Peace Pundit

Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellen, in his new book, accuses the Bush Administration of selling the Iraq war to the American people with carefully crafted propaganda, much of it delivered to the press by McClellan himself. This aspect of the book is summarized in a recent Washington Post article (excerpted below).

Ex-Press Aide Writes That Bush Misled US on Iraq

Michael D. Shear
Washington Post, 28 May 2008

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes in a new memoir that the Iraq war was sold to the American people with a sophisticated “political propaganda campaign” led by President Bush and aimed at “manipulating sources of public opinion” and “downplaying the major reason for going to war.”

McClellan includes the charges in a 341-page book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” that delivers a harsh look at the White House and the man he served for close to a decade.

…

McClellan stops short of saying that Bush purposely lied about his reasons for invading Iraq, writing that he and his subordinates were not “employing out-and-out deception” to make their case for war in 2002.

But in a chapter titled “Selling the War,” he alleges that the administration repeatedly shaded the truth and that Bush “managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option.”

“Over that summer of 2002,” he writes, “top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war…. In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president’s advantage.”

McClellan, once a staunch defender of the war from the podium, comes to a stark conclusion, writing, “What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.”

…

[View Entire Article]

Today the NY Times ran a story asserting that the Democrats plan to “defy” the Bush Administration by attaching restrictions on torture, veterans’ benefits, and domestic unemployment funding to a war-funding bill Bush requested. The claim is that if Bush wants his war money, he will have to accept the attached measures as well. [Read NYT Story]

This is a lame attempt by the Democrats to make it seem that they are standing up to Bush, when in fact they are giving Bush all the war-funding he wants through the end of his term, and even several months into the next President’s administration.

Truly standing up to Bush would mean ending all funding for his occupation of Iraq (let’s not call it a war). The Democrats claim that they cannot simply stop all war funding because:

• it would put the troops at risk,
• it would make them look weak on defense in an election year, and
• they don’t have enough of a majority to override a presidential veto.

These are false excuses.

Cutting off funding would not put the troops at risk. The troops are already at risk in Iraq: 4075 have died and about 35 die every month they remain in Iraq. Cutting off funding would require bringing the troops home, away from risk. If Bush, as Commander in Chief, left the troops in Iraq without funding, he — not the Democrats — would be the one putting the troops at risk. Congress cutting off funds is how the Vietnam debacle ended, and is how the Iraq debacle should be ended.

Second, cutting off funding would not make the Democrats look weak in an election year. On the contrary; it would finally make them look strong! It would show that they have a spine. It would also express the will of the U.S. electorate: over seventy five percent of voters — of all political persuasions — want the U.S. out of Iraq. Yes, a few right-wing militarists, fundamentalist anti-Muslim wing-nuts, and oil-grabbing neo-cons want the U.S. to occupy Iraq forever, but they are such a tiny minority that they should simply be ignored, just as the U.S. ignored right-wingers who wanted the U.S. to side with Hitler against Stalin in WWII.

Third, the lack of a veto-proof majority is no excuse for continuing to fund the war. To exercise his veto, Bush must have something to veto. Congress should simply not send Bush any more war-funding bills, giving Bush nothing to veto.

Please, call your Democratic Representative today and ask — no, tell — her or him to stop funding the continued U.S. occupation of Iraq. No more war funding! Bring our troops home!

Find your representative’s phone number using this directory or the official directory of congress. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s phone numbers are: SF Office: 415/556-4862; DC Office: (202) 225-4965

Then We Have the Clueless Repubs

The Republicans deserve even more scorn than the Democrats. They attack the extra appropriations the Democrats have attached to the war-funding bill as “unnecessary”. They, like Bush, want the Democrats to pass the war-funding by itself and then separately request the other funding… which Bush would of course veto. In their twisted view, $70 billion in veterans’ education and domestic spending is wasteful, whereas $108 billion in war-funding is prudent and necessary.

