AUDIO: Mark Danner, The Secret Way to War:

C-SPAN BOOK TV

AUDIO: Mark Danner, The Secret Way to War:

Mon Jul 31, 2006 01:52

AUDIO: Mark Danner, The Secret Way to War:
http://www.apfn.net/pogo/L001I060730-booktv-mark-danner.MP3

Mark Danner, longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books,
and professor at Berkeley and at Bard, writes about
foreign affairs and American politics, including
Latin America, Haiti, the Balkans and the Middle East.
He speaks and debates widely about America's role
in the world.
http://markdanner.com/

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GE17Ak02.html

In the United States, on the other hand, the Downing Street memorandum has attracted little attention. As I write, no American newspaper has published it and few writers have bothered to comment on it. The war continues, and Americans have grown weary of it; few seem much interested now in discussing how it began, and why their country came to fight a war in the cause of destroying weapons that turned out not to exist. For those who want answers, the Bush administration has followed a simple and heretofore largely successful policy: blame the intelligence agencies. Since "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" as early as July 2002 (as "C", the head of British intelligence, reported upon his return from Washington), it seems a matter of remarkable hubris, even for this administration, that its officials now explain their misjudgments in going to war by blaming them on "intelligence failures" - that is, on the intelligence that they themselves politicized. Still, for the most part, Congress has cooperated. Though the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the failures of the CIA and other agencies before the war, a promised second report that was to take up the administration's political use of intelligence - which is, after all, the critical issue - was postponed until after the 2004 elections, then quietly abandoned.

In the end, the Downing Street memo, and Americans' lack of interest in what it shows, has to do with a certain attitude about facts, or rather about where the line should be drawn between facts and political opinion. It calls to mind an interesting observation that an unnamed "senior adviser" to President Bush made to a New York Times Magazine reporter last fall:

"The aide said that guys like me [ie, reporters and commentators] were 'in what we call the reality-based community', which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality'. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"

Though this seems on its face to be a disquisition on religion and faith, it is of course an argument about power, and its influence on truth. Power, the argument runs, can shape truth: power, in the end, can determine reality, or at least the reality that most people accept - a critical point, for the administration has been singularly effective in its recognition that what is most politically important is not what readers of the New York Times believe but what most Americans are willing to believe. The last century's most innovative authority on power and truth, Joseph Goebbels, made the same point but rather more directly.

"There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be 'the man in the street'. Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology."

I thought of this quotation when I first read the Downing Street memorandum; but I had first looked it up several months earlier, on December 14, 2004, after I had seen the images of the newly re-elected President George W Bush awarding the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor the United States can bestow, to George Tenet, the former director of central intelligence; L Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq; and General (ret) Tommy Franks, the commander who had led American forces during the first phase of the Iraq war. Tenet, of course, would be known to history as the intelligence director who had failed to detect and prevent the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the man who had assured President Bush that the case for Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction was "a slam dunk". Franks had allowed the looting of Baghdad and had generally done little to prepare for what would come after the taking of Baghdad. ("There was little discussion in Washington," as "C" told Prime Minister Blair on July 23, "of the aftermath after military action".) Bremer had dissolved the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police and thereby created 400,000 or so available recruits for the insurgency. One might debate their ultimate responsibility for these grave errors, but it is difficult to argue that these officials merited the highest recognition the country could offer.

Of course truth, as the master propagandist said, is "unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology". He, of course, would have instantly grasped the psychological tactic embodied in that White House ceremony, which was one more effort to reassure Americans that the war the administration launched against Iraq has been a success and was worth fighting. That barely four Americans in ten are still willing to believe this suggests that as time goes on and the gap grows between what Americans see and what they are told, membership in the "reality-based community" may grow along with it. We will see.

Still, for those interested in the question of how our leaders persuaded the country to become embroiled in a counterinsurgency war in Iraq, the Downing Street memorandum offers one more confirmation of the truth. For those, that is, who want to hear it.

Notes
[1] The latter charge might have been given as a reason for intervention in 1988, for example, when the Iraqi regime was carrying out its Anfal campaign against the Kurds; at that time, though, the Ronald Reagan administration - comprising many of the same officials who would later lead the invasion of Iraq - was supporting Saddam in his war against Iran and kept largely silent. The second major killing campaign of the Saddam regime came in 1991, when Iraqi troops attacked Shi'ites in the south who had rebelled against the regime in the wake of Saddam's defeat in the Gulf War; the first Bush administration, despite president George H W Bush's urging Iraqis to "rise up against the dictator, Saddam Hussein", and despite the presence of hundreds of thousands of American troops within miles of the killing, stood by and did nothing. See Ken Roth, "War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention" (Human Rights Watch, January 2004).
[2] See Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (Simon and Schuster, 2004), p 162.
[3] See Woodward, Plan of Attack, pp 177–178.
[4] See "Chirac Makes His Case on Iraq," an interview with Christiane Amanpour, CBS News; March 16, 2003.
[5] See Hans Blix, Disarming Iraq (Pantheon, 2004), p 86.

Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker Staff writer, is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R Luce Professor at Bard College. His most recent book is Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, which collects his pieces on torture and Iraq that first appeared in the New York Review of Books. His work can be found at HTTP://markdanner.com

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Mark Danner, staff writer for The New Yorker, is at work on an extended series of articles on the war in the former Yugoslavia. The articles - which began with Danner's cover piece, "The US and the Yugoslav Catastrophe," in the New York Review of Books of November 20, 1997, and now (with "Kosovo: The Meaning of Victory," New York Review, July 15, 1999) number eleven - were recently recognized by the Overseas Press Club as the "Best Reporting From Abroad of 1998." Next year Pantheon will publish an adaptation of these pieces in a volume entitled, The Saddest Story: America, the Balkans and the Post-Cold War World.
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/faculty/markdanner/

The Secret Way to War: — by Mark Danner, Mon Jul 31 00:53

AUDIO: Mark Danner, The Secret Way to War: — C-SPAN BOOK TV, Mon Jul 31 01:52