Wag the Dog

by Larry Beinhart

  In other words, this is a work of fiction.

  Conspiracy

  THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD has become the criterion and the underpinning for almost all contemporary thought, even casual, not particularly educated, man-in-the-street styles of thinking. It has become so pervasive, basically, because it works. And we can see that it works. A famous psychic once said to me that thinking thoughts at her was insufficient—“If you want to be sure to get in touch with me, try the telephone.”

  The scientific method begins with the objective observation of phenomena. Not what ought to have happened, or we hope happened, or might have happened, but what actually did happen insofar as it is possible for us to observe and verify it. Then we develop a hypothesis to explain why and how it happened.

  We can invent many explanations for a phenomenon. How then do we decide which one to use?

  By the way, and it’s a subtle distinction, science doesn’t really say which theory is true, it determines which one to use, as if it were true, because in the context in which you are using it, it will work.

  The preferred way is to set up a controlled experiment that can then be replicated. This, very frequently, cannot be done with human and historical events. But there are other standards. If there are two theories, or more, which one best accounts for all the known facts? Which one best fits the other things we know, and can demonstrate, about the universe? And which one is the simplest?

  The famous example is the question, does the sun revolve around the earth or the earth around the sun? It is possible—or was, it may not be anymore—to build a model of the universe in which the sun revolves around the earth just as it sort of appears to from where we live, that is, if we have accepted the notion that the earth is round. The problem with it, especially as we observe more and more phenomena, like the moons of Jupiter, is that it becomes very, very complicated and so cumbersome as to be unusable. And then it begins to interfere with other concepts that work for us, including gravity and inertia and so on.

  It is an observable phenomenon that Hussein invaded Kuwait and conquered it. That the United States and its allies then sent troops and arms and fought a war that drove him out of Kuwait. And so on.

  But it’s legitimate to regard the official story about why and how it happened as a hypothesis, an unproved theory, just as many, many people regard the official story of the assassination of John F. Kennedy as flawed. The official story—that Saddam just up and decided to annex Kuwait and we just up and decided that not to oppose him would be to create a new Munich Pact, an appeasement whose consequences would bring worldwide disaster—leaves a whole lot of moons around Jupiter to be explained.

  Here is a list of at least thirty-nine anomalies. There are many, many more. Aficionados of conspiracy theories will want to follow this in detail. If, however, like myself, you fell asleep during Oliver Stone’s JFK, you should, at the most, skim this section and simply accept that the war does not make sense as it was presented.

  1. Why was no one interested in this war except George Bush? the State Department didn’t ask for it. The Pentagon opposed it more than supported it. There were no hawks in Congress as there were, for example, in Korea and Vietnam. Even the Arabs initially opposed it.110

  2. Why was Iraq a friend one day and not the next?111

  3. Why did the U.S. choose to side totally with Kuwait over Iraq? It can’t be simply because Iraq was the aggressor; after all, both Reagan and Bush had supported Iraq—in varying degrees and mostly covertly—after Saddam invaded Iran. There were other options and some sound reasons to at least explore them.”112

  4. Why was Bush suddenly appalled by Iraq’s civil-rights offenses when he hadn’t been a few months earlier and even though they were little or no worse than those of many other countries whom the U.S. either ignores or calls friends?

  5. Why did the U.S. arm and finance Iraq?

  6. Why did we do it with agricultural loans financed by an obscure bank?

  7. Why does it appear that the Justice Department subsequently tried to impede an investigation into those financial manipulations?

  8. Why were the Kuwaitis “encouraged to hang tough in their negotiations with lraq[?]. On the other hand, the Iraqis were led to believe that the United States would not intervene if Kuwait were attacked. Ambassador April Glaspie was merely parroting official policy when she told Saddam that Washington had ‘no opinion of Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.’ ”113

  9. Why were the really big-time potential hostages conveniently out of town the day Saddam invaded Kuwait? April Glaspie left Baghdad two days before the invasion began. The Soviet ambassador left the same day. Harold “Hooky” Walker, the British ambassador, was on holiday. The chief of Israeli intelligence was in Tel Aviv.

