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Chapter from Achin Vanaik (Editor), Selling US Wars (Interlink Publishing, 2007)

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Chapter from Achin Vanaik (Editor), Selling US Wars (Interlink Publishing, 2007) Chapter from Achin Vanaik (editor), Selling US Wars (Interlink Publishing, 2007) The Empire of Fear Zia Mian Whatever they fear from you, you’ll be threatened with. —Seneca (Roman philosopher and statesman, 4 BCE–65 CE) In late February 2001, a year after President George W. Bush took office, his secretary of state, Colin Powell, spoke on the subject of Iraq and its military capabilities. Ten years had passed since the 1991 Gulf War, a decade marked by international inspections aimed at finding and destroying Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and missile programs, stringent sanctions that restricted its access to basic military equipment, as well as denying many vital civilian goods and so causing countless deaths and enormous suffering among Iraq’s people. Powell explained that the US believed Saddam Hussein’s regime “has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction,” and that Iraq’s leader was even “unable to project conventional power against his neighbors.”1 Powell was not alone in the assessment that there was no military danger from Iraq to its neighbors, or to the United States. In late summer of that year, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told CNN: “Let’s remember that his [Saddam’s] country is divided, in effect. He does not control the northern part of his country. We are able to keep his arms from him. His military forces have not been rebuilt.”2 Few would have disputed this judgment. But over the next two years, the Bush administration was able to convince many Americans that a desperate and broken Iraq was an imminent and mortal threat that could only be confronted by war. In this chapter, we look at how the fear of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) was used by the Bush administration to organize public support for its war on Iraq in 2003. We trace the sources for this policy toward Iraq and the pressure for a more militarized US foreign policy and the role played by key figures in the Bush administration who belonged to a hard-line conservative group calling itself the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). The media played a central role in the creation of public opinion in favor of a war on Iraq. We look to see what public understanding and misunderstanding of basic issues connected to the war against Iraq reveals about the media, and especially how misperceptions about the war are linked to watching television channels like Fox and CNN. The nuclear fears that moved the Bush administration and that it used to build public support for its war are widely shared, run deep, and have a long history. We look briefly at the way these have been expressed in American culture and have mobilized an anti- nuclear movement for the six decades since the atomic bomb was first invented and used by the United States to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Buy book at http://www.interlinkbooks.com/ Chapter from Achin Vanaik (editor), Selling US Wars (Interlink Publishing, 2007) Iraq was not the only instance of desperate US efforts to prevent another country from acquiring nuclear weapons. These efforts are as old as the bomb itself. We trace this history and then look at the case of Iran, the newest arena for US efforts to police the proliferation of nuclear weapons capabilities. President Bush has said the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran would be “intolerable,” and many hear echoes of the rhetoric used against Iraq before the war in 2003. At the same time, the threat of the use of nuclear weapons has become more serious as terrorist groups like al-Qaeda may now be seeking nuclear weapons. A broader assessment of US policy on nuclear weapons makes clear there is much more at stake than an effort simply to reduce and end the threat of nuclear weapons. The determination of the US leadership to keep and modernize American nuclear weapons, to allow chosen allies and friends to retain and develop these weapons, and to use sanctions and military force to prevent some states from even trying to acquire knowledge about these weapons is at the heart of American policy. We look in particular at the way the United States has been aiding the development of nuclear capability in India and Israel. We conclude by reflecting on the demands for the elimination of nuclear weapons and the kind of politics this might require. How the White House Set Out to “Educate the Public” According to Richard Clarke, then national coordinator for counterterrorism, at a cabinet meeting the day after the 9/11 attacks on the United States, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld talked about “getting Iraq,” arguing that there were “no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan” and proposed “we should consider bombing Iraq instead.” This suggestion was not rejected by President Bush, who “noted that what we needed to do with Iraq was to change the government, not just hit it with more cruise missiles.”3 The early positions within the government were described by a senior Bush administration official in an interview: Before September 11th, there wasn’t a consensus Administration view about Iraq… There were those who preferred regime change, and they were largely residing in the Pentagon, and probably in the Vice-president’s office… Then, in the immediate aftermath of the eleventh, not that much changed… Some initial attempts by [Deputy Secretary of Defense] Wolfowitz and others to draw Iraq in never went anywhere, because the link between Iraq and September 11th was, as far as we knew, nebulous at most—nonexistent, for all intents and purposes.4 President Bush’s speechwriters were asked at the end of 2001 to make a case for war against Iraq to be included in the forthcoming State of the Union Address.5 In the January 2002 speech, Bush declared that the US confronted an “axis of evil,” naming North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. North Korea and Iran received one sentence each in the speech; the real focus was Iraq.6 The problem, President Bush declared, was that “Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade.”7 He went on to say, “By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the Buy book at http://www.interlinkbooks.com/ Chapter from Achin Vanaik (editor), Selling US Wars (Interlink Publishing, 2007) means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States.” These arguments were to be repeated over the next year with ever greater force and detail. Vice President Dick Cheney returned from the Middle East and on March 24, 2002, appeared on three major Sunday public affairs television programs, bearing similar messages on each. On CNN’s Late Edition he offered the following comment on Saddam: “This is a man of great evil, as the president said. And he is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time.” On NBC’s Meet the Press he said, “[T]here’s good reason to believe that he continues to aggressively pursue the development of a nuclear weapon. Now will he have one in a year, five years? I can’t be that precise.” And on CBS’s Face the Nation: “The notion of a Saddam Hussein with his great oil wealth, with his inventory that he already has of biological and chemical weapons, that he might actually acquire a nuclear weapon is, I think, a frightening proposition for anybody who thinks about it.”8 A few months later, speaking at the United States Military Academy at West Point, President Bush made a more general point that revealed the real fears of the United States: When the spread of chemical and biological and nuclear weapons, along with ballistic missile technology—when that occurs, even weak states and small groups could attain a catastrophic power to strike great nations. Our enemies have declared this very intention, and have been caught seeking these terrible weapons. They want the capability to blackmail us, or to harm us, or to harm our friends.9 The reason why proliferation must be prevented, for President Bush and leaders before him, is that “even weak states and small groups could attain a catastrophic power to strike great nations.” Left unsaid here, of course, is that some “great nations,” most notably the United States, have long had the “catastrophic power” to destroy weak nations, and the goal is to keep it that way. The fear that the spread of WMDs and especially nuclear weapons might allow “weak states” to counter the ambitions and interests of “great nations” is almost as old as the atomic bomb. President’s Bush words echo an argument advanced 50 years ago in one of the earliest studies about how coming of the atomic bomb might affect international relations. It was argued that the atomic weapons were a grave danger to the United States not just because “regular rivals on the same level” might acquire these “absolute weapons” (as the Soviet Union and Britain had already done by then) but that “possibly some of the nations lower down in the power scale might get hold of atomic weapons and change the whole relationship of great and small states.”10 To prevent this has been an important goal of US policy, and that of the other nuclear weapons states as each has developed its weapons.
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