left. “iraqi girl liberated from her legs.” right. see #8  below.

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(1) the executive branch speaks on slavery vice president dick cheny had previously headed halliburton, which built an oil pipeline in burma, one of THE MOST brutal totalitarian states on the planet, making them 400,000 million dollars a year. the project displaced massive amounts of people, stole farmland, destroyed rain forest, and used slave labor controlled by the burmese army. when questioned about the ethics of this investment cheny said: “you have to operate in some very difficult places and oftentimes in countries that are governed in a manner that is not consistent with our principles here in the united states.” why do you “have” to operate there? if usa companies are the sole operator, then isn’t SLAVERY one of “our principles” ? cases like this are going through international courts, and being viewed as THE ARCHETYPE of  the EVILS OF GLOBALIZATION. for a link to two articles on globalization in burma,         click: kicked the baby into the fire.

 
contents of this page
(1) above. why does this person always look like a coldly snarling death’s head? the vice president was, JUST BEFORE ELECTION, the head of the LARGEST INFRA-STRUCTURE CONTRACTOR. do you think this had anything to do with the u.s. going to war?
(2) respect
(3) the true meaning of empire
(4) torture
(5) afghanistan
(6) iran
(7) use of and support for saddam hussein, and logic ignored
(8) kuwait
(9) the “highway of death”
(10) THE DOWNING STREET MEMO – WHAT EVERYONE BUT AMERICANS KNOW.
(11) 9/11 - a photo, a book, two questions, and a web site
(12) TWO FACTS highlighting ABSURDITY
(13) famous quote from the nazi joseph gobbels – also from the articles below.
(14) choice lines from the following newspaper articles
(15) iraq before and after “liberation”
(16) disappearing BILLIONS and PROSECUTING whistleblowers. - the second link is totally bizarre and TERRIFYING.
(17) what the world thinks – terror for the whole world - you've been blatantly lied to, and you sucked it right up.
(18) newspaper articles A+B – adding color to insanity. the original newspaper articles on the lead up to the iraq war. very long but worth it.

sections
(2) respect - how things haven’t changed in over half a century.
americans never even learn just to pronounce the name of a country correctly. “iraq” is pronounced with the first syllable sounding like “ear,” and the second with a short “a”, as in “clock”, not as in “rack” – as virtually everyone does. it’s “earock”
(3) the true meaning of empire

- here's a link to article on women’s condition in iraq:  "war lays waste to women's rights"
– here's a link about children: "collateral damage"
– here's a link to articles on "ground rules" and dubious atrocity trials:  "plea deals pile up"

 
right. by amnesty international - in the reading list.

(4) torture
for a small collection of pictures from abu ghraib prison in iraq and a
few critical statements by soldiers from the "nation" article "the other war,"

(5)  afghanistan
the united states, largely unknown to the american public, fought a war in afghanistan THROUGH THE CIA. the ostensible reason was, as always, containment of communism. in truth, again as always, negotiations were already in progress for a pipeline to transport oil in the region. the russians had invaded with the same idea in mind. the american people, through their government and the CIA, GAVE MASSIVE SUPPORT TO THE TALIBAN.
back then, no one gave a thought to:

• the massive abject poverty of the region.
• the brutal repression of the religious rulers.
• the essentially slave status of women in the theocracy.
• the fact that afghanistan is one of the world’s two largest heroin producing areas.

eventually it became clear to everyone that afghanistan was russia’s vietnam, and that they were not only not winning, but were suffering heavy casualties. seeing this, the united states government CUT OFF SUPPORTING FUNDS TO THE TALIBAN LITERALLY OVERNIGHT, which resulted in a BLOODBATH OF TENS OF THOUSANDS as the russians walked right over the now penniless army of afghanistan.
TODAY
as in iraq, the country has been set back HUNDREDS OF YEARS.

• any semblance of a CENTRAL GOVERNMENT has TOTALLY COLLAPSED.
• VICIOUS WARLORDS have DIVIDED UP THE COUNTRY.
• the religious extremists, the “taliban,” are fighting a TOTALLY SUCCESSFUL GUERRILA WAR on both the americans and the afghani people.

there is WIDESPREAD MURDER for:

• cooperating with american forces.
• being a TEACHER.
• being a woman in ANY sort of profession.
• being a group of children watching a soccer game on television.

there is ample evidence that AMERICAN FORCES ARE COMPLICIT in genocide and ethnic cleansing by AFGHAN ALLIES, by being perfectly aware of it during mutual operations and DOING NOTHING.

                             
                                   the shah of iran
(6) iran      
for the longest time, iran had been ruled by a monarchy. the united states was very friendly with the ruling shah of iran, for the sole reason that he allowed u.s. companies to exploit the region’s oil reserves on easy terms. though not a theocracy,

• one of the shah’s favorite “political” actions used to keep the people in line was to FIRE BOMB MOVIE THEATERS.
• the shah employed a massive, ruthless SECRET POLICE. from thousands of miles away this seems quite harmless. the truth is family members, ON THE SLIGHTEST PRETEXT, would DISAPPEAR and THEIR BODIES WOULD BE FOUND LATER BEING CHEWED ON BY DOGS.
• the common people of iran saw NOT ONE PENNY OF ALL THE OIL PROFITS.

finally, after untold misery, the people overthrew the shah, and ESTABLISHED A PARTIALLY DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENT. however, and quite understandably, the new terms for oil contracts were much more exacting, and the government threatened to nationalize all oil facilities. the CIA BACKED A COUP OF LOYALISTS TO THE SHAH, which was followed by an EVEN GREATER repression than before. much later the people again successfully rebelled, but this time the only organized resistance came from religious leaders.

(7 - a) use of and support of saddam hussain, and logic ignored
during the previous regime in iraq, the united states had employed saddam in an assassination attempt against the relatively popular ruler. the attempt failed and he fled the country. this support, leveraged further by the united states, LED TO HIS LATER INSTALLMENT AS RULER AFTER THE COUP BY “BATHIST” MILITARY OFFICERS.
(7 – b) saddam hussein was at first WARMLY WELCOMED BY THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT, because, as had the shah of iran, he maintained friendly relations with the OIL COMPANIES.

• again, at this time, no one spoke ONE WORD about the cruelty of his regime.

this happened only during the PROPAGANDA BUILD UP to the iraq war. to repeat the information in “allies,” it was the united states who armed iraq with a great variety of sophisticated armaments and manufacturing facilities, worth
                                                                            BILLIONS OF DOLLARS.
below is a picture of rumsfeld being really pally with saddam, followed by a list of arms and manufacturers. all of this information is commonly available 

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the cia trained and armed osama bin laden and the u.s.a. gave aid to the iraq military throughout the 80s.
below,companies that were involved in arming iraq previous to 1991. also, approximately 50 foreign subsidiaries were brokered in the u.s.a.

   key: A – nuclear, Ch – chemical, B – biological, R – rockets

kurdish victims of saddam's gas attacks.

YOU DID.

(7- c) logic ignored
saddam had three very good reasons to not ally with terrorists, or give them weapons of mass destruction, which he never possessed anyway. these reasons are corroborated by common sense and intelligence agencies and available statements by saddam. (1) he got all of his armaments from counties he couldn’t afford to anger. (2) he knew these countries were capable of invading him. (3) he knew that the terrorists were irrational, and any support for them would only contribute to destabilizing the entire region.

(8) kuwait
despite being small to the point of invisibility, kuwait has OIL RESERVES EQUAL TO THE OTHER OIL PRODUCING NATIONS. that is the ONLY reason the u.s. went to war after saddam’s invasion.
this blatant fact, unalloyed by any smoke screen of “fighting terrorism,” is what allowed WORLD WIDE PROTESTERS to have a definite effect in ending the war.

(9) the “highway of death” - derived from the listed web site.
<< the photo at the top of this page is part of the original content of the web site listed below, not chosen at random.>>
the "Highway of Death," is a name the press has given to the road from Mutlaa, Kuwait, to Basra, Iraq. U.S. planes immobilized the convoy by disabling vehicles at its FRONT and REAR, then bombed and strafed the resulting traffic jam for hours. More than 2,000 vehicles and tens of thousands of charred and dismembered bodies littered the sixty miles of highway. The clear rapid incineration of the human being [pictured above] suggests the use of napalm, phosphorus, or other incindiary bombs. These are anti-personnel weapons outlawed under the 1977 Geneva Protocols. This massive attack occurred AFTER Saddam Hussein announced a complete troop withdrawl from Kuwait in compliance with UN Resolution 660. Such a massacre of withdrawing Iraqi soldiers violates the Geneva Convention of 1949, common article 3, which outlaws the killing of soldiers who "are out of combat." There are, in addition, strong indications that many of those killed were Palestinian and Kuwaiti civilians trying to escape the impending seige of Kuwait City and the return of Kuwaiti armed forces. No attempt was made by U.S. military command to distinguish between military personnel and civilians on the "highway of death." The whole intent of international law with regard to war is to prevent just this sort of indiscriminate and excessive use of force. (Photo Credit: © 1991 Kenneth Jarecke / Contact Press Images)

 "It has never happened in history that a nation that has won a war has been held accountable for atrocities committed in preparing for and waging that war. We intend to make this one different. What took place was the use of technological material to destroy a defenseless country. From 125,000 to 300,000 people were killed... We recognize our role in history is to bring the transgressors to justice." Ramsey Clark

Ramsey Clark served as U.S. Attorney General in the administration of Lyndon Johnson. He is the convener of the Commission of Inquiry and a human rights lawyer of world-wide respect. This report was given in New York, May 11, 1991.
here is the link to the rest of the website, plus a wikipedia article:

• http://deoxy.org/wc/warcrime.htm         
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_of_Death

NOTICE the difference in estimates of deaths in the two websites - "thousands" and “a couple of hundred perhaps” by one one reporter, and secretary of state collin powell’s dismisal of the whole event. 

