Workers Vanguard No. 856	14 October 2005

Down With U.S. Occupation of Iraq!

Big Lies and Imperialist War

Judith Miller and Bush Disinformation

OCTOBER 7—New York Times reporter Judith Miller walked out of prison last week after being held for nearly three months for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. The entire time, her bosses at the Times portrayed Miller as a martyr in the cause of the “free press.” But in fact, Miller was freed because she had promised that she would immediately testify before the grand jury.

Many liberals and leftists took up Miller’s cause on the ground of freedom of the press. But what the Miller affair is about is not such a First Amendment right. It is about the U.S. government lies of Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” that were a pretext for the bloody U.S. war and occupation of Iraq, which Miller and the Times shamelessly purveyed.

It is today a commonplace that George Bush and his cronies are contemptible liars on a vast scale. From the myth that Saddam Hussein worked hand in glove with Al Qaeda in carrying out the criminal World Trade Center attack to the bankrupt assertion that Iraq possessed stockpiles of “weapons of mass destruction” and the fantastic notion that it was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons—no falsification was too outrageous for these cynics and their lackeys in the capitalist press if it could serve the purpose of preparing the U.S. population for the war. George Bush probably never read Mein Kampf, but he clearly would appreciate Hitler’s explanation that the “big lie” can be so effective because, for the common folk, “it would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Democratic Party politicians complain about how they were duped by Bush into supporting the war. But the administration’s fabrications were transparent as the war was approaching. It was the Democratic Clinton administration that paved the way for the Iraq war through eight years of bombing attacks and a starvation embargo. And the Democratic Party—the other party of U.S. imperialism—largely voted to grant Bush a blank check to wage war against Iraq. But then the imperialist occupation got into deep trouble. Last year, the John Kerry campaign argued that the Democrats could carry out the occupation in a more “responsible” way by looking for more support from other imperialist powers as well as the UN and deploying more troops to Iraq. Today the Democrats, even as they continue to vote for funding measures for the occupation, smell opportunities over the mounting troubles of the Bush administration: popular outrage over its handling of the Gulf Coast disaster; financial scandals embroiling Tom DeLay and other leading Republicans; the Plame investigation that has spread to Karl Rove and other key administration figures.

In a transparent attempt to divert attention from these problems, and from his plummeting poll figures, Bush stirred the pot of the “war on terror” in a major speech on October 6. The same day, New York City imposed a “terror alert” in the subway system. Typically, Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid responded to Bush’s speech by saying that “the administration’s mishandling of the war in Iraq has made us less safe.” This is the standard complaint raised by the Democrats over Bush’s Iraq policy: that it has encouraged “terrorists” as well as diverted resources away from the “war on terror.” The repressive measures enacted after the September 11 terror attacks are the government’s attempt to carry out a qualitative diminution of democratic rights, aimed not only at immigrants but at black people and the working class as a whole.

Iraq today threatens to completely unravel under the bloody U.S. occupation. More than 4,000 civilians have been killed in Baghdad alone since April. The number of American dead in Iraq is closing in on 2,000. With the approach of the October 15 “referendum” on the Iraqi constitution, the daily toll of car bombings and other deadly attacks is increasing, as is the terror campaign carried out by U.S. forces in predominantly Sunni areas. Illustrating the farcical nature of the “referendum,” earlier this week the provisional Iraqi parliament rewrote the rules to make it all but impossible for the Sunni population, whose interests the document makes decidedly secondary to those of the Shi’ites and Kurds, to vote it down. The move was quickly scuttled as U.S. and UN officials worried that it would blow up in the face of the U.S. and its Iraqi puppets. Meanwhile, occupation authorities are preparing the show trial of Saddam Hussein. Rest assured that his rise to power through the killing of Iraqi Communists and his collaboration with Donald Rumsfeld during the Reagan administration will not be among the evidence used against him.

