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FOCUS | Mission Unaccomplished |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=12708"><span class="small">Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch</span></a>
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Saturday, 09 March 2013 13:56 |
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Van Buren writes: "Not to put too fine a point on it, but the invasion of Iraq turned out to be a joke. Not for the Iraqis, of course, and not for American soldiers, and not the ha-ha sort of joke either."
A waiter on a luxury ship on Iraq's Tigris river prepares silverware. Elsewhere in Iraq, resistance to foreign occupation remains strong. (photo: Getty Images)
Mission Unaccomplished
By Peter Van Buren, TomDispatch
09 March 13
 was there. And "there" was nowhere. And nowhere was the place to be if you wanted to see the signs of end times for the American Empire up close. It was the place to be if you wanted to see the madness -- and oh yes, it was madness - not filtered through a complacent and sleepy media that made Washington's war policy seem, if not sensible, at least sane and serious enough. I stood at Ground Zero of what was intended to be the new centerpiece for a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the invasion of Iraq turned out to be a joke. Not for the Iraqis, of course, and not for American soldiers, and not the ha-ha sort of joke either. And here's the saddest truth of all: on March 20th as we mark the 10th anniversary of the invasion from hell, we still don't get it. In case you want to jump to the punch line, though, it's this: by invading Iraq, the U.S. did more to destabilize the Middle East than we could possibly have imagined at the time. And we - and so many others - will pay the price for it for a long, long time.
The Madness of King George
It's easy to forget just how normal the madness looked back then. By 2009, when I arrived in Iraq, we were already at the last-gasp moment when it came to salvaging something from what may yet be seen as the single worst foreign policy decision in American history. It was then that, as a State Department officer assigned to lead two provincial reconstruction teams in eastern Iraq, I first walked into the chicken processing plant in the middle of nowhere.
By then, the U.S. "reconstruction" plan for that country was drowning in rivers of money foolishly spent. As the centerpiece for those American efforts - at least after Plan A, that our invading troops would be greeted with flowers and sweets as liberators, crashed and burned - we had managed to reconstruct nothing of significance. First conceived as a Marshall Plan for the New American Century, six long years later it had devolved into farce.
In my act of the play, the U.S. spent some $2.2 million dollars to build a huge facility in the boondocks. Ignoring the stark reality that Iraqis had raised and sold chickens locally for some 2,000 years, the U.S. decided to finance the construction of a central processing facility, have the Iraqis running the plant purchase local chickens, pluck them and slice them up with complex machinery brought in from Chicago, package the breasts and wings in plastic wrap, and then truck it all to local grocery stores. Perhaps it was the desert heat, but this made sense at the time, and the plan was supported by the Army, the State Department, and the White House.
Elegant in conception, at least to us, it failed to account for a few simple things, like a lack of regular electricity, or logistics systems to bring the chickens to and from the plant, or working capital, or ... um ... grocery stores. As a result, the gleaming $2.2 million plant processed no chickens. To use a few of the catchwords of that moment, it transformed nothing, empowered no one, stabilized and economically uplifted not a single Iraqi. It just sat there empty, dark, and unused in the middle of the desert. Like the chickens, we were plucked.
In keeping with the madness of the times, however, the simple fact that the plant failed to meet any of its real-world goals did not mean the project wasn't a success. In fact, the factory was a hit with the U.S. media. After all, for every propaganda-driven visit to the plant, my group stocked the place with hastily purchased chickens, geared up the machinery, and put on a dog-and-pony, er, chicken-and-rooster, show.
In the dark humor of that moment, we christened the place the Potemkin Chicken Factory. In between media and VIP visits, it sat in the dark, only to rise with the rooster's cry each morning some camera crew came out for a visit. Our factory was thus considered a great success. Robert Ford, then at the Baghdad Embassy and now America's rugged shadow ambassador to Syria, said his visit was the best day out he enjoyed in Iraq. General Ray Odierno, then commanding all U.S. forces in Iraq, sent bloggers and camp followers to view the victory project. Some of the propaganda, which proclaimed that "teaching Iraqis methods to flourish on their own gives them the ability to provide their own stability without needing to rely on Americans," is still online (including this charming image of American-Iraqi mentorship, a particular favorite of mine).
