What
You're Missing in Our Subscriber-only CounterPunch Newsletter
Special Investigation:
Have Journalists Been Deliberately Murdered in Iraq by the US
Military?
Our new
CounterPunch newsletter, just out, Christopher Reed examines
the growing body count of journalists in Iraq and documents numerous
incidents where US troops have deliberately targeted reporters.
Charles Glass offers a
stark comparison of the uprooting of Palestians in the Galilee
during the 1948 war to the lush compensation of Israelis living
on the same land who were displaced by the war on Lebanon. Remember, we are funded
solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this
website by buying a
subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you
won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation towards the
cost of this online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now
At Tuesday's Senate Armed Services Committee
hearing on the nomination of Robert Gates to be secretary of
defense, it felt like I was paying last respects to the Constitution
of the United States. The Constitution, though, was not the
recipient of the praise customarily heaped on the deceased.
Rather, the bouquets were fulsomely shared back and forth among
the nominee and the senators-all of them "distinguished,"
but none more so than the very reverend John Warner, gentleman
from Virginia and departing chair of the committee, who presided
at the wake.
Distinguished? The Warner
committee is indeed distinguished for the obsequious way it keeps
genuflecting to the executive branch. Beneath the pomposity
lies a dearth of courage. Led by gentleman Warner, the committee
allowed itself to be co-opted by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
and his deputies Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith and sat silently
as they disregarded and even ridiculed those few generals with
the courage to testify truthfully-Gen. Erik Shinseki, for example,
the Army Chief of Staff who warned that more troops would be
needed for Iraq. In effect, the committee abnegated its constitutional
responsibility to prevent misadventures like launching a war
of aggression on Iraq based on transparently false pretences
and feckless planning.
The Nuremberg Tribunal defined
war of aggression as "the supreme international crime, differing
from other war crimes only in that it contains within itself
the accumulated evil of the whole." Think kidnapping, "extraordinary
rendition," torture, for example. When such abuses came
to light, and the election of 2004 approached, the gentleman
from Virginia deferred unconscionably to the Pentagon and CIA
and let them investigate themselves.
In the Past,
"Distinguished" Meant Something
As I sat at the hearing, truly
distinguished Virginia statesmen rushed to mind-men like Patrick
Henry, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Mason who
gave their life's blood to ensuring that checks and balances,
and protections of individual rights, were embedded in the U.S.
Constitution. And I thought about how those patriots must be
rolling over in their graves, weeping at the flaccid timidity
of their 21st Century counterparts. I was on the verge of weeping
myself, when the thought struck me that in less than a month
another Virginian, plain-speaking Senator-Elect James Webb, may
be able to apply the brakes to the more recent tradition of substituting
mutual fawning for the exercise of senatorial responsibility.
With a son fighting with the Marines in Iraq, it seems a good
bet that Webb will be able to inject some reality and urgency-and
a dose of appropriate anger- into Senate deliberations.
But on Tuesday, it was a sorry
spectacle, as pretentiousness and patrician etiquette trumped
courage and vitiated the advise-and-consent prerogative granted
to senators by the framers of our Constitution.
In other news, "A series
of particularly brutal attacks across Baghdad Tuesday resulted
in at least 54 Iraqis killed and scores wounded," according
to the New York Times. The U.S. military announced that three
more American soldiers were killed Monday, adding to the 13 killed
over the weekend. Three more were killed on Tuesday; ten more
on Wednesday; eleven more Thursday. And five Marines are about
to be formally charged with the killing of 24 Iraqis, many of
them women and children, in the village of Haditha in Nov. 2005.
No such bothersome details
were allowed into evidence Tuesday by the stuffed shirts sitting
in stuffed Senate seats in a hearing room stuffed with 80 stenographers
from our domesticated press. Real life-and death-were kept out
of earshot, but the room served well as a kind of funeral parlor
for the late Constitution. There was a surfeit of bouquets,
but none smelled genuine.
A Free Pass
That Gates would be given a
free pass without serious probing was already clear in ranking
member Carl Levin's (D, MI) deference to lame-duck chairman John
Warner's (R, VA) plan for a one-day, carefully scripted hearing,
at which senators could disregard new, documentary evidence of
Gates' deception of both Congress and the Iran-Contra independent
counsel. Expediting the proceeding squandered the leverage given
to senators by the confirmation process, had any of them wished
to put that leverage in play. Moreover, Gates was often able
to say, in effect, "Gosh, I just got here; didn't know about
that; haven't read that, but I'll put that on the top of my reading
pile."
Fully expecting that Levin's
Democratic colleagues would join him in acquiescing in this charade,
antiwar activists told me before the hearing began that they
had come prepared with a rhyming chant:
"You won the elections.
Now ask real questions!"
I later learned that the activists
left after only an hour, unable to stomach the pompous pretence,
as American troops and Iraqi civilians get blown up in Baghdad.
The activists started feeling queasy after Sen. Warner's introductory
remarks raised a brief ray of hope, which was dashed a moment
later. Warner alluded to what he called the "moral obligation
that our government, the executive and legislative, has to the
brave men and women of our armed forces." Moral obligation;
sounds good! But he quickly explained what he meant by "moral
obligation"-merely that the president should "privately
consult with the bipartisan leadership of the new Congress"
before making his "final decisions" on Iraq. It gets
worse: witness the hypocrisy shining through the distinguished
chairman's admonition to Gates:
"In short, you simply
have to be fearless, I repeat, fearless in discharging your statutory
obligations."
Fearless? It was far from
fearless to cede responsibility to the Pentagon to perform the
kind of "full and thorough investigation" reminiscent
of the one President Richard Nixon asked then-Attorney General
John Mitchell to conduct on Watergate.
