The misinformation about Iraq By Mike Carlton December 6, 2003
With the war in Iraq growing ever more disastrous, George Bush's cheerleaders in the Australian media have dutifully trooped into line to spread the latest misinformation. They have seized on a leaked memo from a Pentagon official which claims, fancifully, that Saddam Hussein was as thick as thieves with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
The memo was published in The Weekly Standard, respectfully described by Piers Akerman in The Daily Telegraph as "an influential Washington news magazine". In The Australian Financial Review on Tuesday, Professor David Flint pontificated that the Standard's "revelation does not fit the 'facts' that have been propagated by many who opposed the intervention".
Ahem. The daring duo has omitted some salient points. The Weekly Standard is actually a propaganda rag largely funded by Rupert Murdoch for the Project For The New American Century, an arch-conservative Washington lobby group. The leaked memo was written by the No.3 honcho in the Pentagon, Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defence for policy and notorious in Washington as a frenetic Zionist and one-time confidential adviser to the hard-right former Israeli prime minister Bibi Netanyahu.
The Pentagon has since officially dismissed the Standard's report as "inaccurate" and said the memo was "not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions".
And to say the least, Feith is an unreliable figure. He has been a fierce opponent of both the Oslo peace process and the Camp David accords. Since at least 1996 - long before the 9/11 World Trade Centre atrocity - he has urged the overthrow of Saddam to secure Israel's future. He was specifically charged with hyping the "intelligence" on those weapons of mass destruction and with planning for "postwar" Iraq in which, he believed, democracy and Middle East peace (and fat contracts for US business) would flower instantly from the rubble.
Feith is now in big trouble. He was right about the contracts but, as events have shown, glaringly wrong about everything else. There were no WMDs ; democracy in Iraq is a distant chimera ; the fighting grows every day more lethal. And the senior US commander, General John Abizaid, conceded recently that the guerilla war is being waged by Saddam loyalists and disaffected Sunni Muslims, not by al-Qaeda terrorists.
The well-informed mainstream media in the US report that Feith is now mounting a desperate rearguard action to avoid being set up as the fall guy for the Bush Administration's failings in Iraq. You can see how and why. AFTER 40 years in journalism, man and boy, there is nothing much about media proprietors that surprises me. Many are quite mad. One I worked for in London absconded to Israel owing £37 million to Westminster Council ratepayers.
And, blow me down, the Herald has asked me to continue this column next year. This is my last for 2003. My thanks, and a happy holiday to you.
