4um: The Dead-Enders; Being A Neocon Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry

Title: The Dead-Enders; Being A Neocon Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry
Source: AntiWar.com
URL Source: http://antiwar.com/justin/
Published: Mar 21, 2007
Author: Justin Raimondo
Post Date: 2007-03-21 13:20:01 by Brian S
Keywords: None
Views: 165
Comments: 11

Christopher Hitchens isn't sorry. Not about being a Commie all those years ago; after all, he was a Trotskyite, not one of those icky Stalinists, which merits a "Get Out of Jail Free" card. Not about being frequently drunk in public: after all, it's part of his image as the Courtney Love of punditry. And, most of all, he's not sorry about doing his bit to gin up the Iraq war:

"Four years after the first coalition soldiers crossed the Iraqi border, one can attract pitying looks (at best) if one does not take the view that the whole engagement could have been and should have been avoided. Those who were opposed to the operation from the beginning now claim vindication, and many of those who supported it say that if they had known then what they know now, they would have spoken or voted differently.

"What exactly does it mean to take the latter position? At what point, in other words, ought the putative supporter to have stepped off the train?"

Instead of stepping off the train, the neocons – and Hitchens most of all – have stepped in front of it. In terms of their own credibility, what they did was the equivalent of lying down on the tracks and letting the train run over them. By staking their reputations as serious commentators on the success of a war that Gen. William E. Odom trenchantly and accurately described as the greatest strategic disaster in American military history, they have ensured their place in the pantheon of mistaken prognosticators, along with the inventors of phrenology and the makers of the Edsel.

Oh, a few have recanted, most notably and sincerely Francis Fukuyama. The rest, particularly Kenneth "Cakewalk" Adelman and, most obnoxiously, Andrew Sullivan, have taken to blaming President Bush's supposedly inconsistent and even halfhearted effort to implement their grand theories – much like Trotsky's disciples blamed Stalin's "counter-revolutionary" shortcomings for the inconsistent implementation of the Marxist-Leninist grand design. Hitchens, who has been both a Trot and a warmonger, is a particularly hard case: a dead-ender, in short, who stubbornly sticks to the Revealed Truth even as reality rudely intrudes.

Hitchens sets up a phony dialogue between himself and his interlocutors and lobs himself a lot of softball questions, which he disposes of with his characteristic disdain for facts. It's as if Scooter Libby had cross-examined himself. How pathetic that a writer who used to be so interesting and fun to read, even if one disagreed with him, has descended to this very threadbare bag of tricks.

Hitchens first raises a fundamentally phony question: Oh, but didn't Saddam violate a whole bunch of UN resolutions? Wasn't the credibility of the UN at stake? Why Americans should care about the UN, or why the U.S. military should be put at the disposal of the Security Council, is never made clear. Besides which, if we set up a mechanism whereby an invasion is automatically launched against any country that violates a given number of UN resolutions, we'd have bombed Tel Aviv long ago. At any rate, I don't recall Hitchens being much of a UN fan to begin with, but I guess when your back's against the wall any maneuver will do.

It was "correct," insists Hitchens, to send U.S. forces to the Gulf, because only the threat of force caused the Iraqis to cave on the inspections issue. So Hitchens admits the Iraqis were ready to comply with the UN demand to admit inspectors without conditions – what he doesn't admit is that the U.S. thwarted Saddam's pathetic attempts to effectively surrender, and instead launched a series of provocations designed to torpedo a negotiated settlement. Aside from that, however, the very act of sending military forces to the Gulf made war a foregone conclusion: by that time, the president had invested so much of his own political capital – and America's prestige – in this misadventure that the administration could argue that backing down now, even a little bit, would do irreparable damage to our credibility. Such an argument was, of course, completely unreasonable, but in the Bizarro World we had fallen into post-9/11 – and are only now showing signs of climbing out of – such illogic is perversely "logical."

