Worry Wart

Not.

The story today at Think Progress is that not only did Saddam not actively cooperate with Al Qa’ida, he wrote an edict prohibiting people in his government from doing so.

Feith, a major proponent of the war on Iraq, has recently set about to rewrite history on the matter of how widely and deeply it was believed in the intelligence community that, in fact, Saddam was not a terrorist sympathizer. He has accused them of behaving exactly as we might expect he, himself did. Feith imagines:

“that there were people in the CIA who had a theory that Baath secularists would not cooperate with the religious extremists in Al Qa’ida. And because they had that theory, when they looked at information .. that showed, or that suggested that there was cooperation, they were inclined not to believe that information.

Feith goes on to name Paul Pillar as one of those people.

Feith, here, is engaging in a great neocon trick that gets used with such regularity that if a person hears a neocon blame another for some sort of bad behavior, especially if they do it with some level of insight, you can bet that they know the behavior from the inside out. It is something they have engaged in; and as many times as not it involved exactly the same issue. In short, Feith is describing his own bad behavior and attributing it to his political opponents.

Pillar is quite clear that the intelligence community kept an open mind and carefully assessed the evidence. The fact that the CIA was correct and that it repeatedly told the president the same thing supports Pillar’s assertion. So, too does the fact that the president punished the CIA for not supporting his agenda by propagating the false party line.

Feith, on the other hand “Recommended that the CIA’s assessment be ignored, not challenged, not made part of the dialogue.”

Why would Feith insist that the CIA’s assessment be ignored, not challenged, not part of the dialogue? The only reason is that he wished to create a rationale for a war in Iraq. And the rationale had to be based upon a believable premise. But that open debate would destroy the believability of the premise. In other words, Feith himself must have known that the CIA was correct.

( This whole affair conjures up for us faint echoes of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s idea of a “greater truth” trumping public dialogue in her unfortunate framing of J.S. Mill’s On Liberty As is too frequently the case in public affairs such “greater truths” prove both factually false and destructive to society. )

The fact that Feith argued against engaging in a dialogue strongly suggests that Feith knew that the war in Iraq never had anything to do with terrorism That would mean that the same was true of the people who placed him in the Pentagon: Cheney and Rumsfeld. We imagine that Bush knew also. Although we cannot be quite so certain.

So both of the public justifications for war in Iraq: its supposed support of terrorism and its reputed weapons of mass destruction were known to be false by all of the real decision makers in Bush administration long before the first troops set foot on Iraqi soil.

The war in Iraq was a designer war. It was about distraction, it was about theater, it was about creating a “unitary executive,” it was about croneyism, it was about getting re-elected. Or it was about something else. The jury is still out on what it was about. All we do know is that both justifications were pure fabrications. And that this was known at the highest levels of the administration.

When Americans learn what that real reasons were, we can expect some changes in Washington. And hopefully, some changes in the whole way we view government.