Claims from an enemy of Saddam taken at face value, a jury-rigged intel process, a media campaign of lies and spin, and domestic political calculation; a military attack executed in violation of US and international law (even had the allegations been true), followed by a complete lack of critical evaluation by the press; and hurting mostly Iraqi civilians.
Sounds familiar? However, I’m not talking about Bush, 2002-3. This is not a unique script, this is a blueprint – the intel process has been corrupted for a long time.
You remember Bush’s grandstanding about Saddam, “the guy who tried to kill my Dad”? Well, except that that was a lie, too. After a long search, I finally found Sy Hersch’s 1993 article on the subject.
I recommend reading the article in full.
It not only details the spin, but also how Clinton was pushed into his first bombing campaign by various forces (in the bureaucracy, in politics, in the media) to ‘retaliate’ for this assassination attempt – some of them leftovers from the Republican national security bureaucracy, some of them the same ‘liberal’ hawks who uncritically accepted Bush’s lies, but still want to sell out to the Republicans now.
(BTW, I realise that for many of you, it would be painful to read bad things about members of the fondly remembered Clinton administration – that’s why I chose this event to illustrate the point of this post’s title, with its Papa-Bush-era connections at play, rather than Desert Fox from 1998.)
I doubt you’ll find that many people here that are worried about sullying Clinton’s rep. Personally, I think there are quite a few reasons to sully that rep (bombing the fuck out of Kosovo due to a manufactured crisis leaps to mind).
If so, that’s good. Beyond Desert Fox, Kosovo and the Iraqi no-fly zone extensions come to my mind. (BTW, Clinton bombed the fuck out of the whole of Serbia, just South of the border of my home country, while ostensibly defending Kosovo human rights. Remember Tom Friedman’s sick line: “Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.”)