Like Father, Like Son...Wagging The Dog and the Wars with Iraq

> Like Father, Like Son...Wagging The Dog and the Wars with Iraq

Like Father, Like Son...Wagging The Dog and the Wars with Iraq

By Dave Hornstein

The oldest political trick in the book is for a country to go to war to distract public attention away from domestic problems. This was the theme of the 1997 film "Wag The Dog," in which a phony war was concocted to cover up a presidential sex scandal during a re-election campaign. But this movie has twice had real life counterparts, which unfortunately were real wars, the Iraq War in 2003 and the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

In bringing about these two completely avoidable wars, President George H.W. Bush and his son, President George W. Bush, sought to divert public attention from domestic troubles, particularly their failed economic policies, and improve their re-election chances.

The claim that these two wars were cases of "Wag The Dog" is not made lightly. But if we view the behavior patterns of both Presidents Bush in bringing about these wars from this perspective, examining the facts and connecting the dots, they both fit the model. While there were additional motives for going to war in each instance, re-election factors were the primary motives because it's a basic rule of politics that when someone is in power, their first priority is staying in power.

Saying that a president is willing to start a war in which thousands of people are killed in an attempt to improve his re-election chances is disturbing for many people. But we must face up to the truth, no matter how ugly it is, and put aside American self-righteousness.

Many will respond with denial, some believing that no president would act so despicably, and others being too embarrassed to admit that they were fooled. It is precisely these attitudes that enabled the first President Bush to get away with it and his son to follow his example. If this issue is not addressed, we can look forward to more "Wag The Dog" wars in the future, with Republicans continuing to assume that they are dealing with a cowardly opposition party and a lazy lapdog media, and that even a lot of liberals are afraid to go there.

There were striking parallels in the run-up to each war. In fact, the background, timing and approach were virtually identical. In each case, there was a president with declining approval ratings amid recession and scandal, the run-up to war began shortly before midterm elections, and the president was hell-bent on going to war from the start while making no serious attempt at a diplomatic resolution.

Even more disturbing, there was an almost identical failure of checks and balances each time out, with responses by Congressional Democrats and the major media echoing their ineffectual counterparts in the movie.

The story begins in the summer of 1990. At that time, President George H.W. Bush was in political trouble. His popularity was declining, the economy was slipping into a recession, he was about to break his phony "read my lips" campaign promise not to raise taxes, and the savings and loan scandal, in which his son Neil was deeply involved, was in full bloom.

Midterm elections were coming up, during which the party holding the White House almost always loses seats in Congress. When occurring during a recession, these losses could be substantial.

Having accomplished little of substance during his first two years in office, the senior Bush needed something to improve his sagging approval rating, prevent major Democratic midterm gains and give voters a compelling reason to re-elect him in 1992.

For Bush, the solution to his re-election problem was going to war. The immediate political benefits included covering up the recession and thereby removing it as a midterm issue, increasing Bush's popularity through patriotic appeals and stifling any talk about a post-Cold War peace dividend.

If the war was against a hopelessly overmatched adversary, Bush could pull off a quick and decisive victory with few American casualties. This, in turn, would make him look like a hero and send his popularity through the roof, virtually guaranteeing his re-election.

In selecting an enemy, Bush chose an unsavory ally that had outlived its usefulness to American interests. The U.S. had supported Iraq, an underdeveloped country of 18 million people, in its long and bloody war against Iran, supplying the Iraqis with weapons and intelligence, and acquiescing in their use of chemical weapons against the Iranians. In siding with Iraq, the U.S. feared that a victorious Iran, under the Islamic revolutionary government of the Ayatollah Khomeini, would overrun the oil-producing states of the Persian Gulf and seize control of the world's largest source of oil.

On the whole, the Iran-Iraq War was a stalemate, with Iranian victories in the early stages reversed by the Iraqis at the end. The war left Iran so thoroughly battered that it ceased to be a threat to the Persian Gulf states. For the U.S., Iraq was no longer needed as a bulwark against Iran.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, feeling cocky from the outcome of this war, turned his attention to his tiny oil-rich neighbor, Kuwait. He alleged that the Kuwaitis were engaged in slant drilling at the border to tap into Iraqi oil reserves, and were overproducing oil, thereby lowering prices and costing Iraq 14 billion in revenue needed to rebuild from the war with Iran.

