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Too clever for anyone’s good

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To follow up on V’s post about chemical weapons found in Iraq: Guess Who, in the Bush administration, didn’t want anyone talking about the weapons?

Theories vary, but according to Eli Lake’s article, it would have been Karl Rove:

Starting in 2004, some members of the George W. Bush administration and Republican lawmakers began to find evidence of discarded chemical weapons in Iraq. But when the information was brought up with the White House, senior adviser Karl Rove told them to “let these sleeping dogs lie.”

The issue of Iraq’s WMD remnants was suddenly thrust back into the fore this week, with a blockbuster New York Times report accusing the Bush administration of covering up American troops’ chemically induced wounds…

Dave Wurmser—who served at the time as a senior adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney on national-security issues—remembers…“In 2005-6, Karl Rove and his team blocked public disclosure of these findings and said, ‘Let these sleeping dogs lie; we have lost that fight so better not to remind anyone of it.’”

Rove’s reasons make sense. Except they don’t.

It’s true that a lot of politics is about Controlling The Narrative, and you want people talking about the narratives that work for your side. So you talk up the narratives that do, and you shut up about the ones that don’t. It is sometimes called “message discipline” or “staying on message”.

Except in one important case: WHEN YOU’VE BEEN LIED ABOUT. When someone (the Left) has lied about your integrity or key issue maliciously, you don’t pass up chances to air the exculpatory evidence – also known as The Truth – which will expose your opponents as liars. Especially when those chances to air the truth aren’t going to cost you much.

If Lake’s story is accurate, Rove was so clever about Controlling The Narrative that he lost sight of the most important narrative of all: Spreading the truth. Getting the real story out.

Rove may also have lost sight of the next most important narrative, Obeying the law:

After the U.S. found thousands of the old chemical-weapons shells, Wurmser and others at one point argued that they had an obligation to declare the stocks of chemical weapons under the Chemical Weapons Convention and destroy them. The United States was, after all, the occupier of Iraq and had assumed the country’s sovereign responsibilities as a signatory to the convention.

“It was all for nothing; Rove wanted the issue buried,” Wurmser said.

The law being the Chemical Weapons Convention, in this case.

I should acknowledge here that, if Lake’s story is accurate, then the rise of ISIS isn’t 100% the Obama administration’s fault. Oh yes, it’s largely their fault: the Obama administration was quite negligent in letting the Islamists in Iraq make a comeback. But apparently, the Bush administration may have been negligent in its failure to declare-and-destroy Saddam’s WMD stockpiles.

Comments

  2. I’m open to evidence/argument that part of the reason they didn’t want to talk about the chemical WMD is that they had been manufactured by the U.S. or Germany or someone Western. Supplied to Saddam in the 1980s.

    But that still doesn’t justify Rove’s (alleged) move. If they were Western-manufactured, that’s a sad story about a former administration – to be acknowledged along with everything else.

  3. In 2003, General Colin Powell went before the General Assembly at the US to reveal the nature or Saddam Hussein’s WMD regime. Here is one small segment from the long narrative Gen. Powell delivered:

    And that is my third point. And it is key. The Iraqis have never accounted for all of the biological weapons they admitted they had and we know they had. They have never accounted for all the organic material used to make them. And they have not accounted for many of the weapons filled with these agents such as there are 400 bombs. This is evidence, not conjecture. This is true. This is all well-documented.

    What ramped up the “bush-lied-people-died” crowd is that we never found the anthrax, nerve agents, chemical weapons facilities or the stockpiles.

    What the NYT is reporting is generally old, tired news. We did find shells loaded with deadly gases and it was reported at the time. What the NYT is attempting to sell is that Bush and Company engaged in some sort of diabolical cover-up. That is the part I don’t quite grasp and understand. Does the NYT think they can distract us from ebola, the IRS, Obamacare, ISIS, the economy, etc. with some “October surprise” concerning a Bush cover-up of WMD’s? Whew!

    There is, of course, the mystery of where Saddam’s anthrax and WMD’s ended up. There is conspiracy theory level evidence that it was moved to the Bekaa Valley in Syria. It could be possible that our intelligence people know it is there, but they are keeping it under wraps.

    If Karl Rove wanted to side-step the discussion on the WMD’s, it may have been motivated by having Syria know that we know and Israel knows where the bad stuff is and that Syria has best not get involved in a game of their Baathists helping Saddam’s Baathists, etc.

    You will recall that on September 6, 2007 Israel demolished the Syrian nuclear reactor in the northeast Deir Ezzour region which caused the Syrians to to cover the site with dirt to prevent the spread of nuclear radiation. An unverified report claims that Syria took down long range missiles with chemical warheads after the attack for fear that Israel would counterstrike if they were discovered or used.

    That leads one to believe that our intelligence community and Mossad, Aman and Hatzav in the Israeli intelligence community are probably very aware of where the Syrian nasties are located. When Assad was “talked into” turning over his chemical weapons, it was just another chapter in the WMD’s saga being played out. We know from Putin that those chemical weapons were not entirely handed over.

