Bush Replays Iraq Games on Iran

By Ray McGovern, www.consortiumnews.com

Stop! Please. Get beneath the hype over former White House press secretary Scott McClellan’s book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. Don’t miss forest for trees.

Not since John Dean told the truth about President Richard Nixon’s crimes have we had an account by a very close aide to a sitting president charging him with crimes of the most serious kind.

McClellan writes that George W. Bush abandoned “candor and honesty” to wage a “political campaign” that led the nation into an “unnecessary war.”

The chief U.S. prosecutor of senior Nazi officials at the post-World War II Nuremberg Trials, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, labeled such action – more correctly termed a war of aggression – the “supreme international crime.”

In other words, President Bush used propaganda and deception to lead the United States into what an earlier generation of American leaders judged not just a war crime, but the “supreme” war crime.

And, in all this, Bush had an eager cast aiding and abetting – from careerists in the U.S. intelligence community to the fawning corporate media (FCM) whom McClellan referred to as “deferential, complicit enablers.”

As for the role of intelligence, McClellan tells of “shading the truth.” In the effort to convince the world that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, the president used “innuendo and implication” and intentional ignoring of intelligence to the contrary.”

Water over the dam, you say? No way.

White House spinners are at it again – “fixing” the intelligence around the policy, this time on Iran. The fixing is obvious, but don’t expect to hear about it from the FCM.

An exception is MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann. His antiquated approach is to ask relevant questions – like, for example, will the White House do an encore in preparing us for an attack on Iran?

Interviewing McClellan Thursday evening, Olbermann earmarked time to discuss Iran and asked, “So knowing what you know, if Dana Perino starts making noises similar to what you heard from Ari Fleischer in 2002…would you be suspicious?”

“I would be,” McClellan said.

Wait. Before taking this with a blasé shrug, consider the source.

Fixing In Fits and Starts

The worst kept secret in Washington is that Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are looking for a pretext to order air and missile attacks on Iran. But when and how will Dana Perino and the rest of the propaganda machine market this one?

When to sell? If former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card’s dictum regarding “marketing” the war on Iraq holds sway – i.e. “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August” – the administration has only two months, unless it opts for an “October Surprise” as a more effective way to help achieve a Republican victory in November.

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/33814