Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August/September 2019, pp. 60-61
Waging Peace
By Dale Sprusansky
COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON, who helped sell the ill-fated 2003 Iraq War as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff, sees disturbing similarities between the build-up to the Iraq War and current efforts to get the U.S. entangled in a military confrontation with Iran. On June 28, Wilkerson joined journalist Mehdi Hasan’s “Deconstructed” podcast to reflect on the current warmongering efforts of the Trump administration.
As in 2003, Wilkerson said “raw and unfinished” intelligence is currently being used to push pro-war narratives. In the build-up to the Iraq War, he noted, Paul Wolfowitz of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans fed Vice President Dick Cheney with unfinished intelligence to help sell the war. Today, Wilkerson observed that “think thanks” such as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies are being similarly used to provide the administration with intelligence and analysis that is unsound, but fits their hawkish policy desires.
The media has learned very little from the Iraq War, Wilkerson lamented, and is again complicit in promoting a war by uncritically magnifying the administration’s claims about Iran. Any narratives that push for military confrontation ought to be met with skepticism by the media, not taken at face value and regurgitated, he said.
Wilkerson recalled how Cheney cunningly used the media to legitimize the administration’s claims about Iraq. “I know that Dick Cheney would take raw intelligence, feed it to the New York Times, the New York Times would then print it front-page above the fold, and Cheney would then cite it as verified,” he said.
Just as many believe President Donald Trump does not actually want a war with Iran, Wilkerson believes President George W. Bush did not necessarily want a war with Iraq, but was pushed to that decision by advisers, like Cheney, who capitalized on his desire to buoy his chances of reelection and to avenge his father’s “failure” to remove Saddam Hussain during the First Gulf War.
Trump has been adamant about his disdain for new wars, but Wilkerson believes his decision to employ hawks such as National Security Adviser John Bolton could be a devastating mistake. The president thinks Bolton is helping him apply the pressure necessary to force Iran to negotiate a “better deal,” Wilkerson speculated, while Bolton is actually attempting to lay the groundwork for a war Trump can’t refuse. Trump, like Bush, is also looking for something to boost his reelection prospects, Wilkerson said, while Hasan observed that opposing anything endorsed by President Barack Obama is Trump’s deep-seeded motivation for his rejection of the nuclear deal and confrontational approach toward Iran.
“John Bolton and [Secretary of State] Mike Pompeo look a lot like the characters from the Bush administration, with Pompeo being the sycophant and Bolton being the leader,” Wilkerson opined. “I don’t think the president wants war, but the circle around him does.”
Based on an encounter from 2002, Wilkerson believes Bolton truly does not appreciate the horror of war. When Bolton was serving as Under Secretary of State for Arms Control in the Bush administration and pushing for a military confrontation with North Korea, Wilkerson said he was dispatched to his office to explain the devastating ramifications of such a war. Bolton, he recalled, was “oblivious” to these consequences. “He actually said back to me and [Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs] Jim Kelly, ‘you guys do the war, I don’t do war.’”
Wilkerson noted that Powell connecting Iraqi President Saddam Hussain to al-Qaeda “resonated with the American people” and most effectively sold the war, even though it was a complete lie. There are similar attempts from Pompeo, he noted, to suggest that Iran is in bed with al-Qaeda, a connection Wilkerson said is patently false. Pomepo is making these claims not so much to sell the necessity of war, but to make sure any military confrontation with Iran is permissible under the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF).
Just as fringe Iraqi expatriates had an oversized influence over the Iraq War effort, so too does a fringe extremist Iranian group, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), have a disproportionate sway over Washington, Wilkerson said. Despite being listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. government until 2012 and having a cult-like mentality, U.S. leaders from both political parties regularly engage with the MEK and receive large honorariums for appearing at their conferences and regurgitating their regime change talking points. “You’re talking about the equivalent in many respects of Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress” who pushed the Bush administration into the Iraq War, Wilkerson said.
The bottom line, Wilkerson said, is that the continual push for war since 9/11 shows that hawks will never stop campaigning for armed confrontation, even if more peaceful and viable paths are presented. He noted that in 2003, Iran, which was already cooperating with the U.S. in Afghanistan, offered the U.S. a “grand bargain” in which it was willing to reach an understanding on a plethora of issues that have stymied the bilateral relationship for decades. Instead of taking Iran up on the offer, or even hearing them out, Washington simply ignored the overture. Then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and other top officials “argued that this wasn’t a serious offer and that it had been ‘embellished by the Europeans’” (who were the intermediaries), Wilkerson said. “No one wanted a breakthrough, especially Dick Cheney,” he added. “Dick Cheney stymied the functional statutory decision-making process for four years while I was there by simply not letting Iran come up for a policy decision, and it never did.”