Iraq also had longstanding claims to Kuwait, which had almost led to a war in 1961. At that time, the British protectorate of Kuwait ended and it became fully independent. Iraq's president at the time, Abdel Karim el-Kassem, claimed that Kuwait rightly belonged to Iraq and threatened an invasion. British troops hurriedly returned to Kuwait, were subsequently replaced by an Arab League force, and Iraq backed down.

With the Iraq-Kuwait dispute heating up, Bush instructed U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie to tell Saddam that the U.S. didn't care about it. In a meeting on July 25, 1990, she said to Saddam, "We have no opinion on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait. Secretary of State James Baker has directed me to emphasize the instruction, first given to Iraq in the 1960s, that the Kuwait issue is not associated with America."

This statement appeared in a transcript of the meeting released by the Iraqi government, and was corroborated by Glaspie's cables to the State Department.

As Saddam, an American ally, had relied on the U.S. for crucial aid in the war against Iran, he had reason to trust Glaspie's message, which was stated after he asserted Iraqi claims to Kuwait. If the U.S. was going to be neutral, there was nothing to stop him from invading Kuwait.

What reason would Bush have to send Glaspie's message other than to give Saddam the green light to invade Kuwait? This motive appears highly likely given Bush's attempts to cover up. He kept Glaspie under wraps until after the war, then refused to release the cables to Congress until months after Glaspie testified before it. This enabled Glaspie to lie to Congress about her actions without being directly challenged.

Saddam, played for a sucker by Bush, fell for the bait. On August 2, 1990, eight days after he met with Glaspie, Iraq invaded Kuwait, easily conquering it. Bush responded by double-crossing Saddam. He immediately denounced the invasion and launched a propaganda campaign to build up public support for a war. He was now springing his trap.

The centerpiece of this propaganda campaign was the demonization of Saddam, a man most Americans had not previously heard of. As a ruthless tyrant running a police state with an atrocious human rights record, Saddam was easy to demonize.

This propaganda campaign was successful in diverting attention away from the troubled domestic scene. The recession was covered up for months and received very little media attention until after the war ended.

At the same time, Bush never made a serious attempt to negotiate an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. Instead, he took an arrogant warmongering stance, issuing ultimatum after ultimatum. This was a disturbing approach, for in most international crises, diplomacy is tried first and war is only used as a last resort.

Since Bush wanted war from the start, he refused to seize on Iraqi concessions, such as the release of all hostages, as opportunities to achieve a diplomatic resolution.

Economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations on Iraq after the Kuwait invasion were effective, reducing the Iraqi GNP by 40 to 50 percent after six months. Certainly, a combination of diplomacy and sanctions would have produced an Iraqi withdrawal, but this was never Bush's intention.

Having decided to go to war from the beginning, it didn't matter to Bush that a diplomatic approach would have saved a lot of lives, for diplomatic solutions don't produce victory parades. Along these lines, he rejected an Iraqi withdrawal agreement privately negotiated by former President Jimmy Carter.

Once the war was launched, it immediately dominated the news, with the recession and everything else put on the backburner. As a wartime commander-in-chief, Bush's popularity shot up dramatically, as the usual wartime "rally 'round the flag" attitude took hold.

Bush wouldn't let anything stand in the way of the total military win he wanted to improve his re-election prospects. This is why he rejected a Soviet attempt to head off a ground war after a devastating American bombing campaign had shattered the Iraqi infrastructure. Iraq had agreed to unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait, although some of the details were unsatisfactory. The U.S. was in a position to drive a hard bargain and could have easily negotiated a better deal.