We weren't stupid, mind you. In fact, we all felt smart and clever enough to learn to look the other way. The chicken plant was a funny story at first, a kind of insider's joke you all think you know the punch line to. Hey, we wasted some money, but $2.2 million was a small amount in a war whose costs will someday be toted up in the trillions. Really, at the end of the day, what was the harm?
The harm was this: we wanted to leave Iraq (and Afghanistan) stable to advance American goals. We did so by spending our time and money on obviously pointless things, while most Iraqis lacked access to clean water, regular electricity, and medical or hospital care. Another State Department official in Iraq wrote in his weekly summary to me, "At our project ribbon-cuttings we are typically greeted now with a cursory 'thank you,' followed by a long list of crushing needs for essential services such as water and power." How could we help stabilize Iraq when we acted like buffoons? As one Iraqi told me, "It is like I am standing naked in a room with a big hat on my head. Everyone comes in and helps put flowers and ribbons on my hat, but no one seems to notice that I am naked."
By 2009, of course, it should all have been so obvious. We were no longer inside the neocon dream of unrivaled global superpowerdom, just mired in what happened to it. We were a chicken factory in the desert that no one wanted.
Time Travel to 2003
Anniversaries are times for reflection, in part because it's often only with hindsight that we recognize the most significant moments in our lives. On the other hand, on anniversaries it's often hard to remember what it was really like back when it all began. Amid the chaos of the Middle East today, it's easy, for instance, to forget what things looked like as 2003 began. Afghanistan, it appeared, had been invaded and occupied quickly and cleanly, in a way the Soviets (the British, the ancient Greeks...) could never have dreamed of. Iran was frightened, seeing the mighty American military on its eastern border and soon to be on the western one as well, and was ready to deal. Syria was controlled by the stable thuggery of Bashar al-Assad and relations were so good that the U.S. was rendering terror suspects to his secret prisons for torture.
Most of the rest of the Middle East was tucked in for a long sleep with dictators reliable enough to maintain stability. Libya was an exception, though predictions were that before too long Muammar Qaddafi would make some sort of deal. (He did.) All that was needed was a quick slash into Iraq to establish a permanent American military presence in the heart of Mesopotamia. Our future garrisons there could obviously oversee things, providing the necessary muscle to swat down any future destabilizing elements. It all made so much sense to the neocon visionaries of the early Bush years. The only thing that Washington couldn't imagine was this: that the primary destabilizing element would be us.
Indeed, its mighty plan was disintegrating even as it was being dreamed up. In their lust for everything on no terms but their own, the Bush team missed a diplomatic opportunity with Iran that might have rendered today's saber rattling unnecessary, even as Afghanistan fell apart and Iraq imploded. As part of the breakdown, desperate men, blindsided by history, turned up the volume on desperate measures: torture, secret gulags, rendition, drone killings, extra-constitutional actions at home. The sleaziest of deals were cut to try to salvage something, including ignoring the A.Q. Khan network of Pakistani nuclear proliferation in return for a cheesy Condi Rice-Qaddafi photo-op rapprochement in Libya.
Inside Iraq, the forces of Sunni-Shia sectarian conflict had been unleashed by the U.S. invasion. That, in turn, was creating the conditions for a proxy war between the U.S. and Iran, similar to the growing proxy war between Israel and Iran inside Lebanon (where another destabilizing event, the U.S.-sanctioned Israeli invasion of 2006, followed in hand). None of this has ever ended. Today, in fact, that proxy war has simply found a fresh host, Syria, with multiple powers using "humanitarian aid" to push and shove their Sunni and Shia avatars around.
Staggering neocon expectations, Iran emerged from the U.S. decade in Iraq economically more powerful, with sanctions-busting trade between the two neighbors now valued at some $5 billion a year and still growing. In that decade, the U.S. also managed to remove one of Iran's strategic counterbalances, Saddam Hussein, replacing him with a government run by Nouri al-Malaki, who had once found asylum in Tehran.
Meanwhile, Turkey is now engaged in an open war with the Kurds of northern Iraq. Turkey is, of course, part of NATO, so imagine the U.S. government sitting by silently while Germany bombed Poland. To complete the circle, Iraq's prime minister recently warned that a victory for Syria's rebels will spark sectarian wars in his own country and will create a new haven for al-Qaeda which would further destabilize the region.
