by Russ Baker
Another of Blair’s closest confidantes and aides, an old friend from his native Edinburgh named Anji Hunter, left her job at 10 Downing Street in November 2001 to become director of communications at BP. Blair said he was “sad” over losing such a close confidante after thirteen years, but Hunter’s timing was fortuitous, as discussions were already under way about invading Iraq.35 According to the Observer, Bush raised the issue of removing Saddam with British support over dinner with Blair just nine days after September 11.36
Where such old-school ties did not exist, the Bush administration used hardball against allies that would not go along with its wartime objectives. According to a 2008 book by Chilean diplomat Heraldo Muñoz (with a foreword by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan), the so-called Coalition of the Willing was anything but willing. Muñoz notes that in the march-up to the invasion, the White House virtually declared war on allies who did not fall into line. The administration threatened trade reprisals, spied on them, and demanded that U.N. envoys who resisted U.S. pressure to endorse the war be recalled.37
Making the Case
The news media, opposition politicians, and even popular entertainers faced intense pressure, overt and implied, to support the invasion. When political comedian Bill Maher questioned whether terrorists who turned themselves into missiles were really “cowardly” as opposed to those who launch missiles from afar, expressions of outrage came quickly. “People need to watch what they say, watch what they do,” said presidential press secretary Ari Fleischer.38 The controversy over Maher’s remarks was widely believed to be a factor in the later cancellation of his show.
Fury followed ABC News anchor Peter Jennings’s musing after the September 11 attacks that “the country looks to the president on occasions like this to be reassuring to the nation. Some presidents do it well, some presidents don’t.” Syndicated talk show host Rush Limbaugh declared that Jennings had questioned Bush’s character; ten thousand angry phone calls and e-mails flooded into ABC.39
Aided by a wave of such fervor—and also by the largely inaccurate, administration-fed reports by New York Times reporter Judith Miller that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction—the Bush administration launched its invasion.
Waging war was one thing; winning the propaganda war was another. As Frank Rich details in his book The Greatest Story Ever Sold, the White House became ever more vigilant (and creative) in controlling its message. The administration even gave its invasion a cinematic title: Shock and Awe. “Onscreen the pyrotechnics of Shock and Awe looked like a distant fireworks display, or perhaps the cool computer graphics of a Matrix-inspired video game, rather than the bombing of a large city. None of Baghdad’s nearly six million people were visible.”40 Those in charge made the war appear bloodless, justified, and unimpeachable. What was not to like? Networks like CNN, “mindful of the sensibilities of our viewers,”41 agreed to minimize the blood and guts, and former first lady Barbara Bush applauded. “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it’s gonna happen?” she asked on Good Morning America. “It’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”42
The memory hole also devoured recollections of how the first President George Bush had used propaganda and lies to excite the American public to support an earlier war with Iraq. In October 1990, a new entity calling itself the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, but in reality a creation of the public relations powerhouse Hill and Knowlton, held hearings in order to substantiate claims of Iraqi human rights violations.
The committee heard a particularly moving testimony from a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl, Nayirah, who described the horrors she witnessed in a Kuwait City hospital: “While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where 15 babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.”43 The media gave the story major play. Poppy used it to help justify the war that would begin three months later. It turned out, however, that the girl was actually a member of the Kuwaiti royal family—the daughter of Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States. The vice president of Hill and Knowlton had even coached Nayirah, whose entire testimony was eventually deemed false by investigators.44
Great Moments in Chutzpah
Once the 2003 invasion had taken place, with the predictable portrayal of a magnificent battle with no blood or human toll, it was time for the next stage of pageantry. Here, the Bush team was able to enjoy the sort of accolades showered upon Margaret Thatcher after the British victory in the tiny Falklands War.
The quick dispatch of Saddam was crowned first with the symbolic toppling of the dictator’s statue, followed by an even more stunning photo op: W. appearing to land a fighter jet on board an aircraft carrier that appeared to be at sea somewhere in relation to the war effort. A large banner proclaimed MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. Almost none of it was true. The plane, renamed Navy One, was normally used for refueling. The aircraft carrier was not far out at sea and nowhere near the war—it was in fact just off the coast of San Diego, California. And the mission, it goes without saying, was far from accomplished. But it made for good television, and the media at first lapped it up.
As the war dragged on and it became apparent that the main justification— weapons of mass destruction—did not exist, the national mood turned and the media became more skeptical. It grew clear that Iraq and Saddam Hussein had had nothing to do with September 11.
The emergent truth about Saddam’s Iraq—that it had not posed a substantial threat to the United States—raised any number of important questions that got little attention in the national discourse. Some of these were strategic:
• If al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were the threats, why was Saddam Hussein attacked, removed, and executed instead?
• If Saddam Hussein was the principal threat, why was an enormous and hugely expensive Homeland Security apparatus constructed to defend against an ongoing threat from al-Qaeda?