Hitchens throws himself a few more underhand pitches, all centered on the question of Iraq's degree of cooperation with the UN inspectors, but he never addresses the overarching reality, which is that there weren't any "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. Period. As Scott Ritter pointed out long ago in an article in Arms Control, the Iraqis had been disarmed by the stringent UN inspections regime and would not be able to reconstitute it. Whether Saddam tried to wriggle out of the straightjacket imposed by the IAEA is irrelevant: what matters is that – contrary to what Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Hitchens were telling us at the time – he didn't succeed.

But we couldn't afford to wait for the smoking gun to arrive in the form of a mushroom cloud: Condi Rice's infamous formulation of the "imminent threat" talking point was just one dark note in the administration's Doomsday Symphony, which deliberately evoked the horrors of a nuclear attack on the U.S. The president even conjured visions of Iraqi drones dropping WMD on the continental United States. Those "drones" turned out to be rickety little gliders that could barely have gotten off the ground. It would be funny if the consequences of the president's delusions hadn't led to such tragic results. Cheney went on television and said flat out we know Iraq has reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. Every bit of misinformation put out there by the Office of Special Plans and the private-sector division of the War Party, including Hitchens, proved to be dead wrong – including all that malarkey about "links" between al-Qaeda and the Ba'athist regime. Saddam's supposed "training camp" for Islamist terrorists (a hoax), the "Prague connection" (a fable), the Niger uranium story (based on a forgery) – it was all of it a pack of lies, from beginning to end, and the American people know it.

Yet Hitchens doesn't concede an inch. "Was the terror connection not exaggerated?" he asks, and, like some crazed homeless guy wandering down the street muttering imprecations at invisible demons, he answers himself:

"Not by much. The Bush administration never claimed that Iraq had any hand in the events of Sept. 11, 2001. But it did point out, at different times, that Saddam had acted as a host and patron to every other terrorist gang in the region."

I have to say I agree with him on this point, if only to a limited degree. While Hitchens has absolutely no evidence to show links between the Iraqi government and Islamists of the al-Qaeda type – the author is, as usual, linkless as well as clueless – he is right that Saddam did harbor one terrorist group. The Mujahedin-e-Khalq, or MeK, is a weird neo-Marxist cult made up largely of Iranian women – at least in the top leadership – who are followers of Maryam Rajavi, the self-proclaimed president of "liberated" Iran. The MeK participated in the 1979 revolution that overthrew the shah and installed the Khomeini regime, but fell out of favor and went into violent opposition, launching terrorist attacks (including against U.S. interests and personnel) in Iran from Iraqi soil. Saddam gave them Camp Ashraf, where they remain to this day – under the protection of the U.S. military, which is reportedly using them for expeditions into Iran, the scene of several recent terrorist attacks.

The exact extent of U.S. aid to and cooperation with the MeK is unknown at present. However, they have their advocates in the U.S. Congress and the administration, as well as among neoconservative groups. The recent trial of Scooter Libby was the occasion for a huge document dump, and one interesting find is a memo [.pdf] from John Hannah to Libby regarding the activities and status of the MeK – and there must be a reason why the entire document was blanked out except for the authors' and recipients' names and the subject lines.

Hitchens claims that no one could have predicted the Iraqi civil war, yet I don't believe for a minute I'm the only one who likened the invasion of Iraq to the opening of Pandora's Box, and you shouldn't either.

Hitchens ends with his usual flamboyant flourish:

"So, you seriously mean to say that we would not be living in a better or safer world if the coalition forces had turned around and sailed or flown home in the spring of 2003?

"That's exactly what I mean to say."

If the Bourbons of Talleyrand's day learned nothing and forgot nothing, the "democratic" imperialists of our own day have learned nothing and forgotten everything – including their own bright prognoses for the postwar era in Iraq and throughout the region. War advocates recalled the Allied liberation of Paris when envisioning the likely outcome of Iraq's "liberation." It never happened. Remember how the invasion and especially the Iraqi elections were supposed to augur an era of democratic reform and even revolution in the Middle East? That, too, never happened.

