Life as a Spectator Sport

Retired Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski shares the real goods about how we went to war, in an article published in Salon.com.

Col. Kwiatkowski worked in the Pentagon office of the Near East South Asia (NESA) directorate for 10 months before her retirement. She watched as career employees with years of experience and no political axe to grind were replaced by administration appointees from various think tanks.

At the time, I didn't realize that the expertise on Middle East policy was not only being removed, but was also being exchanged for that from various agenda-bearing think tanks, including the Middle East Media Research Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Interestingly, the office director billet stayed vacant the whole time I was there. That vacancy and the long-term absence of real regional understanding to inform defense policymakers in the Pentagon explains a great deal about the neoconservative approach on the Middle East and the disastrous mistakes made in Washington and in Iraq in the past two years.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (often called by its acronym MEMRI) describes itself as a non-profit, non-partisan organization which "explores the Middle East through the region's media." Their "About Us" page says

MEMRI bridges the language gap which exists between the West and the Middle East, providing timely translations of Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew media, as well as original analysis of political, ideological, intellectual, social, cultural, and religious trends in the Middle East.

That sounds good, but even to someone as unversed in Middle East affairs as I, examination of their site shows an odd bias: almost no articles from Israeli media are reported, all the cartoons they reproduce are of a virulent anti-American or anti-Semitic nature, and the 26 "Special Reports," dating from February 4, 1998 to February 27, 2004 deal almost exclusively with anti-Semitic rhetoric (the single exception is an article about Egyptian president Mubarak). MEMRI certainly has a right to report anti-Semitic bias, even to focus on it. But such a focus seems inconsistent with MEMRI's description of itself as non-partisan.

The only information I could find online about the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, other than its own website, was a suggestion that it was tied politically to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the primary pro-Israel lobbying group. An article from the Washington Report on Middle-East Affairs says, "A glance at names of its officers and board members reveals, however, extensive overlap not only with AIPAC but also with pro-Israel political action committees (PACs) and other organizations identified with support of the government of Israel and its policies." Unfortunately for objective reporting, WRMEA (despite its official sounding name) is as anti-Israel as it accuses the Washington Institute of being pro-Israel, leaving the poor innocent inquirer with a definite feeling of mutual finger-pointing.

The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) says its two-fold mandate is:

1. To educate the American public about the importance of an effective U.S. defense capability so that our vital interests as Americans can be safeguarded; and

2. To inform the American defense and foreign affairs community about the important role Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

JINSA makes no bones about being pro-Israel, saying "Founded as a result of the lessons learned from the 1973 Yom Kippur War, JINSA communicates with the national security establishment and the general public to explain the role Israel can and does play in bolstering American interests, as well as the link between American defense policy and the security of Israel."

I have to say that I'm straying into areas that make me distinctly uncomfortable. As a Christian, I know what I owe to the Jewish faith and the Jewish people. I strongly admire every one of the Jews I personally know. And I share every decent person's horror at what happened to the Jews during World War II. As the member of a pretty unpopular minority myself, I have some understanding of what it means to be despised for something of which I am not only unashamed, but proud. Yet I want my country's policies to be arrived at in as objective a manner as possible, without favoritism to any one group. It doesn't trouble me in the slightest that the Bush administration listened to experts from the Middle East Media Research Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. What bothers me is that other voices were apparently silenced or ignored.

I'd also like to know that an organization as powerful the one which become the "Office of Special Plans" within the Pentagon is managed by someone who knows what he is doing. Col. Kwiatkowski lambasted the performance of Douglas Feith:

Doug Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, was a case study in how not to run a large organization. In late 2001, he held the first all-hands policy meeting at which he discussed for over 15 minutes how many bullets and sub-bullets should be in papers for Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A year later, in August of 2002, he held another all-hands meeting in the auditorium where he embarrassed everyone with an emotional performance about what it was like to serve Rumsfeld. He blithely informed us that for months he didn't realize Rumsfeld had a daily stand-up meeting with his four undersecretaries. He shared with us the fact that, after he started to attend these meetings, he knew better what Rumsfeld wanted of him. Most military staffers and professional civilians hearing this were incredulous, as was I, to hear of such organizational ignorance lasting so long and shared so openly. Feith's inattention to most policy detail, except that relating to Israel and Iraq, earned him a reputation most foul throughout Policy, with rampant stories of routine signatures that took months to achieve and lost documents.