One question went right to the heart of the American political process:
• If George W. Bush and his team were so egregiously wrong on such a significant decision, and if they had deliberately distorted and exaggerated a virtually nonexistent threat from Saddam, and if American troops and innocent Iraqis had died or been maimed as a result, why were there no consequences for Bush and his team?
But one question touched on personal morality, and therefore had the potential to become a public-opinion-changing lightning rod: What was a guy who had apparently skipped out on military service, and ditched his National Guard service prematurely, doing sending thousands of National Guardsmen into combat in a foreign country for a war initiated through deception?
And why, after so many years, if Bush had fulfilled his military obligation as he was supposed to, was it so incredibly difficult to verify that seemingly simple fact?
The answer to these questions harkens back to the same skillful perception management and psy-ops that enabled the administration to sell the invasion in the first place. It also enabled W. to banish the ghosts of his own less-than-admirable past. The personal, it turned out, was political indeed.
The Guard—Again?
During the 2000 election, W.’s National Guard record did not catch on with the mainstream press despite the Boston Globe report that seemed to definitively establish that Bush had failed to show up for a year of service.45 The Gore campaign did not aggressively question Bush on the matter, perhaps because Gore himself was vulnerable for exaggerating the risks of his own service as a military journalist in Vietnam. Gore’s supporters repeatedly tried to raise the issue, but it never gained traction.
Several journalists did pursue the story, including Mary Mapes, a Dallas-based CBS News producer. In 1999, Mapes had to drop her inquiries into W.’s military service because of conflicting assignments. Five years later, however, her dogged pursuit of the Bush Gua
rd story would explode into an enormous scandal that changed the election, traumatized CBS News, and destroyed her career and that of her colleagues, including the anchorman Dan Rather.
Certainly, the Bush forces were keeping a wary eye on the issue, but by 2004 any potential storm seemed to have passed. The further W. got from TV reporter Jim Moore’s persistent questions in 1994 about his Guard service, and the more the damage control effort seemed to be working, the more casual he got about his “military problem.” In fact he became downright cocky. While governor, though he stayed away from Camp Mabry, he bragged about flying an F-102 jet while visiting a veterans’ cemetery. As president, speaking at a Veterans Day event at Arlington National Cemetery in 2003, Bush declared:
Every veteran has lived by a strict code of discipline. Every veteran understands the meaning of personal accountability and loyalty, and shared sacrifice. From the moment you repeated the oath to the day of your honorable discharge, your time belonged to America; your country came before all else.46
To many listeners, it sounded as though he was talking about himself.
But by 2004, as the president continued to order National Guard troops to Afghanistan and Iraq—men and women who, like himself, had assumed that Guard duty would not involve fighting abroad even in wartime—deep public doubts had set in. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction was becoming a huge problem. Tough questions threatened to dominate the campaign, and W.’s prospects were iffy at best. Moreover, the Democratic field included not one but two highly decorated war veterans, John Kerry and Wesley Clark. It would be a disaster if a majority of Americans were to conclude that Bush was a trigger-happy commander in chief who had plunged the United States into a cataclysmic and unnecessary war— after he himself had shirked his own service.
CHAPTER 22
Deflection for Reelection
FOR A TIME, THE ISSUE OF BUSH’S Guard service bubbled along mostly on the Internet and talk radio. But in January 2004, the filmmaker Michael Moore—a supporter of General Wesley Clark’s candidacy— called Bush a “deserter” at a rally of more than thousand people outside Concord, New Hampshire.
On February 1, matters escalated further when the chairman of the democratic National Committee, Terry McAuliffe, appeared on a Sunday chat show and accused Bush of being AWOL. His counterpart at the Republican National Committee, Ed Gillespie, quickly called the comments “slanderous” in an interview with the New York Times.1
“President Bush served honorably in the National Guard,” Mr. Gillespie said in a telephone interview. “He was never AWOL. To make an accusation like that on national television with no basis in fact is despicable.”
Soon, the matter had exploded into a full-scale crisis—so grave that Bush, who hardly ever gave media interviews, went on NBC’s Meet the Press to insist again that he had served in Alabama.2
TIM RUSSERT: The Boston Globe and the Associated Press have gone through some of the records and said there’s no evidence that you reported to duty in Alabama during the summer and fall of 1972.
BUSH: Yeah, they’re—they’re just wrong. There may be no evidence, but I did report; otherwise, I wouldn’t have been honorably discharged. In other words, you don’t just say “I did something” without there being verification. Military doesn’t work that way. I got an honorable discharge, and I did show up in Alabama.
