Kerryn Higgs, Webdiary's American correspondent, is a Webdiary columnist [0]. Her last post was Bush rewrites history [0]. This is Kerryn's first contribution for 2006. Thanks Kerryn, and good to hear from you again.

by Kerryn Higgs

As George W Bush embarks on his sixth year in office, it’s anybody’s guess whether his administration’s egregious misrepresentations, misjudgements and (quite probably) crimes will end up carrying any penalty. We will perhaps be able to gauge the electoral implications with the midterm Congressional elections this November, though it should always be remembered that the US electoral system, which has become heavily reliant on unaudited electronic voting machines, is vulnerable to vote-tampering [1].

Though the trial of ex-Cheney Chief of Staff ‘Scooter’ Libby has been pushed out beyond these elections to January 2007, Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s inquiry continues. Whether White House fixer Karl Rove faces indictment or Vice-President Cheney is under investigation remains unknown. Court documents released recently indicate that Libby’s defence could involve the claim that his ‘superiors’ authorised him [2] to reveal the identity of undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame – a reference, one would imagine, to his boss Dick Cheney.

Cheney’s blunder in the quail-shooting woods at the weekend, by the way, is not expected to carry serious consequences, especially since his victim, seventy-eight year old Republican fundraiser Harry Whittington, seems likely to survive the friendly fire to his face and chest. At worst, Cheney’s failure to get a Texas bird-hunting permit may draw a ‘caution’.

Polls continue to show that Bush’s approval rating rarely rises above 40% - and that the public is weary of the war on Iraq. Nonetheless his studied self-image as commander-in-chief of a nation “at war” continues to mesmerise much of the post-9/11 American public. Polls show that the myth of Republican superiority in matters of national security is wearing well.

On the warrantless wiretapping issue, people are evenly split, indicating the success of the administration’s claim that the program was directed solely at calls to and from al Qaeda and suggesting that many Americans are oblivious to infringements of their civil liberties.

According to TruthOut correspondent Jason Leopold [3], thousands of US citizens have been caught up in these wiretaps, including at least one officer at the State Department. (One has to wonder why al Qaeda was calling the State Department – or vice versa.)

The Democratic opposition is fractured between its own base, bitterly opposed to the war from the outset, and most of its leadership, who either supported regime change in Iraq or are afraid that pull-out language will only compound their image as inadequate defenders of the US people. If these divisions persist, it is hard to see the Democrats recapturing the House and/or Senate in November.

For those of us who have carefully watched the entire sorry drama unfolding since the September 2001 attacks, Bush’s ability to maintain the edge on security is a mystery in itself. After all, it was Bush who ignored counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke’s frustrated demands for action on al Qaeda throughout 2001 and several specific warnings during the summer of 2001 (See my webdiary article here [3]). It was Bush who pulled vital US forces out of Afghanistan before the place was secured [4], in order to divert them to Iraq – a country totally unrelated to al Qaeda, bin Laden or 9/11. And it is the Iraq invasion that has provided a new venue for al Qaeda recruiting and fueled a rising tide of anti-Americanism worldwide.

Last week I saw Eugene Jarecki’s new documentary, Why We Fight [5], which examines the ongoing influence of the US “military-industrial complex” on US decisions to go to war. One of the most compelling people Jarecki interviewed was a New York ex-cop and Vietnam vet whose son died in the World Trade Centre; this man backed the war to the hilt until he found out recently that Saddam had nothing to do with it.

The key to Bush’s success as protector seems to be the administration’s fabulous PR job – a credit to the White House Iraq Group which set out to sell the Iraq war as a “new product [6]”. We had Judith Miller’s front-page WMD stories in the (supposedly liberal) New York Times, superbly-timed appeals to mushroom-cloud hysteria, far-fetched claims that drones might shower the US with chemicals, and Colin Powell’s smoke and mirrors presentation at the UN in February 2003.

The administration ran an irresistible advertising campaign. By the time of the invasion, most Americans believed in Iraq’s WMDs and the fictional connections between Saddam and Osama – most even thought Iraqis were amongst the hijackers! Even now, after belated counter-statements from various officials, including the President, a significant minority still do.

Many of us smelled a rat early on and watched in trepidation as the “facts were fixed around the policy”. Since then, a flood of evidence for this interpretation has reached the public sphere, including numerous leaked Downing Street memos confirming that the course was set long before the decision was announced.

The latest of these memos is revealed in the new edition of Philippe Sands’ Lawless World [7], which describes a meeting between Bush, Blair and their aides in late January 2003. Worried that they weren’t going to get their war resolution through the Security Council (they were right there), Bush proposed painting a US spy-plane in UN colours and trying to tempt Saddam to shoot it down, providing a pretext for retaliation. The war was “pencilled in” on Bush’s calendar for March 10 and he intended to go ahead, with or without the UN.