At the hearing the only thing
fearless was the fawning. It doesn't matter how many times Warner
and Levin claim to have dropped into the hermetically sealed
Green Zone in Baghdad. There is always the "In other news...."
And despite the affectation at Tuesday's hearing, none of
those senators are affected in any immediate way by the carnage
before the Green Zone gate.
It is James Webb's Marine son
and Iraqi civilians who are Lazarus at the gate. And, as Benjamin
Franklin warned, "Justice will not be served until those
who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are."
From Gates:
Candor or Disingenuousness?
On weapons of mass destruction: Little attention is being given to
the disingenuous response Gates gave to this question from Sen.
Mark Dayton (D, MN):
"Given what we know today
about the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, given
the predicament that we're in today, with the benefit of hindsight,
would you say that invading Iraq was the right decision or the
wrong decision?"
Gates left it to "historians"
to decide. Defending his early support for the invasion, he
resorted to the well tested, fair-and-balanced FOX Channel red
herring: "I thought he [Saddam] had weapons of mass destruction...just
like every other intelligence service in the world, apparently,
including the French."
Now, please, Dr. Gates: You
know that to be false confirmation-and anything but fair and
balanced. You know better than most where other intelligence
services get information on strategic weapons in denied areas
like Iraq. From the CIA. Independent-minded intelligence analysts
in Australian and Danish intelligence were able to see through
the subterfuge and warn their government leaders of the peril
in taking at face value the intelligence shared by the U.S.
On links between Iraq and
al-Qaeda: Sen.
Levin reminded Gates that he recently told the senator that he
saw no "evidence of a link between Iraq under Saddam Hussein
and al-Qaeda." Why then, asked Levin, did Gates say publicly
in Feb. 2002 that:
"We know that at least
one of the leaders of the September 11 hijackers met twice in
Prague with Iraqi intelligence officers in the months before
the attack."
Levin wanted to know the source
of that information. "Strictly a newspaper story, sir,"
said Gates. Odd. For Robert Gates is not used to relying on
newspaper stories to make unconfirmed assertions on such neuralgic
issues. It seems altogether likely he would have gotten "confirmation"
from his successor as CIA director, arch-neoconservative James
Woolsey, who cooked up and-together with Vice President Dick
Cheney-promoted that cockamamie story to a fare-thee-well. In
a formal report on Sept. 8, 2006, after two and a half years
of investigation, the Senate Intelligence Committee refuted that
story once and for all.
Fresh Eyes
But No New Ideas
In one moment of genuine-perhaps
unintended-candor, Gates indicated he thought there were no new
ideas to be had in addressing the conflict in Iraq. How about
old ideas? Like dispatching more training teams to work with
the Iraqi army and security forces. Gates said, "That certainly
is an option." And he vowed to show "great deference
to the judgment of generals." New emphasis on the training
mission is what Gen. John Abizaid told the committee less than
three weeks ago is a "major change." Is that the "new"
strategy? It is, in any case, a feckless exercise, as we know
from Vietnam. Been there; done that; should have known that.
The subject of training came
up very early in the Vietnam war. Three months after John Kennedy's
death, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara sent President Lyndon
Johnson a draft of a major speech McNamara planned to give on
defense policy. What follows is a segment of an audiotape of
a conversation between the two on Feb. 25, 1964:
Johnson: Your speech is good,
but I wonder if you shouldn't find two minutes to devote to Vietnam.
McNamara: The problem is what
to say about it.
Johnson: I'll tell you what
to say about it. I would say we have a commitment to Vietnamese
freedom. We could pull out there; the dominoes would fall and
that part of the world would go to the Communists...Nobody really
understands what is out there...Our purpose is to train [the
South Vietnamese] people, and our training's going good."
McNamara: All right, sir.
It wasn't "going good"
then and-as countless middle-grade American officers have recently
conceded-it's not going good now, despite our having thrown our
best generals at the problem. Hewing to this misguided approach
reeks of the "woodenheadedness" of which historian
Barbara Tuchman writes in From Troy to Vietnam: The March
of Folly. It is almost always a forlorn hope that unwelcome
occupation troops can succeed in training indigenous soldiers
and police to kill their countrymen. That the British, who certainly
should know better, have also forgotten that lesson does not
excuse the woodenheadedness.
Speaking
Truth to Power?
Ironically, Tuesday's charade
at the Senate Armed Forces Committee included repeated allusion
to the biblical injunction to "speak truth to power."
This has never been Robert Gates' forte. Rather, his modus
operandi has always been to ingratiate himself with the one with
the power, and then recite-or write memos setting forth-what
he believes that person would like to hear. Thus, while CIA
Director Bill Casey's "analysis" suggested that the
Soviets would use Nicaragua as a beachhead to invade Texas, Gates
pandered by writing a memo on Dec. 14, 1984 suggesting U.S. air
strikes "to destroy a considerable portion of Nicaragua's
military buildup."
This makes me wonder what may
be in store for Iran, should Cheney solicit Gates' help in making
a case for bombing Iran's nuclear facilities.
Gates may have "fresh
eyes," but if past is precedent he will add only marginally
to the flavor of the self-licking ice cream cone that passes
for Bush's coterie of advisers. What Bush has done is replace
Sugary Gates for Rumsfeldian Tart. Otherwise, the Cheney/Bush
recipe is likely to remain the same as the U.S. draws nearer
and nearer to the abyss in Iraq.
Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst from 1963 to 1990
and Robert Gates' branch chief in the early 1970s. McGovern now
serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity (VIPS). He is a contributor to Imperial
Crusades, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.
He can be reached at: rrmcgovern@aol.com
An earlier version of this
article was posted on Truthout.com
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