Republicans need to learn the difference between an investment and an expense. When I blow $100 on a fancy dinner, that’s an expense. When I put $100 into my child’s education or double-pane windows on my house, that’s an investment that will yield a return.

Money for veterans’ education is an investment. The return is a more productive workforce and a higher living standard.

In contrast, almost all money spent on war is an expense. There is very little, if any, return on it. Aircraft, vehicles, and weapons costing millions of dollars are destroyed on a daily basis (ironically, they are called “durable goods” by economists).

The Iraq occupation is a particularly strong example of money thrown down a rat-hole: not only is Iraq in worse shape than it was before the U.S. invaded, the U.S. and the world are in worse shape too. Tens of thousands of our troops have been killed or wounded physically and psychically, reducing our nation’s productivity. Millions of Iraqis have been killed or wounded, and Iraq’s infrastructure is destroyed, creating lasting simmering hostility and destroying any chance of economic and political stability.

The Republicans want to throw more good money — and lives — down that stinking rat-hole?

Republicans accuse the Democrats of being “tax and spend liberals”. A good label for the Republicans is “borrow and blow”: they spend money we don’t have on expenses that have no return value, putting us in hock as a nation, depressing the dollar in world markets, and driving down our domestic economy.

The Republicans need to admit that Bush, even though he is from their party, is the worst President in U.S. history, and that almost nothing he has initiated deserves to be continued. John McCain, take note.

Related Previous PeacePundit Posts

• House Dems Assembling Biggest Iraq Spending Bill
• Sanders: Why the Democrats Aren’t Stopping the Iraq War
• Cuomo: Bush Doesn’t Have Authority to Declare War
• Cheney on Why Invading Iraq Would Be a Bad Idea
• Delusional or Liars? You Be The Judge
• One Day of Iraq War = $720 million

Just after uploading a blog-post summarizing an economist’s recent analysis of the costs of the Iraq War (see previous post, below), I read an extremely disappointing story on the front page of today’s SF Chronicle. Below are excerpts and a link to the story, followed by my letter to the Chronicle, which they printed on May 1 (Mayday).

SF Chronicle, 28 April 2008

House Dems Assembling Biggest Iraq Spending Bill

Zachary Coile, Chronicle Washington Bureau

Washington DC — House Democratic leaders are putting together the largest Iraq war spending bill yet, a measure … expected to fund the war through the end of the Bush presidency and for nearly six months into the next president’s term.

The bill … signals that Democrats are resigned to the fact they can’t change course in Iraq in the final months of President Bush’s term. Instead, the party is pinning its hopes of ending the war on winning the White House in November.

…

The bill is expected to provide $108 billion that the White House has requested for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lawmakers … drafting it say it … will include a … bridge fund of $70 billion to give the new president several months of breathing room …

…

View Entire Article

Printed in San Francisco Chronicle, May 1, 2008

Editor,

It is almost unbelievable that House Democrats are preparing to give President Bush the war funding he seeks for the remainder of his term ["House Dems Assembling Biggest Iraq Spending Bill", April 28].

In the last congressional election, the Democrats asked progressives to work to help them retake Congress. They promised they would end the Iraq war once in the majority. We walked precincts, registered voters, staffed get-out-the-vote phone banks, raised funds. The Democrats won the majority.

What have they done with that majority? Kowtowed to the Bush regime. Behaved as if they were still the minority party. Caved in to conservative members of their own party who wrongly claim that cutting off war funding would make them look “weak on security”.

Apparently, helping elect Democrats isn’t working as a strategy to end the war.

Yo, Speaker Pelosi, listen up: end this war pronto or you’ll lose our support. We won’t be fooled again.

