmad Chalabi had with both the Office of Special Plans and the office of the
vice president. The newly named director
of the OSP, Abram Shulsky, was one of the most senior people sharing our
space that summer. Abe, a kindly and gentle man, who would say hello to me in
the hallways, seemed to be someone I, as a political science grad student,
would have loved to sit with over coffee and discuss the world's problems. I
had a clear sense that Abe ranked high in the organization, although
ostensibly he was under Luti. Luti was known at times to treat his staff,
even senior staff, with disrespect, contempt and derision. He also didn't
take kindly to staff officers who had an opinion or viewpoint that was off
the neoconservative reservation. But with Shulsky, who didn't speak much at the
staff meetings, he was always respectful and deferential. It seemed like
Shulsky's real boss was somebody like Douglas Feith or higher. Doug Feith,
undersecretary of defense for policy, was a case study in how not to run a
large organization. In late 2001, he held the first all-hands policy meeting
at which he discussed for over 15 minutes how many bullets and sub-bullets
should be in papers for Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A year later, in August of
2002, he held another all-hands meeting in the auditorium where he
embarrassed everyone with an emotional performance about what it was like to
serve Rumsfeld. He blithely informed us that for months he didn't realize
Rumsfeld had a daily stand-up meeting with his four undersecretaries. He
shared with us the fact that, after he started to attend these meetings, he
knew better what Rumsfeld wanted of him. Most military staffers and
professional civilians hearing this were incredulous, as was I, to hear of
such organizational ignorance lasting so long and shared so openly. Feith's
inattention to most policy detail, except that relating to Israel and Iraq,
earned him a reputation most foul throughout Policy, with rampant stories of
routine signatures that took months to achieve and lost documents. His poor
reputation as a manager was not helped by his arrogance. One thing I kept
hearing from those defending Feith was that he was "just
brilliant." It was curiously like the brainwashed refrain in "The
Manchurian Candidate" about the programmed sleeper agent Raymond Shaw,
as the "kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human being I've ever
known." I spent time that summer
exploring the neoconservative worldview and trying to grasp what was
happening inside the Pentagon. I wondered what could explain this rush to war
and disregard for real intelligence. Neoconservatives are fairly easy to
study, mainly because they are few in number, and they show up at all the
same parties. Examining them as individuals, it became clear that almost all
have worked together, in and out of government, on national security issues
for several decades. The Project for the New American Century and its now
famous 1998 manifesto to President Clinton on Iraq is a recent example. But
this statement was preceded by one written for Benyamin Netanyahu's Likud
Party campaign in Israel in 1996 by neoconservatives Richard Perle, David
Wurmser and Douglas Feith titled "A Clean Break: Strategy for Securing
the Realm." David Wurmser is the
least known of that trio and an interesting example of the tangled
neoconservative web. In 2001, the research fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute was assigned to the Pentagon, then moved to the Department of State
to work as deputy for the hard-line conservative undersecretary John Bolton,
then to the National Security Council, and now is lodged in the office of the
vice president. His wife, the prolific Meyrav Wurmser, executive director of
the Middle East Media Research Institute, is also a neoconservative team
player. Before the Iraq invasion,
many of these same players labored together for literally decades to push a
defense strategy that favored military intervention and confrontation with
enemies, secret and unconstitutional if need be. Some former officials, such
as Richard Perle (an assistant secretary of defense under Reagan) and James
Woolsey (CIA director under Clinton), were granted a new lease on life, a
renewed gravitas, with positions on President Bush's Defense Policy Board.
Others, like Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz, had apparently overcome previous
negative associations from an Iran-Contra conviction for lying to the
Congress and for utterly miscalculating the strength of the Soviet Union in a
politically driven report to the CIA. Neoconservatives march as
one phalanx in parallel opposition to those they hate. In the early winter of
2002, a co-worker U.S. Navy captain and I were discussing the service being
rendered by Colin Powell at the time, and we were told by the neoconservative
political appointee David Schenker that "the best service Powell could
offer would be to quit right now." I was present at a staff meeting when
Bill Luti called Marine Gen. and former Chief of Central Command Anthony
Zinni a "traitor," because Zinni had publicly expressed
reservations about the rush to war. After August 2002, the
Office of Special Plans established its own rhythm and cadence separate from
the non-politically minded professionals covering the rest of the region.
