Deep Blade Journal

Blair says, “I did what I thought was right”

If he thinks that now, two-thirds million killings and the creation of four million refugees in Iraq during the Bush/Blair war reveals that Mr. Blair’s moral failure is utterly contemptible and he has zero insight into the rot of his own condition.

Patrick Cockburn sums up Blair pretty well today:

For four years he has nailed British colours to a failed US policy over which Britain has no significant influence. He has advertised a humiliating British dependency on Washington without gaining any advantages.

As for Iraqis, despite all his rhetoric about rescuing them from Saddam, he has been surprisingly indifferent to their fate.

CBS’s Mark Knoller takes on Moyers’s “Buying the War” and gets pummeled in return

We have not yet seen Bill Moyer’s devastating documentary on the cooperation of mainstream media with the Bush Administration in developing public consent for the Iraq invasion because our PBS station here in Maine had its annual auction last week. NOTE TO MAINE READERS: It will air THIS WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, at 9pm on channels 10 & 13.

Still I want to point out that there is a very interesting mainstream media response to the Moyers piece from CBS News correspondent Mark Knoller. Knoller attempted to criticize the Moyers piece HERE, on the basis of how Moyers treated an important March 6, 2003 Bush press conference. Knoller wrote last week,

He shows only a single, brief example of a question – deep in the news conference – in which a reporter asked Mr. Bush to reflect on how he was guided by his faith at that difficult time. Admittedly, it was a softball.

But Moyers did not cite any of the other much more pointed questions put to the President that evening in the East Room.

Now, I took quite an interest in this, having posted recently about that very press conference on its 4th anniversary. Before citing the dozens of times the president was allowed to give his stock answer at this crucial pre-war event, “If he [Saddam Hussein] doesn’t disarm, we’ll disarm him,” I wrote,

The president’s gibberish–”I hope we don’t have to go to war, but if we go to war,” and “I’ve not made up our mind about military action. Hopefully, this can be done peacefully,” and “We hope we don’t go to war; but if we should, we will present a supplemental [budget].”–should have been transparent at that point. For the most part, the sheepish press corps was more interested in Mr. Bush’s “faith.”

It is also striking how almost nobody in the room seemed at all interested in the president’s long-term plan for Iraq, and what the costs of a lengthy occupation might be. Only that question about Vietnam even raised the issue about going down a long, destructive path. Of course if the attack had been presented as leading to a lengthy occupation possibly costing thousands of American lives, which at the time even this administration certainly could have expected, support for it would have been much lower.

Needless to say, I do not think much of Knoller’s point about “pointed questions.” Now, there is a whole lot of attack on Knoller in the public comment section for his piece, which I thank CBS for even having. I posted twice in there. The first (now down on page 15) as follows:

If these WH Press Corps questions on March 6, 2003 were so probing, how is it that President Bush was able to give exactly the same answer every time? (eg., “If he doesn’t disarm, we’ll disarm him.”) It was like the WHPC served him, cooperatively, these “doubts” that made a whole lot of the world’s citizens rightfully very angry just so he could bat them away with his stock answer.

I remember almost punching the TV that night, you guys came off so weak.

It is also striking how almost nobody in the room seemed at all interested in the president’s long-term plan for Iraq, and what the costs of a lengthy occupation might be. Only that question about Vietnam even raised the issue about going down a long, destructive path. Of course if the attack had been presented as leading to a lengthy occupation possibly costing thousands of American lives, which at the time even this administration certainly could have expected, domestic support for it would have been much closer to the level in the rest of the world–LOW.
Posted by owl0426 at 07:17 PM : Apr 26, 2007

Yesterday, I noted that Knoller had posted an update, obviously stunned by the content of the hundreds of comments he received. He threw down a challenge for commenters to put themselves into the reporters’ position on March 6, 2003 and to come up with a “finely-crafted question…that both serves the public interest and will get a meaningful response.”

Here’s what I wrote,

I respect Mark Knoller’s challenge here. But I also think one additional, overriding criterion for the questions beyond “serves the public interest” and “meaningful response” needs to be added: “will not harm the correspondent’s access or attract unwanted flak from the White House or bosses”.

Here is something that could have be asked, but probably would have run afoul of that third, unspoken criterion:

In the March 3 issue of Newsweek, John Barry reports that “Hussein Kamel, the highest-ranking Iraqi official ever to defect from Saddam Hussein’s inner circle, told CIA and British intelligence officers and U.N. inspectors in the summer of 1995 that after the gulf war, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them.”

You and Secretary Powell both have cited Kamel as a credible source. Does this not undermine totally your present case that Iraq must now be “disarmed”?

Posted by owl0426 at 01:27 AM : Apr 30, 2007

If the press corps had pressed on this, they might have pumped the Barry story up to the level it deserved, and brought the rest of the then-voluminous available information contrary to Bush’s case for war out into the light. As it turns out, Barry was 100% correct. There was no threat in Iraq that had to be “disarmed,” as the UNMOVIC mission without a doubt eventually would have been able to certify. Iraq had in fact not lied in its declaration under UN Security Council Resolution 1441. The US invasion was pure and simple a war of aggression–a taking of Iraq.

