Was anybody minding the store?
News accounts of widespread institutional negligence and dereliction of duty keep piling up.
It became clear shortly after 9/11 the Bush administration was going to launch a preemptive-preventive-absolutely-witless war against Iraq, without provocation, and nothing -- no diplomacy, no international condemnation, no domestic 'wise men' -- was going to stop it. The administration was dead set on war, and the intelligence community -- which the administration and others now blame for having dropped the ball -- was merely a source of cherry-picked goodies amid what we now know were reams of alarums.
"Months before the invasion of Iraq," the Washington Post reported Saturday, "U.S. intelligence agencies predicted that it would be likely to spark violent sectarian divides and provide al-Qaeda with new opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan.... Analysts warned that war in Iraq also could provoke Iran to assert its regional influence and 'probably would result in a surge of political Islam and increased funding for terrorist groups' in the Muslim world."
Furthermore, "The intelligence assessments, made in January 2003 and widely circulated within the Bush administration before the war, said that establishing democracy in Iraq would be 'a long, difficult and probably turbulent challenge.'"
Furthermore, "The most chilling and prescient warning from the intelligence community prior to the war was that the American invasion would bring about instability in Iraq that would be exploited by Iran and al Qaeda terrorists."
Furthermore -- and here's the kicker -- "The report includes lists indicating that the analyses ... were distributed at senior levels of the White House and the State and Defense departments and to the congressional armed services and appropriations committees."
Let's repeat that last part: "The analyses ... were distributed ... to the congressional armed services and appropriations committees."
In the most perverse way -- and by that I mean the very depths of perversity -- the administration can almost be excused for plunging ahead. After all, internally it was determined to do so, but that was prior to the external certainty that Congress would lie down and rubber stamp whatever the administration wanted.
So there it was, scheming and plotting and dissembling, but at the same time intelligence agencies were passing around all these terrifying predictions about violent sectarianism and Qaeda resurgences and regional eruptions -- in effect, saying, "Here, here is what could preempt the administration" -- indeed, even passing these reports around to oversight congressional committees, which included Democrats, some even "antiwar" Democrats.
And what did these overseers do with all this bloodcurdling information? Why, some cheered the administration out of administration-equivalent mindlessness. Others either dismissed the intelligence warnings, or didn't read these or other intelligence warnings, or had staffers summarize them -- or worse, read them, had their blood promptly curdled, voted against war authorization, and then sat on their butts without saying a word to anyone.
The administration must have thought it was in a candy store without a guardian and in which nothing came at a price. So how else would a bunch of bad-seed, neocon toddlers behave, except to plow ahead? Every check, every balance folded. Every institutional watchdog took a vacation from responsibility. Every fail-safe collapsed.
No one was minding the store. Yet many in Congress now talk of the administration's past "deception." I find that as offensive, if not more so, than the administration's original lies, since the obligation to oppose evil is greater than the evil one's unnatural urge to suppress it. And the evidential offensiveness just keeps piling up.
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[Note on "Comments" section: I seem to have picked up some odd little trolls who enjoy pushing a rather bizarre 9/11 conspiracy theory -- bizarre even for conspiracy theorists. I can't tell you the amount of time I've had to invest lately in monitoring and deleting their unintellectual droppings. I won't have such drivel on this site, but I don't have the time to police the site, either, so I'm discontinuing the 'comments' section (which at least has the benefit of toying with their clinical paranoia). My apologies to all of you who've had intelligent criticisms and other insights to add here, but of course you're always welcome to write me directly.]