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Sandman
 
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Default "1984" all over again

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/06/opinion/06KRUG.html

Get Me Rewrite!
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: February 6, 2004

Right now America is going through an Orwellian moment. On both the foreign
policy and the fiscal fronts, the Bush administration is trying to rewrite
history, to explain away its current embarrassments.

Let's start with the case of the missing W.M.D. Do you remember when the
C.I.A. was reviled by hawks because its analysts were reluctant to present a
sufficiently alarming picture of the Iraqi threat? Your memories are no
longer operative. On or about last Saturday, history was revised: see, it's
the C.I.A.'s fault that the threat was overstated. Given its warnings, the
administration had no choice but to invade.

A tip from Joshua Marshall, of www.talkingpointsmemo.com, led me to a stark
reminder of how different the story line used to be. Last year Laurie
Mylroie published a book titled "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the C.I.A. and
the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror." Ms. Mylroie's book
came with an encomium from Richard Perle; she's known to be close to Paul
Wolfowitz and to Dick Cheney's chief of staff. According to the jacket copy,
"Mylroie describes how the C.I.A. and the State Department have
systematically discredited critical intelligence about Saddam's regime,
including indisputable evidence of its possession of weapons of mass
destruction."

Currently serving intelligence officials may deny that they faced any
pressure - after what happened to Valerie Plame, what would you do in their
place? - but former officials tell a different story. The latest revelation
is from Britain. Brian Jones, who was the Ministry of Defense's top W.M.D.
analyst when Tony Blair assembled his case for war, says that the crucial
dossier used to make that case didn't reflect the views of the
professionals: "The expert intelligence experts of the D.I.S. [Defense
Intelligence Staff] were overruled." All the experts agreed that the
dossier's claims should have been "carefully caveated"; they weren't.

And don't forget the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, created
specifically to offer a more alarming picture of the Iraq threat than the
intelligence professionals were willing to provide.

Can all these awkward facts be whited out of the historical record?
Probably. Almost surely, President Bush's handpicked "independent"
commission won't investigate the Office of Special Plans. Like Lord Hutton
in Britain - who chose to disregard Mr. Jones's testimony - it will brush
aside evidence that intelligence professionals were pressured. It will focus
only on intelligence mistakes, not on the fact that the experts, while
wrong, weren't nearly wrong enough to satisfy their political masters.
(Among those mentioned as possible members of the commission is James
Woolsey, who wrote one of the blurbs for Ms. Mylroie's book.)

And if top political figures have their way, there will be further rewriting
to come. You may remember that Saddam gave in to U.N. demands that he allow
inspectors to roam Iraq, looking for banned weapons. But your memories may
soon be invalid. Recently Mr. Bush said that war had been justified because
Saddam "did not let us in." And this claim was repeated by Senator Pat
Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Why on earth didn't
[Saddam] let the inspectors in and avoid the war?"

Now let's turn to the administration's other big embarrassment, the budget
deficit.

The fiscal 2005 budget report admits that this year's expected $521 billion
deficit belies the rosy forecasts of 2001. But the report offers an
explanation: stuff happens. "Today's budget deficits are the unavoidable
result of the revenue erosion from the stock market collapse that began in
early 2000, an economy recovering from recession and a nation confronting
serious security threats." Sure, the administration was wrong - but so was
everyone.

The trouble is that accepting that excuse requires forgetting a lot of
recent history. By February 2002, when the administration released its
fiscal 2003 budget, all of the bad news - the bursting of the bubble, the
recession, and, yes, 9/11 - had already happened. Yet that budget projected
only a $14 billion deficit this year, and a return to surpluses next year.
Why did that forecast turn out so wrong? Because administration officials
fudged the facts, as usual.

I'd like to think that the administration's crass efforts to rewrite history
will backfire, that the media and the informed public won't let officials
get away with this. Have we finally had enough?


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