But the victory would have looked less than total without ground combat. Instead, Bush issued a final ultimatum, which Saddam rejected as expected. A president has a free hand in running wars, and Bush's rejection of the Soviet peace proposal drew barely a whimper of dissent. The short-lived ground war that followed was little more than a one-sided slaughter. This was to be expected when an elephant stomped on a mouse after suckering it into beating up on a flea.

There were 148 Americans killed in the war. Iraqi casualty figures are unavailable, because the Pentagon, in a break from previous policy, decided not to issue any estimates, even though this can be done more accurately due to technological advances. Refusal to release these figures hid the true human cost of the war, in an attempt at sanitizing it that was both dishonest and racist. According to independent estimates, perhaps as many as 200,000 Iraqis were killed.

Despite this overwhelming victory, the job was left incomplete. During the demonization campaign, Saddam was repeatedly described as "another Hitler." In World War II, the Allies didn't stop at liberating all the occupied countries, but went all the way to Berlin to take Hitler out. Saddam proved far less formidable than Hitler, yet he was allowed to remain in power after the first war. Why did this occur?

Re-election politics again looks like the answer. Bush had already gotten the maximum political mileage out of the Persian Gulf War by winning it and liberating Kuwait. His approval rating had zoomed to 91 percent. While American forces could have gone all the way to Baghdad to remove Saddam, there was the possibility of house-to-house fighting against elite Republican Guard troops on their home turf, which might have multiplied the previously light American casualties. This final victory would then have been followed by a long and expensive occupation, with no exit strategy.

From a political perspective, this outcome, revealing some of the true costs of the war, would have dimmed the luster of Bush's victory. Besides, a Saddam still in power could provide future diversions by continuing to misbehave.

While Bush encouraged Iraqi dissidents, primarily Kurds and Shiites, to rise up to overthrow Saddam, he did nothing to help them. The rebels were no match for even a weakened and divided Iraqi Army. Thousands were killed and millions more were made refugees. Here we see yet another disturbing pattern with this war, for at every decision point, Bush chose the option that got the most people killed.

If the senior Bush hoped to use the Persian Gulf War as a re-election ploy, his success proved short-lived, for he had miscalculated about the recession, which turned out to be longer and deeper than expected. Once the war ended, the recession took center stage and Bush's approval rating plummeted at a record pace. In losing the 1992 election to Bill Clinton, Bush received only 37.4 percent of the popular vote, the second-worst showing ever made by an incumbent president seeking re-election.

But Bush had gotten away with wagging the dog, losing only because he had mismanaged the economy. This allowed for future opportunities to pursue this strategy.

The war left Iraq militarily and economically crippled. The economic sanctions remained in place, Iraq was required to disarm under the watch of UN weapons inspectors, who systematically destroyed its chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction WMD, along with the means to produce them, and no-fly zones were set up in the Kurd and Shiite areas.

Saddam continued to provide diversions, with periodic harassment of UN weapons inspectors before their withdrawal in 1998 and intermittent incidents in the no-fly zones. While the sanctions did nothing to shake Saddam's iron grip on power, they made life miserable for the Iraqi people, with claims that more than 500,000 children died from lack of food and medicine.

Fast-forward to the summer of 2002 and the beginning of the sequel. Bush's son, George W. Bush, had become president. Like his father in the summer of 1990, he was in political trouble.

His approval rating, which shot up in the American response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, was declining. The economy had been in a recession for most of his term in office. There was a major accounting scandal, with Bush himself implicated in alleged insider trading at Harken Energy, his largest lifetime campaign contributor Enron at the center of the scandal, and Vice-President Dick Cheney under a cloud for alleged fraudulent accounting practices at Halliburton while he was CEO.

Questions had been raised over whether Bush could have taken actions to prevent the September 11 terrorist attacks. Midterm elections were on the horizon, with a possibility of major Democratic gains, leaving Bush facing a hostile Congress for the rest of his term.

Like his father in similar circumstances, the younger Bush decided to go to war to divert public attention from domestic troubles, enable the Republicans to take control of the Senate, prevent a Democratic takeover of the House and improve his re-election chances in 2004. This second war would finish the job and remove Saddam from power.

