Bush’s Deadly “Diplomacy”

by Norman Solomon

With 219 days left in his presidency,
George W. Bush laid more flagstones along a path to war on Iran. There
was the usual declaration that “all options are on the table”
– and, just as ominously, much talk of diplomacy.

Three times on Wednesday, The Associated
Press reports, Bush “called a diplomatic solution ‘my first choice,’
implying there are others. He said ‘we’ll give diplomacy a chance to
work,’ meaning it might not.”

That’s how Bush talks when he’s grooving
along in his Orwellian comfort zone, eager to order a military attack.

“We seek peace,” Bush said
in the State of the Union address on January 28, 2003. “We strive
for peace.”

In that speech, less than two months
before the invasion of Iraq began, Bush foreshadowed the climax of his
administration’s diplomatic pantomime. “The United States will
ask the UN Security Council to convene on February the 5th to consider
the facts of Iraq’s ongoing defiance of the world,” the president
said. “Secretary of State Powell will present information and intelligence
about Iraq’s legal – Iraq’s illegal weapons programs, its attempt to
hide those weapons from inspectors, and its links to terrorist groups.”

A week after that drum roll, Colin Powell
made his now-infamous presentation to the UN Security Council. At the
time, it served as ideal “diplomacy” for war – filled with
authoritative charges and riddled with deceptions.

We should never forget the raptures of
media praise for Powell’s crucial mendacity. A key bellwether was The New York Times.

The front page of The Times had been
plying administration lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction for
a long time. Now the newspaper’s editorial stance, ostensibly antiwar,
swooned into line – rejoicing that “Mr. Powell’s presentation was
all the more convincing because he dispensed with apocalyptic invocations
of a struggle of good and evil and focused on shaping a sober, factual
case against Mr. Hussein’s regime.”

The Times editorialized that Powell “presented
the United Nations and a global television audience yesterday with the
most powerful case to date that Saddam Hussein stands in defiance of
Security Council resolutions and has no intention of revealing or surrendering
whatever unconventional weapons he may have.” By sending Powell
to address the Security Council, The Times claimed, President Bush “showed
a wise concern for international opinion.”

Bush had implemented the kind of “diplomacy”
advocated by a wide range of war enthusiasts. For instance, Fareed Zakaria,
a former managing editor of the elite-flavored journal Foreign Affairs,
had recommended PR prudence in the quest for a confrontation that could
facilitate an invasion of Iraq. “Even if the inspections do not
produce the perfect crisis,” Zakaria wrote the previous summer,
“Washington will still be better off for having tried because it
would be seen to have made every effort to avoid war.”

A few months later, on November 13, 2002,
Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that “in the world of a single,
dominant superpower, the UN Security Council becomes even more important,
not less.” And he was pleased with the progress of groundwork for
war, writing enthusiastically: “The Bush team discovered that the
best way to legitimize its overwhelming might – in a war of choice –
was not by simply imposing it, but by channeling it through the UN.”

Its highly influential reporting, combined
with an editorial position that wavered under pressure, made The New
York Times extremely useful to the Bush administration’s propaganda
strategy for launching war on Iraq. The paper played along with the
diplomatic ruse in much the same way that it promoted lies about weapons
of mass destruction.

But to read the present-day revisionist
history from The
New York Times, the problem
with the run-up to the Iraq invasion was simply misconduct by the Bush
administration (ignobly assisted by pliable cable news networks).

Recently, when The Times came out with
an editorial headlined “The Truth About the War” on June 6,
the newspaper assessed the implications of a new report by the Senate
Intelligence Committee. “The report shows clearly that President
Bush should have known that important claims he made about Iraq did
not conform with intelligence reports,” The Times editorialized.
“In other cases, he could have learned the truth if he had asked
better questions or encouraged more honest answers.”

Unfortunately, changing just a few words
– substituting “The New York Times” for “President Bush”
– renders an equally accurate assessment of what a factual report would
clearly show: “The
New York Times should have
known that important claims it made about Iraq did not conform with
intelligence reports. In other cases, The Times could have learned the
truth if it had asked better questions or encouraged more honest answers.”

Now, as agenda-setting for an air attack
on Iran moves into higher gear, the mainline US news media – with The
New York Times playing its influential part – are engaged in coverage
that does little more than provide stenographic services for the Bush
administration.

——–

Norman Solomon is a
columnist and author. His web site is www.normansolomon.com