Academic

Here's the more complete story: "Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan writes in a new memoir that the Iraq war was sold to the American people with a sophisticated 'political propaganda campaign' led by President Bush and aimed at 'manipulating sources of public opinion' and 'downplaying the major reason for going to war.'  . . .  McClellan includes the charges in a 341-page book, 'What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception,' that delivers a harsh look at the White House and the man he served for close to a decade. He describes Bush as demonstrating a 'lack of inquisitiveness,' says the White House operated in 'permanent campaign' mode, and admits to having been deceived by some in the president's inner circle about the leak of a CIA operative's name.  . . .  The book, coming from a man who was a tight-lipped defender of administration aides and policy, is certain to give fuel to critics of the administration, and McClellan has harsh words for many of his past colleagues. He accuses former White House adviser Karl Rove of misleading him about his role in the CIA case. He describes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as being deft at deflecting blame, and he calls Vice President Cheney "the magic man" who steered policy behind the scenes while leaving no fingerprints.  . . .  McClellan stops short of saying that Bush purposely lied about his reasons for invading Iraq, writing that he and his subordinates were not 'employing out-and-out deception' to make their case for war in 2002.  . . .  But in a chapter titled 'Selling the War,' he alleges that the administration repeatedly shaded the truth and that Bush 'managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option.'  . . .  'Over that summer of 2002,' he writes, 'top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war. . . . In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president's advantage.'" To continue reading click here.

The strategy was twofold. First, the reason to go to war involved the neocon desire to revamp the map of the Middle East. According to McClellan, Bush & Company were committed to the oxymoronic term "coercive democracy," the strategy of forcing traditional and tyrannical societies to become democratic or else. With grand Wilsonian irony, the plan envisioned the United States imposing democracy on several nations in the Middle East. But why coercively democratize the Middle East? The answer is simply this: oil and Israel. After all, Kim Jung-il, the North Korean dictator, has murdered more of his own people than Saddam ever dreamt of doing. But though North Korea actually possesses nuclear weapons, confronting this dictator pays no oil dividends. The second part of the strategy was selling the war to the American people. The neocon conspirators knew their actual motives wouldn't sell on main street. Accordingly, they devised a contrived campaign of smoking guns and mushroom clouds.

The White House was livid over the disclosures.  According to the NY Times, "Mr. McClellan writes that President Bush "convinces himself to believe what suits his needs at the moment,' and has engaged in 'self-deception' to justify his political ends. He calls the decision to invade Iraq a 'serious strategic blunder,' and says that the biggest mistake the Bush White House made was a 'decision to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed.' Mr. Bush's press secretary, Ms. Dana Perino, who incidentally could not explain what the 1962 Cuban missile crisis was, took the last resort of a scoundrel by insisting that Mr. McClellan was 'disgruntled' and wanted to sell books. Ironically, this is the perfunctory charge McClellan was told level at other former official who wrote "tell all" books.  Click here for the rest of the reaction.

Scott McClellan forges himself a significant place in history with his memoir. We now have the evidence for what we knew from the start. America was radically ill-served by a man with this inordinate capacity to deceive himself and by doing so deceive us as well. There's no greater example of this capacity than a reply Mr. Bush made to a question about Iran's greater power in the area resulting from the invasion. ?To paraphrase, Mr. Bush was incredulous and said Iran has something to fear in the fledgling new democracy growing stronger at the Iranian's doorstep.

Full post as published by Essentially Contested America on May 30, 2008 (boomark / email).