In the 1989 movie
Roger and Me, filmmaker Michael Moore travels home to
Michigan to confront General Motors Chairman Roger Smith about what
job-exporting GM is doing to the town of Flint. I recently had a
''Douglas and Me'' moment, with a real-life member of the Project
for a New American Century.
It came on the second day of a three-day seminar at the
University of Maryland for editorial writers and columnists on U.S.
progress in the war on terror. We traveled to the Pentagon, where
one of our briefings was with Undersecretary of Defense for Policy
Douglas Feith, one of the neoconservatives whispering in President
Bush's ear.
Feith wrote the infamous Senate Intelligence Committee memo
dredging up the discredited ''Atta in Prague'' theory of Saddam
Hussein's supposed links to al-Qaida. I wanted to ask him whether
Pat Buchanan had it right earlier this year when he said the Project
members and their fellow travelers, including Vice President Dick
Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz, and Bush administration advisor Richard Perle, had,
after Sept. 11, 2001, served the president a ''pre-cooked meal''
involving the invasion of Iraq, with the attacks serving as a
pretext to launch a war they had been pushing since the
mid-1990s.
Recently, President Bush said he approved the operation to depose
Hussein, because he ``will never forget the lessons of September the
11th, 2001. Terrorists attacked us. They killed thousands of our
fellow citizens. And it could happen again. And therefore I will
deal with threats, threats that are emerging and real.''
By ''threats'' he meant Saddam Hussein -- the guy the U.S. Army
just pulled out of a hole in the ground. For flourish, Bush added
that creating ``a free and peaceful Iraq is part of protecting
America.''
But since the administration launched the war based on weapons of
mass destruction, not ''freedom and peace,'' shouldn't they have to
explain how Iraq threatened us, even amid the afterglow of capturing
the former Iraqi dictator?
Little evidence
After all, Hussein didn't attack us on Sept. 11 -- al Qaeda did.
He apparently had no remaining WMD, and no nuclear capability.
During the seminar, none of the experts -- including Lawrence Korb,
a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, Feith and Under
Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Gambone -- could
describe a link between Iraq and global terror.
The only evidence cited -- by Deputy Director for the War on
Terror, Brig. General Vincent Brooks -- were Hussein's $25,000
payouts to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, whose target
is the Israeli occupation, not the U.S., or the ``West.''
In fact, one former intelligence official said flatly that Iraq
has nothing to do with the war on terror.
And yet the linkage between Sept. 11 and Iraq keeps coming
up.
Dismissal
So I asked Feith about the ''pre-cooked meal'' theory.
He dismissed it, saying ''lots of people'' were thinking about
the Iraq threat before Sept. 11, including (drum roll) Bill Clinton.
He then went right back to the Saddam=Sept. 11 playbook, saying that
after the attacks, the administration focused on the nexus between
terrorists' ''grand goal of bringing down the United States,'' and
their state sponsors (who also happen to be WMD proliferators). It
was, ''either change the way we live, or change the way the
terrorists live.'' Unfortunately, Iraq hasn't proved to be much of a
proliferator, and if Saddam had a grand plan to bring down the U.S.,
it didn't do him much good inside that spider hole.
But we have changed the way the terrorists live. They used
to live in Afghanistan, now they live in Iraq.
Roger, I think I found the linkage.
Joy-Ann Reid is an online news editor and freelance
writer.
