Having read Douglas Feith’s War and Decision over the long weekend (a better use of anyone’s time than blogging), I was interested to read about former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s unequal and opposite memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. Just as Mr. Feith’s book is an exemplar of what a political insider’s account ought to be, Mr. McClellan’s, unless seriously misrepresented by press accounts and the excerpt reprinted in the Wall Street Journal, is a counter-exemplar, contributing nothing to historical knowledge but the author’s animus.
In fairness to Mr. McClellan, he does not deserve one criticism that has been widely bruited in the dexterosphere: He did not, during his tenure, knowingly retail what he believed to be falsehoods.
As press secretary, I spent countless hours defending the administration from the podium in the White House briefing room. Although the things I said then were sincere, I have since come to realize that some of them were badly misguided. In these pages, I’ve tried to come to grips with some of the truths that life inside the White House bubble obscured. [emphasis added]
In other words, Mr. McClellan did not perceive any “deception” while he served the Administration. It was only later, after it fired him, that he became “genuinely convinced” “that the dis-esteem in which most Americans currently hold it” is deserved. As press secretary, he was not in any event well-placed to detect deception. Unlike Doug Feith, he wasn’t a regular attendee at key policymaking sessions, didn’t debate the pros and cons of strategy with Cabinet secretaries, other top officials and the President himself, didn’t routinely peruse classified documents and didn’t have any significant background in foreign affairs. Where Mr. Feith’s view of the reasons for invading Iraq is founded on expert knowledge of the facts and careful consideration of their importance, Mr. McClellan’s is simply the “narrative” picked up from the media. He concludes with the confident, naïve, ignorant assertion, “Most objective observers today would say that in 2003 there was no urgent need to address the threat posed by Saddam with a large-scale invasion, and therefore the war was not necessary. But this is a question President Bush seems not to want to grapple with.”
War and Decision reviews in detail why, after 9/11, leaving Saddam Hussein in power was a far graver risk than forcibly removing him. To summarize,
Throughout the 1990’s, liberals decried the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, deplored the refusal of President George H. W. Bush to depose him in 1991, labeled him an “imminent threat” to the American interests and supported legislation that made “regime change” in Iraq official U.S. government policy. Whatever its source or validity, such alarmism cannot have been due to any deception practiced by George W. Bush, who did not become President until 2001.
Also during the 1990’s, Iraq maintained stockpiles of chemical munitions and actively sought both to improve its chemical capabilities and to develop biological and atomic weapons. These facts, verified directly by the United Nations inspections that Saddam shut down in 1998, were largely admitted by Iraq, which claimed to have subsequently halted them but did not allow verification. The post-war Iraq Study Group reports found that covert development efforts had continued and that full resumption was planned as soon as U.N. economic sanctions came to an end.
Saddam’s Iraq was a promiscuous provider of training, subsidies and material support to terrorist groups, with little regard for religious or ideological affiliation. This belief was widely held by the intelligence community before George W. Bush took office. Documents captured during and after the war amply confirm it.
Among the world’s despots, Saddam Hussein stood out for recklessness (invasions of Iran and Kuwait, a threatened reinvasion of Kuwait in 1994), anti-Americanism (the attempted assassination of former President Bush in 1993, daily attempts to shoot down American and British planes patrolling the no-fly zone, murals in honor of the 9/11 attackers) and ferocity (use of poison gas, wanton destruction of Kuwaiti oil fields, internal terrorism and torture). There was no reason to think that he could be reasoned with or deterred.
International sanctions, which were the one hope of keeping the Ba’athists too weak to be a threat, were proving less and less enforceable. Three permanent members of the Security Council (Russia, France, China) favored weakening or abandoning them. After the war, we learned that corruption in the Oil-for-Food program had given Saddam a multi-billion dollar slush fund with which to bribe foreign politicians, making the demise of sanctions even more of a certainty than it had seemed to be.
American intelligence agencies also believed that Iraq had a large quantity of chemical and biological weapons on hand. That belief (which, Mr. Feith notes, was shared by Iraqi generals in communications intercepted by the U.S.) did no more than add another, redundant item to the long list of reasons to regard Ba’athist Iraq as an international menace. Weapons of mass destruction were, Mr. Feith shows, a relatively small, and never decisive, component of the case. If we had known with certainty that Iraq possessed not a single chemical, biological or nuclear weapon, its ability and willingness to aid terrorists in other ways would have been troubling enough. It could and did give a variety of mufsidun cash, equipment (hundreds of time bombs and suicide vests, for instance), training and safe havens.
All of these facts, none of them obscure in 2003 though the “narrative” has obscured them since then, apparently have slipped from, or never entered, the press secretary’s mind. Likewise less than perceptive is his harping on the “permanent campaign” that the Bush Administration supposedly waged to the detriment of “openness and forthrightness”. If the President has been trying to imitate Bill Clinton’s “war room” approach to governing the country, he has gone about it very strangely. The most conspicuous feature of his public relations strategy has been reticence about responding to his opponents’ allegations. A Clinton would have insisted (correctly) that the “sixteen words” about Ba’athist Iraq’s attempts to purchase uranium in Africa were based on solid evidence, that reports of federal ineptitude in dealing with Hurricane Katrina were grossly exaggerated and that WMD stockpiles were only a small part of the rationale for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. President Bush kept silent on all those counts and more. (Vide Douglas Feith, “How Bush Sold the War”.) It looks like Scott McClellan was blind not just to distant Iraq but also to the press operation that he supposedly headed. Whatever else his book may be, What Happened it is not.
Further reading: The Wall Street Journal, “General McClellan’s War”
Peter Wehner, “Scott’s Truth vs. Reality”
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