| Last week, the day before Christmas, Digby took note of an eager wanker (Frank Harvey, pimped by Kelly McParland) making the argument that if Gore had been President instead of Bush, we would have had the exact same clusterfuck, because (a) the neocons had nothing to do with it, that's just a conspiracy theory! (b) invading Iraq was inevitable and (c) Al Gore had all sorts of hawkish attitudes, towards Iraq in particular, so, case closed!
Digby, of course, cheats by quoting Al Gore in opposition to the Iraq War;
Most importantly, we know what Gore actually did, which was speak out against the war at the time. And he did it at a time when it was widely expected that he would run for president in 2004. On September 23, 2002, when the Bush administration was rolling out its new production [in] earnest, Gore gave a speech before the Commonwealth Club of California that began with this:
Like all Americans I have been wrestling with the question of what our country needs to do to defend itself from the kind of intense, focused and enabled hatred that brought about September 11th, and which at this
moment must be presumed to be gathering force for yet another attack. I'm speaking today in an effort to recommend a specific course of action for our country which I believe would be preferable to the course recommended by President Bush. Specifically, I am deeply concerned that the policy we are presently following with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century.
It's a totally devasting take down, of course. But it doesn't even touch some of the rest of the malarky, specifically the claim that the neocons couldn't a dunnit, cuz their power is just a conspiracy theory. Why even bother after Digby's utterly demolished this putz? Because we have to hold the neocons accountable, in order to understand some of the root assumptions that lead us astry. Otherwise, we cannot possibly avoid "going through all these things twice." We will only have more or less similar variations.
Bottom Line: We need to play the "blame game." That's conservative speak for when the "personal responsibility" card gets played on them. It's the only way to get the sort of sweeping change we so desperately need. |
Here's the start of the section Digby quotes before demolishing it:
More than that, he asks a simple question: Had he been elected, would Al Gore have taken the same path as George Bush? He concludes, overwhelmingly, that he would have.
Given the prevailing mood in the aftermath of 9/11, the institutional structures that surround the president, the political and social pressures of the time, the accepted wisdom regarding Saddam Hussein and the international factors at work, says Harvey, Gore "[would have been] compelled ... to make many of the same interim (generally praised) decisions for many of the same reasons. Momentum would have done the rest."
There are several threads to Harvey's argument, which you can read in its entirety here. At the risk of oversimplifying a very detailed examination, here are a few of the arguments he makes:
• Despite its universal acceptance, the prevailing theory of the war, which Harvey calls "neoconism" "remains an unsubstantiated assertion, a 'theory' without theoretical content, an argument devoid of logic or perspective ... Even the most superficial review of its central tenets reveals serious logical, empirical and theoretical flaws."
For instance, he notes, it presumes that Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and a few like-minded ideologues "had the intellectual prowess and political skills to manipulate the preferences, perceptions and priorities" of non-neocons such as Tony Blair and Colin Powell; the majority of both parties in both houses of Congress; the leadership of foreign policy and intelligence committees in the House and Senate -- including every senior Democrat; most European leaders; "every member of the UN Security Council (including France, Russia and China) who unanimously endorsed UN Security Council Resolution 1441; and 60%-70% of the American people at the time.
• The "neocon" argument presumes Gore, in the same circumstances, would not have been presented with similar advice or faced pressures to act in a similar way. Harvey suggests this is wishful thinking. "In fact, all of the relevant evidence from Gore's entire political career - his speeches on Iraq, contributions to the 2000 campaign debates on foreign affairs, policy announcements and interviews" argue Gore would have been at least as aggressive as Bush.
Now, Digby does quickly pour quite a tub of cold water on most of this before turning to Gore himself. But she doesn't specifically go after the "neocons couldn't have done it" argument. That's where I come in. The argument here is essentially that the neocons couldn't be responsible because non-neocons got conned into going along with them.
Neocon Hegemony
Hell-oooooowwwww! I hate to tell you folks, but that's pretty damn close to the dictionary definition of hegemony: when you've got it wired so that even the people most inclinded to oppose you end up doing so in a way that actually furthers your goals. At one level or another, they end up adopting your logic, or at the very least accepting it out of some sort of felt necessity, and once they do that, they're finished.
Three dimensional chess? That's what the practitioners like to think.
The core of it was providing a framework for the far more numerous, but less theoretically nimble theocons. The greedheads were up for anything, as long as the money kept flowing. And the paleocons were just SOL after 9/11. They were like their forebearers, the "America Firsters" after Pearl Harbor. Quite contrary to the Frank Harvey/Kelly McParland narrative, so-called "neoconism" is not "an unsubstantiated assertion, a 'theory' without theoretical content, an argument devoid of logic or perspective." It's a straightforward argument that the BushCo response to 9/11 was an utter non-sequiter from a reality-based perspective, but made perfect sense taking the Project for a New American Century's Sept 2000 document "Rebuilding America's Defenses" as a blueprint--a document that barely mentioned terrorism in passing, but called for Saddam's overthrow matter-of-factly as part of the Mideast division of establishing America's global military dominance in the 21st Century, and noted the need for another Pearl Harbor to get the military spending up to acceptable levels.
