To: "homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org" <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [Homestead] How the US Empire operates,
Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 09:35:06 -0700
or,
That Pesky Downing Street Memo,
or,
The Insignificance of You and Me,
or,
To Hell With Truth
Secret Way to War
By Mark Danner
The New York Review of Books and TomDispatch
Posted May 17, 2005.
The 'smoking gun' memo makes it crystal clear that George Bush was
hell-bent on attacking Iraq at least eight months before the invasion.
It's a long article. Here are the final graphs:
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
advisor" to President Bush made to a New York Times Magazine reporter last
fall:
The aide said that guys like me [i.e., 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 Dec.
14, 2004, after I had seen the images of the newly reelected 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 Gen. (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 Sept. 11 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 the prime minister 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.