Meanwhile, militarily burnt out, economically reeling from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and lacking any moral standing in the Middle East post-Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the U.S. sat on its hands as the regional spark that came to be called the Arab Spring flickered out, to be replaced by yet more destabilization across the region. And even that hasn't stopped Washington from pursuing the latest version of the (now-nameless) global war on terror into ever-newer regions in need of destabilization.
Having noted the ease with which a numbed American public patriotically looked the other way while our wars followed their particular paths to hell, our leaders no longer blink at the thought of sending American drones and special operations forces ever farther afield, most notably ever deeper into Africa, creating from the ashes of Iraq a frontier version of the state of perpetual war George Orwell once imagined for his dystopian novel 1984. And don't doubt for a second that there is a direct path from the invasion of 2003 and that chicken plant to the dangerous and chaotic place that today passes for our American world.
Happy Anniversary
On this 10th anniversary of the Iraq War, Iraq itself remains, by any measure, a dangerous and unstable place. Even the usually sunny Department of State advises American travelers to Iraq that U.S. citizens "remain at risk for kidnapping... [as] numerous insurgent groups, including Al Qaida, remain active..." and notes that "State Department guidance to U.S. businesses in Iraq advises the use of Protective Security Details."
In the bigger picture, the world is also a far more dangerous place than it was in 2003. Indeed, for the State Department, which sent me to Iraq to witness the follies of empire, the world has become ever more daunting. In 2003, at that infamous "mission accomplished" moment, only Afghanistan was on the list of overseas embassies that were considered "extreme danger posts." Soon enough, however, Iraq and Pakistan were added. Today, Yemen and Libya, once boring but secure outposts for State's officials, now fall into the same category.
Other places once considered safe for diplomats and their families such as Syria and Mali have been evacuated and have no American diplomatic presence at all. Even sleepy Tunisia, once calm enough that the State Department had its Arabic language school there, is now on reduced staff with no diplomatic family members resident. Egypt teeters.
The Iranian leadership watched carefully as the American imperial version of Iraq collapsed, concluded that Washington was a paper tiger, backed away from initial offers to talk over contested issues, and instead (at least for a while) doubled-down on achieving nuclear breakout capacity, aided by the past work of that same A.Q. Khan network. North Korea, another A.Q. Khan beneficiary, followed the same pivot ever farther from Washington, while it became a genuine nuclear power. Its neighbor China pursued its own path of economic dominance, while helping to "pay" for the Iraq War by becoming the number-one holder of U.S. debt among foreign governments. It now owns more than 21% of the U.S. debt held overseas.
And don't put away the joke book just yet. Subbing as apologist-in-chief for an absent George W. Bush and the top officials of his administration on this 10th anniversary, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recently reminded us that there is more on the horizon. Conceding that he had "long since given up trying to persuade people Iraq was the right decision," Blair added that new crises are looming. "You've got one in Syria right now, you've got one in Iran to come," he said. "We are in the middle of this struggle, it is going to take a generation, it is going to be very arduous and difficult. But I think we are making a mistake, a profound error, if we think we can stay out of that struggle."
Think of his comment as a warning. Having somehow turned much of Islam into a foe, Washington has essentially assured itself of never-ending crises that it stands no chance whatsoever of winning. In this sense, Iraq was not an aberration, but the historic zenith and nadir for a way of thinking that is only now slowing waning. For decades to come, the U.S. will have a big enough military to ensure that our decline is slow, bloody, ugly, and reluctant, if inevitable. One day, however, even the drones will have to land.
And so, happy 10th anniversary, Iraq War! A decade after the invasion, a chaotic and unstable Middle East is the unfinished legacy of our invasion. I guess the joke is on us after all, though no one is laughing.
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FOCUS | Wisconsin, Inc. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Saturday, 09 March 2013 11:24 |
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Pierce writes: "We have been concentrating a little heavily for a number of reasons on the truly atrocious mining bill that finally passed the Wisconsin Assembly last night."
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker speaks at the National Rifle Association convention in St. Louis, 04/13/12. (photo: AP)
Wisconsin, Inc.
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
09 March 13
 e have been concentrating a little heavily for a number of reasons on the truly atrocious mining bill that finally passed the Wisconsin Assembly last night. The first is that it is yet another indication that Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage their midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin, plans to run for president, so it's a good idea to judge him by his works. The second is that the bill is an almost perfect example of the conception held by modern conservatives — which is to say, Republicans — of the way things are supposed to work, and an almost perfect example of the conservative idea of self-government as public oligarchy. And the last one is that it truly is an atrocious bill, being, at the same time, an environmental catastrophe, a staggering economic giveaway, and a deliberate and obvious offense against the idea of a political commonwealth.
