AfterTV

Po Bronson

“The status system works on the theory that the more you’ve suffered, the more you’ve experienced, the more authentic you are.”— Po Bronson.

* * * * * * * * *

Po Bronson is the author who asked the bestselling question What Should I Do With My Life?, is back with the paperback of the even more provocative and mysterious Why Do I Love These People? Understanding, Surviving, and Creating Your Own Family.

LISTEN TO KEEN AND BRONSON

David Corn

David Corn on The Selling of the Iraq War

“Hubris applies to people who believe that they know best; that they know better than the experts. They believe that their view of the world trumps the experts and everybody else…. They put their presumptions, what they believed to be true, ahead of the evidence. Every component of the disaster that has occured in the war… was written about by folks in and out of the White House prior to the invasion.” — David Corn

Andrew Keen interviews David Corn, the author of the best-selling Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War. Corn is also the Washington editor for The Nation. He blogs @ David Corn.Com.

TRANSCRIPT

Andrew Keen:  Welcome to After TV, the show about media, technology, and culture. Today is September 11th 2006, five years after the tragedy in New York City. Today we are very fortunate to be talking with David Corn, who is the author of a new book called Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War. David is the Washington Editor of The Nation; he's a Fox News Channel contributor; he's also the author of the bestselling--The Lies of George W. Bush, the novel deep background and the biography blogged ghost, davidbloggs@davidcorn.com. Thanks David for appearing on After TV.

David Corn:  Good to be with you and I just have to say that the book Hubris I co-wrote with Michael Isikoff of Newsweek--not here with us now but I want people to know that he's 50-percent responsible for that book as well.

Andrew Keen:  Here in spirit. David why did you write the book?

David Corn:  Well the story--Hubris is really a narrative book. It's a behind-the-scenes account; a lot of the intelligent scuffles and other battles and fights that went on at the CIA, the State Department, and the White House in the run up to the War--really over the justification for the War. And having written about it on and off in magazine pieces and having blogged about it to the nation and having the post at Pajamas Media and my own site, I really thought that you know there was more to the story and I thought it needed to be drilled down into and I also thought it was--it's a tragedy but that it was very--it was full of intrigue and full of drama and it needed to sort of be put together in one place. No one had yet done that; there had been some very good reports out of the Senate Intelligence Committee and then in the WMD Commission set up by Bush. They were narrow in some ways and they certainly stayed away from the White House, being controlled by Republicans, but I--you know no one had really put everything in one place and sort of put blood and flesh onto sort of the bare bones of these dry reports. And Michael Isikoff and I teamed up to do this and I think we ended up surprising ourselves by putting some intense reporting on the subject. We came up with a lot more anecdote scenes and some might say revelations than we even had expected to and it's more of a gripping story than I presumed it was at the start. One thing that's sad and tragic about it that in all the key issues that we raise whether it's the uranium from [Nizaire], the aluminum tubes that were supposed to be for a nuclear centrifuge, the curve-ball disaster that was an Iraqi defector who told the you know--who told the German Intelligence that he worked a mobile biological weapons lab and Colin Powell and others used that charge even though he had never been vetted or talked to by anybody in US Intelligence--that in all these sort of major turning points in the run up to the War there were people within the government who were making the right calls--who were saying wait a second; this curve-ball situation is dodgy. These tubes don't seem to be for a nuclear centrifuge. That came from the top centrifuge experts at the Department of Energy, the guys who know this the best. There were--so I was looking at the [Inaudible] documents at the State Department and thought they were--[Inaudible] spotted them as forgery long before the IAEA did so. And so you know there are unsung heroes in a way but everything they were doing was going against the--the tide at the time and was dismissed, discounted, and put aside, and the White House really had no interest in hearing the other side of all these respected cases.

Andrew Keen:  Why did you call the book Hubris?