Three-dimensional chess? Nah! Try three-card monte.
Of course, when hegemony is totally established, totally solidified, people can't even see this sort of stuff happening. But the neocons were really very new to being in charge, so it was a good deal more out in the open than usual. (As was the denial: We don't exist! Our critics enemies are just anti-semitic conspiracy theorists! Pay no attention to the men behind the curtain!) What they were doing was establishing their hegemony. They were actually a fairly small group, but by coming up with the right framework of ideas and strategies, they could establish hegemony over other brands of conservatism, as indicated above, while also establishing hegemony over the US foreign policy aparratus, and thus over all the US allies and its international subordinates--which pretty much meant almost the entire world at the time.
At least, that's the way it was supposed to work. That's the way hegemony works. And they understood hegemony just fine. Competence, however, not so much. That's why they literally paid no attention to anyone else at all. Ignored the Powell Doctrine. Sneered at the real intelligence pros. Laughed at the generals who said they needed more troops, better planning, exit strategies and whatnot. It's why they had the totally amaturish planning reported in the Downing Street Memos. It's why they had Bush and Blair kick off their sales job for war on Sept 7, 2002, with both of them referring to a non-existent IAEA report on Saddam's WMD capacities. It's why they promoted claims about aluminum tubes via Judy Miller at the NY Times that were immediately challenged by knowledgable scientists. It's why they kept recycling the same sloppy, previously rejected "intelligence" over and over and over again. It was all incredibly incompetent, but as long as it took place in the magic bubble land of Versailles, no amount of sheer incompetence carried any consequences whatsoever.
Things changed in Iraq. But by then, it was too late. Still, they did a bang up job evading responsibility, much less punishment. There was never anything remotely approaching accountability. Heck, there was hardly even any reporting. The Downing Street Memos? Who reported that? And when Valerie Plame's cover was blown? Who paid a price for that? And now, this wanker is arguing, heck, the puny little neocons? How could they have done anything? It was simply what would have happened anyway, regardless of who was there.
Ah, the trump card of ideology: ideology played no role at all!
The capstone of all this bloviating is the retrospective claim that "everyone believed Saddam had WMDs."
• Bush did not invent the conditions or attitudes at the time. Gore would have been presented with the same flawed intelligence on Iraq's weapons capabilities, faced the same public fears and pressures and the same international concerns. "Every member of the UN Security Council (including the war's strongest critics, France and Russia)" unanimously endorsed the belief that Saddam had maintained proscribed weapons and was actively frustrating UN efforts to find them, Harvey writes.
"Anyone looking for reasons to be worried about Iraq could easily ignore speeches by Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld and focus instead on those delivered by Clinton (Bill or Hillary), Gore and Kerry; they could ignore the 2002 [National Intelligence Estimate] and read the NIEs published over the previous five years; or they could simply read the reports by UNMOVIC's chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, or UNSCOM's inspector Scott Ritter (one of the war's strongest critics)."
All that is sort of true. Sort of. Until you start looking at it very carefully, and all the cracks start to appear. Above all, it was BushCo and the neocons who wanted above all to invade Iraq. It was they, and they alone who had a compelling interest in making everything about Iraq, and non-existent WMDs, when 9/11 had nothing at all to do with either of them.
Which is why the "fact" that everyone else was more or less bamboozled by the neocons' tricked out intelligence is utterly beside the point. All that everyone else being mistaken would have lead to (and, btw, everyone else was not mistaken) was another few months of what we already got before the invasion--Hans Blix investigating dry holes in Iraq, until every last person on earth came to realize that Saddam actually didn't have WMDs after all.
This is why, when trying to cut through hegemony, you have become accustomed to dealing structures of lies. Trying to debunk a single lie never really gets you anywhere. One lie is only one part of the puzzle. Lie #1: "Saddam had WMDs". Debunk it, and you get Lie #2: "Well, everyone just believed that Saddam had WMDs, Bush and the neocons were no different from anyone else."
Um, no. Not exactly.
In fact, if one looks carefully at what was going on behind the screen--and even just what was going on in plain sight--it soon becomes quite apparent that BushCo and the neocons were quite aware of how utterly flimsy their "evidence" was. They may have fooled some other folks--or at least bluffed them into playing safe and stiffling their doubts--but they knew all along their case couldn't stand the light of day.
Which is why they never laid it out for anyone else to see. They knew very well that there was no "there" there. They were eager to show us all the evidence. They just didn't have any.
In Part 2, we'll take a closer look. |
