'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Setbacks for the monarchs of spin

Lots happening that I've been wanting to blog about. First, a good discussion about the utility of war developing on the Comments board under the next post down: check it out.

Second, the emergence of details on the great story of how Colin Powell and the Pentagon brass out-maneuvered Rumsfeld and the neo-con Pentagon suits in order to get Washington to take the Iraq dossier back to the UN. A good story on this today in the Wash. Post

The story, by Dana Milbank and Thomas E. Ricks, starts off:

On Tuesday, President Bush's first day back in the West Wing after a month at his ranch, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell walked into the Oval Office to present something close to a fait accompli.

In what was billed as a routine session, Powell told Bush that they had to go to the United Nations with a resolution seeking a U.N.-sanctioned military force in Iraq -- something the administration had resisted for nearly five months. Powell, whose department had long favored such an action, informed the commander in chief that the military brass supported the State Department's position despite resistance by the Pentagon's civilian leadership. Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, whose office had been slow to embrace the U.N. resolution, quickly agreed, according to administration officials who described the episode.

Thus was a long and high-stakes bureaucratic struggle resolved, with the combined clout of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department persuading a reluctant White House that the administration's Iraq occupation policy, devised by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, simply was not working.

The effort by Powell and the military began with a tête-à-tête in Qatar on July 27 between the top U.S. commander in Iraq and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was furthered in a discussion between the Joint Chiefs chairman and Bush at the president's ranch on Aug. 8. And it was cemented in the past 10 days after Powell's deputy, Richard L. Armitage, went public with the proposal.

For an administration that prides itself on centralized, top-down control, the decision to change course in Iraq was uncharacteristically loose and decentralized. As described by officials in the White House, State Department and Pentagon, the White House was the last to sign on to the new approach devised by the soldiers and the diplomats. "The [Pentagon] civilians had been saying we didn't need any more troops, and the military brass had backed them," a senior administration official said. "Powell's a smart guy, and he knew that as soon as he had the brass behind him, that is very tough to ignore."

For months, Rumsfeld and his civilian aides had successfully resisted wishes of the State Department and the British government for U.N. help, arguing that U.S. troops, and foreign troops assembled outside U.N. authority, could get the job done. But this time was different, because the situation in Iraq made Rumsfeld's view look increasingly doubtful to the White House...

Delicious. What can I say? So there is some point in Colin P being in the administration, after all.

Rumsfeld, meanwhile, was caught totally out of the loop because it turns out he's on a previously-unannounced but long-scheduled visit to Baghdad today.

Will he resign??

Should he?????

Setbacks for the Blair spin machine in Britain this week, too. Yesterday, two spooky WMD-intel specialists who were deeply involved in the writing of the now-infamous dossier in Sept 2002 told Lord Hutton's enquiry that they had shared the late weapons scientist David Kelly's misgivings about the way their intel was being (mis-)presented by the political types who made the final decisions on the contents of the dossier, and that they had apparently also shared those misgivings with Kelly.

Today, Hutton heard from Richard Taylor, one of the Ministry of Defence types there who was responsible for what his masters called the "naming strategy"-- that is, the strategy whereby, in continuing pursuit of its grudge match against the BBC, the MoD would let David Kelly hang out to dry by "confirming" that he was the scientist who had earlier come forward to report that he'd talked to gung-ho Beeb reporter Andrew Gilligan if anyone from the media should suggest that it had been Kelly.

Today's Guardian reports from today's enquiry session that, when he was asked if any of the MoD brass or he himself:

had thought to inform Dr Kelly of the planned confirmation process, Mr Taylor merely replied: "We did not go into greater detail at that time."

James Dingemans, QC for the inquiry, responded: "I infer the answer is no?"

Mr Taylor replied: "It is a simple 'no' to that question."

This, in contradiction, I think, to previous MoD assurances that they had thought to tell Kelly before acting fast and loose with his name and had generally looked after him well.

Earlier this week, the enquiry also heard heart-wrenching testimony from Kelly's wife and daughter, detailing how shocked, frustrated, threatened, and depressed he had felt about the way he was treated at the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee that he was forced by his MoD bosses to give testimony to.

It was just a couple of days after that testimony that his body was discovered, after an apparent suicide...

For continuing coverage of this fast-moving and fascinating story, the Guardian has a good centralized site about it, and so does the enquiry itself.

Well, just the other day, I was having a slightly confrontational conversation about the war with a neocon friend whom I can call "JC". He definitely seemed on the defensive. (As he well might. Why, even Bill Kristol is criticizing the Rumsfeld "strategy" in Iraq these days.) But one of JC's last comebacks was, "Well at least the US and Britain are two of the only places in the world where there was even a real debate about the war."

Seems like an attractive argument... After all, who could be against democratic debate over important issues?

But then I thought, oh yes, let's have an engaged public debate about the virtues of slavery, or wife-beating! That would really prove what a mature democracy we are. Right?

It strikes me that some things are so ethically self-evident that the existence of a "debate" around them doesn't tell us anything except about the challenged ethical level of some of the debaters.

And now, we find mounting evidence from all quarters--but especially from the bowels of the US and British government bureaucracies that people in those so-called "democratic" administrations were working hard to distort the terms of the debate by putting their own highly political spin on intelligence, suppressing the voices of doubters, etc etc.

What price "democracy" now?

Maybe we could ask Janice Kelly that question. After all, it's too late now to ask her husband.