David Corn:  Well Hubris, you know it comes out of Greek mythology but it's--I think it applies to people who believe that they know best and they know better than the experts--that their presumptions, their assumptions, their view of the world trumps those who are actually trying to find things in a reality-based evidentiary manner. I mean again and again we--you know we have Dick Cheney for instance and others saying that we know for sure--we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and nuclear--has a reconstituted nuclear weapons program. When even if you look at the intelligence that itself was overstated and flawed--even the intelligence that said there was--might be a nuclear program. It was overstated and flawed and it was full of doubt and question. And so they you know they really put their presumptions, what they believed to be true ahead of the evidence and then when it came to preparing for the War, they you know--they went even further by believing that you know everything would just go the way they expected it to go as if they knew the Arab world and the Iraq world better than the experts. Every major--every component of the disaster that has occurred in Iraq since the War, the sectarian violence, the looting, the rise of an insurgency--was written about or predicted by folks in and out of the government prior to the invasion. And there was just no--no concern on the part of the White House or the civilian leadership of the Pentagon--Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz--to examine any of this. Wolfowitz testified shortly before the War that he had gone to a rally several hundred--300 or so Iranian--excuse me--excuse me, Iraqi Americans in Dearborn, Michigan and they had assured him that everything would go well after the invasion. Well there were you know--[Laughs] there were guys in the military and planning for the War already who are figuring that you needed--would needed hundreds of thousands of troops and that there would be sectarian violence that would have to be dealt with as a security challenge. There would have to be massive reconstruction and there would be all sorts of problems. So here's Wolfowitz, you know saying I know best because I talked to 300 Iraqi Americans who want to see the War and he you know dismisses Eric Shinseki, the Chairman--the Chief of Staff for the US Army who says you're going to need hundreds of thousands of troops; he puts him down in public and he dismisses all this other work being done. So that to me that's Hubris; that's arrogance.

Andrew Keen:  Right; on the front cover of your book, under big blood red Hubris there are four people walking towards the camera. There is Bush and Cheney in the middle, Rumsfeld and Rice on the sides--are these when you talk about they are these the four principal actors if you like or salespeople in the--in the spinning and selling of this War?

David Corn:  Well I would say they make up a good part of it. I mean there are others who are no longer with the Administration. Paul Wolfowitz for one and Doug [Fyfe] who was the number three man at the Pentagon who if we had a bigger cover or just had--happened to have--caught them in the photo it would have been appropriate to keep them there and there's the whole Communications Team at the White House--the speech writers, the--Dan Bartlett and Karen Hughes who created you know the imaging and the messaging, Robert Joseph, who worked at the National Security Council who was vital to presenting the case for war in you know Bush's speeches, and then there are people who worked at Dick Cheney's office, Scooter Libby, David Wurmser, John Hannah, and people who worked under [Fyfe]--that would be David Wurmser, too and Bill [Woody], so I mean there are a cast of characters--I mean if you look at the front of the book we literally have a cast of characters that runs four pages long.

Andrew Keen:  Right.

David Corn:  But you know it seems that these are you know the people who were at the top at the time this went on who are still at the top and you know throughout our book we talk to a guy named John McGuire who was Deputy Chief of the Iraq Operations Group which came up with this extensive covert action plan before the War that was not--it was not geared to topple Saddam Hussein but to pave the way to War and even included a provocation scheme in which they trained ex-Iraqi Special Forces veterans who now are opposed to Saddam. They trained them in a secret test site in Nevada that only several people knew about and part of their mission was to be prepared to take an isolated, nearly abandoned airbase on the border of Iraq and Saudi Arabia in which case they would declare a free Iraq, call for other countries to help them; Saddam Hussein would have to put them you know--have to put down this you know supposed rebellion and in doing so you know they hoped the plan was that he would violate the no-fly zone and that would give the United States and England the chance to start a war. So the CIA cooked up this plan at the White House you know instruction--they never ended up using because they had just had a conventional invasion but the fellow who worked in all this, a guy named John McGuire you know talked to us extensively for the book and told us a lot of you know just neat war stories. But at the end of the book he is rather dismayed that Iraq is just in chaos and you know he thinks it's going to get worse--even than it is now before it gets better. And he's watching you know TV a couple months ago and there's a War Council at Camp David and Bush walks out with these same three people--with Cheney, Rumsfeld and Condi Rice and he's watching it with his wife. And his wife looks at him and goes aren't these the people who got us into this mess and is there any reason to believe that they can get us out? And McGuire, who you know was involved with the War, believed in the War, just sort of shakes his head and doesn't know what to say.