(10) THE “DOWNING STREET MEMO” – WHAT EVERYONE BUT AMERICANS KNOW.
these are actually an overview of the minutes of a SECRET MEETING between us and british intelligence and defense officials on 23 july 2002 including direct reference to classified us policy. It clearly states that, "bush wanted to remove saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. but the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." it also states both that steps were to be taken to antagonize saddam and that military action would take place before the official vote by congress on going to war. the minutes were meant to be kept confidential and are headed "this record is extremely sensitive. no further copies should be made. it should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents." the memo was first published in the british sunday times on may 1 2005, and was at first ignored by us media. no official sources have questioned its accuracy or disputed its authenticity. regarding the aftermath of the war, head of british intelligence said, “there was little discussion in washington of the aftermath after military action.” a group of 131 united states congressmen have repeatedly requested of president george w. bush to respond to the contents of the document.

 here are two links containing a much greater amount of information, including excerpts from the memo, plus other information uncovered since 2005:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_Street_memo/
• http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/

(11) 9/11 - a photo, a book, two questions, and a web site

the reichstag fire. even though it was started by a mentally incompetent pyromaniac, the fire at the german congress was used by the NAZIS as an excuse to LEGALLY take control of the country, giving them EXTRORDINARY POWERS. sound familiar?

the reason this book is great is that the author had no axe to grind, and in fact was not initially even interested in the subject. he just objected to all the wild  rhetoric. he eventually found                                40 points he quite reasonably deemed very suspicious.

1. in case you aren't aware of it, totally outside of commercial radar, the united states is covered so tightly by military radar that a gnat couldn't go off course and not be noticed. 
2. additionall, by law a general alert must be broadcast within five minutes of any plane not following it's designated flight path. 
3. it takes two minutes to scramble a jet fighter.
   

1. how did the planes that hit either the world trade center or the pentagon ever even get close?
2. in addition, the editors of this green site, on the day of 9/11, immediately asked themselves, "how the heck did the "plane" that hit the pentagon get past the missle batteries that guard both the white house and the pentagon?"

a web site on the pentagon destruction - ABSOLUTELY NO  wreckage from the "plane" ? ?
here's the french web site, about the pentagon, that caused a lot of fuss:

• www.asile.org/citoyens/numero13/pentagone/erreurs_en.htm

it's absolutely incredible that conservatives and even academics feel no shame when critiqueing this site by begining with words like
           "obviously" and "imbecilic." 
that should be enough to spark your curiosity. one, when answering the question of why there was no wreckage, produced a picture of a part the size of a large kitchen table, saying, "and many more are available," without producing or referencing any.

(12) TWO FACTS highlighting ABSURDITY
a.  to begin, there was only one witness, a defector deemed mentally unstable and a proven in court to be a liar, who said he had worked in mobile bio-war labs in iraq. the european head of the c.i.a. had deleted his testimony before powell presented his case to congress and the u.n. and was amazed to find it in those speeches. there is no way powell and bush could not have known this. this witness now lives a life of luxery in a "safe house" paid for by american taxes.

b.  in afghanistan, very recently, it was reported in the national newspapers that the taliban sent a military convoy through the capital that was in motion from dusk to three o'clock in the morning. are we really hunting these people?

(13) joseph gobbels - also from the articles below.
"the last century's most innovative authority on power and truth, joseph goebbels - does anyone not know he was A NAZI? - made the same point but rather more directly:

'there was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. for intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be 'the man in the street.' arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.'"

(14) choice lines from the following newspaper articles
"we create reality."
"we are an empire now."
"i believe he's an instrument of god."
"i keep my foot on john kerry's throat."

(15) iraq before and after “liberation” 
this first section is a repitition of one on the page "from idiocy to ugliness"

"light 'em up!!!"  - for generations the iraqi people are terrorized by a tyrant, who they are at least familiar with. then from nowhere, with only the flimsiest of excuses, the most powerful nation on earth rains unimaginable destruction on their  nation. these people have no way  to know about the minds of the invaders, only the propaganda they have been shown, and they expect even more horrors. endless streams of civilian refugees flow from the capital. american soldiers, told that every iraqi is a suicide bomber, kill everyone who doesn't halt on command. when this becomes the norm after days of occupation it turns into a game, with it's own soulless military idiom. when one more car of families doesn't stop , the soldiers open fire, yelling, 

if your country was overrun by invaders would you stop for a man with a pile of bodies next to him?
this story is from a long term veteran officer who resigned after seeing hundreds of civilians die at just one check point around the capital. he was threatened with a court martial for resigning. he characterizes the invasion as genocide.  

• for the complete interview on democracynow.org entitled, "i killed civilians in iraq", click:  http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/24/148212&mode=thread&tid=25

"a suspected terrorist"- and no home is inviolate.
just like in vietnam, as we have seen above, the ordinary populace looks just like the enemy, with no distinguishing uniform, something that the american forces do not seem to be able to handle, so everyone is just one more "gook."  the above story never made it to the american public but this one did, from the post invasion occupation: once again a person does not stop and instead of just wounding the person or calling re-enforcements 

which is an unofficial slogan of the u.s. marines. at the inquiry following this the soldier simply says, "well, he didn't stop" and that's the end of it. the report of an autopsy says, " the man was dead before the sixty bullets were fired." how the heck could they tell that? and does it justify an act of atrocious                                          bragging brutality? of a "suspect"?
it seems to be totally acceptable to the american public, not just to support a war that was begun on a total  lie, but to countenance the complete subjugation of the people. once again just like in vietnam, 
                                                          all buildings and homes are subject to search 
and if you don't open the door they just knock it down, or perhaps  destroy the whole thing. these are necessary measures, right? after all, this is war and we're trying to help these people.

another note. as was said, these people were terrorized by their own ruler and lived in something little better than chaos. no one, no one, who wants to continue living goes out unarmed, yet even carrying a handgun is cause to be labeled "suspect."

"operation iraqi freedom" - a corporate war
a reporter from europe escapes the strictures of a "safe zone" and goes exploring near the american controlled areas. he approaches what seems from a distance to be buildings, but finds instead "what looks like the loading dock of a major world port,  standardized shipping containers stacked five and six high, in rows as far as the eye can see." approaching, he sees a stomach wrenching goo dripping from the containers. there is only one person in uniform nearby , yet when he approaches this person  THE ONLY EMBLEM ON THE MAN'S UNIFORM IS A CORPORATE LOGO.  he asks the person what is in the containers. the man replies with one word:

 "bodies."

see below for a recent article from "the nation" based on interviews with 50 iraqi war vets.

this link can also be found in the page “military,” along with upsetting stories from vietnam, highly compressed from the book “nam,”

in the link:

“heavy contact"

do you think all of that is behind us now, as the (yuck) "neo-cons" would like you to believe? do you believe all the propaganda photos of g.i.s handing out soccer balls and teddy bears to smiling iraqi children? think twice. here's a funny one in arabic culture, a raised palm held outward means, "come here," not, "stop," as it does in western culture. so when the american saviors tell someone to stop and the person keeps coming, they risk being shot to pieces as a "suspected" suicide bomber. you!! come here!! you don't look like you're from boisie "we were told, from the very begining, that if a person was dressed like an arab, they were suspicious and we should arrest and interrogate them." click: haji = gook = sand nigger

conditions
before
yes, saddam hussein was a vicious ruler – but the CENTRAL INDISPUTABLE FACT is that he HELD TOGETHER a country composed of violently opposed factions.
despite the absolute level of abuse as judged by western standards, the truth is that the position of women and children, AS JUDGED BY EVERY INTERNATIONAL AGENCY, INCLUDING THE UNITED NATIONS AND THE RED CROSS, were BY FAR the highest of any arabic islamic country.

• women could MOVE ABOUT FREELY and OBTAIN AN EDUCATION and PRACTICE BUSINESS AND THE PROFESSIONS.
• SHIA, religious law, WAS MUCH LESS STRICT and people were beginning to dress and act in public ALMOST AS THEY PLEASED. 
• people had access to INTERNATIONAL news and entertainment OF ALL SORTS.

these were INEXORABLE FORCES that were, if slowly, TRANSFORMING THE ENTIRE COUNTRY.

today

• the entire country has been reduced to rubble.
• the people have been subjected to what indisputably are genocidal actions by u.s. forces.
• the people have been subjected to massive humiliation. single military units have, just individually, on “good information”, violently invaded thousands of homes, only to find old people and children.
• the condition of women has been reduced to one beyond slavery.
• women are terrified to even leave their homes.
• abduction and rape are EPIDEMIC.  
• there is WHOLE SALE MURDER of any woman attempting to maintain her “pre-invasion.” profession.
  

• complete social chaos, and
• widespread ethnic cleansing
• entire neighborhoods are destroyed or emptied of their former occupants.

the united nations and red cross have said that the conditions of CHILDREN are now the worst of ANY nation.

• there is NO SIGN that us forces have been able to establish ANY KIND order. in fact, u.s. casualties are rising continually and areas once considered even minimally safe for americans are now subject to attack.
• there is NO SIGN that the iraqis can establish order.

(16)  disappearing BILLIONS and PROSECUTING whisteblowers. - the second link is terrifying.

• BIZARRELY, BILLIONS were “lost” in CASH at the beginning of the war, before an interim government was established. 

few americans are aware that 

military personnel in america loaded
plastic wrapped skids of cash onto large transport airplanes and it was
never seen again.

• BILLIONS were spent on military hardware and support alone. this “daddy warbucks” profit was the true motivation for the war, second only to oil, just as it was in vietnam. 
• for an article,click:     "WHO'S PROFITING FROM THE IRAQ WAR?"
• there has been massive price gouging and outright theft by contractors, almost ALL american.
• facilities under construction worth millions of dollars are broken down and sold for scrap by warring factions.
• millions of dollars of “aid” given to contractors and iraqi groups is paid out as “protection money” to warring religious and secular factions.
• here’s an article. click:   "u.s. aid funding terrorists."
• whistle blowers are not just ignored, but are HARASSED and even PROSECUTED. the government is composed of the “daddy warbucks” gang, and they protect their profits with the harshest means possible. this is AS BIZARRE as the “disappearing” cash.
• for an article, click:  97 DAYS IN A MILITARY PRISON

(17) what the world thinks - you've been blatantly lied to, and you sucked it right up.

g
just one city.
11.9.2002 - somewhere between 450,000 and a million europeans
peacefully protested the threatened us invasion of iraq in florence, italy.

the usa is right and everybody else is wrong.