The younger Bush had been thinking of invading Iraq at least as far back as 1999, before he was elected president. According to journalist Mickey Herskowitz, ghostwriter for a campaign autobiography, Bush saw waging a successful war as a means of generating the political capital needed to get his agenda through Congress. He told Herskowitz, "One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it."

According to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, Bush was obsessed with invading Iraq from the time he took office. Along these lines, former White House Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke said that after the September 11 attacks, Bush told him to find an Iraqi link to the attacks. No such link was ever found, but the obsession remained.

Under the political circumstances in the summer of 2002, the timing was right to begin the run-up for a war. If there was no war, the Democrats could wind up controlling both houses of Congress, leaving Bush unable to get his agenda passed. He would look like a failure as president and a likely loser for re-election in 2004.

On July 23, 2002, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Bush's chief ally, met with his top foreign policy, defense and intelligence advisors to discuss Bush's war plans and British involvement. According to the Downing Street Memo, a record of this meeting confirmed as authentic by British officials, Bush had already decided to go to war to overthrow Saddam and "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." At the same time, "There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action."

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said, "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." British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said the timeline for war would likely begin "30 days before the U.S. Congressional elections."

The EYES ONLY Briefing paper, produced on July 21, 2002 in preparation for this meeting, stated, "A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise. As already made clear, the U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point." It also called for a political strategy that included "creating the conditions necessary to justify government military action."

According to both the Downing Street Memo and the EYES ONLY Briefing paper, the only legal justification for invading Iraq would be Saddam's refusal to allow the return of UN weapons inspectors.

The younger Bush needed an excuse for attacking Iraq, but unlike his father he didn't have the smoking gun of a Kuwait invasion. Therefore, he turned to the Big Lie technique, the idea being that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.

In lying to justify a war, Bush made false claims that Iraq had vast stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, an active nuclear weapons program and links to Al Qaeda. Submitting a false report to Congress, such as those containing these claims, is a felony and an impeachable offense. In breaking with American precedent, Bush announced a new doctrine under which the U.S. could launch a pre-emptive war against a country that hadn't attacked or threatened it.

Following in his father's footsteps, the younger Bush launched a propaganda campaign to build up public support for a second war with Iraq, repeatedly lied about alleged Iraqi WMD and links to Al Qaeda, took an arrogant warmongering stance, issued repeated ultimatums, and made no serious attempt to negotiate a peaceful resolution.

Like his father, he had decided to go to war from the start and would pursue no other course. At the same time, his propaganda campaign caused coverage of the recession and accounting scandal to decline dramatically.

Having no direct evidence to prove his false claims, Bush manufactured support for them by manipulating intelligence. Any evidence that these claims were false was disregarded. Any statement that in any way supported the claims was loudly trumpeted by Bush and his supporters, regardless of its credibility.

Even discredited assertions were used for the propaganda campaign. Perhaps the most blatant example was the charge that Iraq had attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from the African nation of Niger. Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador, was sent to check it out, found it to be false, and reported this back to the Bush Administration. Nevertheless, Bush repeated this allegation in his 2003 State of the Union speech.

Wilson wrote an op-ed piece that exposed Bush's lie. The Bush Administration then vindictively leaked to several conservative columnists that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is an undercover CIA agent. One of these columnists, Robert Novak, ran this information. Exposing an undercover CIA agent is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. If Bush ordered the leak, it would be an impeachable offense.

Like his father, Bush refused to seize on Iraqi concessions as the beginning of a diplomatic solution. Thus, when Iraq agreed to the unconditional return of UN weapons inspectors, thereby removing the only legal justification for an invasion, Bush dismissed this action as a ploy because he wanted to go to war from the start.

The UN weapons inspectors returned to Iraq, conducting their most intrusive inspections ever. They found no WMD, because Bush had lied. With no evidence to support Bush's arguments and Iraq well-contained, that should have resolved the matter. But Bush was determined to go to war and already had Congressional authority to do so, so that's what he did, not even allowing the inspectors to complete their work.

