[Peace-discuss] Krugman on Snow jobs for war

[Morton K. Brussel]

   Snow Job in the Desert

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 3, 2007
In February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressing the  
United Nations Security Council, claimed to have proof that Saddam  
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He did not, in fact, present  
any actual evidence, just pictures of buildings with big arrows  
pointing at them saying things like “Chemical Munitions Bunker.” But  
many people in the political and media establishments swooned: they  
admired Mr. Powell, and because he said it, they believed it.

Mr. Powell’s masters got the war they wanted, and it soon became  
apparent that none of his assertions had been true.

Until recently I assumed that the failure to find W.M.D., followed by  
years of false claims of progress in Iraq, would make a repeat of the  
snow job that sold the war impossible. But I was wrong. The  
administration, this time relying on Gen. David Petraeus to play the  
Colin Powell role, has had remarkable success creating the perception  
that the “surge” is succeeding, even though there’s not a shred of  
verifiable evidence to suggest that it is.

Thus Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution — the author of  
“The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq” — and his  
colleague Michael O’Hanlon, another longtime war booster, returned  
from a Pentagon-guided tour of Iraq and declared that the surge was  
working. They received enormous media coverage; most of that coverage  
accepted their ludicrous self-description as critics of the war who  
have been convinced by new evidence.

A third participant in the same tour, Anthony Cordesman of the Center  
for Strategic and International Studies, reported that unlike his  
traveling companions, he saw little change in the Iraq situation and  
“did not see success for the strategy that President Bush announced  
in January.” But neither his dissent nor a courageous rebuttal of Mr.  
O’Hanlon and Mr. Pollack by seven soldiers actually serving in Iraq,  
published in The New York Times, received much media attention.

Meanwhile, many news organizations have come out with misleading  
reports suggesting a sharp drop in U.S. casualties. The reality is  
that this year, as in previous years, there have been month-to-month  
fluctuations that tell us little: for example, July 2006 was a low- 
casualty month, with only 43 U.S. military fatalities, but it was  
also a month in which the Iraqi situation continued to deteriorate.  
And so far, every month of 2007 has seen more U.S. military  
fatalities than the same month in 2006.

What about civilian casualties? The Pentagon says they’re down, but  
it has neither released its numbers nor explained how they’re  
calculated. According to a draft report from the Government  
Accountability Office, which was leaked to the press because  
officials were afraid the office would be pressured into changing the  
report’s conclusions, U.S. government agencies “differ” on whether  
sectarian violence has been reduced. And independent attempts by news  
agencies to estimate civilian deaths from news reports, hospital  
records and other sources have not found any significant decline.

Now, there are parts of Baghdad where civilian deaths probably have  
fallen — but that’s not necessarily good news. “Some military  
officers,” reports Leila Fadel of McClatchy, “believe that it may be  
an indication that ethnic cleansing has been completed in many  
neighborhoods and that there aren’t as many people to kill.”

Above all, we should remember that the whole point of the surge was  
to create space for political progress in Iraq. And neither that  
leaked G.A.O. report nor the recent National Intelligence Estimate  
found any political progress worth mentioning. There has been no hint  
of sectarian reconciliation, and the Iraqi government, according to  
yet another leaked U.S. government report, is completely riddled with  
corruption.

But, say the usual suspects, General Petraeus is a fine, upstanding  
officer who wouldn’t participate in a campaign of deception —  
apparently forgetting that they said the same thing about Mr. Powell.

First of all, General Petraeus is now identified with the surge; if  
it fails, he fails. He has every incentive to find a way to keep it  
going, in the hope that somehow he can pull off something he can call  
success.

And General Petraeus’s history also suggests that he is much more of  
a political, and indeed partisan, animal than his press would have  
you believe. In particular, six weeks before the 2004 presidential  
election, General Petraeus published an op-ed article in The  
Washington Post in which he claimed — wrongly, of course — that there  
had been “tangible progress” in Iraq, and that “momentum has gathered  
in recent months.”

Is it normal for serving military officers to publish articles just  
before an election that clearly help an incumbent’s campaign? I don’t  
think so.

So here we go again. It appears that many influential people in this  
country have learned nothing from the last five years. And those who  
cannot learn from history are, indeed, doomed to repeat it.

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