THERE NEVER WERE EITHER:

• ANY WMD, - both the US and UN inspectors said there was nothing there, and bush called them partisan idiots.
• ANY CONNECTION TO AL- QAIDA. - there simply never was ANY evidence.

THE USA HAS TERRIFIED THE ENTIRE WORLD by its INSANE aggression.

BY TORTURE ABROAD AND LOSS OF RIGHTS AT HOME.

AND A WAR WITH ABOLUTELY NO PLAN – THAT’S TURNED INTO A NIGHTMARE – AGAIN.

THE USA HAS MOTIVATED TERRORISTS A THOUSAND FOLD ACROSS THE WORLD.

THEY WILL BRING ALL OF THIS TO EVERYONE IN THE WORLD.

(18) newspaper articles - ADDING COLOR TO INSANITY
the articles below show the capacity to lie and the key lies, but more important, the absolutely incredible attitude - insanity - of those in power today. 
these people have gone over the edge. the romans made no excuse for their dominance and butchery. american politicians think it's their right.

         
A

America's Newspapers
Paper: New York Times Magazine, The (NY)
Title: Without a Doubt
Date: October 17, 2004

 Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, told me recently that "if Bush wins, there will be a civil war in the Republican Party starting on Nov. 3." The nature of that conflict, as Bartlett sees it? Essentially, the same as the one raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.
"Just in the past few months," Bartlett said, "I think a light has gone off for people who've spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do." Bartlett, a 53-year-old columnist and self-described libertarian Republican who has lately been a champion for traditional Republicans concerned about Bush's governance, went on to say: "This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them. . . .
"This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts," Bartlett went on to say. "He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence." Bartlett paused, then said, "But you can't run the world on faith."
Forty democratic senators were gathered for a lunch in March just off the Senate floor. I was there as a guest speaker. Joe Biden was telling a story, a story about the president. "I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad," he began, "and I was telling the president of my many concerns" -- concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. "'Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?'"
Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator's shoulder. "My instincts," he said. "My instincts."
Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. "I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough!'"
The democrat Biden and the Republican Bartlett are trying to make sense of the same thing -- a president who has been an extraordinary blend of forcefulness and inscrutability, opacity and action.
But lately, words and deeds are beginning to connect
The Delaware senator was, in fact, hearing what Bush's top deputies -- from cabinet members like Paul O'Neill, Christine Todd Whitman and Colin Powell to generals fighting in Iraq -- have been told for years when they requested explanations for many of the president's decisions, policies that often seemed to collide with accepted facts. The president would say that he relied on his "gut" or his "instinct" to guide the ship of state, and then he "prayed over it." The old pro Bartlett, a deliberative, fact-based wonk, is finally hearing a tune that has been hummed quietly by evangelicals (so as not to trouble the secular) for years as they gazed upon President George W. Bush. This evangelical group -- the core of the energetic "base" that may well usher Bush to victory -- believes that their leader is a messenger from God. And in the first presidential debate, many Americans heard the discursive John Kerry succinctly raise, for the first time, the issue of Bush's certainty -- the issue being, as Kerry put it, that "you can be certain and be wrong."
What underlies Bush's certainty? And can it be assessed in the temporal realm of informed consent?
All of this -- the "gut" and "instincts," the certainty and religiosity -connects to a single word, "faith," and faith asserts its hold ever more on debates in this country and abroad. That a deep Christian faith illuminated the personal journey of George W. Bush is common knowledge. But faith has also shaped his presidency in profound, nonreligious ways. The president has demanded unquestioning faith from his followers, his staff, his senior aides and his kindred in the Republican Party. Once he makes a decision -- often swiftly, based on a creed or moral position -- he expects complete faith in its rightness.
The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions. Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now. A writ of infallibility -- a premise beneath the powerful Bushian certainty that has, in many ways, moved mountains -- is not just for public consumption: it has guided the inner life of the White House. As Whitman told me on the day in May 2003 that she announced her resignation as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency: "In meetings, I'd ask if there were any facts to support our case. And for that, I was accused of disloyalty!" (Whitman, whose faith in Bush has since been renewed, denies making these remarks and is now a leader of the president's re-election effort in New Jersey.)
The nation's founders, smarting still from the punitive pieties of Europe's state religions, were adamant about erecting a wall between organized religion and political authority. But suddenly, that seems like a long time ago. George W. Bush -- both captive and creator of this moment -- has steadily, inexorably, changed the office itself. He has created the faith-based presidency.
The faith-based presidency is a with-us-or-against-us model that has been enormously effective at, among other things, keeping the workings and temperament of the Bush White House a kind of state secret. The dome of silence cracked a bit in the late winter and spring, with revelations from the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke and also, in my book, from the former Bush treasury secretary Paul O'Neill. When I quoted O'Neill saying that Bush was like "a blind man in a room full of deaf people," this did not endear me to the White House. But my phone did begin to ring, with Democrats and Republicans calling with similar impressions and anecdotes about Bush's faith and certainty. These are among the sources I relied upon for this article. Few were willing to talk on the record. Some were willing to talk because they said they thought George W. Bush might lose; others, out of fear of what might transpire if he wins. In either case, there seems to be a growing silence fatigue -- public servants, some with vast experience, who feel they have spent years being treated like Victorian-era children, seen but not heard, and are tired of it. But silence still reigns in the highest reaches of the White House. After many requests, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, said in a letter that the president and those around him would not be cooperating with this article in any way.
Some officials, elected or otherwise, with whom I have spoken with left meetings in the Oval Office concerned that the president was struggling with the demands of the job. Others focused on Bush's substantial interpersonal gifts as a compensation for his perceived lack of broader capabilities. Still others, like Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, a Democrat, are worried about something other than his native intelligence. "He's plenty smart enough to do the job," Levin said. "It's his lack of curiosity about complex issues which troubles me." But more than anything else, I heard expressions of awe at the president's preternatural certainty and wonderment about its source.
There is one story about Bush's particular brand of certainty I am able to piece together and tell for the record.
In the Oval Office in December 2002, the president met with a few ranking senators and members of the House, both Republicans and Democrats. In those days, there were high hopes that the United States-sponsored "road map" for the Israelis and Palestinians would be a pathway to peace, and the discussion that wintry day was, in part, about countries providing peacekeeping forces in the region. The problem, everyone agreed, was that a number of European countries, like France and Germany, had armies that were not trusted by either the Israelis or Palestinians. One congressman -- the Hungarian-born Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress -- mentioned that the Scandinavian countries were viewed more positively. Lantos went on to describe for the president how the Swedish Army might be an ideal candidate to anchor a small peacekeeping force on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sweden has a well-trained force of about 25,000. The president looked at him appraisingly, several people in the room recall.
"I don't know why you're talking about Sweden," Bush said. "They're the neutral one. They don't have an army."
Lantos paused, a little shocked, and offered a gentlemanly reply: "Mr. President, you may have thought that I said Switzerland. They're the ones that are historically neutral, without an army." Then Lantos mentioned, in a gracious aside, that the Swiss do have a tough national guard to protect the country in the event of invasion.
Bush held to his view. "No, no, it's Sweden that has no army."
The room went silent, until someone changed the subject.
A few weeks later, members of Congress and their spouses gathered with administration officials and other dignitaries for the White House Christmas party. The president saw Lantos and grabbed him by the shoulder. "You were right," he said, with bonhomie. "Sweden does have an army."
This story was told to me by one of the senators in the Oval Office that December day, Joe Biden. Lantos, a liberal Democrat, would not comment about it. In general, people who meet with Bush will not discuss their encounters. (Lantos, through a spokesman, says it is a longstanding policy of his not to discuss Oval Office meetings.
This is one key feature of the faith-based presidency: open dialogue, based on facts, is not seen as something of inherent value. It may, in fact, create doubt, which undercuts faith. It could result in a loss of confidence in the decision-maker and, just as important, by the decision-maker. Nothing could be more vital, whether staying on message with the voters or the terrorists or a California congressman in a meeting about one of the world's most nagging problems. As Bush himself has said any number of times on the campaign trail, "By remaining resolute and firm and strong, this world will be peaceful."
He didn't always talk this way. A precious glimpse of Bush, just as he was ascending to the presidency, comes from Jim Wallis, a man with the added advantage of having deep acuity about the struggles between fact and faith. Wallis, an evangelical pastor who for 30 years has run the Sojourners -- a progressive organization of advocates for social justice -- was asked during the transition to help pull together a diverse group of members of the clergy to talk about faith and poverty with the new president-elect.
In December 2000, Bush sat in the classroom of a Baptist church in Austin, Tex., with 30 or so clergy members and asked, "How do I speak to the soul of the nation?" He listened as each guest articulated a vision of what might be. The afternoon hours passed. No one wanted to leave. People rose from their chairs and wandered the room, huddling in groups, conversing passionately. In one cluster, Bush and Wallis talked of their journeys.
"I've never lived around poor people," Wallis remembers Bush saying. "I don't know what they think. I really don't know what they think. I'm a white Republican guy who doesn't get it. How do I get it?"
Wallis recalls replying, "You need to listen to the poor and those who live and work with poor people."
Bush called over his speechwriter, Michael Gerson, and said, "I want you to hear this." A month later, an almost identical line -- "many in our country do not know the pain of poverty, but we can listen to those who do" -- ended up in the inaugural address.
That was an earlier Bush, one rather more open and conversant, matching his impulsiveness with a can-do attitude and seemingly unafraid of engaging with a diverse group. The president has an array of interpersonal gifts that fit well with this fearlessness -- a headlong, unalloyed quality, best suited to ranging among different types of people, searching for the outlines of what will take shape as principles.
Yet this strong suit, an improvisational gift, has long been forced to wrestle with its "left brain" opposite -- a struggle, across 30 years, with the critical and analytical skills so prized in America's professional class. In terms of intellectual faculties, that has been the ongoing battle for this talented man, first visible during the lackluster years at Yale and five years of drift through his 20's -- a time when peers were busy building credentials in law, business or medicine.
Biden, who early on became disenchanted with Bush's grasp of foreign-policy issues and is among John Kerry's closest Senate friends, has spent a lot of time trying to size up the president. "Most successful people are good at identifying, very early, their strengths and weaknesses, at knowing themselves," he told me not long ago. "For most of us average Joes, that meant we've relied on strengths but had to work on our weakness -- to lift them to adequacy -- otherwise they might bring us down. I don't think the president really had to do that, because he always had someone there -- his family or friends -- to bail him out. I don't think, on balance, that has served him well for the moment he's in now as president. He never seems to have worked on his weaknesses."
Bush has been called the C.E.O. president, but that's just a catch phrase -- he never ran anything of consequence in the private sector. The M.B.A. president would be more accurate: he did, after all, graduate from Harvard Business School. And some who have worked under him in the White House and know about business have spotted a strange business-school time warp. It's as if a 1975 graduate from H.B.S. -- one who had little chance to season theory with practice during the past few decades of change in corporate America -- has simply been dropped into the most challenging management job in the world.
One aspect of the H.B.S. method, with its emphasis on problems of actual corporations, is sometimes referred to as the "case cracker" problem. The case studies are static, generally a snapshot of a troubled company, frozen in time; the various "solutions" students proffer, and then defend in class against tough questioning, tend to have very short shelf lives. They promote rigidity, inappropriate surety. This is something H.B.S. graduates, most of whom land at large or midsize firms, learn in their first few years in business. They discover, often to their surprise, that the world is dynamic, it flows and changes, often for no good reason. The key is flexibility, rather than sticking to your guns in a debate, and constant reassessment of shifting realities. In short, thoughtful second-guessing.