It is the latter that is the most disturbing. They not only passed the bill, but eliminated any chance the people of Wisconsin had to protect themselves. For example, nobody denies that the massive open-pit mine that Gogebic Taconite plans to gouge out of northern Wisconsin is bound to do environmental damage. The Republicans who pushed for the bill admitted that openly.
And, with numerous groups already vowing to challenge the bill in court, Sen. Tom Tiffany also acknowledged that changes were made to the legislation to put the state on stronger legal ground to withstand such a challenge. "The bill reflects the reality of mining. There are going to be some impacts to the environment above the iron ore body," said Tiffany, R-Hazelhurst. "If the law is challenged and ends up in court, the judge needs to know it was the Legislature's intent to allow adverse (environmental) impacts. That way, a judge can't find fault if the environment is impact.
The legislation was written in such a way as to defang the state's Department Of Natural Resources, provide what is essentially a liability shield for the company, overturn over a century of environmental protection laws for the benefit of a single company. The mine also would benefit from a proposed budget provision that would repeal a state law dating back to the 1880's that prevented Wisconsin land from being controlled by foreign corporations or governments, leading more than a few people to wonder exactly who's going to get the 75 kajillion jobs that Walker and his pet legislature insist the mine will provide. In short, despite the fact that polls show substantial opposition to both the bill and the mine itself, and despite the fact that its sponsors concede the destruction it inevitably will cause, the Wisconsin legislature passed a law not only to permit the project to go forward, but to immunize the corporation against responsibility for any destruction the project might wreak on the state and the people therein. They gave away public lands to this company while arranging that the political entity known as the state of Wisconsin, and therefore the people they ostensibly represent, would be unable to protect themselves from the damage the company will do. Self-government, and the political commonwealth that arises from it, is just something else gouged out of Wisconsin for a buck. This is astonishing. This is something that happens in China.
This is raw state capitalism at its most egregious, and it demonstrates clearly that the conservative movement has plans that go back in history beyond rolling back the Great Society or the New Deal. They are after every progressive advance made since the end of the 19th Century. This isn't something that the conservative movement is trying to hide. In the middle of his filibuster the other day, Rand Paul threw a bouquet at the Lochner decision, the horrid 1906 ruling by the Supreme Court that hamstrung for decades the ability of workers to organize. The Citizens United ruling codified the corporate-personhood heresy that arose out of clerical chicanery in Santa Clara vs. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, and then CU itself was used to strike down state laws of that same era corporate campaign contributions in places like Montana. On the fringes, Glenn Beck made a fortune tracing the Great Progressive Conspiracy through the cobwebbed canyons of his mind, and the likes of Jonah Goldberg got rich explaining how Adolf Hitler really was nothing more than a proto-Green Party activist with an air force and submarines. Teddy Roosevelt didn't have three votes in the Wisconsin Assembly this week, let alone Bob LaFollette or FDR. They are playing for a newer, and far more permanent Gilded Age, and it is not coming about by accident.
(UPDATE - This one was cleaned up a little because my grammar went to the zoo this morning, and because top commenter Saunders got me to sharpen the Gilded Age point, and because a Wisconsin friend cleared up the details on that 1881 law.)
Charlie has been a working journalist since 1976. He is the author of four books, most recently "Idiot America." He lives near Boston with his wife but no longer his three children.
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Bob Woodward: The Myth Bites the Dust |
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Saturday, 09 March 2013 09:15 |
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Holland writes: "For the past week Washington has found itself debating Bob Woodward. The occasion: his very public argument with White House senior official Gene Sperling."
Bob Woodward is an associate editor of the Washington Post. (photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
Bob Woodward: The Myth Bites the Dust
By Max Holland, The Daily Beast
09 March 13
Woodward's recent flap reveals a grotesquely swollen ego fed by 40 years of hero worship. In Newsweek, Max Holland asks: why is this man an American icon?
 or the past week Washington has found itself debating Bob Woodward. The occasion: his very public argument with White House senior official Gene Sperling, in which Woodward left the impression that Sperling had somehow tried to intimidate him-only to see this accusation undermined by the release of an email exchange in which the pair sounded rather conciliatory.
