[I’ve been wanting to write this, but Paul did it better than I could have- BooMan]

President Bush’s determination to oust Iraq’s Saddam Hussein by military force if necessary was set last fall without a formal decision-making meeting or the intelligence assessment that customarily precedes such a momentous decision.
     –USA Today, September 11, 2002

One line of defense in the media against reporting the Downing Street Memo is the claim that it’s nothing new. That “we knew it all along.” And, of course, they are right. That’s just the point of being part of the government propaganda machine in the post-Orwellian world, where doublethink is standard operating procedure. As Orwell wrote:

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

A look back at USA Today‘s story provides a detailed reminder of just how thoroughly the official media has been engaged in promoting and supporting Bush Administration doublethink–as, indeed, it still is today.  They both promote Bush propaganda as if true, and explain how and why it is made up–reveling in their insiderness. Then they treat it as Gospel Truth, again.

[Gory details on the flip]
It was always an open secret that invading Iraq had little or nothing to do with the war on terror. It was openly discussed as a political move, forcing the Democrats to take a stand supporting Bush just before the 2002 elections, thus making it much harder for them to run against his disastrous domestic record.  

But it was also known that the invasion had been planned and decided on long in advance.  This was reported in some detail in an obscure rag known as USA Today on the first anniversary of 9/11, “Iraq course set from tight White House circle”.

While the official media largely ignored the story, many of the details were clearly widely known–as was the enormous gap between the public rhetoric and the secret motivations–and doubts.  Managing all these contradictory pieces of information is what involves the press as co-conspirators with the Administration in the promotion of rule by doublethink.  

These are only part of the larger story, however. Even before Bush took power, the Project for A New American Century (PNAC) had targeted Iraq for invasion.  And even before PNAC had formed, in Bush I’s Administration, Paul Wolfowitz had drawn up plans for global domination–plans that had to be rewritten following an embarrassing leak.

Building on these other, older stories and putting them together with USA Today‘s story, I wrote a piece in Random Lengths News on October 4, 2002, “Iraq Attack–The Aims and Origins of Bush’s Plans”.  It was one of five stories cited by Project Censored as examples of the #1 Censored Story of 2002-2003: The Neoconservative Plan for Global Dominance.

USA Today‘s story, excerpted below, did not range as far and deep as the five stories cited by Project Censored.  Its focus was limited to what happened in just one year–which it did brilliantly. It took the contradictory facts that the entire official media knew in general terms–Bush had, after all, identified Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the “axis of evil”–nailed them down and cast them into sharp relief with its high degree of specificity and its narrative cohesiveness. It was a tour de force.

But many others could have written this story, had they wanted to. The official media were well aware of these contradictions all along. Instead of investigating and reporting on them, the official media consistently disappeared them by taking on the role of Administration spinmeisters, doing their doublethink for them–or were they, perhaps, doing our doublethink for us?

Before turning to USA Today‘s account, let’s remind ourselves of Orwell’s extended description:

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.

It should be clear, then, that the eruption of attention to the Downing Street Memo is, to the doublethink mind, merely a routine occurrence, requiring a routine inversion. What had been universally known and denied is now to be universally known, treated as “old news” with all the past denials themselves now being denied.

With that in mind, we now turn to USA Today‘s story.  It was a rarity, 5-author article. The writers were John Diamond, Judy Keen, Dave Moniz, Susan Page and Barbara Slavin.  They interviewed “officials at the White House, State Department, Pentagon, intelligence agencies, Congress and elsewhere to explore what factors were weighed and whose voices were heard.”  

In short, it was thoroughly researched and nailed down.

Not only was the story published in USA Today, on the anniversary of 9/11, it was also just before Bush appeared before the UN General Assembly to make his case for invading Iraq.  There could not be a better definition of a bombshell story. Yet, it disappeared in the official media without a trace. In broad outline, USA Today found that:

“[H]e [Bush] decided that Saddam must go more than 10 months ago; the debate within the administration since then has been about the means to accomplish that end.”

….