Andrew Keen:  These--so your book I think makes a compelling case that there was I guess a sort of an organized conspiracy to get us into the War and to sell the War to the American people. Why though; your book deals with this I think in some very interesting details. What--what was the obsession with Iraq and with this specific War?

David Corn:  Right; well the book and let me just stress--is not a polemical tract; it really is a narrative account of what went on behind the scenes. And--

Andrew Keen:  But there is a sort of polemical lining to the book.

David Corn:  But we do address these questions--yes. And we came up with some conclusions and some ideas. I think historians will you know--will be thinking and writing about you know what drove the Bush Administration to war in Iraq and how for years to come--and I hope you know of course they improve on what we do and other people come and speak out and maybe you know this Administration won't release anything--maybe documents will come out too that will give us a better understanding. When asked about this I you know--I point back to high school mathematics and people might recall the study of vectors, those lines on graph--you know on graphs that had arrows that went in and I think there were several vectors going on the same time. The book opens with a scene in which George W. Bush in May 2002, nearly a year before the invasion of Iraq is with two Aids, Ari Fleischer and another press aid named Adam Levine and he you know he's hitting tennis balls to his dogs you know taking a break in [the thrust] of his busy day. And he asks you know what happened at the press briefing today? And Ari Fleischer starts telling the thing that Helen Thomas, the noted gab flier reporter was giving him a hard time about what seemed to be the Bush's march or heading towards military confrontation with Iraq. And as Ari describes the scene to Bush, Bush also gets very steely and he starts cursing a blue streak at--not at Ari Fleischer but he says you tell her that I'm going to kick his mother fucking ass all over the Middle East. Now this is long before--months before he went to Congress and asked for the authority to do anything with Iraq. It was--at this time the White House was insisting the President hadn't made up his mind; they insisted that all the way through the invasion even though he was--he had ordered up the plans at the end of 2001. And I think it--not to say this is the only thing driving Bush, but I do think he had a visceral passionate hatred of Saddam Hussein. Now there's a good reason to hate Saddam Hussein; he was a brutal thug, genocidal and human rights abuser, but I doubt that Bush was talking about the leaders of Burma or China you know in the same fashion. There--you know is it because there was the alleged plot to kill his father back in '93? We wrote about that in the book and it turns out the evidence for that is not clear-cut. Is that doing it? You know I also think looking--trying to get a grip on his motivation that after 09/11 he felt a very proactive urge to do something to protect the country; that's a good thing. Al Qaeda is a difficult target; it's in 60 countries or more around the world; it's disbursed; it's like--you know it's basically like trying to stomp out roaches you know. They just keep coming and hiding in corners and they're hard to get. Saddam Hussein is a sitting duck; he's a bad guy. He had a bad history with the United States and he's very easy to demonize. So I think in Bush's mind here was you know a possible threat and he was going to treat him as a real threat to show that he was protecting America. As a Senate Intelligence Report shows that just came out a few days ago there was absolutely no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda--nothing operational and yet the--Bush and Cheney and others continued to make that case even though the intelligence at the time unlike the intelligence saying that there might be [inaudible]--the intelligence at the time, they were saying there's nothing here. So I think that's Bush's motives, but at the same time we have the whole neoconservative tract. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to look at what they said publicly for years; they're not--it's not a conspiracy on their part. They've probably been navigating war with Saddam for years you know out of their vision of having a more influential US in the Middle East and perhaps helping Israel and I don't know if oil plays a role. But in 1998 they sent a letter to  Clinton urging the invasion of Iraq when which they talked about it purely from a geo-strategic perspective. There was nothing about helping the Iraqis and bringing democracy there; it was all about how the US should you know--should basically increase its influence in that region and this was one way to do it. And I think Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld--while not traditional neo-cons, certainly cared about influencing--extending the US military influence throughout the world. I mean in the '80s he was you know used by the Reagan Administration to reach out to Saddam Hussein. So I--but he had come around obviously, so I think there was a lot--you know there was sort of a geo-strategic you know policy impetus for a lot of these people. Paul Wolfowitz was highly influenced; we have a whole chapter on this by an academic named [Laurie Mylroie] who claimed that Saddam Hussein was behind virtually every single act of terrorism in the world up to 09/11 and including 09/11 once it happened. And even though the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency and the FBI had debunked a lot of her theories, Paul Wolfowitz both before and after he entered the Bush Administration was an advocate and champion of these, and when he got into office he ordered people to try to find evidence to back this up. So he long believed in this conspiracy theory of [Laurie Mylroie] that no one else in the government took serious. So he also I'm sure brought the neoconservative you know policy arguments for confrontation with Saddam Hussein; so you have of all these [vectors] pointing in the same direction and they all end up at the same place, which is you know we've got to take Saddam out.