Such is the “democracy” that the American imperialist state, already a prison house for the black population at home, declares it has brought to Iraq. One reason that liberal politicians and newspapers such as the New York Times are today more openly critical of the Bush administration is that the Iraq debacle and the revelations of torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and other U.S. military prison camps are undermining the global “war on terror” by shredding the notion that Washington is pursuing “democracy” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the Spartacist League took a side for the military defense of these countries against imperialist attack. At the same time, we stood in irreconcilable political opposition to the reactionary Afghan Taliban and the capitalist regime of Saddam Hussein, both former allies of U.S. imperialism. We demand the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Insofar as fighters in Iraq aim their blows against the imperialist occupiers and their Iraqi security forces, we call for their military defense against U.S. imperialism. However, we vehemently oppose the fundamentalism, indiscriminate terror and communal violence as the opposite of everything we Marxists stand for.

Growing opposition in the U.S. population to the Iraq occupation, revulsion over the government’s role in the death and destruction of black people and the poor after Hurricane Katrina, anger at the attacks on fundamental democratic rights —the situation speaks to the burning need to build a workers party that would organize class struggle against the U.S. capitalist rulers. The fight against imperialist war cannot be separated from the struggle against the capitalist system that breeds such war. Only when the multiracial proletariat seizes power from the blood-drenched, arrogant capitalist rulers can we begin to speak of a world rid of imperialist wars and occupations and offering material security and social justice for all.

War Lies and More Lies

Deceit, manipulation and cynical “spin” are not the bailiwick of a handful of especially venal politicians; they are part of the normal workings of a political system whose purpose is to protect the profits and rule of a tiny class of exploiters from the masses of the population they exploit and oppress. Describing how the bourgeoisie conducts its foreign policy, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin noted in his 1918 polemic The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky: “In no bourgeois state, not even in the most democratic, is it conducted openly. The people are deceived everywhere, and in democratic France, Switzerland, America and Britain this is done on an incomparably wider scale and in an incomparably subtler manner than in other countries.”

Daniel Ellsberg’s autobiographical Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002) provides a fascinating insider’s account of the endless lies manufactured by the government to conceal its aims from the populace, especially when it comes to waging war. Ellsberg recalls how, shortly after he took a job under Defense Secretary Robert McNamara during the Vietnam War, he received an urgent telephone call: “A Blue Springs drone has gone down in China. Bob is seeing the press at eight-thirty. We have ten minutes to write six alternative lies for him.”

Repulsed by the horrible crimes carried out by the U.S. in Vietnam, Ellsberg in 1971 courageously made public a trove of secret documents, dubbed the Pentagon Papers, documenting over two decades of government lies and cover-ups. From his first day on the job in 1964, Ellsberg witnessed how Democratic president Lyndon Johnson fabricated out of whole cloth a phony “attack” on U.S. naval forces in the Gulf of Tonkin. This provided the pretext for a massive escalation in U.S. bombing and ground forces in Vietnam. Ellsberg recalls how on August 4 Johnson and McNamara

“informed the American public that the North Vietnamese, for the second time in two days, had attacked U.S. warships on ‘routine patrol in international waters’; that this was clearly a ‘deliberate’ pattern of ‘naked aggression’; that the evidence for the second attack, like the first, was ‘unequivocal’; that the attack had been ‘unprovoked’; and that the United States, by responding in order to deter any repetition, intended no wider war.

“By midnight on the fourth, or within a day or two, I knew that each one of these assurances was false.”

The method was classic: Before Hitler attacked Poland in 1939, he had SS troops dressed in Polish uniforms stage a fake attack on the then-German city of Gleiwitz. The Nazi blitzkrieg against Poland was then presented by Hitler as a “counterattack.”

Within three days of the Tonkin Gulf “incident,” Congress—including virtually every one of the Democrats who would later be prominent fixtures on reformist antiwar platforms—approved a resolution authorizing Johnson to “take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force” in Southeast Asia. Claiming that the fall of the U.S. puppet regime in South Vietnam would have a “domino effect,” leading to all Southeast Asia being swallowed up by Communist “totalitarianism,” the U.S. imperialists waged a counterrevolutionary war against the North Vietnamese deformed workers state and its allied National Liberation Front in South Vietnam. The imperialists sought to suppress the struggle of the workers and peasants both against colonial domination and for social revolution and even had plans to nuke North Vietnam, which could not be carried out for fear of Soviet nuclear retaliation. The war ended in a defeat for U.S. imperialism that, for a period, demonstrated to many Americans that this country’s rulers are neither good nor omnipotent. Furthermore, the Soviet degenerated workers state had been able to achieve rough nuclear parity with the U.S. These factors helped stay the hand of American imperialism from embarking on further military adventures.