Jeff Johnson
PeacePundit.com

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-laureate economist and former World Bank President, has analyzed the cost of the Iraq War. His analysis makes several points that war critics have been making since before the war was launched:

• The war has cost the US 50-60 times more than the Bush administration predicted.
• The Bush administration continues to grossly underestimate the cost of the war.
• The Bush administration cost-estimates exclude the cost of rehabilitation and health care for veterans injured, who constitute a higher proportion of casualties than in any prior U.S. war.
• The Iraq War is the second most expensive in U.S. history (after WWII) and the second longest (after Vietnam).
• The cost of the war helped cause the sub-prime banking crisis, which threatens the whole world’s economy.
• The war is primarily responsible for a dramatic rise in oil prices since the war began.
• The war will cost another half trillion between 2008 and 2010 if not ended.
• The money being spent on the war each week would be enough to wipe out illiteracy around the world. Just a few days’ funding would be enough to provide health insurance for US children who were not covered.

An article published recently in “The Australian” summarizes Stiglitz’s analysis. A quote from the article:

“When the Bush administration went to war in Iraq it obviously didn’t focus very much on the cost. Larry Lindsey, the chief economic adviser, said the cost was going to be between $US100billion and $US200 billion - and for that slight moment of quasi-honesty he was fired.

“(Then Defence Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld responded and said ‘baloney’, and the number the administration came up with was $US50 to $US60 billion.

“We have calculated that the cost was more like $US3 trillion. Three trillion is a very conservative number, the true costs are likely to be much larger than that.” View Entire Article

Stiglitz’s mind-boggling cost-estimates are put into perspective by a recent video produced by the American Friends Service Committee: “One Day of Iraq War”. It shows the many productive uses to which one day’s Iraq War cost could be put. View video.

On Wednesday, November 7, Afghan government officials — members of parliament — were visiting a sugar factory in north Afghanistan. Hundreds of school children were on hand to welcome them. In the midst of the ceremony, a suicide bomber blew himself up, killing and injuring many bystanders, including parliamentarians and children. In response, bodyguards of parliamentarians opened fire, killing more people.

A sequence of news reports shows how the chaos of such cataclysmic events can make it difficult to determine accurately what has happened, and that finding the truth depends on who is doing the reporting and requires investigations afterwards.

• An Associated Press (AP) story published by the SF Chronicle on 8 Nov reported that “witnesses said some of the victims may have been killed or wounded by security guards who opened fire after the blast.” This story gave the death toll as “68, most of them children or teenagers.”
• A story in USA Today posted 9 Nov at War Victims Monitor [see story] mentioned only the suicide bomber. This story set the official death toll at 75, including 59 kids and 5 teachers.
• More recently, an AP story printed in the SF Chronicle on 18 Nov (excerpted below) reported: “Up to two-thirds of the 77 people killed and 100 wounded in a suicide bombing last week were hit by bullets from visiting lawmakers’ panicked bodyguards, who fired on a crowd of mostly schoolchildren for up to five minutes” according to a preliminary report coming from a United Nations investigation. According to the article, the Afghan government disputes the finding, arguing that the bomb caused most of the casualties.
• Finally, another AP story published on 19 Nov by the SF Chronicle [see story] reported: “An internal U.N. report obtained Monday said bodyguards protecting parliamentarians fired indiscriminately into a crowd after a suicide bombing and that children bore ‘the brunt of the onslaught.’ The report also said there was no evidence to show authorities had tried to identify those behind the shootings or bring them ‘to account for their crimes.’”

Most Victims in Bombing Hit by Bodyguards’ Gunfire, Report Says

By Alisa Tang, Jason Straziuso, and Fisnik Abrashi
Associated Press

Baghlani-Jadid, Afghanistan — Up to two thirds of the 77 people killed and 100 wounded in a suicide bombing last week were hit by bullets from visiting lawmakers’ panicked bodyguards, who fired on a crowd of mostly schoolchildren for up to five minutes, a preliminary U.N. report says.

Afghanistan’s Interior Minister says only a “small number” of the victims were hit by gunfire, but an Afghan official in Baglan province said the bodyguards were “raining bullets” on the crowd.

The suicide bomb contained ball bearings, the Interior Ministry said, which may have caused wounds that look like bullet holes.

An Afghan doctor who treated patients after the Nov. 6 blast, meanwhile, told the AP that a high-ranking government official told him not to publicly reveal the number of gunfire victims, suggesting a possible government cover-up.