Andrew Keen:  In terms of the book, do you think you expose more spin or more scandal, particularly scandal that might have been broken the law and might make some of the characters actually liable under the law?

David Corn:  Well I've been covering Washington for almost two decades and I always have to remind people that not everything that's wrong or scandalous is criminal. You know that's true in our personal lives as well and you know one can--you know if the President is out there saying Saddam Hussein is working with Al Qaeda and the intelligence--then the best intelligence they have doesn't say that and actually says the opposite. That may not be criminal but I would argue in some ways people should see it as scandalous behavior. And so you know our book you know--here's another one; you know if the President is out there saying or Cheney that these [aluminum tubes]--Condi Rice said this as well you know are indisputable evidence that Saddam Hussein is building nuclear weapons--that they cannot be used for anything else and you have literally, literally the top experts on--the technical experts on this--the Defense--in the Department of Energy disagreeing and they want to go public and their superiors say you're not allowed to inform the public of this disagreement, you know that's not criminal but I would think in some ways that's scandalous. What's wrong with having as much information as possible in an important debate like whether we go to war or not?

Andrew Keen:  Do you think that in retrospect that the debate as it was developing in DC amongst policy makers--was it not properly covered by the media while it was actually going on or were people just not listening?

David Corn:  I think both; I think the media was you know--was loathed to get too confrontational on this matter and they thought if they challenged Bush you know if their reporting was challenging of the assumptions you know behind Bush's sales campaigns it would be you know seen in the aftermath of 09/11 of going too far. I mean the Washington Post, one example I used is in the Washington Post a couple days before Bush took the country to war had a piece that--I don't have it in front of me now but it was written by Dana [Milbank] who was covering the White House. It was not an opinion piece; it was a news piece and it said something like you know as Bush prepares to take the country to war a number of his key assertions have been disputed or challenged or proven wrong by international agencies and experts within the US Intelligence's--you know within the US Intelligence community. And the Washington Post ran that piece on page A-18. And my question would be under what definition of news is it not front-page news that the President of the United States is leading the country into war on the basis of assertions that are challenged by his own US--his own Intelligence Analysts? Now one could disagree or agree with the article; I presume the Washington Post had full faith in its reporter because they you know kept him on the job and they published the piece but why--why take a piece like that that's so important and put it in you know--and bury it on page A-18? And of course you know I have to say to be fair, the New York Times didn't even carry a piece like that. It was only reporting by Judy Miller and others that was you know far too credulous of what their official sources were telling them, and you know it was--there was no due diligence. So I think in some ways that a lot of--some of the debate--not all of it but some of the debate that was going on could be found you know low down in stories in the major newspapers but the way the media works is if they're not highlighted, they don't make it into the echo chamber of the Talking Heads show, other newspapers and other news organizations don't pick up on them so much--so I remember in the whole run-up to the War, you know picking out interesting sentences here and there and saying wait a second; you know this is all being overlooked even though they are appearing in the newspapers. They're just not getting a lot of attention, and the LA Times did a very good job--Bob Drogan and others--other reporters there of getting at some of these debates but you know the way it works is the LA Times is not well recognized by the rest of the media in terms of influencing the--you know the ongoing shouting head of Talking Heads debate that we have in this country.

Andrew Keen:  Do you think it's fair to say though that I mean all this scandal, all this controversy is a consequence of the failure of the war? Had the war actually been successful, had they--had there been no civil war, had there been a successful democracy established relatively quickly in Iraq, there would be no need or at least no market for books like Hubris?

