Arms and influence

Bad memories

The fact that 1 in 3 Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks is not a big surprise. If you add up all the reasons, it makes more sense:

• The invisibility of retractions. Newspapers and politicians rarely make their retractions as prominent as their original claims. Therefore, a person who's not motivated to follow current events closely may not hear a retraction, or the reasons for it.
• Social distortion of perception. Solomon Asch's famous experiment is only the most famous example of how  group pressures could convince people to doubt the evidence of their own eyes.
• Tribal identity. Any group struggling to distinguish itself from other groups erects a series of basic tenets to which all members must adhere. Sometimes, these tenets make sense; at other times, they can be nonsensical, and even self-destructive. However, the group identity--in this case, the diehard adherents of the Bush Administration--repeat the core tenets of their movement, no matter how many of them (Iraq's phantom WMD program, etc.) have been disproven.

The United States will need to recover from many wounds inflicted on it since the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq invasion. This particular injury--the untruth itself, and the political lacerations it keeps splitting open--might be well on the way to healing. However, cynical people, including the top leaders of the executive branch, at first promoted the lie. When it became unsustainable, they did nothing to undo it.

If we say, "That's just how self-interested politicians act," it's worth remembering what happened in the aftermath of the Vietnam War--something that Bush and his subordinates all lived through. Confusion and disagreement over what actually happened--how serious a threat the NLF presented, how much these guerrillas depended on the North Vietnamese government, whether or not the NLF was largely defeated after the Tet Offensive--made it impossible to discuss counterinsurgency in any reasonable fashion in most public forums for decades.

By doing nothing to disperse this misperception, the Bush Administration is displaying more than cynicism. In fact, these wielders of power--one hesitates to call them 'leaders" in this situation--dishonor the dead of two wars that have divided Americans, in some ways that were preventable. They may also contribute to the envenoming of future political disputes, if politicians gamble on the persistence of untruths.

Mystery dance

Indeed, we are spectators to a strange, mysterious dance. The Petraeus report, which General Petraeus didn’t actually write, is about to be published. The report, in which no believes, is being treated as the centerpiece of news about the Iraq war. The timing, to remind people about the 9/11 attacks, will instead underline how Iraq has distracted from the real job of counterterrorism. Once we’ve given the general’s testimony and his non-report a great deal of attention, almost nothing will change--at least, not because of the report.

The failed intelligence that wasn't

Two CIA officers quoted in this Salon article say that they briefed President Bush about Iraq's unconditional weapons capability. Based on interviews with the Iraqi foreign minister, Naji Sabri, by then a paid CIA source, the Iraqis had no WMDs.

We can only hope that more details emerge than what Sidney Blumenthal provided in his two-page Salon piece. This claim needs a lot more scrutiny. How thoroughly did the CIA corroborate Sabri's story? How was this individual fragment in the larger intelligence mosaic presented?

In other words, we need to treat the two CIA officers quoted in the article with greater care than the Bush Administration treated "Curveball," the taxi driver who claimed to be an engineer in Iraq's nuclear program. However Blumenthal's story plays out, one thing is for sure: in 2002 and 2003, the President and his top advisers heard what they wanted to hear about Iraq.

One bomb away

A stock character of bad spy thrillers is the villainous government bureaucrat whose fetish for power and control vastly outweighs national security concerns. You’ll find this sort of character rubbing his hands with glee whenever there’s an excuse for declaring martial law, or bombing another country for the sake of rallying the country behind a faltering chief executive. Burt Lancaster played to this type in Seven Days In May, a Cold War movie about a MacArthur-like general quietly engineering a coup against the President.

In the real world, you don’t find many of these people, and they don’t normally get a chance to use governmental power to advance their perverse ends. National security bureaucrats have to at least maintain the appearance of working in the country’s interests. If the Dark Side takes them over, there are normally plenty of laws and regulations, not to mention simple bureaucratic inertia, to thwart any evil plots.

It’s startling, therefore, to read about people whose moral and political priorities are so out of whack that they see a terrorist attack as being politically useful. That’s why we’re probably going to read the following quote from Jack Goldsmith’s new book:

[Goldsmith] shared the White House's concern that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act might prevent wiretaps on international calls involving terrorists. But Goldsmith deplored the way the White House tried to fix the problem, which was highly contemptuous of Congress and the courts. "We're one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court," Goldsmith recalls Addington telling him in February 2004.

Here’s another revealing passage, courtesy of Glenn Greenwald of Salon:

In his book, Goldsmith claims that Addington and other top officials treated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the same way they handled other laws they objected to: "They blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations," he writes.

If you’re shocked, please go now to the restroom, take a good look in the mirror, and slap yourself in the face. Goldsmith adds another detail to the Bruegel-esque portrait of the Bush Administration, a collection of narrow-minded burghers partying through the wreckage of the American political system.

You should not be surprised to hear that they have been deliberately ignoring or contravening established laws and procedures to see if anyone would actually enforce them. There are, of course, two steps to the law, making it and applying it.

You should not excuse them because “9/11 changed everything,” or they say that they had the best interests of the country in mind. In the real world, no villain ever says, “You got me, copper, I had no good reason for committing that crime.”

You should not ignore the results of these policies. There isn’t any “Whoops” in national security. Politics is the realm of results, and the laws and procedures that people like Addington, Gonzales, Yoo, and others worked very, very hard to wreck instead of fix existed for a very good reason, the results they produced. The former lottery commissioner of Texas, his allies, and his employees decided that the rules designed to ensure accountability, protect Constitutional liberties, and more effectively deal with threats to the United States should be felled, root and branch.

The results? The Al Qaeda of 2007 is nothing like the Al Qaeda of 2001, but it is still a potential threat. We need the cooperation of other countries to fight trans-national terrorists, but we enjoy less international cooperation than we did before the 9/11 attacks.  The extreme secrecy of the Administration has allowed a string of bad decisions, of which the Iraq occupation is only the most conspicuous, to be made without review or challenge. Americans have no idea how significant the terrorist threat to them might be.

However secretly the decisions were made, the challenges to the existing national security procedures and institutions happened in plain sight. The traditional counterweights to Presidential power, the Congress and the press, shrugged when they should have questioned.

If the “one bomb” exploded today, who would oppose further steps the Administration might take? Law requires both passage and execution. Politics requires both opinion and action. Turn off the eleventeenth presidential debate, turn on CSPAN, and hear what your representatives are doing to prevent other mistakes. If they’re not doing what you think they should, take your lunch hour to visit their offices, in person, to tell them what you think.