Like the Gulf War 12 years earlier, the Iraq War was another one-sided slaughter, with Iraq never using weapons of mass destruction. There were 139 Americans killed. With the Pentagon again refusing to release Iraqi casualty figures, perhaps as many as 15,000 Iraqis were killed.

This time around, Saddam was overthrown and Iraq came under American occupation, with no exit strategy. The Bush Administration did a poor job of postwar planning, deploying an insufficient number of troops, putting in place a governing council with no popular support, abusing Iraqi prisoners in violation of the Geneva Conventions, and for reconstruction giving a multi-billion-dollar no-bid contract to Cheney's old company Halliburton.

While Iraq was defeated, it has not been pacified. The botched occupation has been marked by guerilla warfare, terrorist attacks and open rebellion. More than 11 times as many Americans have been killed in the occupation than were killed in the war. It has been estimated that perhaps as many as 100,000 Iraqis have been killed in the war and occupation.

Weapons inspections were resumed after the war, this time under American control. Again, no WMD were found. In January 2004, David Kay, the chief U.S. weapons inspector, resigned, concluding that Iraq never had weapons of mass destruction to begin with. The search for WMD ended in January 2005, with nothing having been found. In addition, no links between Saddam and Al Qaeda were discovered.

But the occupation continued to keep Iraq in the forefront of the news, reducing attention to Bush's mismanagement of the economy. The Democrats had already compromised themselves on the Iraq War and ran a presidential candidate who had voted for it. These circumstances enabled the younger Bush to succeed where his father had failed. He narrowly won while the occupation blew up in his face, in the closest presidential re-election victory since 1916.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi insurgency continues unabated, bringing with it chaos and instability. No major event has affected it, whether it was the capture of Saddam in December 2003, the handover of limited sovereignty to an interim Iraqi government under Prime Minister Ayad Allawi in June 2004, the election of a Transitional National Assembly in January 2005, or the formation of a new government under Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari in April 2005.

While the Iraqi government has the authority to ask U.S. troops to leave, such an action is unlikely to occur anytime soon, with 14 permanent bases being built. In effect, the occupation continues indefinitely under a new guise, with this new Iraqi government resembling that of South Vietnam, a client regime unable to stand on its own two feet, and propped up by the American military.

In a case of bait and switch after finding no WMD, it is claimed by Bush that the U.S. is now trying to bring democracy to Iraq, an unrealistic goal in a country that is religiously and ethnically fractured, with no democratic tradition whatsoever and a strong resentment of foreign occupation.

At the same time, the occupation, continued American military presence, and photos of smiling American soldiers abusing naked and hooded Iraqi prisoners are likely to produce more terrorist recruits and a long-term anti-American backlash in the Arab world.

Both wars could not have taken place without a failure of checks and balances, which has its parallels in the movie "Wag The Dog." In the movie, the president's opponent was blindsided by the phony war and buried in a landslide. Had Democrats in Congress functioned as a unified opposition, they could have prevented both wars. Instead, their response was wimpy at best.

When the senior Bush first sought to launch the Persian Gulf War, Democrats held majorities in both houses of Congress. While most were skeptical about going to war, no one publicly raised the possibility that Bush's actions were politically motivated. With prospects for war dominating the headlines and the recession failing to surface as a campaign issue, Democrats made very small gains in the midterm elections.

The vote on going to war occurred shortly afterward. Congressional approval was by narrow margins, with most Democrats in both houses opposed. Even so, there were enough antiwar votes in the Senate to mount a filibuster, but this was never even attempted.

While the younger Bush made a far weaker case for going to war, the response by Congressional Democrats was even more cowardly. This time around, there was a one-seat Democratic majority in the Senate and narrow Republican control of the House, with the vote to authorize the use of force held before the midterm elections so that Bush could go to war regardless of the election results.

The majority of Democratic senators voted in favor of authorizing force, including Majority Leader Tom Daschle, possible future presidential contender Hillary Rodham Clinton, and 2004 presidential contenders John Kerry, John Edwards and Joseph Lieberman. The majority of House Democrats opposed authorizing force, but not Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, another 2004 presidential contender. With these large scale defections, Congressional approval was by hefty margins.

