|
|
|
That Conniving Cabal of NeoCons Got Us Into War!
Review by William Dale*
A Pretext For War. By James Bamford. (New York: Doubleday, 2004. Pp. 419. $26.95 cloth.)
"The main arguments of this book are that the U.S. intelligence and defense organizations were totally unprepared to perceive or counteract the September attacks and that high officials in the Pentagon and other government offices worked together with conservative politicians in Israel to help drive the United States into war with Iraq."
Author James Bamford, formerly the Washington investigative producer for ABC's World News Tonight with Peter Jennings and author of two best-selling volumes about the National Security Agency, The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, has once again penned another controversial book, this time about 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He uses his extensive knowledge of U.S. intelligence agencies as a springboard for exploring two key questions: why the United States—with the largest and most expensive intelligence apparatus in the world—failed to predict or handle effectively the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, and why American forces attacked Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
The main arguments of this volume are that U.S. intelligence and defense organizations were totally unprepared to perceive or counteract the September attacks and that high officials in the Pentagon and other government offices worked together with conservative politicians in Israel to help drive Washington into war with Iraq. Bamford employs a painstaking investigative approach to prove his theses and he succeeds admirably in this fascinating, though controversial book.
To prove his argument, the author utilizes an unusually broad array of sources. These include transcripts of media news broadcasts, magazine articles, monographs, personal interviews with key actors, congressional testimony, and even transcripts of flight records. Bamford combines these sources to achieve a new angle on the events he describes and hence, produces a new understanding of them.
Writing almost as though he were creating a thriller, Bamford provides the reader with a real sense of anticipation as he leads us from horror to horror. He writes in an informal style and with great clarity and is careful to provide the background necessary to give each incident full meaning. The author divided his work into three main sections. First, he gives a detailed picture of what happened on September 11 and what led up to it. Then he traces how each key figure (including the president of whom Bamford is especially critical of that first day) reacted to the horrendous news of the attacks. Bamford describes the futile efforts of the U.S. Air Force to act, President Bush's flight westwards before returning to the White House, and the Director of Central Intelligence's ignorance of the attacks during the first crucial moments.
In the next section, the reader learns that the intelligence agencies had acquired a large amount of information, but lacked sufficient numbers of experts to translate and evaluate the material. Human intelligence was especially lacking in those regions of the world from whence the terrorists came. The reader is amazed to learn that "Alec Station," the special office the CIA established to deal with Osama Bin Laden, had dropped the ball completely. The second section also analyzes the terrorists' motivations and their activities, stressing the importance in their minds of U.S. support for Israel.
In the third section, Bamford picks apart Bush's Middle East foreign policy. He argues that the president was anxious from the very beginning of his term to get rid of Saddam Hussein, to extract Washington from its role as mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and rearrange the Middle East in such a way as to promote U.S. interests in the area.
The third portion of the book also traces the activities of the Neocons, mostly American friends of Israel, and conservative Israelis to nudge Washington into war with Baghdad. By the time of the present Bush administration, the Neocons were in an influential position with Paul Wolfowitz as Deputy Secretary of Defense, Richard Perle as Chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Douglas Feith as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and David Wurmser as the vice-president's expert on the Middle East. According to Bamford, they used their respective positions to manipulate the intelligence agencies so that it would appear that Iraq did possess weapons of mass destruction. Towards the end of the book, the author analyzes the strong connection between the Neocons and the conservative Sharon government in Israel. He describes the means used by the Israelis and the Bush administration to push the United States into a war on the pretext of weapons of mass destruction when in reality it was fought to reshape the Middle East. Finally, Bamford describes the administration's use of publicity to support the war.
Bamford certainly bit off a huge bite of foreign policy to cover in a single volume. Nevertheless, he succeeds brilliantly, providing the reader with new material and insights regarding the Bush administration's actions during the past four years.
October 5, 2004
Endnotes
Note *: Ambassador William N. Dale is a retired senior Foreign Service Officer whose lengthy career includes service on the staff of the National Security Council and the Department of State's Policy Planning Council. He has also served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Tel Aviv and U.S. Ambassador to the Central African Republic. He is past President and a continuing member of the Board of Directors' of American Diplomacy Publishers. A frequent contributor to American Diplomacy, he currently resides in Chapel Hill, NC. Back