While often accused of creating intelligence, I saw only two apparent
products of this office: war planning guidance for Rumsfeld, presumably
impacting Central Command, and talking points on Iraq, WMD and terrorism.
These internal talking points seemed to be a mélange crafted from obvious
past observation and intelligence bits and pieces of dubious origin. They
were propagandistic in style, and all desk officers were ordered to use them
verbatim in the preparation of any material prepared for higher-ups and
people outside the Pentagon. The talking points included statements about
Saddam Hussein's proclivity for using chemical weapons against his own
citizens and neighbors, his existing relations with terrorists based on a
member of al-Qaida reportedly receiving medical care in Baghdad, his widely
publicized aid to the Palestinians, and general indications of an aggressive
viability in Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program and his ongoing efforts
to use them against his neighbors or give them to al-Qaida style groups. The
talking points said he was threatening his neighbors and was a serious threat
to the U.S., too. I suspected, from reading
Charles Krauthammer, a neoconservative columnist for the Washington Post, and
the Weekly Standard, and hearing a Cheney speech or two, that these talking
points left the building on occasion. Both OSP functions duplicated other
parts of the Pentagon. The facts we should have used to base our papers on
were already being produced by the intelligence agencies, and the war
planning was already done by the combatant command staff with some help from
the Joint Staff. Instead of developing defense policy alternatives and
advice, OSP was used to manufacture propaganda for internal and external use,
and pseudo war planning. As a result of my duties
as the North Africa desk officer, I became acquainted with the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) support staff for NESA. Every policy regional
director was served by a senior executive intelligence professional from DIA,
along with a professional intelligence staff. This staff channeled DIA
products, accepted tasks for DIA, and in the past had been seen as a valued
member of the regional teams. However, as the war approached, this type of
relationship with the Defense Intelligence Agency crumbled. Even the most casual
observer could note the tension and even animosity between "Wild
Bill" Luti (as we came to refer to our boss) and Bruce Hardcastle, our
defense intelligence officer (DIO). Certainly, there were stylistic and
personality differences. Hardcastle, like most senior intelligence officers I
knew, was serious, reserved, deliberate, and went to great lengths to achieve
precision and accuracy in his speech and writing. Luti was the kind of guy
who, in staff meetings and in conversations, would jump from grand theory to
administrative minutiae with nary a blink or a fleeting shadow of
self-awareness. I discovered that Luti
and possibly others within OSP were dissatisfied with Hardcastle's briefings,
in particular with the aspects relating to WMD and terrorism. I was not clear
exactly what those concerns were, but I came to understand that the DIA
briefing did not match what OSP was claiming about Iraq's WMD capabilities
and terrorist activities. I learned that shortly before I arrived there had
been an incident in NESA where Hardcastle's presence and briefing at a bilateral
meeting had been nixed abruptly by Luti. The story circulating among the desk
officers was "a last-minute cancellation" of the DIO presentation.
Hardcastle's intelligence briefing was replaced with one prepared by another
Policy office that worked nonproliferation issues. While this alternative
briefing relied on intelligence produced by DIO and elsewhere, it was not a
product of the DIA or CIA community, but instead was an OSD Policy
"branded" product -- and so were its conclusions. The message sent
by Policy appointees and well understood by staff officers and the defense
intelligence community was that senior appointed civilians were willing to
exclude or marginalize intelligence products that did not fit the agenda. Staff officers would
always request OSP's most current Iraq, WMD and terrorism talking points. On
occasion, these weren't available in an approved form and awaited Shulsky's
approval. The talking points were a series of bulleted statements, written
persuasively and in a convincing way, and superficially they seemed
reasonable and rational. Saddam Hussein had gassed his neighbors, abused his
people, and was continuing in that mode, becoming an imminently dangerous
threat to his neighbors and to us -- except that none of his neighbors or Israel
felt this was the case. Saddam Hussein had harbored al-Qaida operatives and
offered and probably provided them with training facilities -- without
mentioning that the suspected facilities were in the U.S./Kurdish-controlled
part of Iraq. Saddam Hussein was pursuing and had WMD of the type that could
be used by him, in conjunction with al-Qaida and other terrorists, to attack
and damage American interests, Americans and America -- except the
intelligence didn't really say that. Saddam Hussein had not been seriously
weakened by war and sanctions and weekly bombings over the past 12 years, and
in fact was plotting to hurt America and support anti-American activities, in
part through his carrying on with terrorists -- although here the
intelligence said the opposite. His support for the Palestinians and Arafat
proved his terrorist connections, and basically, the time to act was now.