Almost all the commentary about this flap fits neatly under the heading, "What the Hell Happened to Bob Woodward?" But posing that question, as New York magazine did last week, implies a transformation that never occurred. Woodward is the same now as he ever was. His misrepresentation of his interaction with Sperling is only the latest in a long string of questionable journalistic episodes.
To understand how this started, one has to begin near the beginning: Woodward and Carl Bernstein's book about their Watergate exploits, All the President's Men. The authors enjoyed titanic-sized credibility when the book appeared in the spring of 1974; not too many reporters could point to having received a public apology attesting to the veracity of their work from a press secretary to the president of the United States. ("I would apologize to the Post, and I would apologize to Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein," Ron Ziegler had said on May 1, 1973, retracting his earlier criticism of the newspaper's articles on Watergate.) The natural assumption was that Woodstein's book would meet that same high standard. Why would their nonfiction for The Washington Post differ from nonfiction written for Simon and Schuster?
Yet there was a vast difference that went all but unnoticed at the time. For the Post they had written about the president's men; in the book they were writing about themselves and their sources. Simultaneously, they adopted a style that was all the rage at the time-the so-called New Journalism, a technique that employed literary devices normally considered the domain of novels. In the hands of an apostle like Tom Wolfe or Norman Mailer, the result might be categorized as literature. But the critic Dwight MacDonald argued it was actually a bastard form that tried to have it both ways: "exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction."
Woodward and Bernstein apparently exploited the liberties of the form to the hilt. "Some of their writing is not true," Post Watergate editor Barry Sussman told Alan Pakula, director of the eponymous 1976 movie. (Pakula interviewed nearly everyone involved in the Post's Watergate coverage in 1975, and the late director's papers were opened in 2003.) "They're wrong often on detail" about what happened inside the newsroom, Sussman said, and they "sentimentalize" the story. (Sussman had a bitter falling out with the reporters, which has sometimes led to his perspective being discounted.)
One untruth Sussman said he knew of-it had apparently been his idea in the first place-involved the reporters' effort to interview members of the Watergate grand jury in December 1972. According to the book, "Woodward and Bernstein"-writing about yourself in the third person was a New Journalism signature-"attempted the clumsy charade with about half a dozen members of the grand jury. They returned with no information." Yet Sussman told Pakula that the reporting duo "did get information from one person" who was a grand juror-and indeed, All the President's Men, a few paragraphs after denying that Woodstein got anything from any grand juror, proceeded to describe the information they got from the grand juror, whom they code-named "Z."
How do we know Z was a grand juror? Because Jeff Himmelman-author of Yours in Truth, a biography of Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee released last year-found Bernstein's notes from his interview with Z. Woodward and Bernstein's explanation: that Bernstein did not know she was a grand juror when he talked to her. Yet this was dubious at best, because in All the President's Men they described how Woodward memorized a list of grand jurors' names ahead of time.
In short, Sussman told Pakula that All the President's Men was a "modified, limited hangout" of what actually happened-intentionally borrowing a phrase made notorious by Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichman, Nixon's chief domestic-policy aide.
Other problems with the book have come to light since 2007, when the Woodward and Bernstein papers-which had been sold to the Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, for $5 million in 2003-were opened. (When I interviewed Woodward in 2011, he told me that all of his notes from interviews with Deep Throat-a.k.a. Mark Felt, associate director of the FBI-were included in these papers.) There are a number of inconsistencies between these notes and how the conversations are rendered in All the President's Men. Phrases not enclosed in quotation marks in the notes are presented within quotes in the book, lending the impression that Felt spoke those exact words. Occasionally, the meaning of what he said is substantially altered. The book also contains information not present in the notes at all.
For example, Woodward’s typewritten notes from an October 9, 1972, meeting with Felt read “[E. Howard] Hunt op[eration] not really to check leaks to news media but to give them out,” and this sentence is not set off by quotes in the notes. But in the book this sentence is put in quotes, and it reads: “That [Hunt] operation was not only to check leaks to the papers but often to manufacture items for the press.”