Separate teams of U.N. investigators have uncovered conflicting information about the number of people hit by gunfire and are trying to reconcile the differences …

…

Among the dead were 61 students and five teachers, said Education Ministry advisor Hamid Almi. Six members of parliament and five bodyguards also died. Among the parliamentarians killed was Seyyed Mustafa Kazemi, the chief spokesman of Afghanistan’s only opposition group, the United National Front.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack… The Taliban has denied it was responsible. …

…

Senator Bernie Sanders on Congressional inaction on the Iraq War and other important issues: Watch Video

It ends with a call for Americans to get active about issues they care about.

A New York Times news article from 2003 shows that those who planned the Iraq war were either seriously delusional in their assessments of what would happen, or they were lying through their teeth. At this point, it perhaps doesn’t matter which it was; we just must stop this man-made disaster before it causes more damage.

That means scrutinizing General David Petraeus’ arguments with the same skepticism that we now see was warranted with the 2002-2003 arguments of Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Cheney, and Bush.

New York Times, 28 February, 2003

Pentagon Contradicts General on Iraq Occupation Force’s Size

By Eric Schmitt
New York Times

In a contentious exchange over the costs of war with Iraq, the Pentagon’s second-ranking official today disparaged a top Army general’s assessment of the number of troops needed to secure postwar Iraq. House Democrats then accused the Pentagon official, Paul D. Wolfowitz, of concealing internal administration estimates on the cost of fighting and rebuilding the country.

Mr. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, opened a two-front war of words on Capitol Hill, calling the recent estimate by Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army that several hundred thousand troops would be needed in postwar Iraq, “wildly off the mark.” Pentagon officials have put the figure closer to 100,000 troops. Mr. Wolfowitz then dismissed articles in several newspapers this week asserting that Pentagon budget specialists put the cost of war and reconstruction at $60 billion to $95 billion in this fiscal year. He said it was impossible to predict accurately a war’s duration, its destruction and the extent of rebuilding afterward.

“We have no idea what we will need until we get there on the ground,” Mr. Wolfowitz said at a hearing of the House Budget Committee. “Every time we get a briefing on the war plan, it immediately goes down six different branches to see what the scenarios look like. If we costed each and every one, the costs would range from $10 billion to $100 billion.” Mr. Wolfowitz’s refusal to be pinned down on the costs of war and peace in Iraq infuriated some committee Democrats, who noted that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the budget director, had briefed President Bush on just such estimates on Tuesday.

“I think you’re deliberately keeping us in the dark,” said Representative James P. Moran, Democrat of Virginia. “We’re not so naïve as to think that you don’t know more than you’re revealing.” Representative Darlene Hooley, an Oregon Democrat, also voiced exasperation with Mr. Wolfowitz: “I think you can do better than that.”

Mr. Wolfowitz, with Dov S. Zakheim, the Pentagon comptroller, at his side, tried to mollify the Democratic lawmakers, promising to fill them in eventually on the administration’s internal cost estimates. “There will be an appropriate moment,” he said, when the Pentagon would provide Congress with cost ranges. “We’re not in a position to do that right now.”

At a Pentagon news conference with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, Mr. Rumsfeld echoed his deputy’s comments. Neither Mr. Rumsfeld nor Mr. Wolfowitz mentioned General Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, by name. But both men were clearly irritated at the general’s suggestion that a postwar Iraq might require many more forces than the 100,000 American troops and the tens of thousands of allied forces that are also expected to join a reconstruction effort.

“The idea that it would take several hundred thousand U.S. forces I think is far off the mark,” Mr. Rumsfeld said. General Shinseki gave his estimate in response to a question at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday: “I would say that what’s been mobilized to this point — something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers — are probably, you know, a figure that would be required.” He also said that the regional commander, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, would determine the precise figure.