Every word the War Party rattled off before the invasion – the reasons for the invasion, the "evidence" of WMD, the alleged connection between the Iraqi regime and 9/11 – was either a lie or a half-truth intended to obscure the full truth. Hitchens was one of the main disseminators of these lies, yet he has the temerity to stand there and tell us he's not sorry. He and his pal Ahmed Chalabi belong to the legion of "heroes in error": they're proud of their deceit. It has proved, after all, the key to their postwar success. I hear Chalabi is in line for minister of oil resources, and our laptop bombardiers have done quite well for themselves, as one wag recently pointed out in Radar magazine. The journalistic price to pay for being so wrong has been less than nil. Bill "New American Century" Kristol has been rewarded for being wrong about Iraq with a column in Time magazine. Hitchens became a media star in the run-up to war, when he was all over television charming those gullible Americans who are suckers for any snake oil salesman with a British accent. No doubt his lecture fees are at an all-time high.

He isn't sorry because the war has been good for him, but it's not just about careerism. For the War Party, the world is a better place now that the U.S. has invaded Iraq and occupied it for four years: we have the "surge" to look forward to – and now the glad tidings of yet another war, an even bigger and "better" one, with Iran. As far as Hitchens and his fellow neocons are concerned, happy days are here again.

When the Soviet Union fell and the Cold War abruptly ended, the professional warmongers and Sovietologists were out of their jobs, and it was a long stretch of lean times between the Berlin Wall's fall and the fall of the twin towers. Sept. 11, however, did more than merely revive the War Party's fortunes – it enabled the neocons to effectively pull off a coup d'etat at the very top levels of U.S. government. In Colin Powell's characterization, they set up a "separate government."

Centered in the office of the vice president, the neocons did an end run around the mainstream intelligence agencies to manufacture the lies that lured us into war, and Christopher Hitchens did more than his part to spread these lies. But in the minds of the neocons, all their lies are noble ones – besides , this whole obsession with such outdated concepts as truth and falsehood is just a superstition dreamed up by the "reality-based community," as one White House official put it to Ron Suskind. Watch us while we make history: in the triumphal atmosphere of the War Party's heyday, a fatal hubris was in the air, and the pro-war intellectuals breathed this in so deeply that the effects have yet to wear off. Hitchens is drunk on a lot more than booze.

Alcoholics often suffer from delusions, and their recalcitrance is part and parcel of their strenuous denial. The reality on the ground has proved the drunken warriors utterly wrong, yet they still go on pretending that all is well, if only the "surge" would be given time to work, if only the media would stop subverting the war effort, if only…

When the neoconservative version of this war's history is written, each chapter will elaborate on a different "if only" scenario that deftly ignores what actually happened and instead focuses on the imperfect implementation of their wonderful scheme.

Hitchens at least tries to defend the indefensible, which is a brave thing to even attempt, but his fellow neocon Richard Perle is clearly uninterested in making the effort. Here he is chatting with Tim Russert:

"RUSSERT: Mr. Perle, is the war, war in Iraq worth the price we've paid?

"PERLE: Forgive me for saying it, but I think it's the wrong question. It's a bit academic for one thing. But the question is what is in our national interest now, what is going to make Americans safer. I disagree with what we've just heard. A defeat in Iraq brought about in the worst instance by precipitous withdrawal would have terrorists around the world celebrating. It is the idea that the United States can be defeated that motivates terrorists. And we have Osama bin Laden himself saying that and saying it repeatedly. So the question the country faces now is not is this a reason – is this a bargain, is it a reasonable price. The question is what do we do. And I think we have to win this war, and I hope that the new strategy that's been adopted will enable us to do that."

The most basic question, whether it was right to have sacrificed so many lives in pursuit of Perle's policy, is "a bit academic" to one of this war's chief intellectual architects and public advocates. His answer to his critics is simple: I got you into this mess, and only I can get you safely out of it, so listen up ….

The problem for Perle and Hitchens is that few are listening. Even in Washington, where both parties collaborated in bringing this disastrous war about, the ranks of the War Party are noticeably thinning. In the country at large, the war is wildly unpopular. The electorate longs for an antiwar presidential candidate like evangelicals pining for the Messiah's return. Deliver us from evil! appears to be the general sentiment, although what sort of evil the American public is just beginning to learn.