We wrote about the government’s history of deception in the service of war in the July 2003 amici curiae brief issued by the Spartacist League and the Partisan Defense Committee on behalf of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who was seized as an “enemy combatant” at Chicago’s O’Hare airport in May 2002 and who remains in government custody without charges. As the brief stated:

“American history is replete with examples of outright fabrications and manipulation of truth used to coerce a reluctant populace to go to war and justify other military depredations. Americans marched into this country’s first imperialist slaughter, the 1898 Spanish-American War, under the blood-curdling call to ‘Remember the Maine,’ based on the fiction that the battleship Maine was blown up by an enemy mine. In truth the explosion was caused by a faulty construction design.”

The Hearst press played a forward role in mobilizing public support for that imperialist war. Less than two days after Spanish sailors had helped pull survivors from the sea, the New York Journal (17 February 1898) declared that the Maine “was split in two by an enemy’s secret infernal machine.”

U.S. entry into World War II was also prepared through government duplicity. In order to reverse isolationist sentiment, Democratic president Franklin D. Roosevelt deliberately provoked the Japanese into attacking U.S. military forces, thereby assuring U.S. imperialism’s entry into the war. Many historians believe that the administration knew the attack was coming and did nothing about it in order to make it that much easier to declare war. As part of a deluge of racist war propaganda, Time magazine described the U.S. response to Pearl Harbor as “Why, the yellow bastards!” The snooty New York Times chimed in after one battle to describe the enemy as “a beast which sometimes stands erect.”

At the close of the war, President Truman dropped two atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki despite knowledge that the Japanese were already trying to surrender. This was both an act of pure racist spite and an attempt to intimidate the Soviet Union and affect the postwar world order. Throughout the anti-Soviet Cold War, journalists for the New York Times and other major newspapers worked hand in glove with the CIA, passing information from pro-imperialist “dissidents” and others inside the Soviet bloc to Langley and Washington.

Truth and the Times

As the Pentagon Papers were being published by the New York Times in June 1971, Richard Nixon’s aide, H. R. Haldeman, told the president: “The implicit infallibility of presidents, which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt by this, because it shows that people do things the president wants to do even though it’s wrong” (Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets). One year later, Nixon was up to his neck in the Watergate affair, which was triggered when burglars under the president’s orders broke into the Democratic Party’s National Committee offices. With Democrats and even some Republicans clamoring for his head, Nixon resigned in August 1974 under the threat of impending impeachment.

Why did the same capitalist press that loyally parroted every lie uttered by the Bush White House about Iraq defy the president back then? Where did the Democrats, so supine in the face of Bush’s Iraq war, find the backbone to cross swords with Nixon? By the late 1960s the bourgeoisie was deeply split over the Vietnam War. A growing defeatist wing saw the war as a loser for U.S. imperialism and wanted to cut their losses. Nixon was also called to order because he had broken the unwritten rules of the game by using against the capitalist Democratic Party the sort of “dirty tricks” that the FBI had long employed against leftists and black militants.

In 1998, the Republican right spearheaded a drive to impeach Democratic president Clinton for a consensual sexual affair. The Democrats have raised no such calls in regard to Bush despite his record of murderous lies over Iraq. Even John Dean, who served as White House counsel during the Watergate affair, says Bush should be impeached for lying about Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. The capitalist rulers, Democrats included, generally do not tamper lightly with the imperial presidency. Moreover, there is broad agreement in the ruling class that to pull out of Iraq now would be an unacceptable sign of weakness and vulnerability. And whatever their feelings about particular provisions of the USA Patriot Act, Democrats are fundamentally at one with the Republicans on the “war on terror.”

George W. Bush certainly does not feel any more constrained by bourgeois legal and political norms than Nixon did. A case in point is the leaking of the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame. It is a violation of the bourgeoisie’s own rules to out their secret agents. The leak was retaliation by the administration for an op-ed piece by Joseph Wilson, former U.S. ambassador to Gabon and Plame’s husband, who blew out of the water Bush’s lies about a supposed Iraqi nuclear weapons program. Appearing in the New York Times (6 July 2003), the article revealed that in early 2002 Wilson had been sent by the CIA to Niger in an effort to verify Saddam Hussein’s attempt to obtain yellow-cake uranium. Upon his return, Wilson informed both the CIA and the State Department that there was no such attempt. Following Wilson’s piece, right-wing columnist Robert Novak revealed Plame’s identity.