George W. Bush, who went off to Texas to be an oil wildcatter, never had a chance to learn these lessons about the power of nuanced, fact-based analysis. The small oil companies he ran tended to lose money; much of their value was as tax shelters. (The investors were often friends of his father's.) Later, with the Texas Rangers baseball team, he would act as an able front man but never really as a boss.
Instead of learning the limitations of his Harvard training, what George W. Bush learned instead during these fitful years were lessons about faith and its particular efficacy. It was in 1985, around the time of his 39th birthday, George W. Bush says, that his life took a sharp turn toward salvation. At that point he was drinking, his marriage was on the rocks, his career was listless. Several accounts have emerged from those close to Bush about a faith "intervention" of sorts at the Kennebunkport family compound that year. Details vary, but here's the gist of what I understand took place. George W., drunk at a party, crudely insulted a friend of his mother's. George senior and Barbara blew up. Words were exchanged along the lines of something having to be done. George senior, then the vice president, dialed up his friend, Billy Graham, who came to the compound and spent several days with George W. in probing exchanges and walks on the beach. George W. was soon born again. He stopped drinking, attended Bible study and wrestled with issues of fervent faith. A man who was lost was saved.
His marriage may have been repaired by the power of faith, but faith was clearly having little impact on his broken career. Faith heals the heart and the spirit, but it doesn't do much for analytical skills. In 1990, a few years after receiving salvation, Bush was still bumping along. Much is apparent from one of the few instances of disinterested testimony to come from this period. It is the voice of David Rubenstein, managing director and cofounder of the Carlyle Group, the Washington-based investment firm that is one of the town's most powerful institutions and a longtime business home for the president's father. In 1989, the catering division of Marriott was taken private and established as Caterair by a group of Carlyle investors. Several old-guard Republicans, including the former Nixon aide Fred Malek, were involved.
Rubenstein described that time to a convention of pension managers in Los Angeles last year, recalling that Malek approached him and said: "There is a guy who would like to be on the board. He's kind of down on his luck a bit. Needs a job. . . . Needs some board positions." Though Rubenstein didn't think George W. Bush, then in his mid-40's, "added much value," he put him on the Caterair board. "Came to all the meetings," Rubenstein told the conventioneers. "Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years: 'You know, I'm not sure this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else. Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the board. You don't know that much about the company.' He said: 'Well, I think I'm getting out of this business anyway. And I don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign from the board.' And I said thanks. Didn't think I'd ever see him again."
Bush would soon officially resign from Caterair's board. Around this time, Karl Rove set up meetings to discuss Bush's possible candidacy for the governorship of Texas. Six years after that, he was elected leader of the free world and began "case cracking" on a dizzying array of subjects, proffering his various solutions, in both foreign and domestic affairs. But the pointed "defend your position" queries -- so central to the H.B.S. method and rigorous analysis of all kinds -- were infrequent. Questioning a regional supervisor or V.P. for planning is one thing. Questioning the president of the United States is another
Still, some couldn't resist. As I reported in "The Price of Loyalty," at the Bush administration's first National Security Council meeting, Bush asked if anyone had ever met Ariel Sharon. Some were uncertain if it was a joke. It wasn't: Bush launched into a riff about briefly meeting Sharon two years before, how he wouldn't "go by past reputations when it comes to Sharon. . . . I'm going to take him at face value," and how the United States should pull out of the Arab-Israeli conflict because "I don't see much we can do over there at this point." Colin Powell, for one, seemed startled. This would reverse 30 years of policy -- since the Nixon administration -- of American engagement. Such a move would unleash Sharon, Powell countered, and tear the delicate fabric of the Mideast in ways that might be irreparable. Bush brushed aside Powell's concerns impatiently. "Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things.
Such challenges -- from either Powell or his opposite number as the top official in domestic policy, Paul O'Neill -- were trials that Bush had less and less patience for as the months passed. He made that clear to his top lieutenants. Gradually, Bush lost what Richard Perle, who would later head a largely private-sector group under Bush called the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had described as his open posture during foreign-policy tutorials prior to the 2000 campaign. ("He had the confidence to ask questions that revealed he didn't know very much," Perle said.) By midyear 2001, a stand-and-deliver rhythm was established. Meetings, large and small, started to take on a scripted quality. Even then, the circle around Bush was tightening. Top officials, from cabinet members on down, were often told when they would speak in Bush's presence, for how long and on what topic. The president would listen without betraying any reaction. Sometimes there would be cross-discussions -- Powell and Rumsfeld, for instance, briefly parrying on an issue -- but the president would rarely prod anyone with direct, informed questions.
Each administration, over the course of a term, is steadily shaped by its president, by his character, personality and priorities. It is a process that unfolds on many levels. There are, of course, a chief executive's policies, which are executed by a staff and attending bureaucracies. But a few months along, officials, top to bottom, will also start to adopt the boss's phraseology, his presumptions, his rhythms. If a president fishes, people buy poles; if he expresses displeasure, aides get busy finding evidence to support the judgment. A staff channels the leader.
A cluster of particularly vivid qualities was shaping George W. Bush's White House through the summer of 2001: a disdain for contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness, a retreat from empiricism, a sometimes bullying impatience with doubters and even friendly questioners. Already Bush was saying, Have faith in me and my decisions, and you'll be rewarded. All through the White House, people were channeling the boss. He didn't second-guess himself; why should they?
Considering the trials that were soon to arrive, it is easy to overlook what a difficult time this must have been for George W. Bush. For nearly three decades, he had sat in classrooms, and then at mahogany tables in corporate suites, with little to contribute. Then, as governor of Texas, he was graced with a pliable enough bipartisan Legislature, and the Legislature is where the real work in that state's governance gets done. The Texas Legislature's tension of opposites offered the structure of point and counterpoint, which Bush could navigate effectively with his strong, improvisational skills.
But the mahogany tables were now in the Situation Room and in the large conference room adjacent to the Oval Office. He guided a ruling party. Every issue that entered that rarefied sanctum required a complex decision, demanding focus, thoroughness and analytical potency.
For the president, as Biden said, to be acutely aware of his weaknesses -- and to have to worry about revealing uncertainty or need or confusion, even to senior officials -- must have presented an untenable bind. By summer's end that first year, Vice President Dick Cheney had stopped talking in meetings he attended with Bush. They would talk privately, or at their weekly lunch. The president was spending a lot of time outside the White House, often at the ranch, in the presence of only the most trustworthy confidants. The circle around Bush is the tightest around any president in the modern era, and "it's both exclusive and exclusionary," Christopher DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise Institute, the neoconservative policy group, told me. "It's a too tightly managed decision-making process. When they make decisions, a very small number of people are in the room, and it has a certain effect of constricting the range of alternatives being offered."
On Sept. 11, 2001, the country watched intently to see if and how Bush would lead. After a couple of days in which he seemed shaky and uncertain, he emerged, and the moment he began to lead -- standing on the World Trade Center's rubble with a bullhorn -- for much of America, any lingering doubts about his abilities vanished. No one could afford doubt, not then. They wanted action, and George W. Bush was ready, having never felt the reasonable hesitations that slowed more deliberative men, and many presidents, including his father.
Within a few days of the attacks, Bush decided on the invasion of Afghanistan and was barking orders. His speech to the joint session of Congress on Sept. 20 will most likely be the greatest of his presidency. He prayed for God's help. And many Americans, of all faiths, prayed with him -- or for him. It was simple and nondenominational: a prayer that he'd be up to this moment, so that he -- and, by extension, we as a country -- would triumph in that dark hour.
This is where the faith-based presidency truly takes shape. Faith, which for months had been coloring the decision-making process and a host of political tactics -- think of his address to the nation on stem-cell research -- now began to guide events. It was the most natural ascension: George W. Bush turning to faith in his darkest moment and discovering a wellspring of power and confidence.
Of course, the mandates of sound, sober analysis didn't vanish. They never do. Ask any entrepreneur with a blazing idea when, a few years along, the first debt payments start coming due. Or the C.E.O., certain that a high stock price affirms his sweeping vision, until that neglected, flagging division cripples the company. There's a startled look -- how'd that happen? In this case, the challenge of mobilizing the various agencies of the United States government and making certain that agreed-upon goals become demonstrable outcomes grew exponentially.
Looking back at the months directly following 9/11, virtually every leading military analyst seems to believe that rather than using Afghan proxies, we should have used more American troops, deployed more quickly, to pursue Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora. Many have also been critical of the president's handling of Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 19 hijackers; despite Bush's setting goals in the so-called "financial war on terror," the Saudis failed to cooperate with American officials in hunting for the financial sources of terror. Still, the nation wanted bold action and was delighted to get it. Bush's approval rating approached 90 percent. Meanwhile, the executive's balance between analysis and resolution, between contemplation and action, was being tipped by the pull of righteous faith.
It was during a press conference on Sept. 16, in response to a question about homeland security efforts infringing on civil rights, that Bush first used the telltale word "crusade" in public. "This is a new kind of -- a new kind of evil," he said. "And we understand. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while."
Muslims around the world were incensed. Two days later, Ari Fleischer tried to perform damage control. "I think what the president was saying was -- had no intended consequences for anybody, Muslim or otherwise, other than to say that this is a broad cause that he is calling on America and the nations around the world to join." As to "any connotations that would upset any of our partners, or anybody else in the world, the president would regret if anything like that was conveyed."
A few months later, on Feb. 1, 2002, Jim Wallis of the Sojourners stood in the Roosevelt Room for the introduction of Jim Towey as head of the president's faith-based and community initiative. John DiIulio, the original head, had left the job feeling that the initiative was not about "compassionate conservatism," as originally promised, but rather a political giveaway to the Christian right, a way to consolidate and energize that part of the base.
Moments after the ceremony, Bush saw Wallis. He bounded over and grabbed the cheeks of his face, one in each hand, and squeezed. "Jim, how ya doin', how ya doin'!" he exclaimed. Wallis was taken aback. Bush excitedly said that his massage therapist had given him Wallis's book, "Faith Works." His joy at seeing Wallis, as Wallis and others remember it, was palpable -- a president, wrestling with faith and its role at a time of peril, seeing that rare bird: an independent counselor. Wallis recalls telling Bush he was doing fine, "'but in the State of the Union address a few days before, you said that unless we devote all our energies, our focus, our resources on this war on terrorism, we're going to lose.' I said, 'Mr. President, if we don't devote our energy, our focus and our time on also overcoming global poverty and desperation, we will lose not only the war on poverty, but we'll lose the war on terrorism.'"
Bush replied that that was why America needed the leadership of Wallis and other members of the clergy
"No, Mr. President," Wallis says he told Bush, "We need your leadership on this question, and all of us will then commit to support you. Unless we drain the swamp of injustice in which the mosquitoes of terrorism breed, we'll never defeat the threat of terrorism."
Bush looked quizzically at the minister, Wallis recalls. They never spoke again after that.
"When I was first with Bush in Austin, what I saw was a self-help Methodist, very open, seeking," Wallis says now. "What I started to see at this point was the man that would emerge over the next year -- a messianic American Calvinist. He doesn't want to hear from anyone who doubts him."
But with a country crying out for intrepid leadership, does a president have time to entertain doubters? In a speech in Alaska two weeks later, Bush again referred to the war on terror as a "crusade.
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: "Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you." When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, "Look, I'm not going to debate it with you."
The 9/11 commission did not directly address the question of whether Bush exerted influence over the intelligence community about the existence of weapons of mass destruction. That question will be investigated after the election, but if no tangible evidence of undue pressure is found, few officials or alumni of the administration whom I spoke to are likely to be surprised. "If you operate in a certain way -- by saying this is how I want to justify what I've already decided to do, and I don't care how you pull it off -- you guarantee that you'll get faulty, one-sided information," Paul O'Neill, who was asked to resign his post of treasury secretary in December 2002, said when we had dinner a few weeks ago. "You don't have to issue an edict, or twist arms, or be overt."