This was the gist of the talking points, and it remained on message
throughout the time I watched the points evolve. But evolve they did, and
the subtle changes I saw from September to late January revealed what the
Office of Special Plans was contributing to national security. Two key types
of modifications were directed or approved by Shulsky and his team of
politicos. First was the deletion of entire references or bullets. The one I
remember most specifically is when they dropped the bullet that said one of
Saddam's intelligence operatives had met with Mohammad Atta in Prague,
supposedly salient proof that Saddam was in part responsible for the 9/11
attack. That claim had lasted through a number of revisions, but after the
media reported the claim as unsubstantiated by U.S. intelligence, denied by
the Czech government, and that Atta's location had been confirmed by the FBI
to be elsewhere, that particular bullet was dropped entirely from our
"advice on things to say" to senior Pentagon officials when they
met with guests or outsiders. The other change made to
the talking points was along the line of fine-tuning and generalizing. Much
of what was there was already so general as to be less than accurate. Some bullets were
softened, particularly statements of Saddam's readiness and capability in the
chemical, biological or nuclear arena. Others were altered over time to match
more exactly something Bush and Cheney said in recent speeches. One item I
never saw in our talking points was a reference to Saddam's purported attempt
to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger. The OSP list of crime and evil had
included Saddam's attempts to seek fissionable materials or uranium in
Africa. This point was written mostly in the present tense and conveniently
left off the dates of the last known attempt, sometime in the late 1980s. I
was surprised to hear the president's mention of the yellowcake in Niger in
his 2002 State of the Union address because that indeed was new and in theory
might have represented new intelligence, something that seemed remarkably
absent in any of the products provided us by the OSP (although not for lack
of trying). After hearing of it, I checked with my old office of Sub-Saharan
African Affairs -- and it was news to them, too. It also turned out to be
false. It is interesting today
that the "defense" for those who lied or prevaricated about Iraq is
to point the finger at the intelligence. But the National Intelligence
Estimate, published in September 2002, as remarked upon recently by former
CIA Middle East chief Ray McGovern, was an afterthought. It was provoked only
after Sens. Bob Graham and Dick Durban noted in August 2002, as Congress was
being asked to support a resolution for preemptive war, that no NIE
elaborating real threats to the United States had been provided. In fact, it
had not been written, but a suitable NIE was dutifully prepared and submitted
the very next month. Naturally, this document largely supported most of the
outrageous statements already made publicly by Bush, Cheney, Rice and
Rumsfeld about the threat Iraq posed to the United States. All the caveats,
reservations and dissents made by intelligence were relegated to footnotes
and kept from the public. Funny how that worked. Starting in the fall of
2002 I found a way to vent my frustrations with the neoconservative hijacking
of our defense policy. The safe outlet was provided by retired Col. David
Hackworth, who agreed to publish my short stories anonymously on his Web site
Soldiers for the Truth, under the moniker of "Deep Throat: Insider Notes
From the Pentagon." The "deep throat" part was his idea, but I
was happy to have a sense that there were folks out there, mostly military,
who would be interested in the secretary of defense-sponsored insanity I was
witnessing on almost a daily basis. When I was particularly upset, like when
I heard Zinni called a "traitor," I wrote about it in articles like
this one. In November, my Insider
articles discussed the artificial worlds created by the Pentagon and the
stupid naiveté of neocon assumptions about what would happen when we invaded
Iraq. I discussed the price of public service, distinguishing between public
servants who told the truth and then saw their careers flame out and those
"public servants" who did not tell the truth and saw their careers
ignite. My December articles became more depressing, discussing the history
of the 100 Years' War and "combat lobotomies." There was a painful
one titled "Minority Reports" about the necessity but unlikelihood
of a Philip Dick sci-fi style "minority report" on
Feith-Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Cheney's insanely grandiose vision of some future
Middle East, with peace, love and democracy brought on through preemptive war
and military occupation. I shared some of my
concerns with a civilian who had been remotely acquainted with the
Luti-Feith-Perle political clan in his previous work for one of the senior
Pentagon witnesses during the Iran-Contra hearings. He told me these guys
were engaged in something worse than Iran-Contra. I was curious but he
wouldn't tell me anything more. I figured he knew what he was talking about.