As a result of the investigation into the source of that leak, Judith Miller was imprisoned for contempt of court for refusing to testify about her alleged contact with an administration official, now revealed to be I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff. Miller was and is a most unlikely standard-bearer for the notion of a free and independent press. Soon after the September 11 attacks, Miller began churning out stories about nuclear and chemical weapons sites in Iraq allegedly retailed by shadowy Iraqi defectors.

An 8 September 2002 New York Times article by Miller and Times military affairs correspondent Michael Gordon promoted the story that aluminum tubes procured by Iraq were intended for production of atomic bombs. What Miller and Gordon presented as undisputed fact was being debated even in U.S. intelligence agencies. In fact, the aluminum was used for rocket components. A 12 November 2002 Times article by Miller implied that Iraq was preparing to use nerve gas against U.S. troops. A Miller “exclusive” in the 3 December 2002 Times was headlined: “C.I.A. Hunts Iraq Tie to Soviet Smallpox.”

When the war began in March 2003, Miller was the only reporter embedded with the U.S. military’s Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Alpha, whose mission was to find evidence of WMDs. Miller flaunted her connections to the military brass and Bush administration, and in one incident forced the reversal of an Army commander’s order withdrawing the unit from the field. In April, she told the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer that MET Alpha had found “more than a ‘smoking gun’... what they found is a silver bullet,” an Iraqi scientist who claimed firsthand knowledge of chemical and biological weapons. Miller further claimed that they had found “building blocks of what you would need to put together a chemical or a biological weapon.”

After it was clear to all that this was a pack of lies, the 26 May 2004 Times ran a major statement from the editors claiming that “editors at several levels” were not sufficiently skeptical of tales provided by “Iraqi defectors,” thus providing fall guys for Gordon and Miller (who is not even mentioned in the Times’s “confession”). Miller and her superiors at the Times no doubt saw her imprisonment as a way to refurbish their tarnished credentials. But even the deal she cut with federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that got her out of jail is raising some eyebrows. Miller was made to testify only about her discussions with Libby to the grand jury investigating the leaks about Valerie Plame. Miller, however, never even wrote about Plame. As Russ Hoyle, a former senior editor at Time and the New York Daily News, wrote in a 2 October online article, “Whose Skin Is Judith Miller Really Trying to Save?”:

“The chattering classes so far have completely ignored the possibility that what Miller is so determined to protect may have nothing to do with the Plame case.

“It may, however, have plenty to do with I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby…whom Miller met with on July 8, 2003 and spoke with at least once more that week, along with other unnamed officials, after her return from Iraq and the unsuccessful U.S. search for Saddam’s weapons. And it may have everything to do with protecting the White House officials who leaked classified intelligence—not about Valerie Plame to Robert Novak in the summer of 2003—but to Miller herself about Iraq’s allegedly reconstituted nuclear weapons program in September 2002” (emphasis added).

Democratic Rights and the Working Class

Among the leftists who took up Miller’s cause was the Internationalist Group which, while noting her role as “a conduit for official disinformation,” headlined its article “Free Judith Miller!” and called her jailing “an ominous attempt to throttle the press” (Internationalist, July 2005).

Certainly, the Bush administration, obsessed with shaping the President’s image as something grander than that of a bungling idiot, has tried fiercely to stamp out critical commentary in the mainstream media. When Newsweek reported that military guards at Guantánamo had sought to degrade Muslim prisoners by flushing a Koran down the toilet, government arm-twisting forced a retraction. Soon after, the Pentagon’s own report on Guantánamo showed that desecration of the Koran is standard operating procedure, including an incident in which a guard urinated on a prisoner’s Koran. Meanwhile, the capitalist media, by kowtowing to their White House masters with apologies for occasionally leaking a bit of truth, help chill free speech and assist the government’s assault on civil liberties and the right to dissent.