In a way, the president got what he wanted: a National Intelligence Estimate on W.M.D. that creatively marshaled a few thin facts, and then Colin Powell putting his credibility on the line at the United Nations in a show of faith. That was enough for George W. Bush to press forward and invade Iraq. As he told his quasi-memoirist, Bob Woodward, in "Plan of Attack": "Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord's will. . . . I'm surely not going to justify the war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray to be as good a messenger of his will as possible."
Machiavelli's oft-cited line about the adequacy of the perception of power prompts a question. Is the appearance of confidence as important as its possession? Can confidence -- true confidence -- be willed? Or must it be earned?
George W. Bush, clearly, is one of history's great confidence men. That is not meant in the huckster's sense, though many critics claim that on the war in Iraq, the economy and a few other matters he has engaged in some manner of bait-and-switch. No, I mean it in the sense that he's a believer in the power of confidence. At a time when constituents are uneasy and enemies are probing for weaknesses, he clearly feels that unflinching confidence has an almost mystical power. It can all but create reality.Whether you can run the world on faith, it's clear you can run one hell of a campaign on it.
George W. Bush and his team have constructed a high-performance electoral engine. The soul of this new machine is the support of millions of likely voters, who judge his worth based on intangibles -- character, certainty, fortitude and godliness -- rather than on what he says or does. The deeper the darkness, the brighter this filament of faith glows, a faith in the president and the just God who affirms him.
The leader of the free world is clearly comfortable with this calculus and artfully encourages it. In the series of televised, carefully choreographed "Ask President Bush" events with supporters around the country, sessions filled with prayers and blessings, one questioner recently summed up the feelings of so many Christian conservatives, the core of the Bush army. "I've voted Republican from the very first time I could vote," said Gary Walby, a retired jeweler from Destin, Fla., as he stood before the president in a crowded college gym. "And I also want to say this is the very first time that I have felt that God was in the White House." Bush simply said "thank you" as a wave of raucous applause rose from the assembled.
Every few months, a report surfaces of the president using strikingly Messianic language, only to be dismissed by the White House. Three months ago, for instance, in a private meeting with Amish farmers in Lancaster County, Pa., Bush was reported to have said, "I trust God speaks through me." In this ongoing game of winks and nods, a White House spokesman denied the president had specifically spoken those words, but noted that "his faith helps him in his service to people.
A recent Gallup Poll noted that 42 percent of Americans identify themselves as evangelical or "born again." While this group leans Republican, it includes black urban churches and is far from monolithic. But Bush clearly draws his most ardent supporters and tireless workers from this group, many from a healthy subset of approximately four million evangelicals who didn't vote in 2000 -- potential new arrivals to the voting booth who could tip a close election or push a tight contest toward a rout
This signaling system -- forceful, national, varied, yet clean of the president's specific fingerprint -- carries enormous weight. Lincoln Chafee, the moderate Republican senator from Rhode Island, has broken with the president precisely over concerns about the nature of Bush's certainty. "This issue," he says, of Bush's "announcing that 'I carry the word of God' is the key to the election. The president wants to signal to the base with that message, but in the swing states he does not."
Come to the hustings on Labor Day and meet the base. In 2004, you know a candidate by his base, and the Bush campaign is harnessing the might of churches, with hordes of voters registering through church-sponsored programs. Following the news of Bush on his national tour in the week after the Republican convention, you could sense how a faith-based president campaigns: on a surf of prayer and righteous rage.
Righteous rage -- that's what Hardy Billington felt when he heard about same-sex marriage possibly being made legal in Massachusetts. "It made me upset and disgusted, things going on in Massachusetts," the 52-year-old from Poplar Bluff, Mo., told me. "I prayed, then I got to work." Billington spent $830 in early July to put up a billboard on the edge of town. It read: "I Support President Bush and the Men and Women Fighting for Our Country. We Invite President Bush to Visit Poplar Bluff." Soon Billington and his friend David Hahn, a fundamentalist preacher, started a petition drive. They gathered 10,000 signatures. That fact eventually reached the White House scheduling office.
By late afternoon on a cloudy Labor Day, with a crowd of more than 20,000 assembled in a public park, Billington stepped to the podium. "The largest group I ever talked to I think was seven people, and I'm not much of a talker," Billington, a shy man with three kids and a couple of dozen rental properties that he owns, told me several days later. "I've never been so frightened."
But Billington said he "looked to God" and said what was in his heart. "The United States is the greatest country in the world," he told the rally. "President Bush is the greatest president I have ever known. I love my president. I love my country. And more important, I love Jesus Christ."
The crowd went wild, and they went wild again when the president finally arrived and gave his stump speech. There were Bush's periodic stumbles and gaffes, but for the followers of the faith-based president, that was just fine. They got it -- and "it" was the faith.
And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. "You think he's an idiot, don't you?" I said, no, I didn't. "No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!" In this instance, the final "you," of course, meant the entire reality-based community.
The bond between Bush and his base is a bond of mutual support. He supports them with his actions, doing his level best to stand firm on wedge issues like abortion and same-sex marriage while he identifies evil in the world, at home and abroad. They respond with fierce faith. The power of this transaction is something that people, especially those who are religious, tend to connect to their own lives. If you have faith in someone, that person is filled like a vessel. Your faith is the wind beneath his or her wings. That person may well rise to the occasion and surprise you: I had faith in you, and my faith was rewarded. Or, I know you've been struggling, and I need to pray harder.
Bush's speech that day in Poplar Bluff finished with a mythic appeal: "For all Americans, these years in our history will always stand apart," he said. "You know, there are quiet times in the life of a nation when little is expected of its leaders. This isn't one of those times. This is a time that needs -- when we need firm resolve and clear vision and a deep faith in the values that make us a great nation."
The life of the nation and the life of Bush effortlessly merge -- his fortitude, even in the face of doubters, is that of the nation; his ordinariness, like theirs, is heroic; his resolve, to whatever end, will turn the wheel of hist
Remember, this is consent, informed by the heart and by the spirit. In the end, Bush doesn't have to say he's ordained by God. After a day of speeches by Hardy Billington and others, it goes without saying.
"To me, I just believe God controls everything, and God uses the president to keep evil down, to see the darkness and protect this nation," Billington told me, voicing an idea shared by millions of Bush supporters. "Other people will not protect us. God gives people choices to make. God gave us this president to be the man to protect the nation at this time."
But when the moment came in the V.I.P. tent to shake Bush's hand, Billington remembered being reserved. "'I really thank God that you're the president' was all I told him." Bush, he recalled, said, "Thank you."
"He knew what I meant," Billington said. "I believe he's an instrument of God, but I have to be careful about what I say, you know, in public."
Is there anyone in America who feels that John Kerry is an instrument of God?
"I'm going to be real positive, while I keep my foot on John Kerry's throat," George W. Bush said last month at a confidential luncheon a block away from the White House with a hundred or so of his most ardent, longtime supporters, the so-called R.N.C. Regents. This was a high-rolling crowd -- at one time or another, they had all given large contributions to Bush or the Republican National Committee. Bush had known many of them for years, and a number of them had visited him at the ranch. It was a long way from Poplar Bluff.
The Bush these supporters heard was a triumphal Bush, actively beginning to plan his second term. It is a second term, should it come to pass, that will alter American life in many ways, if predictions that Bush voiced at the luncheon come true.
He said emphatically that he expects the Republicans will gain seats to expand their control of the House and the Senate. According to notes provided to me, and according to several guests at the lunch who agreed to speak about what they heard, he said that "Osama bin Laden would like to overthrow the Saudis . . .
then we're in trouble. Because they have a weapon. They have the oil." He said that there will be an opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice shortly after his inauguration, and perhaps three more high-court vacancies during his second term.
"Won't that be amazing?" said Peter Stent, a rancher and conservationist who attended the luncheon. "Can you imagine? Four appointments!"
After his remarks, Bush opened it up for questions, and someone asked what he's going to do about energy policy with worldwide oil reserves predicted to peak.
Bush said: "I'm going to push nuclear energy, drilling in Alaska and clean coal. Some nuclear-fusion technologies are interesting." He mentions energy from "processing corn.
"I'm going to bring all this up in the debate, and I'm going to push it," he said, and then tried out a line. "Do you realize that ANWR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] is the size of South Carolina, and where we want to drill is the size of the Columbia airport?"
The questions came from many directions -- respectful, but clearly reality-based. About the deficits, he said he'd "spend whatever it takes to protect our kids in Iraq," that "homeland security cost more than I originally thought."
In response to a question, he talked about diversity, saying that "hands down," he has the most diverse senior staff in terms of both gender and race. He recalled a meeting with Chancellor Gerhard Schroder of Germany. "You know, I'm sitting there with Schroder one day with Colin and Condi. And I'm thinking: What's Schroder thinking?! He's sitting here with two blacks and one's a woman."
But as the hour passed, Bush kept coming back to the thing most on his mind: his second term.
"I'm going to come out strong after my swearing in," Bush said, "with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing of Social Security." The victories he expects in November, he said, will give us "two years, at least, until the next midterm. We have to move quickly, because after that I'll be quacking like a duck."
Joseph Gildenhorn, a top contributor who attended the luncheon and has been invited to visit Bush at his ranch, said later: "I've never seen the president so ebullient. He was so confident. He feels so strongly he will win." Yet one part of Bush's 60-odd-minute free-form riff gave Gildenhorn -- a board member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and a former ambassador to Switzerland -- a moment's pause. The president, listing priorities for his second term, placed near the top of his agenda the expansion of federal support for faith-based institutions. The president talked at length about giving the initiative the full measure of his devotion and said that questions about separation of church and state were not an issue.
Talk of the faith-based initiative, Gildenhorn said, makes him "a little uneasy." Many conservative evangelicals "feel they have a direct line from God," he said, and feel Bush is divinely chosen.
"I think he's religious, I think he's a born-again, I don't think, though, that he feels that he's been ordained by God to serve the country." Gildenhorn paused, then said, "But you know, I really haven't discussed it with him."
A regent I spoke to later and who asked not to be identified told me: "I'm happy he's certain of victory and that he's ready to burst forth into his second term, but it all makes me a little nervous. There are a lot of big things that he's planning to do domestically, and who knows what countries we might invade or what might happen in Iraq. But when it gets complex, he seems to turn to prayer or God rather than digging in and thinking things through. What's that line? -- the devil's in the details. If you don't go after that devil, he'll come after you."
Bush grew into one of history's most forceful leaders, his admirers will attest, by replacing hesitation and reasonable doubt with faith and clarity. Many more will surely tap this high-voltage connection of fervent faith and bold action. In politics, the saying goes, anything that works must be repeated until it is replaced by something better. The horizon seems clear of competitors.
Can the unfinished American experiment in self-governance -- sputtering on the watery fuel of illusion and assertion -- deal with something as nuanced as the subtleties of one man's faith? What, after all, is the nature of the particular conversation the president feels he has with God -- a colloquy upon which the world now precariously turns?
That very issue is what Jim Wallis wishes he could sit and talk about with George W. Bush. That's impossible now, he says. He is no longer invited to the White House.
"Faith can cut in so many ways," he said. "If you're penitent and not triumphal, it can move us to repentance and accountability and help us reach for something higher than ourselves. That can be a powerful thing, a thing that moves us beyond politics as usual, like Martin Luther King did. But when it's designed to certify our righteousness -- that can be a dangerous thing. Then it pushes self-criticism aside. There's no reflection.
"Where people often get lost is on this very point," he said after a moment of thought. "Real faith, you see, leads us to deeper reflection and not -- not ever -- to the thing we as humans so very much want."
And what is that?
"Easy certainty."