I thought of him when I read much later about the 2002 and 2003 meetings
between Michael Ledeen, Reuel Marc Gerecht and Iranian arms dealer Manucher
Ghorbanifar -- all Iran-Contra figures. In December 2002, I
requested an acceleration of my retirement to the following July. By now, the
military was anxiously waiting under the bed for the other shoe to drop amid
concerns over troop availability, readiness for an ill-defined mission, and
lack of day-after clarity. The neocons were anxiously struggling to get that
damn shoe off. That other shoe fell with a thump, as did the regard many of
us had held for Colin Powell, on Feb. 5 as the secretary of state capitulated
to the neoconservative line in his speech at the United Nations -- a speech
not only filled with falsehoods pushed by the neoconservatives but also containing
many statements already debunked by intelligence. War is generally crafted
and pursued for political reasons, but the reasons given to the Congress and
to the American people for this one were inaccurate and so misleading as to
be false. Moreover, they were false by design. Certainly, the
neoconservatives never bothered to sell the rest of the country on the real
reasons for occupation of Iraq -- more bases from which to flex U.S. muscle
with Syria and Iran, and better positioning for the inevitable fall of the
regional ruling sheikdoms. Maintaining OPEC on a dollar track and not a euro
and fulfilling a half-baked imperial vision also played a role. These more
accurate reasons for invading and occupying could have been argued on their
merits -- an angry and aggressive U.S. population might indeed have supported
the war and occupation for those reasons. But Americans didn't get the chance
for an honest debate. President Bush has now
appointed a commission to look at American intelligence capabilities and will
report after the election. It will "examine intelligence on weapons of
mass destruction and related 21st century threats ... [and] compare what the
Iraq Survey Group learns with the information we had prior..." The
commission, aside from being modeled on failed rubber stamp commissions of
the past and consisting entirely of those selected by the executive branch,
specifically excludes an examination of the role of the Office of Special
Plans and other executive advisory bodies. If the president or vice president
were seriously interested in "getting the truth," they might
consider asking for evidence on how intelligence was politicized, misused and
manipulated, and whether information from the intelligence community was
distorted in order to sway Congress and public opinion in a narrowly
conceived neoconservative push for war. Bush says he wants the truth, but it
is clear he is no more interested in it today than he was two years ago. Proving that the truth is
indeed the first casualty in war, neoconservative member of the Defense
Policy Board Richard Perle called this February for "heads to
roll." Perle, agenda setter par excellence, named George Tenet and
Defense Intelligence Agency head Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby as guilty of failing
to properly inform the president on Iraq and WMD. No doubt, the intelligence
community, susceptible to politicization and outdated paradigms, needs
reform. The swiftness of the neoconservative casting of blame on the
intelligence community and away from themselves should have been fully
expected. Perhaps Perle and others sense the grave and growing danger of
political storms unleashed by the exposure of neoconservative lies.
Meanwhile, Ahmad Chalabi, extravagantly funded by the neocons in the Pentagon
to the tune of millions to provide the disinformation, has boasted with
remarkable frankness, "We are heroes in error," and, "What was
said before is not important." Now we are told by our
president and neoconservative mouthpieces that our sons and daughters,
husbands and wives are in Iraq fighting for freedom, for liberty, for justice
and American values. This cost is not borne by the children of Wolfowitz,
Perle, Rumsfeld and Cheney. Bush's daughters do not pay this price. We are
told that intelligence has failed America, and that President Bush is
determined to get to the bottom of it. Yet not a single neoconservative
appointee has lost his job, and no high official of principle in the
administration has formally resigned because of this ill-planned and
ill-conceived war and poorly implemented occupation of Iraq. Will Americans hold U.S.
policymakers accountable? Will we return to our roots as a republic,
constrained and deliberate, respectful of others? My experience in the
Pentagon leading up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq tells me, as Ben
Franklin warned, we may have already failed. But if Americans at home are
willing to fight -- tenaciously and courageously -- to preserve our republic,
we might be able to keep it. Karen Kwiatkowski now
lives in western Virginia on a small farm with her family, teaches an
American foreign policy class at James Madison University, and writes
regularly for militaryweek.com on security and defense issues. |