  10. Does the story that the president modeled himself on Churchill because he read a book ring true? Is the president known to have ever read another book or to have made any other policy decision in his entire life based on literature?

  11. How come the Soviet Union got onboard so fast?

  12. Financing. Who ever heard of the U.S. getting its Allies to pay it for military costs? Our whole history is exactly the opposite.

  13. Why did Saddam take hostages and go on TV with hostages, thereby enraging the West? “Bush’s best ally was Saddam Hussein himself, who seemed to possess an unerring capacity for giving ordinary Americans reasons to detest him.”114

  14. Saddam threatened to use the hostages as human shields. This might well have been an effective tactic. Would Bush have given the order to kill Americans in order to destroy the military installations behind them? Would American pilots have been willing to carry out those orders? Saddam seemed almost to have gone out of his way to incur the onus of suggesting it, and then gave up the very real benefits of actually doing it. Why?

  15. Subsequently, Saddam released the hostages and he did so prior to hostilities even though the West had made it quite clear the release of the hostages was not going to stop the war.

  16. There were many in the military establishment who did not especially like General Schwarzkopf. He was given Central Command probably because it “was considered a backwater [that] had no troops attached to it . . . it was widely known that Schwarzkopf would take his retirement at the earliest possible opportunity.” Leading a war is the plum of plums—look what it did for Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight David Eisenhower. Who selected the less-than-loved Norman to lead it? Was he merely in the right place at the right time? Or was it, as was subsequently proved, a brilliant piece of casting?

  17. Why did the majority of Arab leaders, prior to the Gulf War—according to General Schwarzkopf and others—say we did not have to worry about Iraq, they would never attack a fellow Arab?

  18. Why is it that Central Command, which had never had plans for an Iraqi threat, suddenly started to plan for one just months before it happened?

  19. Why did Saddam take all of Kuwait? If he had taken just the Rumaila oil field—which would have solved his financial problems—and occupied just enough of Kuwait to have direct access to the Gulf, he “probably could have kept his ill-gotten gains at little cost except some short-lived international criticism.”

  20. Why did Saddam stop after he took Kuwait?

  21. Why did Saddam wait when American forces arrived and were most vulnerable?

  22. The original deployment of U.S. forces in the Gulf was represented as necessary to defend Saudi Arabia from Iraqi attack. But the Saudis were not convinced they were threatened by Saddam, and despite the elaborate spin control engineered by Washington, there is no evidence that they were.”115

  23. Why did Saddam appear to dig in, but actually send his elite troops, the Republican Guard, to safety, and why did he do the same with the bulk of his air force?

  24. Why were the Iraqi frontline troops “almost without exception . . . poorly trained and poorly led, made up of the least educated men from the countryside and the citie
s. Many . . . created for the war . . . about 70 percent of Saddam’s frontline forces were Shiites, 20 percent Kurds . . . Saddam Hussein’s ‘throwaway divisions.’ ”

  25. Why did we stop when we could have driven into Baghdad?

  26. Why didn’t the Kurds receive any support from the Allies. In August, Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani came to Washington. Although it’s obvious on the face of it that a Kurdish revolt would have weakened Iraq and drawn troops away from the Gulf, no one wanted to talk to him. “ ‘We were concerned about the violations of the Kurds’ human rights,’ a senior Bush advisor explained later. ‘But we did not want to get involved in anything like the creation of a new Kurdish nation.’ ”

  27. Why did Schwarzkopf give Saddam permission to use helicopters, giving him exactly enough force to suppress both Shiite and Kurdish rebellions?

  28. Why even attempt to name Robert Gates head of the CIA when (1) it had been necessary to withdraw his name once before; (2) there was practically a revolt by CIA analysts over his appointment, an unprecedented internal rejection; (3) he has a track record of unbelievably incorrect projections, and misanalyzing many important contemporary political events? Unless it’s to reward him for something that we don’t know about.

