Remember when America believed all the absurd stories told by political refugees who wanted their home country invaded?
That’s too general, I guess. So many cases come to mind — Kosovo, Libya, Aleppo...
I was actually thinking of the lies told in the leadup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but all these stories have one common feature: the US intelligence/media elite took the word of political exiles on trust, never doubting that sleazes like Ahmed Chalabi were telling the simple truth.
You’ll recall that after the WMD claim was shown to be false, all the respectable media said they had no reason to doubt their sources, like Ahmed Chalabi (photo above). The implication was always that we found ourselves in a unique, unprecedented 21st-century situation. How, O how, could anyone have known Chalabi was lying?
Well, they could’ve looked him up in their files for a start. But even if they didn’t want to bother with that, if they simply read a little more widely in military history, they’d have known that analysts, folktales, and legal writers have warned for thousands of years that political refugees trying to promote invasion of their homelands can never be trusted.
That’s the thing with these mainstream media people, as free of memory as one of those brain-damage cases who wake up to a new world every single morning. For them, every script is 50 First Wars, starring Drew Barrymore as Judith Miller.
Truth is, people with sense have always known not to take the word of a disgruntled émigré. Even good ol’ Aesop had a fable on the topic, “The Tale of the Fox and the Goat.”
You can probably guess who wins from the title alone. Fox vs. Goat has a point spread in triple figures, at least in the storytelling realm. (The few actual goats I’ve seen were a lot tougher than their fictional representatives.) Here’s the story, short and to the point:
A fox fell into a deep well and couldn’t get out. A goat passing by looked down and asked the fox what he was doing down there. Thinking fast, the fox said, “Don’t you know? A drought is coming and this way I’m sure of water. If you had any sense, you’d get down here too.” The goat jumped into the well, found the bottom dry, and said, “There’s no water down here!” The fox laughed, jumped on the goat’s back, and vaulted out of the well. Before going on his way, the fox leaned over the well and told the goat, “Never take advice from a man in trouble.”
The story fits Iraq 2003 perfectly. Ahmed Chalabi, the most trusted and least trustworthy Iraqi political refugee, the darling of the DC elite, had been “a man in trouble” for years before he started telling WaPo, NYT, and Congress that Iraq was hungry for a US invasion. Chalabi was so crooked that he was convicted of fraud in Jordan — that’s Jordan, folks — and had to flee the country in the trunk of a local princeling’s car.
In 1998 he convinced the rubes in Congress to give him almost $100 million to start an Iraqi refugee organization, the Iraqi National Congress (INC). By 2001 he’d stolen so much money from the INC and in such a crude, contemptuous way that even the rubes took notice, accusing the INC of fraud. But two years later — in 2003, when Chalabi was working eight days a week telling everyone that Saddam had WMDs and Iraqis longed for American boots on their ground — the Feds gave Chalabi another $33 million dollars.
Now that’s gullible. Or is it? This is a question that always seems to come up when you look at the dumber projects of the military-industrial complex: Are they really naïve goats, or something more like lying snakes? That is, did they really think they could trust a guy like Chalabi or did they just use him to push the invasion, knowing he was lying the whole time?
That’s a tough one. We’re all proud cynics here, or we think we are at least, so it’d be easy to say they knew he was lying. I’m not sure it’s that simple. People who have managed to adapt to an organization have learned to practice belief in things that are obviously absurd to mere civilians. Over time, they do believe, at least for a while. The process is murkier than simple lying. In some ways it makes lying seem clean.
Think of people you wish you’d never trusted, and you’ll see that the best liars weren’t Shakespeare villains rubbing their hands in glee, chuckling at their lies, but (in my experience anyway) upbeat enthusiasts with very little memory and less conscience. Every day is a new day for them, and the new day has no resemblance to any previous day. In fact, their view is more like “WHAT previous day? What are you talking about?”
You learn about these people the hard way. That’s where knowing a little history comes in — or doesn’t, in the case of Beltway insiders, NYT reporters, and Congress dummies.
If you go back through the history of invading on the advice of political refugees, you find that people in the old days knew perfectly well that you couldn’t trust defeated claimants from another power.
Here’s a passage written in April 1861, with a Union political analyst expressing his shock that the French government had invaded Mexico on the advice of Mexican political refugees:
“I am astonished that concerning Mexico Louis Napoleon was taken in… Experience ought to have made him familiar with the general policy of political refugees. This policy was, is, and always will be based on imaginary facts. Political refugees befog themselves and befog others.” [my emphasis]
That passage is from the 1861-2 diary of Adam Gurowski, the smartest real-time analyst of the US Civil War. It may be asking too much for our elite journalists, pundits, and analysts to match Gurowski’s insights, but they might have noticed that Saddam himself jumped like a goat into a very deep well of his own partly because he took the word of angry political refugees. And that was only a couple of decades before the US did the same thing in 2003.
In 1980, Saddam Hussein was thinking about invading Iran. He wasn’t a very democratic guy, to put it mildly, but he did survey the same kind of sources the US would end up using in 2003: his intelligence services, mainstream news reports (including those from the US media), and above all, the Iranian political refugees living in Baghdad. (Such refugees always cluster in the capital city, whether it’s Baghdad or DC, the better to lobby.)