Despite the high stakes, the decision was reached with surprising speed. The policy would take longer to unveil than to devise; Bush would suggest his intentions in January with a State of the Union speech that labeled Iraq part of an ”axis of evil.”

The authors themselves wrote:

Among the key findings:

  • The decision to target Saddam ”kind of evolved, but it’s not clear and neat,” a senior administration official says, calling it ”policymaking by osmosis.”

    ”There wasn’t a flash moment. There’s no decision meeting,” national security adviser Condoleezza Rice says. ”But Iraq had been on the radar screen — that it was a danger and that it was something you were going to have to deal with eventually . . . before Sept. 11, because we knew that this was a problem.”

  • Members of Congress weren’t consulted. Nor were key allies. The concerns of senior military officers and intelligence analysts, some of whom remain skeptical, weren’t fully aired until afterward.

    The White House still has not requested that the CIA and other intelligence agencies produce a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, a formal document that would compile all the intelligence data into a single analysis. An intelligence official says that’s because the White House doesn’t want to detail the uncertainties that persist about Iraq’s arsenal and Saddam’s intentions. A senior administration official says such an assessment simply wasn’t seen as helpful.

    Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, calls that ”stunning.”

    ”If we are about to make a decision that could risk American lives, we need full and accurate information on which to base that decision,” he says in a letter sent Tuesday to leaders of the committee and CIA Director George Tenet.

  • Some of the factors that figured in the decision last October – including fears that the al-Qaeda network might be close to obtaining nuclear weapons and that international terrorists might be behind the anthrax attacks – now seem to have been overblown. But the decision wasn’t revisited.
  • Whether Saddam was involved in the attacks on Sept. 11 — and the evidence on that is still unclear — wasn’t the central question. Instead, within days after the attacks on New York and Washington one year ago, the president and his top aides turned their sights on Baghdad as the biggest future threat to a nation that suddenly seemed all-too-vulnerable to terrorists and international outlaws.

That’s right, kiddies!  USA Today had Condi Rice on record about how the decision was made by osmossis long before anyone outside the Administration had a chance to say, “Boo!”

Condi: “There wasn’t a flash moment. There’s no decision meeting.”

Smoking gun. Smoking gun. Smoking gun.

The account of how the decision was made is straightfoward, and chilling in its remove from the official story.  Even though the USA Today story was largely ignored, the press readily assimilated the Administration’s views that USA Today reported in the following section. Believing both the Administration’s paranoid worldview and its official rationale implicated the official press in the Administration’s doublethink.

The question of whether Saddam conspired with the Sept. 11 terrorists would divide the administration and bedevil career intelligence analysts who felt they were being pressured to draw firm conclusions from minimal and conflicting evidence….  

In any case, finding a link would help the administration in terms of public relations — in convincing the United Nations, Congress and the American people that action was justified. But it wasn’t necessary for Bush. He saw the threat of future terrorism by Saddam as reason enough.

”Terrorism is a problem, weapons of mass destruction is a problem, the potential link between the two is a real problem,” Rice says. ”What Sept. 11 did was to vivify what happened if evil people decide that they’re going to go after you, and that it doesn’t take much.”

What the attacks on Sept. 11 did for the Bush administration was turn the nagging problem of Iraq into a top priority — as important as catching Osama bin Laden or achieving a Mideast peace….

Four days after the attacks, on Sept. 15, Bush met with his top advisers at Camp David to discuss the coming war….

Wolfowitz argued the threat Saddam posed to the United States dwarfed that of bin Laden….

Rumsfeld agreed. He had concluded before Sept. 11 that the policy toward Iraq was failing. After the attacks, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz had a visceral reaction that containing Saddam was no longer enough, regardless of whether he was implicated this time. ”They decided, ‘We’ve got to do something about this,’ ” an adviser to the two men says.

Their views were reinforced four days later, on Sept. 19.

The smell of smoke still permeated the Pentagon when the Defense Policy Board, an advisory group of former top officials and outside experts, gathered in a conference room adjacent to Rumsfeld’s office…. The group was joined by Middle East historian and author Bernard Lewis and by Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella group of those opposed to Saddam…. Rumsfeld dropped in for some of their discussions….