David Corn:  Oh I'm positive that had the war you know gone according to their you know their unreality based assumptions that Hubris, the book I wrote, and I have to say again I wrote it with Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, would not exist; there would--you know the publishers would not be interested in this. You know Americans you know are result-oriented people, you know. That's not such a bad thing and if the war had gone well you know even if the justification for it had proven to be false or misleading and even if we had proven there had been you know--I don't use the word conspiracy--I mean proven that the White House had consciously said things untrue to get the war going and winning public support for it, you know all of that would--you know would have just been left to you know a few historians to worry about had the--you know had the war gone well. But you know in some ways you look at this--look at what happened and you know it's--that really what's the last land the sun also rises--isn't it pretty to think so? It's far you know more clear to think that the war was destined to go poorly because again this gets back to Hubris and the notion of arrogance--these fellows and gals who run the Administration hadn't bothered to plan for what to do afterwards. They just assumed it would go well--that there would be--you know that it would be self-financing, there would be no sectarian violence. You know there was a story just the other day in a--I think it's a retiring Pentagon official who gave an interview. I think it was the Newport News paper in Virginia who said that he tried to you know raise issues of post-invasion planning and Donald Rumsfeld essentially said anyone who raises that will be fired. I mean they did not want to talk about the cost--you know the difficulties that might ensue that a lot of people recognized because that would make the sales campaign more difficult. If we really did need hundreds of thousands of troops afterwards, if we would have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars, the American public might say well this is an elective war; you know maybe we shouldn't go ahead and do it. So it was their--you know so the failures in some ways were pre-programmed in from the start because they refused to deal with you know--with realistic assumptions and presumptions about what would happen after you invaded Iraq.

Andrew Keen:  For students of contemporary international history what's the news in Hubris? What have you discovered that people won't have picked up from other sources? It's certainly a very readable narrative but I'm curious as to where you see the originality of the book or are you just really joining the dots?

David Corn:  No; I mean what--as I said earlier, I think what surprised Michael Isikoff and I as we did the book was you know at first we just wanted to do a good narrative account but as we started reporting and talking to people who had been in the Administration and near the Administration we did end up finding out you know--finding new revelations. And you know the easiest thing to do is to go to my blog www.davidcorn.com; you know the press release lists four pages of revelations in the book and people can find that on my site.

Andrew Keen:  What is the one though that sort of most shocked you?

David Corn:  [Sighs] It's hard--you know that's a good question; I hadn't really thought about one that was most shocking. I mean I told this story earlier about Bush's visceral outburst at Saddam Hussein. I'm not sure I'm shocked by that.

Andrew Keen:  But I read that and I wasn't--I have to admit I wasn't really surprised by that.

David Corn: But you know--but there was one thing--

Andrew Keen:  You'd expect that of him.

David Corn:  There's one thing--well one thing, you know we mentioned earlier, the--how entranced Paul Wolfowitz was by the theories of Laurie [Mylroie], you know did actually surprise and worry me because he just you know--he kept pushing it years after it had been debunked and kept ordering people to find evidence and he supposedly is a smart fellow but you know that struck me as really pretty you know shocking in a way. But there's also a scene--I don't know if you've come across it yet--in which David [Kaye] who was the--

Andrew Keen:  The inspector?