Copyright (c) 2004 The New York Times Company
Author: Ron Suskind
Section: Magazine Desk
Page: 44
Copyright (c) 2004 The New York Times Company

B

Secret Way to War
Commentary: A British memo shows the decision to go to war was made before the intelligence -- good, bad, or indifferent -- was even seriously put into play.
By Mark Danner
May 16, 2005

Introduction by Tom Engelhardt

In its June 9 issue (on sale this week), the New York Review of Books will be the first American print publication to publish the full British "smoking gun" document, the secret memorandum of the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair's top advisors in July 2002, eight months before the Iraq War commenced. Leaked to the London Sunday Times, which first published it on May 1, the memo offers irrefutable proof of the way in which the Bush administration made its decision to invade Iraq -- without significant consultation, reasonable intelligence on Iraq, or any desire to explore ways to avoid war -- and well before seeking a Congressional or United Nations mandate of any sort.

By July, as the British officials reported, the decision to invade was already in the bag. The only real questions -- other than those involving war planning -- were how to organize the intelligence in such a way as to promote the war to come and how to finesse Congress (and the UN). While people often speak of the "road to war," in the case of the invasion of Iraq, as this document makes clear, a more accurate phrase might be "the bum's rush to war." The Review is also publishing an accompanying piece on the secret memo and what to make of it by their regular Iraq correspondent, Mark Danner, and its editors have been kind enough to allow Tomdispatch to distribute the piece early on-line.

That the Review is the first publication here to print the document is not only an honorable (and important) act,

but a measure of the failure of major American papers to offer attention where it is clearly due.

After all, whole government investigations have, in the past, gone in search of "smoking guns." In fact, the Bush administration spent much time searching fruitlessly for its own "smoking gun" of WMD in Iraq -- and this process was considered of front-page importance in our major papers and on the TV news. That a "smoking gun" document about the nature of the war in the making has appeared in this fashion, not in Kyrgyzstan but in England; that no one in the British or American governments has even bothered to dispute its provenance or accuracy; and that, with a few honorable exceptions like columnist Molly Ivins, that gun was allowed to lie on the ground smoking for days, hardly commented upon (except on the political internet, of course), tells us much about our present moment. Should you want to consider the miserable coverage in this country, check out FAIR's commentary on the matter.

Congressman John Conyers has just sent a letter, signed by eighty-nine Democratic congressional representatives, to the President demanding some answers to the document's revelations. And articles by good reporters in major papers finally did start to appear late this week -- but those of John Daniszewski at the Los Angeles Times and Walter Pincus at the Washington Post were typically tucked away on inside pages (meant for political news jockeys), and they had a distinctly just-the-facts-maam, nothing-out-of-the-ordinary feel to them.

But shouldn't it be a front-page story that, as Danner points out below, all the subsequent arguments we've had to endure about the state of, and accuracy of American intelligence on Iraq, were actually beside the point? After all, as the smoking-gun memo makes perfectly clear, the decision to go to war was made before the intelligence -- good, bad, or indifferent -- was even seriously put into play. As the secret memo also makes clear, administration officials, and the President himself, had already rolled the dice and placed their bet -- on the existence of WMD in Iraq as an excuse for the war they so desperately wanted. (Their Iraqi exile sources had, of course, assured them that it was so and, as the Brits reported in July 2002, they were already wondering, "For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one [of an invasion].") After all, it seemed so logical. Saddam had used such weapons in the 1980s in the Iran-Iraq War and against Kurds in Iraq. American troops and UN inspectors had found such weaponry in profusion after our first Gulf War. So why not now as well?

Recently, Ted Rall, considering press response to a more modest smoking-gun incident -- the covered up friendly-fire death of former NFL star Pat Tillman in Afghanistan whose revelation was reported rather reluctantly on the inside pages of papers -- wrote tellingly: "For journalists supposedly dedicated to uncovering the truth and informing the public, this is exactly the opposite of how things ought to be. Corrections and exposés should always run bigger, longer and more often than initial, discredited stories." Dream on, as we smoking-gunsters like to say.

The least commented upon aspect of the smoking-gun memo has been its military side. It is, in significant part, a military document, reflecting how much serious thinking and planning at the highest levels in the U.S. and Britain had already gone into the question of how to have a war by July 2002. The question of how technically to launch the "military action" -- whether by a "generated start" or a "running start" -- was, for instance, front and center. Also addressed was the mundane but crucial issue (for the Pentagon) of where, around Iraq, to base forces. "The US," reads the memo, "saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either [the generated or running start] option." Diego Garcia is the British-controlled Indian Ocean Island that was already a stationary American "aircraft carrier" and from which, 8 months later, B-2s would fly on Baghdad.

Since Danner -- whose book Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror does much to explain the nature of the fix the Bush administration now finds itself in -- covers the British document in great and fascinating detail below, let me just add a final note: To me, perhaps the most telling line in the memo, given what's happened since, is the observation of Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of M16 (the British CIA equivalent), just back from a U.S. visit, that "[t]here was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action." This line not only represented the greatest gamble the Bush administration's top officials would make, but the hubris with which they approached the taking of Iraq. As true believers in force ? nothing impressed them more than the advanced technology of destruction they possessed and its possible applications -- they were already awed by themselves and deeply believed in the shock to come once they hit Iraq hard. As the British smoking-gun memo indicates in that single classic line, they placed their deepest faith in their conviction that, once the invasion was completed successful and Saddam had fallen, everything else in Iraq would simply fall into place as well. Planning for a post-war occupation? What me worry? Tom

Secret Way to War

By Mark Danner

1.