While they did serve up a few, mild, non-detailed critiques of the WMD case chielfly so Bush could slap them down, the sheep in the press corps failed to press Bush on his stock answer, and failed to vigorously pursue any stories about how the president’s “views were challenged or disputed by others.”

The world could have been spared the utter disaster that is now Iraq if members of this elite press corps had taken their jobs seriously.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR): 4 million displaced Iraqis since 2003

The title of this post is the same as that of an oped published Sunday in the Washington Post (reprinted today in the Bangor Daily News) carrying the byline of the Republican presidential candidate, Arizona Senator John McCain. Along with McCain’s properly much-ridiculed April Fools walk through a Baghdad market backed by a powerful militia, his oped would be extremely silly except for the fact that the war McCain so dearly supports is causing death, injury, and displacement for millions of innocent Iraqis.

I won’t take on McCain’s “cautious optimism” point-by-point. Instead I’ll challenge his complete omission of any sense that he understands the full devastating depth and breadth of the total destruction of the foundations of Iraqi society that the war has brought. And, let me say I just cringe at the deep colonial mentality revealed by the “counterinsurgency approach” that McCain argues “for” — “separating the reconcilable population from the irreconcilable.”

If taken to its logical end, the language used here by McCain shows that he believes the part of the Iraqi population who continue to display their opposition to US control of their country is disposable. To me, McCain’s use of “irreconcilable” suggests that in the end his recommended approach would involve applying force in a manner tantamount to genocide. To McCain, “separating” means ridding Iraq of those who never will accept American domination, a clear majority in every study of Iraqi public opinion.

Unfortunately, McCain is correct in one unintended sense. Many Americans who find themselves reading war cheerleading by the likes of the senator are not reading about how terrible the actual war is.

Just today, for example, the International Committee of the Red Cross released a report that describes an Iraq where, “The suffering that Iraqi men, women and children are enduring today is unbearable and unacceptable. Their lives and dignity are continuously under threat.” The American media barely has covered this release. It’s a slight footnote in a few news stories and I have seen no mention yet on television.

The report, called “Civilians Without Protection,” (unlike the situation for Senator McCain in the Baghdad market) describes the “ever worsening humanitarian crisis” where “Thousands of Iraqis continue to be forced out of their homes owing to military operations, general poor security and the destruction of houses. And the outlook is bleak, particularly in Baghdad and other areas with mixed communities, where the situation is likely to worsen.”

It’s all so depressing. American public opinion generally has turned against McCain and the war, but there still is woeful ignorance about what is actually happening to the Iraqis as a direct result of the American invasion. We don’t see the most important reporting on the situation.

Patrick Cockburn of the UK Independent, author of The Occupation, a riveting book on Iraq, is an essential antidote to the poison of McCain. His dispatches are not published in American newspapers, but the Internet is an easy way to get them. Here are just a few recent doses of reality filed by Cockburn around the 4th anniversary of the invasion:

• March 19, 2007: Almost Every Aspect of Iraqi Life has Gotten Worse in the Last Four Years

Tony Blair and George Bush still occasionally imply that the picture of Iraq as a war-torn hell is an exaggeration by the media. They suggest, though not as forcibly as they did a couple of years ago, that parts of the country are relatively peaceful. Nothing could be more untrue.

In reality, the violence is grossly understated. The Baker-Hamilton report by senior Republicans and Democrats, led by James Baker, took a single day last summer, when the US army reported 93 acts of violence in Iraq, and asked American intelligence to re-examine the evidence. They found the real figure was 1,100–the US military had deliberately understated the violence by factor of over 10….

• March 20, 2007: Four Years After the Invasion: Iraq is a Vast, Blood-Drenched Human Disaster

Four years after the US and British troops invaded Iraq the country is drenched in blood and its people full of fear. Iraqis often have a look of half-suppressed panic in their eyes as they tell how violent death had touched them and their families again and again….

• April 10, 2007: The Beacon of the US “Success” The Myth of Tal Afar

Embedded American journalists scurried to this poor and depressing Turkoman city between Mosul and the Syrian border to report on the good news. President Bush even singled it out for optimistic comment in March 2006. “Tal Afar shows that, when Iraqis can count on a basic level of safety and security, they can live together peacefully,” he said. “The people of Tal Afar have shown why spreading liberty and democracy is at the heart of our strategy to defeat the terrorists.”

It was always a myth. On March 27, a gigantic truck bomb exploded in a Shia market area in Tal Afar. It was the deadliest single bomb out of the many that have been detonated by Sunni insurgents. The Interior Ministry said that 152 people were killed and 347 wounded in the explosion….

It was always absurd to treat Tal Afar as a possible textbook case of how the US might successfully expedite a counter-insurgency policy.

For more on Tal Afar, see Deep Blade Journal HERE. This SEARCH produces a large catalog of Patrick Cockburn dispatches from Iraq. Cockburn’s book, “The Occupation,” is a highly recommended read.