"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. Then you win." --Mahatma K. Gandhi

Americans are in a great deal more danger now than they were before 9/11. Plus we've lost a great deal of freedom. And if you weren't so stupid Mr. Perle, you would realize that your Israel is in a lot more danger now too. But, as I said you're just too stupid and arrogant to see the truth.

"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes nor between parties either — but right through the human heart." — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Mr. Perle is less concerned with Israel than with his own hide and his own fortune.

"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. Then they fight you. Then you win." --Mahatma K. Gandhi

You know, angle, I just realized that maybe I should adopt that as my motto too.

And finally there are a very few brave ones who have tried to fight me via debate (or what they think passes for debate).

They've made good foils for my views which I think my intended audience will ultimately appreciate.

Yeah- I read Hitchen's essay. It was just as Raimondo describes it- deluded and dishonest.

Hitchens behaves as though he's being blackmailed into defending a position that is inconsistent with his true beliefs.

To reason, indeed, he was not in the habit of attending. His mode of arguing, if it is to be so called, was one not uncommon among dull and stubborn persons, who are accustomed to be surrounded by their inferiors. He asserted a proposition; and, as often as wiser people ventured respectfully to show that it was erroneous, he asserted it again, in exactly the same words, and conceived that, by doing so, he at once disposed of all objections. - Macaulay, "History of England," Vol. 1, Chapter 6, on James II.

You're the one who posted the Hitchens piece that is the subject of Raimondo's column, aren't you?

I wonder if you or Raimondo could explain to us on what basis Scott Ritter made this claim? And why did Ritter make a 180 degree change in his views from the time he last had access to inspection information and now?

Here is what Ritter had to say (to the Senate) in September of 1998 right after the inspectors were kicked out of Iraq and at a time when he last had access to classified material:

"I can say is that we have clear evidence that Iraq is retaining prohibited weapons capabilities in the fields of chemical, biological and ballistic- missile delivery systems of a range of greater than 150 kilometers. And if Iraq has undertaken a concerted effort run at the highest levels inside Iraq to retain these capabilities, then I see no reason why they would not exercise the same sort of concealment efforts for their nuclear programs."

"The threat of force was made back in April 1991 when the Security Council together with the vote and pushing and backing of the United States passed the original cease-fire resolution. I don't see anything that would have caused the law to be altered. Iraq has not been disarmed. I would assume that that threat of force still exists today."

"The fact of the matter is that since April 1991 under the direct orders and direction of the President of Iraq the government of Iraq has lied to the Special Commission about the totality of its holdings. We cannot conduct verification of Iraq's compliance with Security Council resolutions without an understanding of what there was to begin with. Iraq not only lied to us in April 1991. In the summer of 1991 they conducted what they call unilateral destruction: that is, they disposed of certain materials without the presence of weapons inspectors and then destroyed the records of this alleged destruction. They also diverted certain materials to the presidential security forces. This has confused an already confusing situation. We do not know the totality of what Iraq has. What we do know is that the declarations they have made to the Special Commission to date are false. And the explanations that they give to us about how they disposed of weapons are wrong."

"There is no question that Saddam Hussein is the problem here. All decisions pertaining to his retention of weapons of mass destruction in direct disobedience of international law, are made by him and him alone. And he is the only one who can make the decision to comply with Security Council resolution. So I would agree with you that Saddam Hussein is the problem. How you resolve the problem of Saddam Hussein is an issue that's better left to people whose responsibility that is."

"What we have today is two things. One, the cease-fire resolution is being violated on a continual basis by Iraq. And if we do not take action to turn this around, we will have, in fact, lost the gulf war. We will have, in fact, dishonored those Americans who died in the gulf war and those Americans who paid a heavy price, personal or physical, through the conduct of the gulf war. But even worse, Saddam Hussein will have disgraced the body of the Security Council. "

"The Special Commission has intelligence information, which indicates that components necessary for three nuclear weapons exist, lacking the fissile material."

"I believe within a period of six months Iraq could reconstitute its biological-weapons and chemical-weapons capability."