In addition, none of the Felt notes contain any reference to the so-called Canuck letter, a 1972 letter to the editor of the Manchester Union-Leader. (This letter alleged that then-Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Edmund Muskie had used the term Canuck to refer to constituents of French-Canadian descent around the time of the New Hampshire primary, and Woodstein alleged that the letter typified the “dirty tricks” thought up by the Nixon White House or campaign.) Notwithstanding the fact that there is no mention of the Canuck letter in the contemporaneous notes, in the book Felt is quoted as saying, “It [the Canuck letter] was a White House operation—done inside the gates surrounding the White House and the Executive Office Building.”
In 2011, I asked Woodward about the discrepancies between his book and his Felt notes. Regarding his having put words into quotes that weren’t in quotes in the notes, he said, “I may have had a distinct recollection [while we were writing the book, and reviewing the notes] that something was in quotes ... and so I may have put quotes in it.” Regarding instances where information in the notes was altered, or where passages in the book are not reflected in the notes at all, he said, “It’s just like when you testify under oath in a courtroom. You may have some notes, and you may say, ‘The notes say this, but I recall that in addition.’”
Discrepancies between Woodstein’s notes and the book were not limited to conversations with Felt. They also occurred when All the President’s Men described the information conveyed to Bernstein by Judith Hoback, the bookkeeper for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President (CRP). In the book, Hoback is quoted as saying, “But Sally [Harmony, burglar Gordon Liddy’s secretary]—and others—lied.” However, in Bernstein’s typewritten notes from the September 14, 1972, interview—notes which are to be found in the Pakula papers—Hoback never asserts that Harmony (or anyone else at the CRP) flatly “lied.” In a similar vein, Hoback is quoted in the book as saying about Robert Odle, in response to a question about his rumored involvement in the break-in, “Certainly not in knowing anything about the bugging. He’s a glorified office boy, [deputy CRP director Jeb] Magruder’s runner.” In the notes, however, Hoback simply states there is “no reason to think Odle [is] involved”—without adding a pejorative characterization of him. (Of course, it’s worth noting the possibility that there are notes pertaining to Hoback that I have not seen. In 2012, I attempted to contact Bernstein in order to ask him about the Hoback notes, but he did not respond.)
A reference in the book to former attorney general John Mitchell, who had stepped down as CRP director after the break-in, seems to suggest a more serious kind of embroidery. In the book Hoback is quoted as saying: “If you could get John Mitchell, it would be beautiful. But I just don’t have any real evidence that would stand up in court that he knew. Maybe his guys got carried away, the men close to him.”
This same passage in the notes is only different by a few words, but they alter the meaning of the quote in a way that is more charitable to Mitchell: “If you could get [John Mitchell] it would be beautiful. I just don’t have any evidence I belive [sic] he knew. Maybe his guys got carried away, the men close to him.”
Also problematic was Woodstein’s description of Felt’s motive in leaking. The duo fostered the impression that Deep Throat was leaking out of principle: he “was trying to protect the office [of the presidency], to effect a change in its conduct before all was lost,” they wrote in All the President’s Men.
But was this really the case? There has been ample evidence over the decades that Felt was not leaking out of principle but rather as a tactic, to win the vicious scramble to become FBI director after J. Edgar Hoover’s death. Specifically, Felt was leaking to undermine L. Patrick Gray, who had been appointed acting director after Hoover’s demise. The permanent appointment was still up for grabs, and leaking details of a politically sensitive FBI investigation was sure to prejudice the White House against nominating Gray for the job. This was hardly a secret at the time: shortly after All the President’s Men was published, an August 1974 Washingtonian magazine article fingered Felt as Deep Throat and quoted a top Justice Department official as saying Felt’s motive would have been ambition: “He had enough contact with the press that he might have tried to use his Watergate information to hurt Gray.”
Unless Woodward is obtuse—and no one who knows him thinks that—he should have realized what Felt’s true motive was by no later than 1992, when the bureau opened up its Watergate files and Woodward went in and read them. The FBI investigation had never been truly or seriously stymied, the alleged reason for Felt’s clandestine meetings with Woodward. Indeed, the records showed that the FBI was days, weeks, and even months ahead of the Post’s reporting. Yet to this day Woodward persists in calling Felt a “truth-teller” with complicated motives. (In comments last year to The Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove after my book about Deep Throat was published, Woodward disputed that the duo’s Watergate reporting had trailed behind the prosecutors’ investigation. He also said that Felt “was troubled. I knew him. I just think this idea that there’s one motive behind somebody’s action doesn’t match up with reality.”)
