Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (25 page)

Propaganda has been an integral part of war in modern times. The history of America’s war with Iraq, from the Gulf War to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, has seen the upgrading of propaganda from distortion and exaggeration of known facts to the deliberate invention of lies. Decisive in persuading members of Congress to vote for the Gulf War was a statement by a Kuwaiti “nurse” who claimed to have seen Iraqi soldiers looting the maternity department of a Kuwaiti hospital and killing babies. Later, it came to light that the “nurse” was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington, and her account was fabricated for the Rendon Group, a media consultancy firm employed for the war, by Michael K. Deaver, a former media adviser to Ronald Reagan. During the Gulf War, it was often claimed that the Iraqi army was the fourth most powerful in the world and therefore truly a threat to peace—in and beyond the region. On February 20, 2002, the
New York Times
revealed that the Pentagon had, on orders from Donald Rumsfeld and Undersecretary for Defense Douglas Feith, created the Office of Strategic Influence (OSI) with a mandate to generate false news to serve U.S. interests. Coordinated by an air force general, Simon Worden, the OSI was authorized to engage in disinformation, particularly to foreign media. Its activities
included a contract worth $100,000 a month with the Rendon Group. The OSI was officially dissolved after these revelations but subsequent developments—particularly the “rescue” of Private Jessica Lynch—raised questions about whether this was indeed the case, or whether its mandate had been taken up by another agency.

The by now well-known story of Jessica Lynch’s “rescue” was splashed across the U.S. media in April 2003. According to the official account, she was ambushed on March 23, fired at the Iraqis until her ammunition ran out, then was hit by a bullet, stabbed, tied up, and taken to a hospital in Nasariyah where she was supposedly beaten by an Iraqi officer. A week later, she was freed by U.S. Special Forces who broke into the hospital, overcame resistance from her guards, rescued her, and flew her by helicopter to Kuwait. That same evening, President Bush announced her rescue to the nation in an address from the White House. Eight days later, the Pentagon supplied the media with a video of the rescue, one that easily matched the standard of the best of Hollywood action movies.

When the war ended, journalists—including those from the
New York Times
, the
Toronto Star, El Pais
, and the BBC—went to Nasariyah to find out the truth. The Iraqi doctors they interviewed told them that Lynch’s wounds, a fractured arm and leg and a dislocated ankle, were not caused by bullets but by an accident in the truck in which she had traveled. American doctors who later examined her also confirmed this fact. Rather than being mistreated, the Iraqi doctors had shown her the utmost consideration. “She had lost a lot of blood,” explained Dr. Saad Abdul Razak, “and we had to give her a transfusion. Fortunately, members of my family have the same blood group: O positive. We were able to obtain sufficient blood. She had a pulse rate of 140 when she arrived here. I think that we saved her life.” At considerable
risk, the doctors contacted the U.S. Army to inform them that the Iraqi army had retreated and that Lynch was waiting to be claimed. Two days before the Special Forces arrived, the doctors had even taken her in an ambulance to a location close to U.S. lines. But U.S. soldiers opened fire and almost killed her. When Special Forces arrived, equipped with special equipment for a pre-dawn raid, members of the hospital staff were surprised. Dr. Amnar Uday told the BBC’s John Kampfner: “It was like in a Hollywood film. There were no Iraqi soldiers, but the American Special Forces were using their weapons. They fired at random and we heard explosions. They were shouting ‘Go! Go! Go!’ The attack on the hospital was a kind of show, or an action film with Sylvester Stallone.” A former assistant of director Ridley Scott, who had worked on the film
Black Hawk Down
, filmed the “rescue” with a night-vision camera. Robert Scheer of the
Los Angeles Times
reported that the images were then sent for editing to U.S. Central Command in Qatar, then for checking by the Pentagon, and then distributed worldwide.

In the United States, the saving of Jessica Lynch has come to represent the most heroic moment of the 2003 conflict in Iraq. And yet the story of her rescue is as much a lie as the two major reasons given for launching the war on Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or the links between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda. The very notion of “weapons of mass destruction” was invented as a scare to go alongside the notion of an “evil” regime whose arsenal must evoke deep fear. At the heart of the debate on the quality of intelligence that justified the invasion of Iraq is an ad hoc and secret agency created by the Bush administration: the Office of Special Plans (OSP) based in the Pentagon. The OSP was the subject of an extended piece by Seymour M. Hersh, a veteran investigative journalist at
The New Yorker.
According to Hersh, OSP was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, overseen by Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, and directed by Adam Shulsky. Set up in the days after 9/11, OSP’s job was to analyze data received from security services—including the CIA and the Pentagon’s DIA—and to produce summaries to be passed on to the White House. But a Pentagon adviser told Hersh that OSP “was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to al-Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States.” To make this case, OSP turned to defectors sought out by an umbrella Iraqi exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmad Chalabi, with whom Wolfowitz and Perle had “a personal bond … dating back many years.” As the small group of analysts at OSP went beyond coordinating existing information to generating new information, they eclipsed existing intelligence-gathering agencies. The former chief of Middle East intelligence at the DIA, W. Patrick Lang, told Hersh: “The D.I.A. has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there is no guts at all in the C.I.A.” In one year, Hersh concluded, OSP had “brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community” and “helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq”—Hersh noted a February 2003 poll showing that 72 percent of Americans believed it was likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.

