Wars in Iraq and Vietnam (3): War and Presidential deception

This installment of my posts on the book Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn from the Past (2007), Lloyd Gardner and Marilyn Young, eds., is about the essay by John Prados, "Wise Guys, Rough Business, Iraq and the Tonkin Gulf."

Prados takes a look at some of the actions taken by the Cheney-Bush administration relative to war with Iraq even prior to Bush's late-January 2002 State of the Union address in which he used the now-infamous phrase "axis of evil" (Iraq, Iran, North Korea). Here are a few keys points in time to which he calls attention.

09/11/01: Rummy mentions to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers that his instinct was to attack Iraq in response to the terrorist attacks that had occurred in the US that same day.

09/17/01: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfofwitz suggests that Iraq be included on the administration's target list and Bush agrees, following up later by ordering CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks to plan for a war on Iraq.

Late Nov 2001: Bush asks Rummy about their Iraq options.

01/02/02: Dark Lord Cheney's "footprints first appear" in the Iraq War planning. Cheney and Scooter Libby meet with CIA director George Tenet to discuss covert ops against Saddam Hussein's regime.

Other indicators at around this time include Wolfowitz's demand for the CIA to investigate Hans Blix, the chief of the UN weapons inspection unit, and that Douglas Feith's shadow intelligence-analysis group, then known as the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group (PCEG), began milking raw intelligence reports to cook up a case for war on Iraq.

Apr-May 2002: CIA Director Tenet was moving forward with new covert operations against Saddam's regime.

The timing of the decision-making is important, not only for historical reasons but possibly legal ones, as well. There is one inherently tricky aspect of pinning that down. The final decision to go to war isn't made until the war itself starts. Up until he ordered the actual invasion in March, 2003, Bush could have changed his mind and backed off the invasion. And preparing war plans isn't in and of itself hard evidence of a decision to go to war.

But it's very clear from his bad-faith conduct over the UN weapons inspections alone that Bush had made a clear decision to go to war well before the invasion. Prados concludes from the evidence available at the time he wrote:

Evidence indicates that the key decisions had been made by the time Bush met with British prime minister Tony Blair at the Crawford ranch in early April [2002]. President Bush issued orders for specific war preparations and for deployment of forces in June and July [2002].

The administration moved ahead with covert ops and diplomatic efforts to secure allies, the latter not having notable success. Congress held hearings on Iraq in July, and "realist" Brent Scowcraft's famous op-ed opposing war appeared in the Wall Street Journal in August, preceded by a Scowcroft TV interview on August 4. Scowcroft's intervention was widely assumed to have been as a proxy for Old Man Bush cautioning his son against invading Iraq.

The administration sales job went into full swing with Cheney's [VFW] speech of August 27. The famous campaign of bluster, leaks of cooked intelligence and a sloppy National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) followed. Congress approving a spectacularly ill-advised war resolution in October, which Bush nevertheless blatantly violated when he initiated the invasion of March 2003.

It's important to not let the fog of political "gotcha" points obscure the real situation then. After Bush's UN speech of September 12, 2002, which convinced columnist Robert Fisk immediately that Bush had definitely decided to go to war, only 33% of the American public supported a war against Iraq without specific UN authorization.

Prados makes an important point about Bush's intent to go to war:

Prodded by allegations of Iraqi perfidy, and unimpressed by Saddam Hussein's September 17 agreement to readmit UN weapons inspectors, the Bush administration and Congress hammered out a joint resolution to approve the use of force. Bush's own draft text went to Capitol Hill two days after Baghdad agreed to the inspections, an additional commentary that goes to the point that nothing Iraq could have done short of preemptive surrender would have avoided this war. The resolution passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 296 to 133 and the Senate by 77 to 23. The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution became Public Law 107-243. No part of the law permitted war for the purpose of regime change, to bring democracy to Iraq, or to force any other internal changes in that country's territory or behavior. (my emphasis in bold)

He notes further of that October 2002 war resolution:

The operative language in Section 2 allowed for the use of armed force to defend the United States against the "threat posed by Iraq," and to "enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq." If Iraq posed no threat to the United States, that provision had no force. If Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, under the existing Security Council resolutions Baghdad would be considered disarmed and the resolutions fulfilled, and the authorization for force voted by Congress would expire. Thus the Bush administration's legal authority to wage war flowed directly from the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and nothing else. Deception — of the public, of the Congress, and of world opinion — was central to the Bush administration's enterprise. Since the fresh Security Council resolution passed on November 8 also had the purpose of ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, and no more, President Bush derived no additional authority from it. (my emphasis)

I'm very glad to see Prados emphasizing that Cheney and Bush violated that 2002 war resolution in invading Iraq. They did violate it. That alone is an impeachable offense. And if there had been a Congress serious about its Constitutional responsibilities in office, they would have impeached both of them and removed them from office. Voting for the resolution was a terrible political mistake for Democrats. It played into Karl Rove's 2002 election strategy and put the Reps in control of both Houses of Congress. And the adminstration used it to give a "bipartisan" cast to its drive to war that the Democrats should never have given him. But the resolution did not authorize the war Cheney and Bush launched in March, 2003. That the Democrats (with some exceptions like Ted Kennedy) even today can't make that point clearly and forcefully is astonishing to me.