  29. Why was the press handled so very well here, although it hadn’t been in Grenada, Panama, and Vietnam?116

  30. “The size of the Iraqi army in the Kuwait Theater of Operations was probably much smaller than claimed by the Pentagon. On the eve of the war, Iraq may have had as few as 300,000 soldiers there—less than half of the 623,000 claimed by General Schwarzkopf or the 540,000 estimated by the Pentagon.”

  31. “Iraqi casualties were probably far lower than the 100,000 calculated by the Defense Intelligence Agency. In fact, the number of Iraqi soldiers killed in action may have been as small as 8,000.”

  32. The Pentagon had a war game on computer that played out an Iraqi invasion. “Its code name was Internal Look. . . . ‘It was something like The Twilight Zone,’ said Major John Feeley. . . . ‘I would brief the computer game,’ Feeley said, ‘and then I would turn right around and brief the real situation as it was developing. Sometimes I would get them mixed up. I had to keep thinking, OK, the computer did that; no, this is the real thing over here!’ ”

  33. The Pentagon, Powell, Scowcroft, Gates, and John Sununu opposed the United Nations role and felt it would hamper the president. Bush and Baker were for it. Baker has managed to garner most of the credit for it as he always does when anything near him works or almost works.

  34. What happened to Saddam’s threats to unleash terrorists on the West?

  35. What happened to Saddam’s threats to use biological and chemical warfare. And wasn’t handing out all those gas masks great, great video?

  36. What was that whole business with the Scuds and the Patriots? They both had terrific political impact and very little military impact.

  37. Why was Saddam given virtual carte blanche to suppress the Shiite and Kurdish revolts Bush had invited and inspired?

  38. Bob Woodward, in The Commanders, reports this scene: “In the White House, Bush, Quayle, Scowcroft, and Sununu gathered in the small private study adjacent to the Oval Office to watch television. When the sounds of the bombing could be heard behind the voices of the reporters still in their Baghdad hotel rooms, Bush, visibly relieved, said ‘Just the way it was scheduled.’ ”

  39. The biggie. How come, if Saddam is another Hitler, we let him stay in power?

  There are a few other items worth noting that don’t quite fit into the format above or may not seem relevant in the alternate version of the story as told here.

  First, there are the deals. In order to bring the world into line, the United States cut a lot of deals. This is not to suggest that they are wrong, but to remark on the style of them, which is frankly more that of a motion-picture packager than of a conservative Republican president. Egypt got $7 billion in forgiven military debts. Colombia, chief target of the war on drugs, was quietly allowed to renounce its treaty agreements to extradite major drug traffickers to the U.S., the only effective tactic in that war and the only thing that Colombia had ever done that was serious enough to annoy a major member of one of the cocaine cartels. Malaysia, a member of the U.N. Security Council at the time, got a break on textile import quotas. Syria got taken off the State Department terrorist list and received billions in aid from Saudi Arabia. Turkey, which may have climbed onboard primarily to be one of the European gang, something they desperately desire, despite a Third World economy, also managed to get a little much-needed cash out of the deal. They received long-sought permission to resell American F-16 fighters to Egypt for millions of dollars.

  Second, there is the whole motion-picture, television-miniseries flavor to the war. As if we got it that some TV or film director was doing a quickie-cheapie sequel to World War II, WWII-2-V, even if we didn’t actually know it. A perfect example is the story in The Nation (5/11/92) entitled “Pentagon-Media Presents—The Gulf War as Total Television.” It said:

  This is what the Bush Administration seemed to offer in the Gulf War—an outside production company able to organize a well-produced, subsidized total event that could be channeled to the American public at, relatively speaking, bargain basement prices.

  With its million or more uniformed extras, its vast sets . . . its own built-in coming attractions . . . dazzling Star Wars—style graphics, theme music and logos, as well as stunningly prime-timed first moments (Disneyesque fireworks over Baghdad). . .