Perhaps the oddest thing about All the President’s Men was that Woodward and Bernstein emerged with their reputation for discretion and ethical treatment of sources not only intact but enhanced. This, despite the fact that Felt had been treated differently as an anonymous source than he apparently wanted to be.
The rules of their “deep background” arrangement, as described in All the President’s Men, were that Woodward would never identify Felt or his position to anyone. His very existence was to be a secret. Furthermore, Felt was never to be quoted, even as an anonymous source.
Yet nearly all these ground rules—which had been more or less observed in The Washington Post—were broken when Woodstein wrote for Simon and Schuster. Felt’s existence (though not his name) was revealed; he was quoted directly; and he was linked to specific stories and disclosures. Only his agency of employment (the FBI) and his name were left out. Little wonder that Felt instantly became a prime suspect in a Washington parlor game that would persist for decades. All the while Woodward and Bernstein would be hailed by a starstruck press for their fidelity to sources. The only explanation Woodward has ever given for including Felt as an anonymous character in All the President’s Men was the one offered in The Secret Man, his 2005 book about Deep Throat. It “never really crossed my mind to leave out the details of Deep Throat’s role,” Woodward wrote. “It was important.”
After Watergate, it seems to me that two key factors came into play in Woodward’s career, one internal, the other external. The first was Woodward’s extraordinary inner drive and work ethic. He wanted to show that Watergate wasn’t a fluke, a one-off stroke of luck that would never be replicated. One is tempted to call this Woodward’s Orson Welles syndrome: what was he going to do for an encore? Welles, after enjoying similarly spectacular success at an early age with Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, never again directed films remotely as good. Woodward, I believe, was determined not to suffer a similar fate.
The other powerful fact in his life was the unceasing adulation that came his way from within the journalistic community and without, from the Washington elite down to perfect strangers. Woodward was the white-hatted journalist who brought down a president. It didn’t matter that this was exaggerated—it was the public shorthand. When Woodward himself tried to correct the misimpression, which he often did, his modesty only seemed to make him that much more appealing.
His celebrity and reputation, moreover, were turbocharged by the never-ending mystery over Deep Throat’s identity. Woodward found it extraordinarily tiresome to respond to the same questions year after year. Yet his legend and prominence were inextricable from the hunt for his über-secret Watergate source. No human being could withstand his experiences without getting a swelled head. Fame is usually fleeting, and that’s a good thing; even presidents are brought down a full peg or two after leaving office. That did not happen with Woodward.
Over the years, there would be other questionable Woodward episodes: a 1987 four-minute interview with ailing CIA director William Casey that the Casey family and the CIA said did not unfold as claimed, or warrant Woodward’s bold conclusion; the Valerie Plame affair, in which Woodward derided a special prosecutor’s investigation into the leaking of a CIA officer’s name, without telling the Post or the public that he was in fact the first reporter to receive the leak. (Woodward has stood by his reporting on Casey; regarding the Plame leak, he later apologized for not telling his boss at the Post.)
But perhaps no single episode is more embarrassing for Woodward than how he treated Jeff Himmelman. A Washington native, Himmelman was initially hired to help research Woodward’s 2000 book Maestro—a fawning tribute to Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman whose flawed laissez-faire ideology would eventually help bring about the most catastrophic economic downturn since the Great Depression. Eventually Himmelman was recruited to help Ben Bradlee satisfy a book contract he had signed but no longer had an interest in completing. The project morphed into a biography of Bradlee with Himmelman as author, Bradlee already having published his memoirs in 1995.
Over time Himmelman gained access to Bradlee’s personal papers. These included documents dating back to the Post’s Watergate investigation, and some unexpurgated interview transcripts of Bradlee that had been conducted for his memoirs. In the former, Himmelman found Bernstein’s notes from his December 1972 interview with “Z.” In the latter, Himmelman came across a 1990 interview in which Bradlee had said, “I have a little problem with Deep Throat,” meaning as he was represented by Woodstein in All the President’s Men. “There’s a residual fear in my soul that that [portrayal] isn’t quite straight,” Bradlee had added, referring to the cinematic depictions of underground garage meetings and flags in flowerpots.
According to Himmelman’s book, Woodward implored, cajoled, and then bullied him, in that order, to try to bury Bradlee’s comments. Barry Sussman had long been on record, of course, as saying that All the President’s Men contained inaccuracies, but it was quite another matter to have Bradlee eating away at Woodward’s foundational myth. Woodward took to smearing Himmelman in the press. He termed the book “alarmingly dishonest” to The New York Times and a “total dishonest distortion” in The Washington Post. On Politico, he compared Himmelman with Nixon.
