Two Must-Reads

The Bush White House has never been overly concerned with the truth, much less telling the truth to the American people. Two new articles by two top-rate journalists drive that point home regarding the war with Iraq.

Sy Hersh: Who Lied to Whom? Hersh, writing in the New Yorker, looks into the case of the supposed attempts by Iraq to purchase a large amount of uranium oxide from Nigeria. The Bush administration used this "evidence" of Iraqi nuclear ambitions to help convince Congress to grant authority to the President to go to war in Iraq, and to mobilize public support for that war. But as discussed here a few weeks ago, the documents that supported this claim turned out to be rather crude forgeries. So who lied? Apparently, almost everyone, and certainly the CIA.

The former high-level intelligence official told me that some senior C.I.A. officials were aware that the documents weren’t trustworthy. “It’s not a question as to whether they were marginal. They can’t be 'sort of' bad, or 'sort of' ambiguous. They knew it was a fraud—it was useless. Everybody bit their tongue and said, 'Wouldn’t it be great if the Secretary of State said this?'" …

“Somebody deliberately let something false get in there,” the former high-level intelligence official added. “It could not have gotten into the system without the agency being involved. Therefore it was an internal intention. Someone set someone up.”

Josh Marshall: Practice to Deceive. Marshall gives us something new to think about regarding the Bush administration's ultimate aims in the war with Iraq. It's not pretty:

In short, the administration is trying to roll the table—to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism. So events that may seem negative—Hezbollah for the first time targeting American civilians; U.S. soldiers preparing for war with Syria—while unfortunate in themselves, are actually part of the hawks' broader agenda. Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further into the region and each countermove in turn will create problems that can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic governments—or, failing that, U.S. troops—rule the entire Middle East.

Of course, Marshall argues, Bush doesn't tell us all this up front; instead, war is justified on a shifting terrain of links to terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and brutal dictatorship. If most people did know what the administration was up to, they'd never support it. So Bush and Company decide they don't really need to know.