In one sense, though, Prados is understating the gravity of the violation of the war resolution. What he says is true, that without the WMDs, the resolution gave Cheney and Bush no authority to go to war. But there were two conditions for war in that resolution, both of which had to be met to satisfy its requirements. The second was that the administration had to show definite connections between Saddam's regime and the Al Qa'ida group of Osama bin Laden, specifically including Iraqi involvement in the 9/11 attacks.

But Prados is dead-on in the following description of the behavior of the administration in the Iraq War:

... the hubris displayed by President Bush and his colleagues is painful to behold. These policy makers played as rough as Mafia wise guys. Not only did they depend on deception - and then changed their story even more as their original justifications collapsed - they failed to plan for the Iraq occupation, failed to respond to an incipient resistance, failed at the task of reconstructing the country destroyed in this maneuver, botched the Iraqi political realignment they wanted, failed at the alleged goal of making Iraq the basis for a democratic revolution in the Middle East, and all the while claimed victory, "mission accomplished." Today the United States pays more for war in Iraq than that country's own gross domestic product, and before this book is published the dollar cost of the Iraq war will exceed that for Vietnam. All of that is apart from the question of whether the Iraq war was even legal under U.S. and international law, which it was not. The Iraq experience gives new meaning to the idea of "the best and the brightest." (my emphasis)

I wish John Prados would start his own blog!

The Aznar document on Bush's meeting at Crawford in February 2003 had not yet come to public light at the time of Prados' essay. Mark Danner discusses the more recent report from the Spanish newspaper El País on that 2002 Crawford meeting in "The Moment Has Come to Get Rid of Saddam": Bush's Faith Run Over by History TomDispatch.com 10/17/07.

In his comparison of the Iraq War to the Vietnam War, Prados reminds us of a number of ways that Lydon Johnson was preparing for an intensification of the war in Vietnam, even while he was running as a peace candidate in the 1964 Presidential election against Republican Barry Goldwater. The administration already had the basic text of what became the Tonkin Gulf Resolution that was passed that year ready even before the Tonkin Gulf incident offered a pretext to send it to Congress.

The Johnson administration also grossly exaggerated the significance of the Tonkin Gulf incident itself to the point of outright deception.

Prados notes a bitterly ironic note at the very end of the Vietnam War in 1975, when Rummy was serving his firt stint as Secretary of Defense under that famous "moderate" President, Jerry Ford the national healer. The White House announced prematurely that all Americans had left Vietnam. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wanted to blame it on the Defense Department, though it actually resulted from an erroneous assumption by Kissinger himself.

Rummy put out the real story saying, "This war has been marked by so many lies and evasions that it is not right to have the war end with one last lie." Warms your heart, doesn't it?

Prados sees a serious problem int he Constitutional system as it currently functions, in that such serious deceptions by both the Johnson and the even more outrageous ones of the Cheney-Bush administration were able to involve the country in wars that have done such serious damage to the US:

In both cases an American president permitted - and actively participated in - deliberately misleading Congress and the American people on an issue of war and peace for the purpose of obtaining legal authority to conduct hostilities. In the Vietnam case the deception involved masking particulars of an incident whose true circumstances would have undercut the Johnson administration's demand for the grant of authority to make war. In the Iraq case the deception involved making up an "imminent" threat, contriving an image of an aggressive adversary out of whatever claims and charges could be patched together. In both cases a time element was inserted to galvanize Congress, and efforts were made to cloak the U.S. moves under the mantle of multinational action. The Bush administration's maneuvers on Iraq actually seem the more egregious because they started a war where no prior conflict existed, where the deception was open-ended and based upon no events whatsoever, and because the Bush administration "gamed" the system, domestic and international, playing Congress and the United Nations off against each other. ...

In the 2002 Iraq war resolution the example of the Gulf of Tonkin had not been entirely forgotten. That was one reason the resolution that passed was more circumscribed, predicated on enforcing a United Nations mandate and requiring periodic reports from the president. Congress tied the grant of authority to a second body, the United Nations Security Council. The executive branch proceeded to claim powers from a broader swath of UN resolutions that it asserted were activated as a result of its own deception, as well as to rely upon the commander-in-chief clause as if no restrictions on this exist. A similar arrogation of power based on deceit has characterized Bush's conduct of the entire war on terror.(my emphasis)

Prados is a senior fellow at the National Security Archives at George Washington University. An online set of article and documents from the Archives, edited by Prados, is available: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, 40 Years Late: Flawed Intelligence and the Decision for War in Vietnam.

Tags: iraq and the lessons of vietnam, iraq war, john prados, vietnam war