[NYTr] Snow Job in the Desert - More on the Bush-CIA Photo Forgery on Iraq Weapons

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The New York Times - Sep 3, 2007
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/09/03/opinion/03krugmancolumn.html

Snow Job in the Desert

By PAUL KRUGMAN

In February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressing the
United Nations Security Council, claimed to have proof that Saddam
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He did not, in fact, present
any actual evidence, just pictures of buildings with big arrows
pointing at them saying things like “Chemical Munitions Bunker.” But
many people in the political and media establishments swooned: they
admired Mr. Powell, and because he said it, they believed it.

Mr. Powell’s masters got the war they wanted, and it soon became
apparent that none of his assertions had been true.

Until recently I assumed that the failure to find W.M.D., followed by
years of false claims of progress in Iraq, would make a repeat of the
snow job that sold the war impossible. But I was wrong. The
administration, this time relying on Gen. David Petraeus to play the
Colin Powell role, has had remarkable success creating the perception
that the “surge” is succeeding, even though there’s not a shred of
verifiable evidence to suggest that it is.

Thus Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution — the author of “The
Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq” — and his colleague
Michael O’Hanlon, another longtime war booster, returned from a
Pentagon-guided tour of Iraq and declared that the surge was working.
They received enormous media coverage; most of that coverage accepted
their ludicrous self-description as critics of the war who have been
convinced by new evidence.

A third participant in the same tour, Anthony Cordesman of the Center
for Strategic and International Studies, reported that unlike his
traveling companions, he saw little change in the Iraq situation and
“did not see success for the strategy that President Bush announced in
January.” But neither his dissent nor a courageous rebuttal of Mr.
O’Hanlon and Mr. Pollack by seven soldiers actually serving in Iraq,
published in The New York Times, received much media attention.

Meanwhile, many news organizations have come out with misleading
reports suggesting a sharp drop in U.S. casualties. The reality is that
this year, as in previous years, there have been month-to-month
fluctuations that tell us little: for example, July 2006 was a
low-casualty month, with only 43 U.S. military fatalities, but it was
also a month in which the Iraqi situation continued to deteriorate. And
so far, every month of 2007 has seen more U.S. military fatalities than
the same month in 2006.

What about civilian casualties? The Pentagon says they’re down, but it
has neither released its numbers nor explained how they’re calculated.
According to a draft report from the Government Accountability Office,
which was leaked to the press because officials were afraid the office
would be pressured into changing the report’s conclusions, U.S.
government agencies “differ” on whether sectarian violence has been
reduced. And independent attempts by news agencies to estimate civilian
deaths from news reports, hospital records and other sources have not
found any significant decline.

Now, there are parts of Baghdad where civilian deaths probably have
fallen — but that’s not necessarily good news. “Some military
officers,” reports Leila Fadel of McClatchy, “believe that it may be an
indication that ethnic cleansing has been completed in many
neighborhoods and that there aren’t as many people to kill.”

Above all, we should remember that the whole point of the surge was to
create space for political progress in Iraq. And neither that leaked
G.A.O. report nor the recent National Intelligence Estimate found any
political progress worth mentioning. There has been no hint of
sectarian reconciliation, and the Iraqi government, according to yet
another leaked U.S. government report, is completely riddled with
corruption.

But, say the usual suspects, General Petraeus is a fine, upstanding
officer who wouldn’t participate in a campaign of deception —
apparently forgetting that they said the same thing about Mr. Powell.

First of all, General Petraeus is now identified with the surge; if it
fails, he fails. He has every incentive to find a way to keep it going,
in the hope that somehow he can pull off something he can call success.

And General Petraeus’s history also suggests that he is much more of a
political, and indeed partisan, animal than his press would have you
believe. In particular, six weeks before the 2004 presidential
election, General Petraeus published an op-ed article in The Washington
Post in which he claimed — wrongly, of course — that there had been
“tangible progress” in Iraq, and that “momentum has gathered in recent
months.”

Is it normal for serving military officers to publish articles just
before an election that clearly help an incumbent’s campaign? I don’t
think so.

So here we go again. It appears that many influential people in this
country have learned nothing from the last five years. And those who
cannot learn from history are, indeed, doomed to repeat it.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company