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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September-October 2008, pages 16-17 Special Report McCain, Lieberman and Iraq: ’Till Death Do Us PartBy Laurence A. ToenjesWithin weeks of casting their fateful October 2002 votes giving President George W. Bush the authority to attack Iraq, Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT) became the honorary co-chairmen of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI), a public relations entity set up at the behest of the Bush administration to help sell the Iraq war to U.S. allies and the American public. As recently confirmed by former Bush press secretary Scott McClellan in his book What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, this was part of a well-planned, intensive propaganda campaign by the Bush administration to lay the groundwork for war with Iraq. Nor was this the first alliance between McCain and Lieberman. The Republican and then-Democrat first paired up to help promote U.S. action against Iraq in 1998, when they helped pass the Iraq Liberation Act, thereby making regime change in Iraq official U.S. policy. President Bill Clinton may not have signed the measure with enthusiasm, but he signed it nonetheless. Funds appropriated under this act eventually fell into the hands of Ahmed Chalabi, whose inaccurate representations provided much of the justification for U.S. action against Saddam Hussain following 9/11. As reported by Mark Mazzetti in the Sept. 9, 2006 New York Times, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that the Chalabi-led Iraqi National Congress “…attempted to influence United States policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists.” The startup of the CLI was first reported in a Nov. 4, 2002 Washington Post article by Peter Slevin. At that time, Slevin pointed out, Americans’ support for an attack on Iraq was 55 percent—down from 64 percent two months earlier—and “only 26 percent of 1,751 Pew respondents said they would favor the use of force if the United States were acting alone, down from 33 percent in mid-September.” Given the decline in public support for military action against Iraq, the administration felt compelled to undertake a hard sell for war. McCain and Lieberman first paired up to help promote U.S. action against Iraq in 1998.It is now known that the propaganda effort to which the CLI contributed was but one element in the administration’s effort to control the news during the buildup to the Iraq war and its subsequent execution. In a long article in the April 20, 2008 New York Times, reporter David Barstow described the extent of the Pentagon’s use of retired military officers to paint a more positive picture of the war effort. Ultimately involving some 75 retired officers serving as “military experts” for Fox News, NBC, CNN, CBS and ABC, with aggregate television and radio appearances numbering in the “tens of thousands,” they were presented as independent, objective analysts relying upon their experience and expertise to inform the American public on what was “really” going on in Iraq. “Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air,” Barstow reported. “But collectively [they represent] more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants…all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror.” In addition, the New York Times article pointed out, “Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq….Both men also had their own consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.” Thus, not only did Senators McCain and Lieberman vote for funds to help overthrow Saddam Hussain as early as 1998, they also voted to give President Bush the authority to use military force against him and, through their involvement with the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, actively contributed to the propaganda effort of trying to shape American public opinion in favor of the war. Forging, Then Promoting, Policy
The CLI was just one of many organizations involved in helping to forge U.S. policy toward Iraq and to promote that policy once adopted. In an attempt to understand how the U.S. war on terrorism morphed into the war on Iraq, this writer identified 14 organizations involved in the process and established links among them. The connecting links consisted of the numerous instances of overlapping memberships in the organizations. These overlapping memberships occurred with such frequency and involved such prominent individuals that the effect was to essentially merge them into a unified nexus focused on developing the policies and public support for the eventual U.S. invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003. These 14 organizations and the linkages among them are shown in the diagram on the facing page. The numbers associated with each link represents the numbers of individuals who were associated with each pair of the connected organizations. Only those linkages which have at least three common members are shown. (The complete description of this diagram, the organizations, and many of the individuals involved can be found at <http://www.opednews.com/toenjessummary.htm>.) As pointed out above, Senators McCain and Lieberman were honorary co-chairs of the CLI, represented in the lower-right corner of the diagram. Senator Lieberman also was a member of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). The diagram shows that six individuals (Richard Perle, the late Jeane Kirkpatrick, James Woolsey, Joshua Muravchik, George Shultz and Lieberman) were members of both CLI and WINEP. More generally, the diagram shows how closely CLI was integrated into the entire network of organizations focusing on U.S. Iraq policy. That is, in addition to having six members in common with WINEP, CLI also shared five with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), four with the Center for Security Policy (CSP), six with the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), seven with the Defense Policy Board (DPB), four with The Weekly Standard and, last but not least, 11 members shared with the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The premise is that the greater the number of common memberships in a specific pair of organizations, the more closely they are linked—and therefore the greater the degree of mutual influence, coordination, and common purpose between the two organizations. When many organizations are linked together in that manner, an entire network with some degree of common purpose is thereby established, as shown in the diagram. Significantly, the membership lists upon which this diagram was based for the most part represented memberships before George W. Bush took office. Many of the individuals involved subsequently became officials in the Bush administration. To name just a few:
An advantage of the above diagram is that it does not rely on assumptions about the ethnic or national origins of any of the persons involved in the U.S. foreign policy process to conclude that Israeli national interests played a prominent role in the push for the Iraq war. JINSA, IASPS, WINEP and MEF all are organizations which focus heavily upon Israeli concerns. In some instances, their own Web sites state unequivocally that this is the case. For example, the IASPS Web site clearly describes its close relationship to Israel:
One might well ask why the U.S. Congress needs to employ members of Israel’s policy community. Perhaps Senator McCain or Lieberman can enlighten Americans in that regard—for it is clear that they were major players in the development of Bush administration policy on Iraq. It is also clear that they were closely allied, via their involvement in CLI, with an entire network of organizations and individuals that helped develop those policies. Indeed, a number of the most prominent members of that network are today serving as advisers to McCain in his presidential bid. According to the Oct. 2, 2007 Washington Post, these include, in addition to Lieberman:
While not all of these individuals are commonly considered neoconservatives, such as Eagleburger or Schlesinger, most of them are. Five of the above McCain advisers—Woolsey, Kristol, Kagan, Scheunemann and Schmitt—were associated with both CLI and PNAC. Scheunemann, in fact, was the director of PNAC—which many observers consider the key organization in promoting and justifying Bush’s Iraq war policy. For its part, CLI, with the help of Senators McCain and Lieberman, played a central role in the effort to shape public opinion during the buildup to that war. These observations lend credibility to the assertion that a McCain presidency would be little different from that of George W. Bush insofar as U.S. Middle East policy is concerned. While a president’s advisers may not necessarily pre-determine his policies, their mere selection certainly indicates something about a candidate’s preferences. Laurence A.Toenjes, who received his doctorate in economics from Southern Illinois University, is retired from the University of Houston’s Department of Sociology, where he was a researcher with The Sociology of Education Research Group. |
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