  Stephen R. Graubard in Mr. Bush’s War: Adventures in the Politics of Illusion, said:

  The war began with aerial photographs of the bombing of Baghdad; it ended with a black American soldier reassuring an Iraqi prisoner of war that he was safe; all was well. The war was a tale manufactured for television from beginning to end.

  James Dunnigan and Austin Bay in From Shield to Storm get a sense of it too:

  From a purely television-image point of view, Saddam offered the hawks a perfect target . . . Operation Desert Storm was also dazzling international television . . . heady and enhanced by instantaneous local coverage of the attacks on Baghdad. . . . the first true ‘videowar.’

  All of these things make sense if we believe the. other story:

  That Lee Atwater wrote a memo. He would have hardly been the only one to reflect on Maggie Thatcher’s fortunes after the war in the Falklands and what they meant. On a certain level this book could be dedicated to Dan Quayle, who said on camera: “I reminded Mrs. Thatcher that there was another time she was very low in the polls, but she bounced back. And I asked her, ‘Do you have any advice for me.’ Turned out she did. Now I’ve just got to figure out a way that I can invade the Falkland Islands.” It is also a fact that they tried to replicate her success—Grenada, Panama—and failed.

  That the fix was in. That Saddam’s threats were carefully orchestrated—by a Western media intelligence—to get and keep the West “fightin’ mad,” but were never carried out to the degree that would create the kind of hysteria that would force the Western powers to remove him from government, incarcerate or even execute him.

  The thing that really stands out and screams Hollywood is the financing of the war. This is exactly how movies are always financed. No war has ever been financed that way. Certainly, no American war. In fact, in the twentieth century we’ve financed all our wars exactly the opposite way, with the United States contributing money to its allies to keep them fighting. It is difficult to imagine that radical a financial creativity in Washington.

  The main argument for the official story of the war is our faith that a president of the United States would not do the things suggested here. A president wouldn’t hire film directors to tell him what to say and do. Presidents don’t manufacture incidents to go to war. A president wouldn’t make policy, life-and-death policy, just for the sake of being reelected. Our leaders are men who put honor over expedience.

  110 “. . . to judge from initi
al soundings, there was no great alarm in Washington, and no suggestion of an attempt to roll back the Iraqi assault. . . . Bush met with Scowcroft, Cheney, Powell, Judge William Webster of the CIA, White House Chief of Staff John Sununu, and other members of the National Security Council. The prevailing attitude among the group, according to one participant, was “Hey, too bad about Kuwait, but it’s just a gas station and who cares whether the sign says Sinclair or Exxon?”

  “. . . both King Hussein and King Fahd placed the blame for the invasion squarely on the Kuwaitis who were being exceptionally stubborn and difficult in their negotiations with Iraq. . . . ‘It’s all Kuwait’s fault,’ he [King Fahd] told King Hussein the morning after the invasion. ‘They would be this adamant. They’ve brought this about’ ”(Jean Edward Smith, George Bush’s War [Holt, 1992])

  111 How friendly were we? “In March 1982, Iraq was removed from the State Department’s list of terrorist countries, making it eligible for U.S. economic aid. . . . said Noel Kock, head of the Pentagon’s counterterrorism unit—‘The reason was to help them succeed in the war with Iran.’ Late that year the Department of Agriculture agreed to guarantee $300 million in credits for the purchase of American farm products. By 1990, Iraq had received about $3 billion in farm and other loans. . . .

  “[The U.S.] looked the other way . . . when an errant Iraqi jet launched an Exocet missile into the USS Stark, killing 37 marines. . . .

  “When the war with Iran concluded . . . Washington continued its tilt toward Baghdad. When Saddam directed his attention to Iraq’s Kurdish minority, including the infamous gas attack . . . the U.S. more or less ignored it. The Bush administration . . . reviewed America’s pro-Iraqi orientation and decided that there was no reason to change. A National Security directive to that effect was issued in Oct ’89. . . . On 1-17-90, President Bush signed an executive order certifying that to halt loan guarantees to Iraq by the government’s Export-Import bank would not be ‘in the national interest of the United States.’” (Smith, George Bush’s War)