David Corn:  --head of the Iraq Survey Group sent to Iraq to look for weapons of mass destruction; before the war believed they were there--and went on TV as a Talking Head; he was an NBC consultant you know saying that he thought so. He briefed Democratic members of Congress saying the same thing. And he gets there and after you know six weeks kind of concludes there are no stockpiles, there are no real you know extensive programs here at all and not just that they're not here--that they weren't here in the first place and you know comes to believe that maybe Iraq had maintained what they call a production surge--a capability meaning that if Saddam snapped his fingers they could gear something. He later concluded that wasn't even true but after six or seven weeks into the job he comes back to Washington and he is whistled into the Oval Office to brief the President, the Vice President, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld--Paul Wolfowitz is there and he says you know I haven't found anything and I'm not going to find anything major--maybe this production capacity but nothing like you guys talked about.  And what happened next stunned him; Bush asked no questions. He just kind of said thank you and he--and everyone looked around the room and nobody else asked any questions like are you sure; have you checked this; you know might they have been produced and shipped elsewhere; have you talked to all the defectors; you know have you--you know what's been your methodology; what so you intend to do and he walked out of the room and he--and he says to us in the book--we quote him in the book saying this that he had never met a more uninquisitive person at a senior level of government. He was absolutely flabbergasted by that. So again you know depending on what one thinks of Bush, one may or may not be shocked by that but I thought that was you know at least telling and dramatic. You know the book also was broken news that [Armitage] was the leaker--the first leaker in the [Valerie Plame] story but also that [Valerie Plame] and this you know I had no clue of--nobody knew this--you know when she was in the CIA she was not an analyst or paper pusher as some conservatives said to diminish the impact of the leak; she was Chief of Operations for the Joint Task Force on Iraq which is part of the super-secret Operations directorate; she was mounting espionage operations around the world doing what--trying to find evidence of Iraqi WMD to back up the justification for the war. I mean you couldn't ask for a more ironic situation than you know--that she's the one who's been leaked you know by an Administration that's trying to protect its sales pitch.

Andrew Keen:  Well they were going after Wilson though on that rather than her specifically.

David Corn:  Yeah; no, they were--oh no they were not going after her per se but they were going after Wilson, but you know as our book you know chronicles to maybe too much detail although [Armitage] was the leaker--the first leaker to [Novak] he leaked at a time that the White House was [inaudible]--Scooter Libby, Karl [Rove] and others were indeed mounting a campaign against Joe Wilson because he had come out publicly and criticized the White House and part of that campaign was Karl [Rove] leaking the same information to Matt Cooper of Time before the [Novak] leak appeared and it was--a part of that was also Scooter Libby giving that same information--[inaudible] information that [Valerie Plain] worked at the CIA, but they didn't say what she did--to Judy Miller of the New York Times hoping that she'd write about it, although in that instance she didn't.

Andrew Keen:  Final question David; I mean you've written a very, very rich narrative, an essential narrative obviously of this War and of this aftermath. In a longer term perspective though how are historians and future generations going to look back at this both inside and outside America?

David Corn:  Well I think going back to our earlier conversations you know there will be--they will look through--in the future they'll look through the prism that we don't have available now and that is what the outcome of this is and at some point in time American troops will leave and Iraq will either be existent or it will be divided into three you know states or the chaos is just going to go on for another 10 years, and that will obviously color it and shape how historians you know view this episode. But I mean I think you know it's going to be telescoped and we're talking on the fifth anniversary of 09/11. I'm sitting in an office literally half a block from the Capitol and I remember being here that day when they were--when they told us that planes were heading towards us, you know. One plane was still in the air and it was--they thought it was coming into the Capitol. And I quickly you know evacuated and went to my building and evacuated everybody and then ran--ran for my life I thought with my assistant--just headed north, just get away off Capitol Hill. And I think in you know--as we get further away from these events everything gets telescoped together and as we talk about 09/11 even today you can't talk about it without talking about Iraq. Nine-eleven, you know in some ways you know the Afghan campaign, far more justified is talked about less now than Iraq; Iraq has become the--you know has defined the Bush Administration's response to 09/11. And I think in the future time will be telescoped even further and it will be 09/11 and Iraq. And that's how all this is going to be seen--that the Bush campaign--that the Bush White House responded to 09/11 by you know making this case for War on Iraq and it's the case that hasn't held up and it's a war that as of now has not gone well and has resulted in a lot of death and has cost this country greatly.

Andrew Keen:  David, I want to thank you on that very, I think, ironic and disturbing note--for a fascinating interview and I strongly encourage everyone to buy your book. It's called again Hubris; it's by David Corn and Michael Isikoff. It's published by Crown and it's in bookstores now. Thank you again, David very much for a fascinating interview.

David Corn:  Thank you Andrew.

Narrator:  Thanks for listening to After TV, which is hosted and distributed by www.pajamasmedia.com, featuring music by Unity, an artist licensed by Creative Commons. Hope you can join us again.

.