July 5, 2005
Spin
cycles are supposed to last little longer than 24 hours, especially when
it’s bad news for Bush & Co. That is, perhaps, one reason why the
Downing Street Memos (DSM) are causing such consternation in
journalistic circles. A recent column by Newsday editorialist James
Klurfeld, "Downing
St. memos: Been there, knew that" (6-24-05), is of particular interest
to me, since I live on Long Island, and because it is a fascinating window
into the thought processes of an influential member of the Mainstream
Media (MSM), a man who plays an important role in creating storylines
about George Bush. The entire interest of the piece is in watching
Klurfeld frame the issues, beginning with his opening shot: "Somebody
needs to explain to me all this furor over the Downing Street memos" --
from which I conclude that he’s furious.
According to
Klurfeld, the proper way to understand the DSM is in terms of partisan
politics, the eternal clash between the extreme right wing and the
center-right. "Bush, say the critics, misled everybody because he said war
was a last resort when, in reality, it was his first choice."
"Hello? Anybody who
was paying attention in the summer of 2002 had to understand that the Bush
administration was beating the drums of war and if an actual decision had
not been made (what is the actual decision?) the mind-set was clear."
I love that
parenthetical, existential aside, which to me is the heart of Klurfeld’s
argument, "What is the actual decision?" It says so much about the MSM’s
mind-set. The MSM have been so gradually corrupted from their true
mission that there is no one moment when they made a conscious decision to
betray the public trust -- and that, to them, constitutes innocence. In
that sense -- in that betrayal is instinctive rather than plotted -- I
believe Klurfeld unconsciously identifies with George Bush; it is his
basis forgiving Bush the professional benefit of the doubt.
It is, of course,
also pure self-serving horseshit, right up there with Pontius Pilate
washing his hands, symbolical man, and asking, "What is truth?"
But then the
argument takes a hairpin turn as Mr. Klurfeld, who has been insisting that
anyone not comatose knew exactly what was happening in 2002, gives us two
very significant "pieces of evidence" to prove that Bush’s intentions were
crystal clear. The first is a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece by
Brent Scowcroft, in which Scowcroft, who had been in Bush Senior’s
cabinet, argues against pre-emptive war, thereby proving that pre-emptive
war was on the table. Uh huh. That was big news.
Secondly, Dick
Cheney made a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, in which he
explicitly advocated a pre-emptive-strike policy. "Was there anybody who
believed Cheney was off the reservation, speaking on his own? Give me a
break."
Notice Mr. Klurfeld
has framed the entire discussion around the question of whether or not
Bush’s intentions were clear, citing two wonky speeches where
administration officials used the word "pre-emptive" as conclusive
evidence. What the average reader of Mr. Klurfeld’s paper saw, though, was
not a debate about pre-emptive war as a policy, but a steadily darkening
picture of Iraq as a terrorist country, part of an "Axis of Evil," with
weapons of mass destruction capable of reaching the civilized world within
45 minutes.
The press, which,
apparently, was not at all fooled by George Bush’s constant references to
ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda, nevertheless treated official claims about
weapons of mass destruction with unquestioning respect, passing on
administration press releases as if they were the result of investigative
reporting and independent verification.
"Does this mean the
administration had made a final, irrevocable decision?" Klurfeld asks
himself. "That just gets into a semantic game...." Well, actually,
Klurfeld has just boxed himself into semantics, by once again ignoring the
elephant in the room: the Bush administration’s essential bad faith. Like
the waiter whose attention you can’t get, the press has made an art of
refusing to connect the dots about George Bush. Every new disinformation
campaign is passed along with a patriotic snap salute, even now, as the
GOP slowly winds up its spin about Iran. While certain stories do get
press, like Scowcroft’s opinion piece and Cheney’s speech at the VFW, they
receive only peripheral attention. The smoking gun and the mushroom cloud
are always and forever front and center.
Klurfeld mentions,
as the press dutifully reported back then, that George Bush did go to the
UN, "as it turned out" -- as if that buttresses Bush’s sincerity. In fact,
the DSM state that Blair’s people advised Bush’s people that they needed
the UN for political cover. The Brits, you see, unlike the Bushies, were
worried about war crimes. As usual, Bush made a half-assed hash of his end
of the bargain, but Blair accepted it.
And, oh, yes, "[t]he
memos also say there had not been adequate planning for the postwar
period. That is a more telling point but also not new information." Why is
that a more telling point, I wonder? Because the war was such an obviously
foregone conclusion? There is no mention whatsoever about the
air strikes on strategic war targets inside Iraq a full year before
George Bush received any congressional authorization to use force -- which
is a very telling point.
No, the real story
here, Klurfeld informs us, is the bellyaching Democrats, who made a
political miscalculation by not opposing the war. "Were they so naïve they
didn’t understand the administration’s mind-set?" Klurfeld believes they
were testing the political winds, especially John Kerry. "Bad decision.
He’s one of the Democrats bleating over the memos now. Some people never
learn."
In all fairness, I
will say here that Newsday narrowly endorsed Kerry in 2004, and
even then they found his main flaw to be that he had supported the war. I
will also say that prior to the invasion, Newsday and Klurfeld very
often criticized plans for war. But early in 2003, Newsday’s
position became that the naysayers should just shut up, since, like it or
not, we were about to go to war. I bitterly resented that opinion.
But the dead center
of the column is what Klurfeld leaves out: shockingly, he never once
mentions the bombshell line, "the intelligence and facts will be fixed
around the policy." It may very well be that John Kerry and others knew
that Junior wanted war. But it may also be that they believed the
thoroughly bogus intelligence briefings they were receiving. Certainly
many wavering Democrats were tipped in Bush’s favor by Colin Powell’s
brandishing of a vial of powdered sugar.
Untroubled by any of
that, Klurfeld concludes with a flourish: "The furor over the Downing
Street memos is nonsense. It will take historians to figure out whether
the invasion of Iraq was wisdom or folly." (That has a nice sound to it,
but I have to say Klurfeld is in a coma if he thinks the folly of this
venture is not already abundantly clear.) "And that will depend on what
Iraq looks like in 20 years." (That’s looking ahead, alright; he’s a
patient man -- with other people’s lives.)
"Meanwhile, this
irrelevant debate is diverting the nation from a discussion of the
critical issue before us: How much treasure, in lives and money, will we
and should we continue to spend on Iraq? What will it take to make Iraq a
stable, secure nation? And are we willing to pay it?"
"This irrelevant
debate," as Mr. Jimmy calls it, is the closest we’ve come to really
discussing what went on in the months leading up to the war -- and,
frankly, it casts a very harsh light on the venality, incompetence, and
plain old double dealing of the MSM.
The main frame
Klurfeld relies on, in dismissing the DSM, is the same one he used to
silence dissent before the war, namely, that the die has already been cast
and only questions about the next step are valid. Another neat little box
in which to contain and stifle debate, a box that removes George Bush from
any possibility of wrongdoing and hence from accountability.
I, on the other
hand, believe that the issue of burning importance now is how to remove
this criminal junta from power before they become too entrenched to stop.
Patricia Goldsmith
is a member of Long Island Media Watch, a grassroots free media and democracy
watchdog group. She is also a frequent contributor to
MandateTHIS.org. She
can be reached at:
plgoldsmith@optonline.net.