This response played right into the younger Bush's hands. With the recession and accounting scandal obscured as campaign issues, the Republicans made small gains in both houses of Congress in the midterm elections, taking control of the Senate. Ironically, the only incumbent Democratic senators to be defeated, Max Cleland of Georgia and Jean Carnahan of Missouri, had both voted to authorize force.

The Democrats continued to be haunted by their political cowardice in 2004. Kerry got the presidential nomination, but because he had voted to authorize force, he was unable to attack Bush head-on over the Iraq War, instead promising to do a more competent job of running the occupation, getting allies and the UN more involved, and working on an exit strategy. In effect, he campaigned against Bush with one hand tied behind his back. When Kerry finally came out against the war late in his campaign, it made him look like a flip-flopper.

With Bush re-elected, Republicans again picked up seats in both houses of Congress, with Daschle the only incumbent Democratic senator to lose.

During the two debates over going to war, not a single antiwar Congressional Democrat ever publicly accused either Bush of wagging the dog. This stands in stark contrast to the behavior of some Congressional Republicans towards Clinton in 1998.

During that year, Al Qaeda bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Clinton retaliated by bombing Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan alleged to be producing chemical weapons for terrorists.

Because these retaliatory raids occurred during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, a significant number of Congressional Republicans accused Clinton of wagging the dog to distract the public from the scandal, a claim based more on partisanship than the surrounding facts. This response kept Clinton from pursuing a more aggressive counterterrorism strategy that might have prevented the September 11 attacks.

When we compare the willingness of Democrats and Republicans to raise the "Wag The Dog" issue, it should remind us of the situation described by William Butler Yeats in his poem "The Second Coming," where:

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."

As a postscript, one former Democratic congressman publicly stated that the Iraq War was a case of "Wag The Dog" after leaving office. On March 7, 2004, former House Minority Whip David Bonior spoke to the Huntington Woods MI Peace, Citizenship & Education Project on the costs of the Iraq War. During a question and answer period at the conclusion of the speech, I asked Bonior if this war was a case of wagging the dog. He said that it was.

In the movie "Wag The Dog," the major media are totally clueless that a phony war is afoot and follow the administration line like a bunch of sheep. So it was with the mainstream media coverage of both wars, as they behaved more as lapdogs than watchdogs.

The media were lazy in failing to pursue investigative reporting to uncover the real motives of the two Presidents Bush. Before the Gulf War, very little attention was paid to the pivotal Saddam-Glaspie meeting, a smoking gun, and there was scarcely a mention of Saddam's status as a recent U.S. ally. Before the Iraq War, there was very little digging into the flimsiness of Bush's false claims about Iraqi WMD and links to Al Qaeda. The recent publication of the Downing Street Memo, another smoking gun, has also gotten little media attention.

In the run-up to each war, major media coverage was extremely one-sided, with a disproportionately greater amount of attention paid to prowar views than to arguments for avoiding war.

Once each war was launched, the mainstream media acted as cheerleaders, with sanitized coverage. There was little footage of the gruesome carnage and no one in the media publicly questioned the Pentagon's refusal to release Iraqi casualty figures.

The two "Wag The Dog" wars with Iraq paint a sad picture of the American political scene, one where presidents can lead the nation into avoidable wars and get away with it, with no effective checks and balances.

We need to seriously examine the conduct, ethics and morality of the two Presidents Bush. After all, what can we say of two presidents who, in attempts to improve their re-election chances, got thousands of people killed in two completely avoidable wars, even going so far as to hide the numbers? The answer, sad to say, is that both are mass murderers.

At the same time, we seem to have adopted a double standard when it comes to presidential lies and their consequences. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about having a sexual liaison with an intern. George W. Bush lied about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda, bringing about a completely avoidable war in which thousands of people have been killed, but at this point there is no serious talk of impeachment. What's wrong with this picture?

Dave Hornstein is a Detroit area freelance writer.