It was October 16, 2002, and the United States Congress had just voted to authorize the President to go to war against Iraq. When George W. Bush came before members of his Cabinet and Congress gathered in the East Room of the White House and addressed the American people, he was in a somber mood befitting a leader speaking frankly to free citizens about the gravest decision their country could make.

The 107th Congress, the President said, had just become "one of the few called by history to authorize military action to defend our country and the cause of peace." But, he hastened to add, no one should assume that war was inevitable. Though "Congress has now authorized the use of force," the President said emphatically, "I have not ordered the use of force. I hope the use of force will not become necessary." The President went on:

"Our goal is to fully and finally remove a real threat to world peace and to America. Hopefully this can be done peacefully. Hopefully we can do this without any military action. Yet, if Iraq is to avoid military action by the international community, it has the obligation to prove compliance with all the world's demands. It's the obligation of Iraq."

Iraq, the President said, still had the power to prevent war by "declaring and destroying all its weapons of mass destruction" -- but if Iraq did not declare and destroy those weapons, the President warned, the United States would "go into battle, as a last resort."

It is safe to say that, at the time, it surprised almost no one when the Iraqis answered the President's demand by repeating their claim that in fact there were no weapons of mass destruction. As we now know, the Iraqis had in fact destroyed these weapons, probably years before George W. Bush's ultimatum: "the Iraqis" -- in the words of chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kaye -- "were telling the truth."

As Americans watch their young men and women fighting in the third year of a bloody counterinsurgency war in Iraq -- a war that has now killed more than 1,600 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis -- they are left to ponder "the unanswered question" of what would have happened if the United Nations weapons inspectors had been allowed -- as all the major powers except the United Kingdom had urged they should be -- to complete their work. What would have happened if the UN weapons inspectors had been allowed to prove, before the U.S. went "into battle," what David Kaye and his colleagues finally proved afterward?

Thanks to a formerly secret memorandum published by the London Sunday Times on May 1, during the run-up to the British elections, we now have a partial answer to that question. The memo, which records the minutes of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair's senior foreign policy and security officials, shows that even as President Bush told Americans in October 2002 that he "hope[d] the use of force will not become necessary" -- that such a decision depended on whether or not the Iraqis complied with his demands to rid themselves of their weapons of mass destruction -- the President had in fact already definitively decided, at least three months before, to choose this "last resort" of going "into battle" with Iraq. Whatever the Iraqis chose to do or not do, the President's decision to go to war had long since been made.

On July 23, 2002, eight months before American and British forces invaded, senior British officials met with Prime Minister Tony Blair to discuss Iraq. The gathering, similar to an American "principals meeting," brought together Geoffrey Hoon, the defense secretary; Jack Straw, the foreign secretary; Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general; John Scarlett, the head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, which advises the prime minister; Sir Richard Dearlove, also known as "C," the head of MI6 (the equivalent of the CIA); David Manning, the equivalent of the national security adviser; Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, the chief of the Defense Staff (or CDS, equivalent to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs); Jonathan Powell, Blair's chief of staff; Alastair Campbell, director of strategy (Blair's communications and political adviser); and Sally Morgan, director of government relations.

After John Scarlett began the meeting with a summary of intelligence on Iraq -- notably, that "the regime was tough and based on extreme fear" and that thus the "only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action," "C" offered a report on his visit to Washington, where he had conducted talks with George Tenet, his counterpart at the CIA, and other high officials. This passage is worth quoting in full:

"C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

Seen from today's perspective this short paragraph is a strikingly clear template for the future, establishing these points:

1. By mid-July 2002, eight months before the war began, President Bush had decided to invade and occupy Iraq.

2. Bush had decided to "justify" the war "by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD."

3. Already "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

4. Many at the top of the administration did not want to seek approval from the United Nations (going "the UN route").

5. Few in Washington seemed much interested in the aftermath of the war.

We have long known, thanks to Bob Woodward and others, that military planning for the Iraq war began as early as November 21, 2001, after the President ordered Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to look at "what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein if we have to," and that Secretary Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, who headed Central Command, were briefing American senior officials on the progress of military planning during the late spring and summer of 2002; indeed, a few days after the meeting in London leaks about specific plans for a possible Iraq war appeared on the front pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post.

What the Downing Street memo confirms for the first time is that President Bush had decided, no later than July 2002, to "remove Saddam, through military action," that war with Iraq was "inevitable" -- and that what remained was simply to establish and develop the modalities of justification; that is, to come up with a means of "justifying" the war and "fixing" the "intelligence and facts...around the policy." The great value of the discussion recounted in the memo, then, is to show, for the governments of both countries, a clear hierarchy of decision-making. By July 2002 at the latest, war had been decided on; the question at issue now was how to justify it -- how to "fix," as it were, what Blair will later call "the political context." Specifically, though by this point in July the President had decided to go to war, he had not yet decided to go to the United Nations and demand inspectors; indeed, as "C" points out, those on the National Security Council -- the senior security officials of the U.S. government -- "had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record." This would later change, largely as a result of the political concerns of these very people gathered together at 10 Downing Street.

After Admiral Boyce offered a brief discussion of the war plans then on the table and the defense secretary said a word or two about timing -- "the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections" -- Foreign Secretary Jack Straw got to the heart of the matter: not whether or not to invade Iraq but how to justify such an invasion:

"The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss [the timing of the war] with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran."

Given that Saddam was not threatening to attack his neighbors and that his weapons of mass destruction program was less extensive than those of a number of other countries, how does one justify attacking? Foreign Secretary Straw had an idea: "We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force."

The British realized they needed "help with the legal justification for the use of force" because, as the attorney general pointed out, rather dryly, "the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action." Which is to say, the simple desire to overthrow the leadership of a given sovereign country does not make it legal to invade that country; on the contrary. And, said the attorney general, of the "three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or [United Nations Security Council] authorization," the first two "could not be the base in this case." In other words, Iraq was not attacking the United States or the United Kingdom, so the leaders could not claim to be acting in self-defense; nor was Iraq's leadership in the process of committing genocide, so the United States and the United Kingdom could not claim to be invading for humanitarian reasons.[1] This left Security Council authorization as the only conceivable legal justification for war. But how to get it?

At this point in the meeting Prime Minister Tony Blair weighed in. He had heard his foreign minister's suggestion about drafting an ultimatum demanding that Saddam let back in the United Nations inspectors. Such an ultimatum could be politically critical, said Blair -- but only if the Iraqi leader turned it down:

"The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD.... If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work."

Here the inspectors were introduced, but as a means to create the missing casus belli. If the UN could be made to agree on an ultimatum that Saddam accept inspectors, and if Saddam then refused to accept them, the Americans and the British would be well on their way to having a legal justification to go to war (the attorney general's third alternative of UN Security Council authorization).

Thus, the idea of UN inspectors was introduced not as a means to avoid war, as President Bush repeatedly assured Americans, but as a means to make war possible. War had been decided on; the problem under discussion here was how to make, in the prime minister's words, "the political context ...right." The "political strategy" -- at the center of which, as with the Americans, was weapons of mass destruction, for "it was the regime that was producing the WMD" -- must be strong enough to give "the military plan the space to work." Which is to say, once the allies were victorious the war would justify itself. The demand that Iraq accept UN inspectors, especially if refused, could form the political bridge by which the allies could reach their goal: "regime change" through "military action."

But there was a problem: as the foreign secretary pointed out, "on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences." While the British considered legal justification for going to war critical -- they, unlike the Americans, were members of the International Criminal Court -- the Americans did not. Mr. Straw suggested that given "US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum." The defense secretary, Geoffrey Hoon, was more blunt, arguing "that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the U.S. did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush." The key negotiation in view at this point, in other words, was not with Saddam over letting in the United Nations inspectors -- both parties hoped he would refuse to admit them, and thus provide the justification for invading. The key negotiation would be between the Americans, who had shown "resistance" to the idea of involving the United Nations at all, and the British, who were more concerned than their American cousins about having some kind of legal fig leaf for attacking Iraq. Three weeks later, Foreign Secretary Straw arrived in the Hamptons to "discreetly explore the ultimatum" with Secretary of State Powell, perhaps the only senior American official who shared some of the British concerns; as Straw told the secretary, in Bob Woodward's account, "If you are really thinking about war and you want us Brits to be a player, we cannot be unless you go to the United Nations." [2]

2.

Britain's strong support for the "UN route" that most American officials so distrusted was critical in helping Powell in the bureaucratic battle over going to the United Nations. As late as August 26, Vice President Dick Cheney had appeared before a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars and publicly denounced "the UN route." Asserting that "simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction [and] there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us," Cheney advanced the view that going to the United Nations would itself be dangerous:

"A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with UN resolutions. On the contrary, there is great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow 'back in the box.'"

Cheney, like other administration "hard-liners," feared "the UN route" not because it might fail but because it might succeed and thereby prevent a war that they were convinced had to be fought.

As Woodward recounts, it would finally take a personal visit by Blair on September 7 to persuade President Bush to go to the United Nations:

"For Blair the immediate question was, Would the United Nations be used? He was keenly aware that in Britain the question was, Does Blair believe in the UN? It was critical domestically for the prime minister to show his own Labour Party, a pacifist party at heart, opposed to war in principle, that he had gone the UN route. Public opinion in the UK favored trying to make international institutions work before resorting to force. Going through the UN would be a large and much-needed plus."[3]

The President now told Blair that he had decided "to go to the UN" and the prime minister, according to Woodward, "was relieved." After the session with Blair, Bush later recounts to Woodward, he walked into a conference room and told the British officials gathered there that "your man has got cojones." ("And of course these Brits don't know what cojones are," Bush tells Woodward.) Henceforth this particular conference with Blair would be known, Bush declares, as "the cojones meeting."

That September the attempt to sell the war began in earnest, for, as White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card had told the New York Times in an unusually candid moment, "You don't roll out a new product in August." At the heart of the sales campaign was the United Nations. Thanks in substantial part to Blair's prodding, George W. Bush would come before the UN General Assembly on September 12 and, after denouncing the Iraqi regime, announce that "we will work with the UN Security Council for the necessary resolutions." The main phase of public diplomacy -- giving the war a "political context," in Blair's phrase -- had begun. Though "the UN route" would be styled as an attempt to avoid war, its essence, as the Downing Street memo makes clear, was a strategy to make the war possible, partly by making it politically palatable.

