Maybe they should have hired the Taco Bell dog

Today’s Washington Post contains an in-depth report on the Bush administration’s “marketing efforts” on the war in Iraq – a dedicated task force within the White House and the creation of the “nuclear threat” that served to ensure public support for the controversial doctrine of preemptive war. The article is disturbing in it’s detail of a chain of misdirection and calculated selling of the idea; lending even more legitimacy to the assumption which many people have that Bush and his neocon advisors had planned on invading Iraq regardless of evidence or necessity.

Systematic coordination began in August, when Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. formed the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, to set strategy for each stage of the confrontation with Baghdad. A senior official who participated in its work called it “an internal working group, like many formed for priority issues, to make sure each part of the White House was fulfilling its responsibilities.”

In an interview with the New York Times published Sept. 6, Card did not mention the WHIG but hinted at its mission. “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August,” he said.

…
The day after publication of Card’s marketing remark, Bush and nearly all his top advisers began to talk about the dangers of an Iraqi nuclear bomb.

Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair conferred at Camp David that Saturday, Sept. 7, and they each described alarming new evidence. Blair said proof that the threat is real came in “the report from the International Atomic Energy Agency this morning, showing what has been going on at the former nuclear weapon sites.” Bush said “a report came out of the . . . IAEA, that they [Iraqis] were six months away from developing a weapon. I don’t know what more evidence we need.”

There was no new IAEA report. Blair appeared to be referring to news reports describing curiosity at the nuclear agency about repairs at sites of Iraq’s former nuclear program. Bush cast as present evidence the contents of a report from 1996, updated in 1998 and 1999. In those accounts, the IAEA described the history of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program that arms inspectors had systematically destroyed.

Note how the following round of “marketing” attempts were wisely grouped around the September 11 anniversary to raise the perceived threat level for the American people:

Two debuts took place on Sept. 8: the aluminum tubes and the image of “a mushroom cloud.” A Sunday New York Times story quoted anonymous officials as saying the “diameter, thickness and other technical specifications” of the tubes — precisely the grounds for skepticism among nuclear enrichment experts — showed that they were “intended as components of centrifuges.”

No one knows when Iraq will have its weapon, the story said, but “the first sign of a ‘smoking gun,’ they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.”

Top officials made the rounds of Sunday talk shows that morning. Rice’s remarks echoed the newspaper story. She said on CNN’s “Late Edition” that Hussein was “actively pursuing a nuclear weapon” and that the tubes — described repeatedly in U.S. intelligence reports as “dual-use” items — were “only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.”

“There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons,” Rice added, “but we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

Anna Perez, a communications adviser to Rice, said Rice did not come looking for an opportunity to say that. “There was nothing in her mind that said, ‘I have to push the nuclear issue,’ ” Perez said, “but Wolf [Blitzer] asked the question.”

Powell, a confidant said, found it “disquieting when people say things like mushroom clouds.” But he contributed in other ways to the message. When asked about biological and chemical arms on Fox News, he brought up nuclear weapons and cited the “specialized aluminum tubing” that “we saw in reporting just this morning.”

Cheney, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” also mentioned the tubes and said “increasingly, we believe the United States will become the target” of an Iraqi nuclear weapon. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” asked listeners to “imagine a September 11th with weapons of mass destruction,” which would kill “tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children.”

Bush evoked the mushroom cloud on Oct. 7, and on Nov. 12 Gen. Tommy R. Franks, chief of U.S. Central Command, said inaction might bring “the sight of the first mushroom cloud on one of the major population centers on this planet.”
(Don’t forget that the Republican Convention will be held in New York just prior to September 11, and that it doubtless will be a patriotic lovefest orchestrated by the neocons to position Bush as our great protector; creating more threats where few exist in order to exalt his power to save us all. Just a reminder. Be more literate of how you’re manipulated, OK?)

In its initial meetings, Card’s Iraq task force ordered a series of white papers. After a general survey of Iraqi arms violations, the first of the single-subject papers — never published — was “A Grave and Gathering Danger: Saddam Hussein’s Quest for Nuclear Weapons.”

…
The fifth draft of the paper was obtained by The Washington Post. White House spokesmen dismissed the draft as irrelevant because Rice decided not to publish it. Wilkinson said Rice and Joseph felt the paper “was not strong enough.”

The document offers insight into the Bush administration’s priorities and methods in shaping a nuclear message. The white paper was assembled by some of the same team, and at the same time, as the speeches and talking points prepared for the president and top officials. A senior intelligence official said last October that the president’s speechwriters took “literary license” with intelligence, a phrase applicable to language used by administration officials in some of the white paper’s most emotive and misleading assertions elsewhere.

paper precedes other known instances in which the Bush administration considered the now-discredited claim that Iraq “sought uranium oxide, an essential ingredient in the enrichment process, from Africa.” For a speechwriter, uranium was valuable as an image because anyone could see its connection to an atomic bomb. Despite warnings from intelligence analysts, the uranium would return again and again, including the Jan. 28 State of the Union address and three other Bush administration statements that month.

Other errors and exaggerations in public White House claims were repeated, or had their first mention, in the white paper.

Much as Blair did at Camp David, the paper attributed to U.N. arms inspectors a statement that satellite photographs show “many signs of the reconstruction and acceleration of the Iraqi nuclear program.” Inspectors did not say that. The paper also quoted the first half of a sentence from a Time magazine interview with U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix: “You can see hundreds of new roofs in these photos.” The second half of the sentence, not quoted, was: “but you don’t know what’s under them.”

As Bush did, the white paper cited the IAEA’s description of Iraq’s defunct nuclear program in language that appeared to be current. The draft said, for example, that “since the beginning of the nineties, Saddam has launched a crash program to divert nuclear reactor fuel for . . . nuclear weapons.” The crash program began in late 1990 and ended with the war in January 1991. The reactor fuel, save for waste products, is gone.

There is a lot more in this article – how the administration planned to mislead Congress and other nations to gain support; how they re-interpreted evidence to make it fit their needs; how they stretched physics to make a case for a nuclear program.

As I see it, there are two major issues here. The first, obviously, is how an administration can get away with lies and misrepresentations to push this country into a horrible doctrine of preemptive strikes. The second, and far scarier, is the excuse that seems to have emerged: the end justifies the means. That makes it very difficult for people, like me, to completely oppose the war. Saddam Hussein was a deadly tyrant, and I am very glad that he is out of power. But have the Iraqi people really benefitted? The US is now an occupying force in a world we know little about. Hussein has still not been captured. The situation there is still deadly to American troops. It’s almost as if the administration spent so much time coming up with the marketing plan to sell this war that they never thought about how to finish it.
And it’s certainly diverted attention from Afghanistan, another morass of failure, and the fact that Osama bin Laden is still on the loose, 2 years and counting.
A very poor performance from the strong leader and protector that the Bushies are trying to portray.