A spokesman for General Shinseki, Col. Joe Curtin, said today that the general stood by his estimate. “He was asked a question and he responded with his best military judgment,” Colonel Curtin said. General Shinseki is a former commander of the peacekeeping operation in Bosnia.

In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq. He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo. He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that “stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible,” but would oppose a long-term occupation force. And he said that nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it. “I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq in reconstruction,” Mr. Wolfowitz said. He added that many Iraqi expatriates would likely return home to help.

In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, many nations agreed in advance of hostilities to help pay for a conflict that eventually cost about $61 billion. Mr. Wolfowitz said that this time around the administration was dealing with “countries that are quite frightened of their own shadows” in assembling a coalition to force President Saddam Hussein to disarm.

Enlisting countries to help to pay for this war and its aftermath would take more time, he said. “I expect we will get a lot of mitigation, but it will be easier after the fact than before the fact,” Mr. Wolfowitz said. Mr. Wolfowitz spent much of the hearing knocking down published estimates of the costs of war and rebuilding, saying the upper range of $95 billion was too high, and that the estimates were almost meaningless because of the variables. Moreover, he said such estimates, and speculation that postwar reconstruction costs could climb even higher, ignored the fact that Iraq is a wealthy country, with annual oil exports worth $15 billion to $20 billion. “To assume we’re going to pay for it all is just wrong,” he said.

At the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld said the factors influencing cost estimates made even ranges imperfect. Asked whether he would release such ranges to permit a useful public debate on the subject, Mr. Rumsfeld said, “I’ve already decided that. It’s not useful.”

Cuomo, governor of New York from 1983 to 1995, now a lawyer in New York, wrote this outstanding and to-the-point op-ed article for the Los Angeles Times.

Los Angeles Times, 03 September 2007

What the Constitution Says About Iraq

By Mario M. Cuomo

Congress and the courts must recommit to the legislative branch’s sole authority to declare war.

Most Americans want the war in Iraq ended, but it continues and Americans are killed, mutilated or wounded every day, as the Democratic majorities in Congress struggle to produce legislation that will take our forces out of harm’s way. Meanwhile, President Bush continues to insist that as commander in chief, he has the constitutional power to go to war and decide when to end it, unilaterally. At the same time, another possible disaster emerges from the shadows: Bush appears to be considering a military assault on Iran, again apparently without Congress declaring war first.

How did we get to this point and what, if anything, can we do now?

The war happened because when Bush first indicated his intention to go to war against Iraq, Congress refused to insist on enforcement of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. For more than 200 years, this article has spelled out that Congress — not the president — shall have “the power to declare war.” Because the Constitution cannot be amended by persistent evasion, this constitutional mandate was not erased by the actions of timid Congresses since World War II that allowed eager presidents to start wars in Vietnam and elsewhere without a “declaration” by Congress.

Nor were the feeble, post-factum congressional resolutions of support of the Iraq invasion — in 2001 and 2002 — adequate substitutes for the formal declaration of war demanded by the founding fathers.

What can be done now?

First, Democrats should make clear that it is the president who is keeping the war in Iraq from ending. Even if Congress were able to pass a veto-proof bill with respect to withdrawal, the president would resist enforcement of the bill, insisting that as commander in chief, he is immune from Congress’ decision. That would raise a constitutional issue for the courts.

But judging by the courts’ history concerning constitutional war powers, including decisions involving the Iraq war in the U.S. 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Massachusetts, the judiciary would, in all probability, choose not to intervene, claiming that the disagreement between the president and Congress is a political question.

However, the political-question thesis is nowhere referred to in the Constitution, and it denies the people the protection of the Constitution in dealing with perhaps the most serious question the nation has to face: “Should we go to war?” That position should be challenged as an abdication of constitutional duty by the courts, but the sad truth is that the current conservative-dominated Supreme Court would probably support our current conservative president. As a practical matter, that means only the president can end this war or change our strategy in Iraq.