Last week, Paul Pillar, ex-CIA analyst in charge of Middle East assessments, published a scathing critique [8] of the administration’s cavalier approach to intelligence in Foreign Affairs.

Like Pentagon policy officer Karen Kwiatkowski, who watched the Office of Special Plans at close range from her post on the Pentagon Middle East desk [9], Pillar was in a position to observe the CIA process first hand. What he concluded was that the administration’s motivations for the war had nothing to do with the actual intelligence on Iraq.

If the entire body of official intelligence analysis on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war – or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath. What is most remarkable about pre-war US intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important US policy decisions in recent decades.

...

Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war. On the issue that mattered most, the intelligence community judged that Iraq probably was several years away from developing a nuclear weapon...

The Bush administration deviated from the professional standard not only in using policy to drive intelligence, but also in aggressively using intelligence to win public support for its decision to go to war. This meant selectively adducing data – “cherry-picking” – rather than using the intelligence community's own analytic judgments…

But the greatest discrepancy between the administration's public statements and the intelligence community's judgments concerned… the relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda. The enormous attention devoted to this subject did not reflect any judgment by intelligence officials that there was or was likely to be anything like the "alliance" the administration said existed. The reason the connection got so much attention was that the administration wanted to hitch the Iraq expedition to the "war on terror" and the threat the American public feared most, thereby capitalising on the country's militant post-9/11 mood.

A majority of US citizens now believe they were lied to before the war – but whether this will affect their votes in November is an open question. By then, it may be that the publicity machine will have focused their attention elsewhere.

Among the key factors which will influence the fate of the Bush administration (and the rest of us) is the extent to which the American people continue to accept the President as their best bet against the threats of terrorism – something well understood by the Republican Party itself. Doug Thompson of Capitol Hill Blue wrote last November [10] that a confidential memo circulating among senior Republican leaders described the possibility of a new terrorist attack as “blue sky thinking”.

The closely-guarded memo lays out a list of scenarios to bring the Republican party back from the political brink, including a devastating attack by terrorists that could “validate” the President’s war on terror and allow Bush to “unite the country” in a “time of national shock and sorrow.”

Evidently, some Republicans would count a further terrorist strike as a stroke of luck.

It was in this spirit, no doubt, that “new details” of a 2002 terrorist attack on the tallest building in Los Angeles were unveiled by the President [11] last week. Bush got the name of the tower wrong, intelligence professionals expressed scepticism and the mayor of LA promptly slammed the President for releasing information without briefing the city first.

Bush announced that a shoe-bomber was to blow open the cockpit door of a plane. But, as one journalist pointed out to Press Secretary Scott McClellan, it is hard to see how such a tactic would work without either incinerating the shoe-bomber or blowing the front off the plane – either of which would presumably compromise the alleged hijacking. However flawed the claim, it was amplified in the heartland by the shock jocks and represents the ongoing management of Bush’s credibility by skilled public relations tactics – focusing attention back on 9/11, the lynchpin of his security ploy.

Scoring a domestic attack would rely on mere “luck” again. Back in 2001, Bush, who had promised to run an overall budget surplus, except in the event of recession, war or national emergency told his budget director Mitch Daniels, "Lucky me. I hit the trifecta. [12]"

The launching of a new overseas exploit, however, lies well within the power of the administration. On this, the signs are ominous. Iran got a spot in the “axis of evil” in 2002 and reports of an actual plan of attack date back at least a year. (see my Webdiary article, The trouble with Iran [12].)

In November 2005, The New York Times reported details of a US briefing to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), using a laptop which purported to prove Iran was building nuclear warheads (archived here [13]). The Times noted that no-one was told where the laptop came from, except that the supplier had since died:

American officials, citing the need to protect their source, have largely refused to provide details of the origins of the laptop computer beyond saying that they obtained it in mid-2004 from a longtime contact in Iran.

Numerous experts have challenged the laptop evidence:

"I can fabricate that data," a senior European diplomat said of the documents. "It looks beautiful, but is open to doubt…" Several intelligence experts said that a sophisticated Western spy agency could, in theory, have produced the contents of the laptop. But American officials insisted there was no evidence of such fraud.

Given the Bush administration’s relationship to the Niger forgeries – at best inept credulity, more likely intentional fraud – it would seem wise to take such reassurances with a grain of salt. However, when the IAEA voted last week to report Iran to the Security Council, it turned out [14] that the decision had been based, (at least “in part”) on the laptop of unknown provenance.

Meanwhile, reports keep surfacing that the US, or possibly Israel, is ready to launch a devastating attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. In the absence of a capitulation, the Security Council will consider the matter in early March. Iran warns [15] that it will retaliate if attacked.

An attack on Iran would signify a new escalation in the downward spiral of world security. If Bush’s PR machine thinks the tactic will work for him, we will witness such an attack – and all of us will have to deal with the consequences.