As Pierre Razoux says in his recent history of the Iran-Iraq War,
"Shapour Bakhtiar, the [Shah’s] last prime minister, now exiled in Paris, emphatically declar[ed] that ‘Khomeini will be done with! It will last seven or eight months at most! Less than a year in any case. That is certain.’ In Baghdad, these statements were taken as proof that the Iranian Army was weakening. Members of the Iranian opposition who had sought refuge in Baghdad reinforced this impression… They were echoed by Iraqi intelligence reports. The emigres attempted to convince [Saddam’s] regime to help them overthrow [Khomeini], emphasizing the prevailing anarchy, the administration’s collapse, and the purges and desertions that had rendered the [Iranian] Army inoperative.”
The parallel to DC circles is obvious. In fact, the Iranian exiles’ accounts were much closer to the truth than the lies peddled in 2003 by disgruntled Iraqis like America’s favorite source, Curveball.
“Curveball,” real name Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, was an even more obvious con man than Chalabi. He admitted, once it was all over, that he himself was astonished when US and UK intelligence took his fantasies about Iraqi chemical warfare labs seriously. All he’d wanted was the German equivalent of a Green Card:
“Former CIA official Tyler Drumheller summed up Curveball as 'a guy trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth.' Alwan lives in Germany, where he has been granted asylum.
"In a February 2011 interview with British newspaper The Guardian, Alwan 'admitted for the first time that he lied about his story, then watched in shock as it was used to justify the war.'"
So “Curveball” was like the low-level variant of émigré ulterior motives. All he wanted was legal status, while Chalabi wanted to rule Iraq, once it had been conquered by the U.S. Those are standard motives for political refugees over the centuries. You can probably find mix-n-match examples from any military history you know well.
It might seem odd that Saddam believed Iranian emigres with that sort of story when decided to invade in 1980. After all, he was nowhere near as naïve about the region as his American analogues were in 2003. But he shared one fatal trait with them: he wanted to believe, so believe he did, encouraged by his intelligence agencies.
The Iraqi agencies’ way of massaging political exiles’ tall tales, as described by Razoux, will seem familiar to anyone who lived through the US media’s jingo party in 2003: “The Iraqi authorities prudently gave the [Iranian] opposition lip service, [while] doubting their actual ability to topple [Khomeini’s] regime.”
As the Iraqi and American intel establishments discovered, that kind of bet-hedging is dangerous. You, the intelligence service, may think you’re only giving “lip service” to the regime that pays your salary, but people like Saddam or Cheney, people who already consider themselves inerrant and omniscient, tend to take that kind of lip service and run with it, all the way into hopeless invasions.
That’s what Saddam did on September 22, 1980, launching a massive invasion of Iran that he thought would be a cakewalk. Without rehashing the details, the cakewalk turned into a long, losing war that killed a quarter-million Iraqis. Within a year after believing those political refugees from Iran and the western media who gave them unlimited air time, Saddam was begging for a ceasefire. Khomeini was not the forgiving type, however, and it was not until August 1988 that The Ayatollah was persuaded to accept Saddam’s latest offer and end the slaughter.
In 1991, just three years after finally extricating Iraq from the Iran quagmire, Saddam invaded Kuwait, partly because his earlier trust in political refugees had left Iraq broke and angry, needing money and a new target. This time, Saddam didn’t count on any support within Kuwait. It wasn’t necessary, because the Kuwaiti military was pretty much a joke and its American protector was in no position to react quickly to an invasion. So maybe he did learn a kind of lesson from his trust in Iranian expats back in 1980.
The Kuwait invasion didn’t work out too well either, but at least the debacle this time didn’t come from trusting the tales of political refugees.
But you know, I keep coming back to that puzzle: Are these moments of naïve trust, from people like Cheney and Saddam, really naivete? Those people aren’t what you’d call credulous IRL. Neither are their trusting stenographers in the media.
Consider the mainstream American journalists who helped sell the lies in the leadup to 2003. Can’t say I know any of them personally but many of them come from backgrounds a little like mine. Max the Boot, a big invasion booster, is a UC Berkeley grad and probably prowled the same Dwinelle Hall corridors Mark and I did. (He even wrote a column for the Daily Californian, UCB’s ditch-dull NYT homonculus.)
Take a couple other big war-boosting liars of 2003 vintage, the NYT’s Judith Miller and WaPo’s Jim Hoagland.
And I kinda doubt that any of those people are gullible in real life. Could you convince these people to cosign your mortgage, based solely on sad stories you told them about your exile from Iran or Kuwait? I very much doubt it. They’d shrug you right off. People like that wear Teflon shoulder pads. Hell, I may be playing the cynic here but truth be told I’d be a much easier mark for any con than any of them.
So did they believe the lies they peddled? It depends to some degree on the amnesia question. Their amnesia is purely professional, lasting only until the evening commute. During working hours (and people like this are very hard-working), they believe all very hard-working), they believe all sorts of nonsense, whether it’s Iraqis tossing babies out of incubators in Kuwait, or Iraqi WMDs peddled by emigres wanting permanent-resident status.
But then, after writing totally naïve stories about the big lie of the moment, those people — Max Boot, Judith Miller, Jim Hoagland — get in their luxury cars and drive home…and a little miracle happens on the way. By the time they pull into that horseshoe driveway under the cherry trees, all their gullibility has vanished.
Just test it. Drop by Jim Hoagland’s place to borrow the BMW for a few days; tell Max Boot the house you’re showing him will gentrify any day now; assure Judith Miller that you only moved her Adderall supply to get at the Bactine in the medicine cabinet and you SWEAR TO GOD they were all there when you last looked in the bottle. You’ll find that once the workday is over, that touching faith in other peoples’ tall tales is not to be seen in those courteous, cold faces. It’s not that they were lying a few hours earlier, writing up Chalabi’s latest BS, but — you know — that was business.
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