"We know in fact that Iraq has a plan to have a breakout scenario for reconstitution of long-range ballistic missiles within six months of the "go" signal from the president of Iraq."

"SEN. MCCAIN: So it is your opinion that if these inspections are further emasculated, then within a six-month period of time, Saddam Hussein would have the capability to deliver a weapon of mass destruction?

"SEN. INHOFE: Do you think, in your evaluation of the type of person that Saddam Hussein is, that he would hesitate in any way from using a weapon of mass destruction and delivering it to the United States, if he had the capability?

MR. RITTER: My experience with the Iraqi government is that it is a ruthless government and that it would carry out such a task if that was the decision of the president of Iraq."

MR. RITTER: The intent is clear; to retain the capability to possess weapons of mass destruction. Back in -- he made a strategic decision in the 1980s to get this capability. He's linked his capability directly to his person. And today his goal is to retain this capability, so that he can menace the region and project himself as a regional superpower.

SEN. HAGEL: Would it be fair to say to use potential nuclear/biological/chemical weapons to blackmail the region?

MR. RITTER: I believe that his past statements, especially concerning the threat in April 1990 to burn half of Israel, imply that that is indeed one of the tactics that he uses."

"It's a cease-fire resolution, which states Iraq must disarm, and what we have is the vanquished boarding the Missouri and dictating the terms of conflict resolution to those who won the war. And it's a travesty, and I'm really sad that it's happening."

"We exposed the VX warheads through the inspection process. We discovered a document, which exposed the absolute lie that Iraq's told about consumption of chemical weapons. What I would say is that inspections designed to expose Iraq's concealment mechanism have not been allowed to proceed."

And a few months later, writing in the New Republic, Ritter was even more specific.

"Even today, Iraq is not nearly disarmed. Based on highly credible intelligence, UNSCOM [the U.N. weapons inspectors] suspects that Iraq still has biological agents like anthrax, botulinum toxin, and clostridium perfringens in sufficient quantity to fill several dozen bombs and ballistic missile warheads, as well as the means to continue manufacturing these deadly agents. Iraq probably retains several tons of the highly toxic VX substance, as well as sarin nerve gas and mustard gas. This agent is stored in artillery shells, bombs, and ballistic missile warheads. And Iraq retains significant dual-use industrial infrastructure that can be used to rapidly reconstitute large-scale chemical weapons production.

Meanwhile, Iraq has kept its entire nuclear weapons infrastructure intact through dual-use companies that allow the nuclear-design teams to conduct vital research and practical work on related technologies and materials. Iraq still has components (high explosive lenses, initiators, and neutron generators) for up to four nuclear devices minus the fissile core (highly enriched uranium or plutonium), as well as the means to produce these. Iraq has retained an operational long-range ballistic missile force that includes approximately four mobile launchers and a dozen missiles. And, under the guise of a permitted short-range missile program, Iraq has developed the technology and production means necessary for the rapid reconstitution of long-range ballistic missile production."

Iraq supports its retained prohibited capabilities with an extensive covert procurement network operated by Iraqi intelligence. While images of starving Iraqi children are beamed around the world by American television, Iraqi front companies have spent millions of dollars on forbidden material related to all weapons categories, in direct violation of existing sanctions and often under the cover of the humanitarian "oil for food" program.

Finally, Iraqi security forces have kept critical documentation, including the vital "cookbooks" that contain the step-by-step process to make chemical agent, outline the procedures for producing weapons-grade biological agent, detail the final design of the Iraqi nuclear weapon, and provide the mechanical integration procedures for long-range ballistic missiles.

These capabilities may seem paltry compared with what Iraq had before the Gulf war. But they represent a vital "seed stock" that can and will be used by Saddam Hussein to reconstitute his former arsenal."

Yet within about a year of publishing saying those things, while no longer privy to classified intelligence, Ritter changed his tune 180 degrees. What could prompt such a dramatic change?

Iraq's intelligence services bought gold jewellery that they planned to give to the wife and daughter of Scott Ritter, the controversial former weapons inspector, as part of a clandestine project to encourage him to work closely with Saddam Hussein's regime, according to documents discovered by The Telegraph in Baghdad.