At the White House, aides were putting the final touches on the speech Bush would deliver the next day to a joint session of Congress….

But Cheney was cautious, despite his hard-line instincts. After consultations with Arab leaders, Cheney became convinced that their support would be imperiled if the initial mission were broadened….

The speech on Sept. 20 would make only a passing reference to Iraq. Cheney told Wolfowitz to stop agitating for targeting Saddam.

But that goal was only being delayed, Cheney assured him, not rejected. ”First things first,” the president told aides.

USA Today then discusses the growing fear of another attack, the actuality of the anthrax attacks, and growing feeling of fear and vulnerability to possible “dirty bombs.”

But by the end of October, all those factors helped build momentum behind the idea of using military action to oust Saddam. The course advocated by Rumsfeld and Cheney became policy, despite concerns by Powell and others. Bush set a course likely to define his presidency, just as the Gulf War defined his father’s.

The article then goes on to discuss how Rumsfeld pushed for a surgical strike–which was eventually rejected:

Emboldened by the quick progress of the war in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld and others argued that U.S. military forces would overwhelm Iraq’s rusting army. The mission would be relatively easy to execute, they said, the politics of it aside. Rumsfeld envisioned a surgical strike using relatively few troops, many of them from special operations forces….

On Feb. 7, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon left a meeting with Bush convinced that he would confront Saddam, and soon. By March, White House aides were making preliminary plans for military action in Iraq that could have begun as early as August….

The White House hadn’t asked the CIA and other intelligence agencies to produce a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq….

One intelligence official says the White House decided not to request the report to avoid enshrining in a widely circulated document the uncertainties that persist about Iraq — the doubts about links between al-Qaeda and Iraq, about what weapons of mass destruction Saddam already had, and about whether he was likely to use them against the United States and its allies.

At the Pentagon, some senior military officers disagreed with Rumsfeld about whether a small force would be sufficient. They proposed a massive invasion; Rumsfeld called their plans predictable and oversized. The officers warned that a new invasion while the war in Afghanistan continued would stretch the military thin.

If Bush wouldn’t listen to the military, Democrats in Congress would:

Some lawmakers worried that Bush wasn’t hearing the generals’ objections. At a White House meeting last week, Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., informed Bush that senior officers had told him about their strong reservations about the proposed unprovoked attack. Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., who was also at the meeting, says Bush looked stunned and, after a pause, replied, ”Well, I wish they’d tell me about their concerns.”

Classic Bush!  He’s really perfected his father’s art of being “out of the loop” in his own administration.

The exchange came after months of leaks about dissent within the Bush administration. They fueled questions about whether the president had consulted widely enough. The tightly held process left the impression with some that Bush was searching for a justification after deciding to target Saddam.

”The decision-making process . . . bypassed much of the intelligence community and many people in the U.S. Central Command as well as the normal national security process,” says Anthony Cordesman, a veteran Mideast military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. ”As a result, it has never achieved any clear consensus within the administration, and there has been nothing approaching coherent public diplomacy to convince our allies.”

When Cheney was dispatched to tour Arab capitals in March to rally support against Saddam, he was met instead by demands that the United States first address escalating violence between Israelis and Palestinians.

Israeli diplomats raised another issue. They asked that Bush consider waiting to attack Iraq until Israel’s improved missile-defense system had been more fully deployed.

The notion of a stealth strike faded…

Which brings us to the time-frame of the Downing Street Memo:

In late June or early July, Bush decided he would ask Congress for its formal endorsement. Senior State Department and Pentagon officials met with a group of Iraqi opposition leaders on Aug. 9 to ease concerns about a lack of strategy for a post-Saddam Iraq. With his speech to the United Nations, Bush will seek the world’s support.

But whatever the response, aides say the president’s determination to oust Saddam — the decision he made in the seven weeks following the attacks on Sept. 11 — hasn’t wavered.

Orwell, again:

Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them and to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary.

Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able – and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years – to arrest the course of history…

That is what we are fighting against.