OSP’s main contentions were directly disputed by the joint congressional inquiry into the suicide hijackings of 9/11, that concluded that “U.S. intelligence had no evidence that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks, or that it had supported al-Qaeda.” Georgia senator Max Cleland, a member
of the congressional committee that produced the report, got to the point: “The administration sold the connection to scare the pants off the American people and justify the war. What you have seen here is the manipulation of intelligence for political ends.” Representative Jane Herman, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and a California moderate who had voted for the Iraq war, said Bush had no right to declare, as he did on March 17, that “intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” Representative Herman drew conclusions for the future: “It is clear that there were flaws in U.S. intelligence. WMD [were] not located where the intelligence community thought [they] might be. Chemical weapons were not used in the war despite the intelligence community’s judgment that their use was likely. I urge this administration not to contemplate military action, especially preemptive action, in Iran, North Korea or Syria until these issues are cleared up.” Senator Cleland accused the administration of deliberately delaying the report’s release to keep up the momentum for the war: “The reason this report was delayed for so long—deliberately opposed at first, then slow-walked after it was created—is that the administration wanted to get the war in Iraq in and over. Had this report come out in January like it should have done, we would have known these things before the war in Iraq, which would not have suited the administration.”

During the war, no evidence of a stockpile or the use of weapons of mass destruction came forth. This meant either that the regime had no such weapons or that, if it did, it was responsible enough not to use them, even in the face of certain defeat. One wondered which fact would be more damning for the invaders. After the war, the administration deployed a fourteen-hundred-member
inspection team, the Iraq Survey Group under General Dayton, but it too failed to come up with any evidence of WMD stockpiles. Perhaps anticipating this possibility, soon after the war, Wolfowitz, in an interview in
Vanity Fair
magazine, said that the United States had focused on alleged weapons of mass destruction as the primary justification for invading Iraq because it was politically the most convenient: “For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everybody could agree on.”

One might ask why the United States targeted the Hussein regime if it was not an imminent threat in military terms. Iraq has the world’s second-largest proven stocks of oil, after Saudi Arabia. But oil cannot provide the full explanation, or even the bulk of it. Iraq’s real significance is political. Just as after 1991 Iraq was turned into an example of the punishment that can be meted to a regime that dares go outside the framework of a U.S.-defined alliance, so the significance of Iraq after 9/11 again extends beyond the country itself. In attacking Iraq, the Bush administration hoped to achieve more than just a regime change: Iraq presented another chance to redraw the political map of the entire region, something the United States has tried several times before—the highlights being the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which failed to create a buffer Christian state; the alliance with Iraq against Iran in the 1980s; and the war in Afghanistan. The overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime is meant to change the balance of forces in the Middle East. Writing in April 2003 under the auspices of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Israeli major-general Ya’akov Amidror put it bluntly: “Iraq is not the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is the Middle East, the Arab world and the Muslim world. Iraq will be the first step in this direction; winning the war against terrorism means structurally changing the entire area.”
The United States seeks to replace defiant regimes and intimidate others, imposing a new regional order by creating pro-American regimes, first in Iraq, and then in an apartheid-style Bantustan-like state of Palestine, presenting regime change as a strategy for “democratization.” And yet the thrust of this administration’s policy shift is global, not just regional, in spite of the sometimes shrill rhetoric that equates terrorism with Islam. The policy shift is driven by Protestant “fundamentalism,” which has a parochial orientation but global consequences, and neoconservatism, which is marked by global ambitions. Its target is militant nationalism, in the Middle East and beyond. Though the methods have changed after 9/11, with proxy war giving way to outright invasion, the objective remains the same as under the Reagan administration: to target and liquidate militant nationalism through regime change.

Dispensing with the Rule of Law Internationally

The defining feature of modern Western imperialism—particularly British and French—was the claim that expanding domains were key to spreading the rule of law internationally. Even the most brutal of dictatorships that were self-consciously western, such as Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, insisted that they were upholders of the rule of law.

From this perspective, the George W. Bush administration’s open disdain for the rule of law is unmatched in the history of Western imperialism. At the same time, the contemptuous dismissal of rules, agreements, treaties, even institutional arrangements goes along with a self-proclaimed mission to spread “democracy” globally. Unlike those who rationalized global Western domination earlier, but very much like the Reagan administration,
the Bush administration claims that there is sharp opposition between rule of law and democracy, two values that have hitherto been seen as cornerstones of Western civilization. So post-9/11 America has scuttled any possibility of an international rule of law and has claimed impunity for American power in the name of spreading democracy internationally. Will this growing contempt for international law be a defining feature of this administration, the stamp of a coalition of secular neoconservatives and Protestant fundamentalists, or are these forces expressing a growing Jacksonian consensus in post-9/11 America? Is this an anomaly or a turning point?

During the Cold War, the United States dealt with the UN at arm’s length, limiting participation and cooperation to issues, agencies, and periods that suited American interests. It paid dues if and when it considered necessary and in the amount it chose to pay. It left UN agencies whose purposes it opposed, such as UNESCO, and rejoined them to gain temporary favor, as it did with UNESCO after eighteen years absence. Once the Cold War was over and the United States stood as the world’s sole superpower, it felt free to renounce treaties it considered no longer in accord with its interests, at the same time openly coercing the assignment of leading personnel in UN agencies.

Top-level international civil servants who have insisted that America abide by a rule of law have been targeted and left with one choice: resign or be sacked. The most prominent of these was, of course, the former secretary-general of the UN, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, whose passionately naïve conviction that the end of the Cold War would clear the way for an international rule of law led to frequent disagreements with Madeleine Albright and ultimately a clear message from the Clinton administration that his candidacy would be vetoed should he seek a second term.
Other high-level post-9/11 victims of U.S. power include Mary Robinson, the former Irish president, who retired after only a one-year renewal of her contract as the UN high commissioner for human rights; Robert Watson, the much-respected chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and Jose Mauricio Bustani, the head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), only a year after he had been unanimously elected to a second five-year term.