Marxists are intransigent defenders of democratic rights. However, the solidarity-with-Miller brouhaha turns the question of free speech and the public’s right to be informed totally on its head. Judith Miller is no Daniel Ellsberg. This is not a case of the press being harassed for exposing government lies—it is, in fact, the polar opposite. The “confidential source” protected by Miller was not some whistle-blower who needs protection from vindictive government higher-ups, but those selfsame higher-ups, the Bush administration.

As Marxists, we look at all issues, including questions of democratic rights, from a proletarian class standpoint—the standpoint of the interests of the working class in furthering the struggle for socialist revolution. The jailing of journalists has a chilling effect on free speech, but this is not the central issue in Miller’s case. Her right to not divulge her sources is decidedly secondary to the need for the fullest possible exposure of the Bush administration’s lies, which she duly retailed, that served as the pretext for the colonial war of occupation of Iraq. Such exposure aids in further tearing through the “national unity” hysteria whipped up after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The climate of unity against “terrorism”—unity extending from the Republicans and Democrats to the trade-union bureaucracy and civil liberties organizations—goes a long way to explaining the lack of struggle against Bush’s wholesale attacks on democratic rights and the labor movement.

Take the case of Wen Ho Lee, an American nuclear scientist originally from Taiwan who was subjected to a witchhunt and arrested in December 1999 on frame-up charges, castigated in the press as a possible spy for the People’s Republic of China. Lee eventually filed a civil suit claiming that Justice Department, FBI and Energy Department officials had leaked information about him and his family to the press when he was under investigation for allegedly spying for China. In August 2004, four reporters were held in contempt of court for refusing to name confidential sources for their articles on the case, which helped create a climate of hysteria around the supposed “Chinese spy.” Lee’s right to uncover the truth in his case outweighs the right of the journalists to maintain “confidentiality.”

Under bourgeois democracy, which is simply one, historically conditioned form of capitalist rule, democratic rights exist, in the first instance, for the benefit of the capitalists. The extension of democratic rights to the rest of the population, and in particular to the oppressed black masses, has required massive social and class struggle and even civil war. As we wrote in the Programmatic Statement of the Spartacist League/U.S. (“For Socialist Revolution in the Bastion of World Imperialism!”, November 2000):

“Despite the hypocritical preachings of ‘democracy for all,’ the only rights to which the bourgeoisie is unalterably committed are those which enforce its property relations—the right to hold private property, to own the basic means of production, to employ wage labor, etc. Those specifically proletarian rights which may exist under bourgeois democracy—like the right to picket, to strike, to organize unions—are wrested from the bourgeoisie and maintained only through the independent action of the proletariat. Even broader democratic rights (free speech and assembly, trial by a jury of one’s peers, etc.) are secured under capitalism, especially for working people and the oppressed, through social struggle and are eminently reversible in the absence of such struggle.”

The manifold discontents in this society need to be directed against the capitalist class enemy, with the social power of the multiracial proletariat mobilized on behalf of all the exploited and oppressed. For such a struggle to go forward to victory, it is necessary to forge a workers party to lead a socialist revolution that breaks the power of the bourgeoisie and establishes workers rule.

One of the first orders of business of a workers government would be to open the files of the former capitalist government and publicize the truth behind its lies and secrets to the world’s working people. This was precisely what the Soviet workers state under V. I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky did shortly after the Bolshevik Party led the working class to power in the October Revolution of 1917. The publication by the Bolsheviks of the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot treaty, in which the British and French imperialists conspired to carve up the Near East following World War I, had an electrifying effect across the region. This contributed to a series of national revolts and popular uprisings triggered by the Bolshevik Revolution in the broad swath then occupied by British forces from Egypt to Iran. In 1919, the Soviet government made public and annulled the secret treaties imposed by the tsarist regime on China and renounced Russian claims in Manchuria. This helped further the anti-imperialist May Fourth Movement, out of which came a number of those who would form the Chinese Communist Party.

In his 1938 pamphlet “Their Morals and Ours,” Trotsky wrote of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party: “Wherever it could, it, of course, deceived the class enemies; on the other hand it told the toilers the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Only thanks to this did it succeed in winning their trust to a degree never before achieved by any other party in the world.” Telling the toilers the truth was and is key to advancing revolutionary consciousness in the proletariat, whose historic destiny is to be the gravedigger of the capitalist system of exploitation, oppression and imperialist war.