As it turned out, however -- and as Cheney and others had feared -- the "UN route" to war was by no means smooth, or direct. Though Powell managed the considerable feat of securing unanimous approval for Security Council Resolution 1441, winning even Syria's support, the allies differed on the key question of whether or not the resolution gave United Nations approval for the use of force against Saddam, as the Americans contended, or whether a second resolution would be required, as the majority of the council, and even the British, conceded it would. Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador to the UN, put this position bluntly on November 8, the day Resolution 1441 was passed:

"We heard loud and clear during the negotiations about 'automaticity' and 'hidden triggers' -- the concerns that on a decision so crucial we should not rush into military action.... Let me be equally clear.... There is no 'automaticity' in this Resolution. If there is a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter will return to the Council for discussion as required.... We would expect the Security Council then to meet its responsibilities."

Vice President Cheney could have expected no worse. Having decided to travel down "the UN route," the Americans and British would now need a second resolution to gain the necessary approval to attack Iraq. Worse, Saddam frustrated British and American hopes, as articulated by Blair in the July 23 meeting, that he would simply refuse to admit the inspectors and thereby offer the allies an immediate casus belli. Instead, hundreds of inspectors entered Iraq, began to search, and found...nothing. January, which Defence Secretary Hoon had suggested was the "most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin," came and went, and the inspectors went on searching.

On the Security Council, a majority -- led by France, Germany, and Russia -- would push for the inspections to run their course. President Jacques Chirac of France later put this argument succinctly in an interview with CBS and CNN just as the war was about to begin:

"France is not pacifist. We are not anti-American either. We are not just going to use our veto to nag and annoy the US. But we just feel that there is another option, another way, another more normal way, a less dramatic way than war, and that we have to go through that path. And we should pursue it until we've come [to] a dead end, but that isn't the case."[4]

Where would this "dead end" be found, however, and who would determine that it had been found? Would it be the French, or the Americans? The logical flaw that threatened the administration's policy now began to become clear. Had the inspectors found weapons, or had they been presented with them by Saddam Hussein, many who had supported the resolution would argue that the inspections regime it established had indeed begun to work -- that by multilateral action the world was succeeding, peacefully, in "disarming Iraq." As long as the inspectors found no weapons, however, many would argue that the inspectors "must be given time to do their work" -- until, in Chirac's words, they "came to a dead end." However that point might be determined, it is likely that, long before it was reached, the failure to find weapons would have undermined the administration's central argument for going to war -- "the conjunction," as ?C' had put it that morning in July, "of terrorism and WMD." And as we now know, the inspectors would never have found weapons of mass destruction.

Vice President Cheney had anticipated this problem, as he had explained frankly to Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, during an October 30 meeting in the White House. Cheney, according to Blix,

"stated the position that inspections, if they do not give results, cannot go on forever, and said the U.S. was 'ready to discredit inspections in favor of disarmament.' A pretty straight way, I thought, of saying that if we did not soon find the weapons of mass destruction that the US was convinced Iraq possessed (though they did not know where), the US would be ready to say that the inspectors were useless and embark on disarmament by other means."[5]

Indeed, the inspectors' failure to find any evidence of weapons came in the wake of a very large effort launched by the administration to put before the world evidence of Saddam's arsenal, an effort spearheaded by George W. Bush's speech in Cincinnati on October 7, and followed by a series of increasingly lurid disclosures to the press that reached a crescendo with Colin Powell's multimedia presentation to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. Throughout the fall and winter, the administration had "rolled out the product," in Card's phrase, with great skill, making use of television, radio, and all the print press to get its message out about the imminent threat of Saddam's arsenal. ("Think of the press," advised Josef Goebbels, "as a great keyboard on which the government can play.")

As the gap between administration rhetoric about enormous arsenals -- "we know where they are," asserted Donald Rumsfeld -- and the inspectors' empty hands grew wider, that gap, as Cheney had predicted, had the effect in many quarters of undermining the credibility of the United Nations process itself. The inspectors' failure to find weapons in Iraq was taken to discredit the worth of the inspections, rather than to cast doubt on the administration's contention that Saddam possessed large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

Oddly enough, Saddam's only effective strategy to prevent war at this point might have been to reveal and yield up some weapons, thus demonstrating to the world that the inspections were working. As we now know, however, he had no weapons to yield up. As Blix remarks, "It occurred to me [on March 7] that the Iraqis would be in greater difficulty if...there truly were no weapons of which they could ?yield possession.'" The fact that, in Blix's words, "the UN and the world had succeeded in disarming Iraq without knowing it" -- that the UN process had been successful --meant, in effect, that the inspectors would be discredited and the United States would go to war.

President Bush would do so, of course, having failed to get the "second resolution" so desired by his friend and ally, Tony Blair. Blair had predicted, that July morning on Downing Street, that the "two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work." He seems to have been proved right in this. In the end his political strategy only half worked: the Security Council's refusal to vote a second resolution approving the use of force left "the UN route" discussed that day incomplete, and Blair found himself forced to follow the United States without the protection of international approval. Had the military plan "worked" -- had the war been short and decisive rather than long, bloody, and inconclusive -- Blair would perhaps have escaped the political damage the war has caused him. A week after the Downing Street memo was published in the Sunday Times, Tony Blair was reelected, but his majority in Parliament was reduced, from 161 to 67. The Iraq war, and the damage it had done to his reputation for probity, was widely believed to have been a principal cause.

In the United States, on the other hand, the Downing Street memorandum has attracted little attention. As I write, no American newspaper has published it and few writers have bothered to comment on it. The war continues, and Americans have grown weary of it; few seem much interested now in discussing how it began, and why their country came to fight a war in the cause of destroying weapons that turned out not to exist. For those who want answers, the Bush administration has followed a simple and heretofore largely successful policy: blame the intelligence agencies. Since "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" as early as July 2002 (as "C," the head of British intelligence, reported upon his return from Washington), it seems a matter of remarkable hubris, even for this administration, that its officials now explain their misjudgments in going to war by blaming them on "intelligence failures" -- that is, on the intelligence that they themselves politicized. Still, for the most part, Congress has cooperated. Though the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the failures of the CIA and other agencies before the war, a promised second report that was to take up the administration's political use of intelligence -- which is, after all, the critical issue -- was postponed until after the 2004 elections, then quietly abandoned.

In the end, the Downing Street memo, and Americans' lack of interest in what it shows, has to do with a certain attitude about facts, or rather about where the line should be drawn between facts and political opinion. It calls to mind an interesting observation that an unnamed "senior advisor" to President Bush made to a New York Times Magazine reporter last fall:

"The aide said that guys like me [i.e., reporters and commentators] were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

Though this seems on its face to be a disquisition on religion and faith, it is of course an argument about power, and its influence on truth. Power, the argument runs, can shape truth: power, in the end, can determine reality, or at least the reality that most people accept -- a critical point, for the administration has been singularly effective in its recognition that what is most politically important is not what readers of the New York Times believe but what most Americans are willing to believe. The last century's most innovative authority on power and truth, Joseph Goebbels, made the same point but rather more directly:

"There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be 'the man in the street.' Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology."

I thought of this quotation when I first read the Downing Street memorandum; but I had first looked it up several months earlier, on December 14, 2004, after I had seen the images of the newly reelected President George W. Bush awarding the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor the United States can bestow, to George Tenet, the former director of central intelligence; L. Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq; and General (ret.) Tommy Franks, the commander who had led American forces during the first phase of the Iraq war. Tenet, of course, would be known to history as the intelligence director who had failed to detect and prevent the attacks of September 11 and the man who had assured President Bush that the case for Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction was "a slam dunk." Franks had allowed the looting of Baghdad and had generally done little to prepare for what would come after the taking of Baghdad. ("There was little discussion in Washington," as "C" told the Prime Minister on July 23, "of the aftermath after military action.") Bremer had dissolved the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police and thereby created 400,000 or so available recruits for the insurgency. One might debate their ultimate responsibility for these grave errors, but it is difficult to argue that these officials merited the highest recognition the country could offer.

Of course truth, as the master propagandist said, is "unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology." He of course would have instantly grasped the psychological tactic embodied in that White House ceremony, which was one more effort to reassure Americans that the war the administration launched against Iraq has been a success and was worth fighting. That barely four Americans in ten are still willing to believe this suggests that as time goes on and the gap grows between what Americans see and what they are told, membership in the "reality-based community" may grow along with it. We will see. Still, for those interested in the question of how our leaders persuaded the country to become embroiled in a counterinsurgency war in Iraq, the Downing Street memorandum offers one more confirmation of the truth. For those, that is, who want to hear

--May 12, 2005

Notes

1. The latter charge might have been given as a reason for intervention in 1988, for example, when the Iraqi regime was carrying out its Anfal campaign against the Kurds; at that time, though, the Reagan administration -- comprising many of the same officials who would later lead the invasion of Iraq -- was supporting Saddam in his war against Iran and kept largely silent. The second major killing campaign of the Saddam regime came in 1991, when Iraqi troops attacked Shiites in the south who had rebelled against the regime in the wake of Saddam's defeat in the Gulf War; the first Bush administration, despite President George H.W. Bush's urging Iraqis to "rise up against the dictator, Saddam Hussein," and despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of American troops within miles of the killing, stood by and did nothing. See Ken Roth, "War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention" (Human Rights Watch, January 2004).

2. See Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (Simon and Schuster, 2004), p. 162.

3. See Woodward, Plan of Attack, pp. 177?178.

4. See "Chirac Makes His Case on Iraq," an interview with Christiane Amanpour, CBS News, March 16, 2003.

5. See Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq (Pantheon, 2004), p. 86.

Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker Staff writer, is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His most recent book is Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, which collects his pieces on torture and Iraq that first appeared in the New York Review of Books. His work can be found at markdanner.com

This article appears in the June 9th issue of The New York Review of Books. It appeared first at Tomdispatch.com by kind permission of that magazine.

Copyright 2005 Mark Danner

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