It can’t get any better than this

by Justin Raimondo

It was a disastrous week for the War Party, as the lies that lassoed us into Iraq were definitively debunked, and Bush, in a vain effort to defend the indefensible, was once again humiliated on national television by his Democratic opponent. The Duelfer report showed that not only did Saddam not have WMD, but he didn’t even have the capacity to develop them. In an address to the Council on Foreign Relations, none other than Donald Rumsfeld was forced to look reality full in the face:

"It turns out that we have not found weapons of mass destruction. Why the intelligence proved wrong I’m not in a position to say."

As is true of so much of what comes out of the mouths of our leaders, this statement could have at least two possible meanings, both of which exonerate the speaker of any blame for the current disaster. Either he really doesn’t know why they were so wrong ¨C in which case he ought to resign, or be fired, on grounds of sheer incompetence ¨C or he does know, but would rather not say.

For a number of reasons ¨C all having to do with his own key role and culpability in the Grand Deception ¨C I am inclined to go with the latter. But leaving that aside for the moment, let us note that Rumsfeld, who likes to give at least the appearance of forthrightness, also admitted in that same address that the Iraqi dictator’s much-ballyhooed "links" to al-Qaeda lacked "strong evidence." In typical Washingtonian style, however, he immediately began to back away from his original statement, issuing a statement that essentially placed the blame for this particular failure of perception elsewhere:

"I have acknowledged since September 2002 that there were ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq. This assessment was based upon points provided to me by then CIA Director George Tenet to describe the CIA’s understanding of the al-Qaeda-Iraq relationship."

In a picture perfect display of the War Party’s Orwellian mindset, the response to every criticism of their policies is to blame their critics. The civilian leadership of the Pentagon, populated with neoconservative ideologues centered in Douglas Feith’s policy shop, engaged in a protracted bureaucratic guerrilla war against the CIA, the DIA, and the State Department, cherrypicking dubious "raw intelligence" to buttress the case for an invasion. The U.S. intelligence community was so opposed to the rush to war, so skeptical of information proffered by Iraqi exiles with a clear political agenda, that the neocons were forced to do an end run around the Agency and its allies in government, setting up a rogue operation that cooked up phony "evidence" of Iraqi WMD and fed the White House (and a gullible media) a steady diet of lies.

As the Telegraph has pointed out, the attempt to paint al-Zarqawi as the new Osama bin Laden, even while the original edition continues to mock us from the comfortable depths of his cave, is nothing but an attempt to characterize the Iraq war as a war against al-Qaeda as opposed to the reality of an indigenous Iraqi resistance. This ploy also diverts attention away from this administration’s devastating failure to do anything but aid and abet the real bin Laden, starting with their "outsourcing" of the job of getting OBL and al-Qaeda’s top leadership in the mountains of Tora Bora. A failure, as repeatedly underscored by Kerry in both debates, resulting in the escape of the Vanishing Imam and the dispersal of al-Qaeda throughout the region ¨C a strategic disaster for the U.S., the consequences of which will continue to reverberate with increasing deadliness for a long time to come.

The catastrophic capstone of the War Party’s worst week yet was the news that each and every one of the opposition candidates running in the Afghan elections had decided to pull out at the last minute. Abdul Satar Sirat, a former aide to Afghanistan’s last king and a leading monarchist politician, echoed the sentiments of the opposition united front when he told the international media:

"Today’s election is not a legitimate election. It should be stopped and we don’t recognize the results."

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=3759