According to the documents, which were found in the bombed headquarters of Iraq's intelligence services, the cost of the presents was approved at the highest level in an attempt to develop "strong relations with them [Mr Ritter's family] that affect positively on our relations with him".

The documents say that the gifts should be offered via an intermediary, who was named as Shakir al-Khafaji, an Iraqi-American businessman and close associate of Mr Ritter.

The documents, which are signed by the then director-general of Iraqi intelligence, purport to reveal close links between Mr al-Khafaji and Iraqi intelligence, and suggest that the regime was making available substantial funds to offer him. Mr Ritter and Mr al-Khafaji have both made clear that they received no such gifts or funds.

The papers referring to the so-called "Scott Ritter Project" were found in a file marked "Hosting in hotels 1997-2000", which held details of Iraqi intelligence guests who had travelled to Baghdad. The records were in the same folder as reports of a visit to Baghdad in 1998 by an envoy of Osama bin Laden, which were disclosed in The Telegraph last week.

The five pages of documents dated between July 18 and September 14, 2000, appear to record a trip to Baghdad made by Mr Ritter, Mr al-Khafaji and a film crew. Their visit took place shortly before Mr Ritter raised £250,000 to make a highly controversial documentary about Iraq that was critical of American policy towards Saddam's regime.

Mr Ritter formed a partnership with Mr al-Khafaji to finance the film, Shifting Sands which, according to Mr Ritter, "proved" that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. In an interview with the New York Times in 2001, Mr Ritter stated that none of Mr al-Khafaji's funding came from Saddam's regime. Of the £250,000 spent on the film, he said that only £26,250 went into his own pocket.

While he confirmed that he had received money from Mr al-Khafaji, Mr Ritter said that he had had his business associate checked by CIA "sources" via a friend who was a reporter, and was reassured.

The documents cast new light on the Iraqi regime's attitude to the film, which was widely denounced as paid-for propaganda. The documents suggest to show that Iraqi intelligence officials had direct contacts with Mr al-Khafaji. They also record discussions among senior officials about offering financial incentives, apparently in an attempt to underwrite projects that Mr al-Khafaji was developing with Mr Ritter.

The correspondence discussed further ways to come up with money to offer to Mr al-Khafaji to cover his travel costs. One letter requests approval to make funds available by siphoning profits from an oil deal, apparently controlled by Iraqi intelligence. The documents state that the matter would be passed on to Tariq Aziz, then Iraq's vice-president, to deal with.

There is no suggestion in the documents that any money or other benefits were ever paid to Mr al-Khafaji.

Last night Mr Ritter said that the Iraqis had tried more than once to compromise Shifting Sands. He confirmed that officials had offered a gold bracelet for his wife and had volunteered to finance the film, either directly or via a French oil company.

Mr Ritter said that he had rebuffed each attempt and filed reports on the approaches to the FBI. He had also filed reports to the US Treasury when he was raising the money for Shifting Sands.

"Be careful how you interpret those documents," he said. "I would hate to read that I had taken Iraqi money, which I did not.

"Perhaps you can find documents relating to the meeting I eventually had with Tariq Aziz, in which I told him I would take no money, and he replied, 'We respect you because you do not have your hand out'," Mr Ritter said.

Mr al-Khafaji, an Iraqi who has lived in America for 30 years, insisted that the documents proved only that Iraqi intelligence agents were corrupt. "Everybody knows that these people . . . defrauded the government out of their own pockets.

"The US government is well aware of where the money came from for the film. It came from me and two colleagues. It was checked by the government. It came from personal assets and from bank loans," he said.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/01/22/ritter.arrest/ "ALBANY, New York (CNN) -- Scott Ritter, a former U.S. Marine and U.N. weapons inspector who has been an outspoken critic of a possible war with Iraq, was arrested in 2001 and charged with a misdemeanor after allegedly communicating with an undercover officer posing as a 16-year-old girl, a source close to the investigation has told CNN. Ritter confirmed the arrest in an interview with CNN Wednesday but declined to confirm any detail about the nature of the case."