W.’s service record was a justifiable line of inquiry. He had included it in his campaign biography, and he invoked the military imagery whenever it was opportune. More, he was sending the current generation of Guardsmen off to Iraq, where the risk of injury or death was great. For the Bush forces, exposure was a fundamental threat. Any new revelations regarding the candidate’s own record could be devastating, especially in crucial swing states such as Florida, chock ablock with military personnel past and present. Bush was counting on those votes in what looked to be another tight election.
And the stakes were higher still: Abandoning military service is a felony with no statute of limitations. Punishment is at the discretion of the soldier’s commander, and can range from a mild “rehabilitation” to more severe penalties, especially in wartime.3
A Masterpiece of Spin
Anybody who had watched the Bush team in action knew how it would respond: a fierce defense, followed by a rapid reversion to attack mode. It moved quickly to suppress the Guard story, and then to destroy the messengers. Then it seized the offensive and raised doubts about Kerry’s service as a soldier in Vietnam. It was a staggering display of chutzpah, and like a refresher course in Psy-Ops 101.
The first part—diverting inquiry into Bush’s missing two years of National Guard duty—was particularly challenging. But the Bush team was primed for challenges.
No sooner had McAuliffe fired his “AWOL” salvo than the White House communications apparatus swung into action. It tried to overwhelm the media by dumping large quantities of military records, usually on short notice. Many of these records turned out to be duplicates of previous releases from 2000; sometimes there were multiple copies within a single set. In some cases, journalists were allowed to look at documents but not make copies. The Bush team understood media time pressures and overburdened reporters, and leveraged those liabilities to its advantage.
The White House also depended on friendly journalists to ask safe questions and run out the clock. There was punishment and virtual exile from Republican campaign sources for those who demanded answers.
Meanwhile, stonewalling was the order of the day. Suddenly, military offices of all types, used to routinely responding to reporters’ requests, were indicating that their hands were tied. In general, all inquiries to military offices were redirected, without explanation, to the Pentagon, starting in mid-February. “If it has to do with George W. Bush, the Texas Air National Guard or the Vietnam War, I can’t talk with you,” Charles Gross, chief historian for the National Guard Bureau in Washington, D.C., told reporters from the Spokane, Washington, Spokesman-Review.4
None of this erased the fundamental dilemma. There were abundant indications that in May 1972, when he abruptly left Houston for Alabama, the future president and commander in chief had simply walked away from his National Guard duty during the Vietnam War. No amount of equivocation could get around that. Neither could an honorable discharge received in 1973 explain why the sole evidence that he had actually shown up anywhere after May 1972 was a machine-generated form listing dates and points earned. The fact was, his own officers had not seen him in Texas, and no credible documentation or witnesses emerged in Alabama.
A related issue was his failure to continue piloting a military jet for the full six-year period of his contract. Though he was supposed to serve as a pilot through 1974, Bush’s last time in a cockpit was in April 1972. The Bush White House explained that W. had stopped flying because to continue he would have needed to take an annual flight physical. It was almost laughable, but surprisingly effective in obscuring the central point: Bush had simply left his Houston unit without taking the required physical. He just hadn’t bothered; and so it was his own action—or rather inaction—that had led to the end of his flying career. On that basis alone, he was essentially AWOL. Bush had made an effort to join a postal unit in the Alabama Guard. When he was rejected as “ineligible,” he got permission to join a flying unit in which he would not be required to fly—where, as best as can be determined, he never even bothered to show up.
In short, Bush abruptly stopped flying, walked away from his unit, failed to take a physical, and, all credible evidence indicates, never again put in a day of service. This, as we have seen, became a problem three decades later. In 2003, Bush was ordering thousands of National Guardsmen into battle in Iraq and Afghanistan—including large numbers from Texas. Few of these part-timers had ever expected to see combat abroad, just as W. himself hadn’t. Many of them felt poorly prepared.5 In interviews, they said that they had had only a few weeks of specialized training and that they had begged for more, in va
in. In addition, they complained about inadequate equipment and vehicle armor. One Guard soldier described how his unit lacked even a basic handbook on tactical procedures, much less any briefing on the complicated social fabric of Iraq. In other words, they were sitting ducks.
During this period, the published lists of military casualties in Iraq frequently included Guardsmen. And here was evidence that their commander in chief, the one who had ordered them to duty, had apparently skipped out when it had been his turn to serve, even though it was a cushy assignment that involved practically no physical danger.
REGARDING BUSH’S FAILURE to take his flight physical in 1972, his political handlers presented an array of inadequate and conflicting explanations. During the 2000 presidential campaign, a spokesman stated that Bush did not take the exam prior to his birthday in July 1972 as required because he was in Alabama at the time while his personal physician was back in Texas. That answer was misleading at best. Only authorized flight surgeons could perform the physical, and such surgeons were certainly available in Alabama. And if Bush believed that any doctor could perform the physical— i.e., not just his personal one—why didn’t he simply go to a doctor in Alabama?