  4. We did find shells loaded with deadly gases and it was reported at the time.

    Yes….barely. More in the back pages, acknowledged by few (or no) Democrats, not part of the popular memory today, etc. The NYT is re-injecting it into the Left’s memory. It never occurred to me that they might have intended an October Surprise. Regardless of their motive, “better late than never”. If the Bush adminstration did fail to destroy weapons, or did a bad job on treating soldiers or whatever, it deserves to be acknowledged (though of course, not exaggerated or over-emphasized).

  5. we never found the anthrax, nerve agents, chemical weapons facilities or the stockpiles

    I’m not sure how to parse that. We did find chemical weapons facilities and stockpiles: that’s the point. And we didn’t find nuclear or bio-weapon stockpiles, but we did find research, tools, etc. that Saddam wasn’t supposed to have. His strategy was to preserve, not a current stockpile or current manufacturing capability, but a future manufacturing capability that he would restore once the world had finally gotten tired of inspecting him.

  7. While finding the expected chemical weapons was dictated to be kept under the hat, it was hardly secret. It was widely reported in the mid 2000’s. However; it was on par with not making a bit deal of incoming dead at US airports. The public’s focus was to be kept from turning these things into a bigger deal than they were. Talking, reporting about chem weapons would have automatically kept an already rabid focus on the search for “wmd’s”. Instead of the strategies of war. As ILC has implied.
    However; I would think Pentagon planners under a Cheney directive, would have been responsible for not making a bigger deal about the chem weapons, than already existed.
    I don’t see, finding older chem weapons & not immediately destroying them, as a break with the law.
    I’m not a big defender of the Bush Admin, but believe giving credit where it’s due & not becoming hysterical during wartime.

  8. I’m an admirer of Rove & am very conservative. I don’t believe anyone else could have done better with an overall orchestration of everything, given the actual scope of the whole picture. Presidential campaign, set up of the administration, agencies & war.
    I’m someone that’s never jumped on the bandwagon of people blaming, pointing fingers at Rove. He was & is, brilliant.

  9. ILC, I agree with your comments in tone and clarity, but my opinions are shaped by the dearth of positive evidence that was declassified. We did find one of Saddam’s mobile biological/chemical wagons and it was moved in pieces to a cooperating intelligence agency in a friendly nearby country.

    We had Chemical Ali (Ali Hassan Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti) in custody and there is no declassified information concerning his debriefings. In addition, we found parts and pieces of nuclear centrifuges and many, many documents which are classified. We would not have permitted either Saddam or Chemical Ali to go to trial and hanged without having gotten a great deal of information.

    My opinion is that we know a very great deal and that Saddam was successful in moving the goods and destroying a lot of evidence before we took over. He was also pretty adept at bluffing. But, if you will recall, it was that bluffing skill that our intelligence community jumped on to explain away the lack of evidence. That is either mostly true or it is a very convenient cover for a huge pyramid of classified information.

    Assad was never, ever a big enough player to supplant Saddam in the strutting and bluster department. There are many reasons not to actually upend his regime, not the least of which is the fact that Putin is a silent partner in this poker game of dirty weapons.

    Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is not really a mystery player in his role as President of Turkey. He hates the Kurds, fears a rebirth of Kurdistan, has the Armenian skeleton in his closet, hates Syria and plays a power politics role with with Russia’s access to the Mediterranean while being a strange bedfellow member in NATO. All the while, he is loosening the separation of Islam and the state which Ataturk installed and the Islamic influence in state policy is rapidly growing in importance in Turkey. He has every reason to dread ISIS because Istanbul is the natural capitol of a new caliphate.

    All of this “secondary” background is to help illuminate the power vacuum the world faces in dealing with a nuked up Iran and a biological and chemical stockpile hidden in Syria with Israel already nuked up for self protection and Europe dependent on oil and natural gas imports from Russia and the Middle East.

    Unfortunately, it is all coming to a head under the sorriest excuse for a President this country has ever had.

    The NYT is totally aware of geo-politics and the weapons (WMD’s) involved. They are trying to tangle the web with some sort of blame game that is too lame to begin to understand and has about as much chance taking flight as you would give the average bulldozer.

    The New York Times is in the throes of financial collapse. They have made their ideological bed and they are sailing directly toward the iceberg with Krugman, Friedman, Brooks, Kristof and Dowd rearranging the deck chairs. Very little of consequence comes from the pages of the NYT compared with its past history of cutting edge journalism.

    This story was not a weekend dump. It was launched mid week and expected to guide the Sunday talk shows. Clearly, ebola wins by a mile.

  13. There were charges that ISIS connected with some of Syria’s chemical stuff. In fact, that tale was put out by Syrian government propaganda. Who knows?

    Also, I seriously doubt that we learned where all of Saddam’s deteriorating chemical junk was buried and stored. So it is more than possible that ISIS could find some.

    But, worse, ISIS has heavy artillery stolen from Iraq. Putting chemical heads on the munitions is not exactly rocket science and ISIS can cook up bad stuff fairly easily. The terrorist recipe book is full of nasty stuff. They don’t have to wait for Mother Jones to print it.