Perhaps organizational competence was not really necessary, however, as Col. Kwiatkowski says that OSP's functions duplicated those of other Pentagon departments:

The facts we should have used to base our papers on were already being produced by the intelligence agencies, and the war planning was already done by the combatant command staff with some help from the Joint Staff. Instead of developing defense policy alternatives and advice, OSP was used to manufacture propaganda for internal and external use, and pseudo war planning.

Kwiatkowski describes the "talking points" developed by OSP:

The talking points were a series of bulleted statements, written persuasively and in a convincing way, and superficially they seemed reasonable and rational. Saddam Hussein had gassed his neighbors, abused his people, and was continuing in that mode, becoming an imminently dangerous threat to his neighbors and to us -- except that none of his neighbors or Israel felt this was the case. Saddam Hussein had harbored al-Qaida operatives and offered and probably provided them with training facilities -- without mentioning that the suspected facilities were in the U.S./Kurdish-controlled part of Iraq. Saddam Hussein was pursuing and had WMD of the type that could be used by him, in conjunction with al-Qaida and other terrorists, to attack and damage American interests, Americans and America -- except the intelligence didn't really say that. Saddam Hussein had not been seriously weakened by war and sanctions and weekly bombings over the past 12 years, and in fact was plotting to hurt America and support anti-American activities, in part through his carrying on with terrorists -- although here the intelligence said the opposite

These talking points changed as public information made some positions untenable. "First," says Kwiatkowski, "was the deletion of entire references or bullets."

The one I remember most specifically is when they dropped the bullet that said one of Saddam's intelligence operatives had met with Mohammad Atta in Prague, supposedly salient proof that Saddam was in part responsible for the 9/11 attack. That claim had lasted through a number of revisions, but after the media reported the claim as unsubstantiated by U.S. intelligence, denied by the Czech government, and that Atta's location had been confirmed by the FBI to be elsewhere, that particular bullet was dropped entirely from our "advice on things to say" to senior Pentagon officials when they met with guests or outsiders.

Kwiatkowski remarks upon the attempt to blame the intelligence community for "failures" in Iraq. In August 2002, Senators Bob Graham and Dick Durban wanted to know why no National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) had been produced to explain why the US needed to engage in a pre-emptive war.

In fact, it had not been written, but a suitable NIE was dutifully prepared and submitted the very next month. Naturally, this document largely supported most of the outrageous statements already made publicly by Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld about the threat Iraq posed to the United States. All the caveats, reservations and dissents made by intelligence were relegated to footnotes and kept from the public.

In a scathing summary of the reasons for the war on Iraq, Kwiatkowski says:

War is generally crafted and pursued for political reasons, but the reasons given to the Congress and to the American people for this one were inaccurate and so misleading as to be false. Moreover, they were false by design. Certainly, the neoconservatives never bothered to sell the rest of the country on the real reasons for occupation of Iraq -- more bases from which to flex U.S. muscle with Syria and Iran, and better positioning for the inevitable fall of the regional ruling sheikdoms. Maintaining OPEC on a dollar track and not a euro and fulfilling a half-baked imperial vision also played a role. These more accurate reasons for invading and occupying could have been argued on their merits -- an angry and aggressive U.S. population might indeed have supported the war and occupation for those reasons. But Americans didn't get the chance for an honest debate.

Kwiatkowski will surely be criticized for her frequent use of the term "neoconservative," a moniker that right-wingers haven't yet decided is pejorative or complimentary, and for leaking some of this information while she was still on active duty. But it's hard to argue with someone who was there, and saw what happened, without calling her an outright liar, and you can't read her account without hearing the bewildered anger of an indignant, sincere and patriotic career officer.

Karen Kwiatkowski also writes for MilitaryWeek.com, and her column Without Reservation is a revealing adjunct to the Salon.com article. It will be interesting to see what kind of smear campaign is mounted against her in the coming days.

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