Woodward and Bernstein’s coverage of Watergate for The Washington Post was justly celebrated. But that should not excuse what came next: They wrote a self-glorifying account of their role, seemingly altered information from their notes, apparently reneged on a pledge to Deep Throat, then later downplayed evidence that Mark Felt was leaking for self-interested reasons. And finally, when a former Woodward lieutenant came across some facts that undermined the narrative that Woodstein had dined out on for decades, Woodward responded to this heresy by attacking the writer’s integrity.
Woodward’s recent flap with Gene Sperling would be trivial, and instantly forgettable, except that it reveals a grotesquely swollen ego fed by 40 years of hero worship. Indeed, last weekend, appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, Woodward proposed a rather shocking means for resolving his dispute with Sperling: “I am in the business of listening,” he said, “and I’m going to invite him over to my house if he’ll come and hopefully he’ll bring others from the White House, maybe the president himself, and we can—you know, talking really works.” If there was any doubt that Bob Woodward’s ego is out of control, inviting the president to his house should put those doubts to rest.
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John McCain Doesn't Understand Civil Liberties |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=10204"><span class="small">Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Saturday, 09 March 2013 09:14 |
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Chait writes: "John McCain, understandably distraught to see most of his party suddenly embracing the libertarian view of drone warfare, took to the Senate floor to pour contempt on Rand Paul."
Senator John McCain. (photo: AP)
John McCain Doesn't Understand Civil Liberties
By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
09 March 13
 ohn McCain, understandably distraught to see most of his party suddenly embracing the libertarian view of drone warfare, took to the Senate floor to pour contempt on Rand Paul. What particularly raised McCain's ire was Paul's use of an extreme hypothetical case: the government murdering Jane Fonda during her visit to North Vietnam. Sneered McCain:
To allege that the United States of America, our government, would drop a drone hellfire missile on Jane Fonda - that brings the conversation from a serious discussion of policy to the realm of the ridiculous.
Of course it's ridiculous. This is one way of understanding the point of civil liberties. They're designed to prevent the government from doing ridiculous things. If your view is that we'd never do terrible things like that because we're the United States of America, then you don't need civil liberties. But the whole construction of the Constitution is premised on the possibility that elected officials might abuse their power.
The Wall Street Journal has an editorial today, which McCain quoted in his speech, attempting to allay Paul's fear but serving only to spread confusion:
Calm down, Senator. Mr. Holder is right, even if he doesn't explain the law very well. The U.S. government cannot randomly target American citizens on U.S. soil or anywhere else. What it can do under the laws of war is target an "enemy combatant" anywhere at anytime, including on U.S. soil. This includes a U.S. citizen who is also an enemy combatant. The President can designate such a combatant if he belongs to an entity-a government, say, or a terrorist network like al Qaeda-that has taken up arms against the United States as part of an internationally recognized armed conflict. That does not include Hanoi Jane.
Right. The government can't just go assassinating American citizens. There's an intermediate step of designating them an enemy combatant. The concern is that a president might be tempted to misuse the power of declaring somebody an enemy combatant.
I'm willing to be persuaded that a process like this could be designed. But the Journal seems to assume that the declaration of enemy-combatant status is tantamount to the real thing.
In 1972, Jane Fonda traveled to North Vietnam for a propaganda mission, and even posed on an anti-aircraft battery. You could at least argue that she "belonged to an entity" that was at war with the United States.
Now, Richard Nixon never tried to assassinate Jane Fonda, in part because she was a powerful propaganda weapon for his policies. He did order the firebombing of the Brookings Institution, though his henchmen didn't carry it out, probably in part because they knew it was illegal. Imagining a president who orders a bombing of the Brookings Institution is even more absurd than imagining a president who orders the murder of Jane Fonda. The absurdity of the case is precisely its value.
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he Republicans are openly introspective about why they failed to regain the presidency and the Senate. It is time for the same kind of rigorous self-analysis by the Democrats, who floated through their failure to regain control of the House without apparent dismay. Their failure to dislodge Speaker John Boehner and majority leader Eric Cantor assures that President Obama and congressional Democrats will get very little done for the next two years. 