Even if it is too late for Congress to remedy its failure to comply with the Constitution with respect to Iraq, at the very least our candidates for president and our congressional leaders should assure us that they will not allow this lapse to result in further unilateral acts of war — against Iran, Pakistan or any other nation — by this president or any other. Our leaders must make it clear that in the future, Congress will insist on compliance with Article I, Section 8 for any military action that is not fairly deemed an unexpected emergency.

It is frightening that our government has permitted this fundamental and costly constitutional transgression to persist for more than four years.

We must do everything we can to end the war in Iraq and avoid a new tragedy abroad by recommitting to strict adherence to the rule of law and to the Constitution by the president, Congress and the courts — especially with respect to war powers.

In 1994, after the Gulf War, some analysts criticized the George HW Bush administration for not invading Iraq, occupying the country, deposing Saddam Hussein, and installing a new, pro-U.S. government. Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense in that first Bush administration, explained why that would have failed. His answer was clear and, as it turned out, prophetic:

Dick Cheney in his own words

It makes one wonder why he and Bush junior didn’t listen to Cheney’s own advice.

During Condoleezza Rice’s Senate confirmation hearings, Dr. Rice reacted angrily to pointed questions from Senator Barbara Boxer concerning Rice’s role in convincing Congress and the public to support the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Rice accused Boxer of impugning her integrity: “Senator, we can have this discussion in any way that you would like. But I really hope that you will refrain from impugning my integrity.”

Senator Boxer wouldn’t say it explicitly, but I will: Yes, we question Dr. Rice’s integrity. Not her intellect. Not her academic pedigree and achievements. Not her foreign policy experience. Those are all fine. What we question is precisely her integrity.

Why shouldn’t we, when Rice lied repeatedly and explicitly to Congress and the public about the urgency of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime? Dr. Rice made statements that not only are known now—in retrospect—to be false, but were known by administration officials to be false when she made them.

For example, in a September 8, 2002 interview on CNN, Rice issued this dire warning about Saddam Hussein: “We do know that he is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. We do know that there have been shipments going into … Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes … that are really only suited for nuclear weapons programs.” In fact, U.S. weapons inspectors and the CIA had previously concluded that those aluminum tubes were not being used to develop nuclear weapons. It was also well known in the Bush administration that other supposed “evidence” of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program, such as the infamous “yellow cake” shipments from Africa, were fake. Rice, as National Security Advisor to the President, surely knew about these prior assessments of the Iraqi nuclear threat. Nonetheless, she ignored them while hawking the Bush plan to attack Iraq. If that isn’t lying to the American public, I don’t know what is.

True, Rice was not the only Bush administration official who lied to us. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Vice-President Dick Cheney, and President George W. Bush also lied blatantly and repeatedly. But that should not have surprised us: they never had any integrity. Bending the truth and disdain for the public are how they operate.

We expected a bit more from Rice’s predecessor as Secretary of State, Colin Powell. He began his tenure as Secretary of State as a hero of the previous Gulf War, with integrity on a par with that of Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama. Through his defense of Bush’s rush into war—which included his infamous false presentation before the United Nations—he ended up with integrity somewhere south of Oliver North’s.

Note to the Secretaries of State, former and current: Integrity, once earned, does not automatically endure for life. It cannot be taken for granted. It must be maintained and renewed. It can easily be lost. Former President Bill Clinton learned that lesson all too well.

Condoleezza Rice needs to understand that Senator Boxer was only doing her sworn duty as a U.S. Senator: challenging a Cabinet nominee’s record of false and misleading public statements. Over 3525 American soldiers have been killed in Iraq. They have died at an average rate of about two per day since we started this war. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have died during the same period, and more die each day. The monetary cost of the war is out of sight and still climbing. Bush administration officials, of which Rice is one, must be held accountable. What is astounding is not that Boxer asked pointed questions during Rice’s hearing, but that more Senators didn’t.

More importantly, Rice needs to understand this: you go into confirmation hearings with the integrity you have, not the integrity you wish you had, or the integrity you once had. By her continued participation in the plutocratic Bush regime, Rice is rapidly throwing away her last shreds of integrity.