Whose War Is It?

Changcho links in the comments to ex-CIA agent Ray McGovern's interview by Amy Goodman. There are many sharp points in transcript, and George Tenet has impaled himself on many of them.

The question that interests me the most, though, is why the heck we got into that war in the first place. George Bush is obviously the key, and I will come back to that in a future post, but why did he have so many eager enablers? One hint comes from this part where McGovern takes a few chunks out of a couple of Democratic Senators:

RAY McGOVERN: I think people like Dick Durbin have to change their whole mindset and realize that they are not a subservient branch of government. You know, I’m a Virginian, and I think George Mason and James Madison and Tom Jefferson of rolling over in their grave. Here’s Durbin saying, “I knew that the war was going to be fought on false pretenses, but I was sworn to secrecy.” Well, he was sworn to defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, both foreign and domestic. And that’s what he ought to have done. Classification is to protect sources and methods. It’s not to protect presidents, OK? And so, he should have come out and said, “Look, this is not what I’m hearing in the Intelligence Committee. Hold the presses. We’re not going to go to war until I get satisfaction.” He didn’t do that.

Now they're -- well, now they’re in the majority. They were in the majority then in the Senate, and they didn’t stand up to it. Now, you have to stand up to it now, because this country needs this war to stop. I hope they have the guts to do it.

AMY GOODMAN: That issue that you raise of Senator Dick Durbin saying that he was angry about it, but “frankly, I couldn’t do much about it, because in the Intelligence Committee we are sworn to secrecy.” He was talking about being misled into the war. Durbin went on to say, “We can’t walk outside the door and say the statement made yesterday by the White House is in direct contradiction to classified information that is being given to this Congress.” Why can't he say precisely that?

RAY McGOVERN: Sure, he can. Sure, he can. And for several years now, the people in the House have been saying, “Well, we can’t do anything because we’re in the minority.” Well, in reflecting on this, I realize that when he did that or did not do that, the Democrats were in the majority in the Senate. And so, what I’m saying here is that they have to step up to their constitutional prerogatives, their constitutional responsibilities, and make sure that this war stops, because there is no justification for the surge or for the funding, other than to prevent the war from being definitively lost while George Bush and Dick Cheney are still in office. That’s what our men are dying for, our men and women are dying for now, and it’s unconscionable.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think should happen if the President does, indeed, as he promised, veto the bill that has been sent to him?

RAY McGOVERN: I think that the Democrats need to go back to the drawing board and impose rather strict structures in the next piece of legislation and not simply fold their tent like Arabs and silently steal away. The conventional wisdom was that if the first bill was rejected, then the Democrats would have to give the President what he wants. What really troubles me, Amy, is that people like Carl Levin have played into that, have said we will never refuse funding of the troops.

And trying to piece together why Carl Levin would undercut the Senate Majority Leader, I found out an interesting thing, Amy, and that is that Carl Levin gets more money from the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC than any other senator. Now, do I suggest that he’s doing this for the money? I think we have to give him the benefit of the doubt, because he’s one of the good guys, but certainly he appears to be one of those folks like the neocons who can’t see any daylight between what they perceive to be the strategic interest of Israel, on the one hand, and the strategic interests of the United States, on the other. And when Olmert and Livni, the foreign minister, come here to the AIPAC meeting four weeks ago and say, “Don’t show weakness on Iraq now. If you leave Iraq, that would make this area more dangerous for Israel -- well, and for the whole world and for yourselves, too,” -- my goodness, Amy, it’s very transparent. If Levin is one of those people that can’t see any daylight between our interests and those of Israel, well, he hasn’t read George Washington's farewell speech, which warned against precisely this: passionate attachments, entangling alliances. That’s what we’ve got, and that lies at the bottom of a lot of our troubles in the Middle East.

McGovern will no doubt be excoriated as an anti-Semite by the usual suspects for saying these things, but the fact is that a lot of support for the war came from those who were motivated by the thought of making Israel safer. That's a legitimate point of view, even for Americans, but it's not a legitimate point of view for an American politician if it makes America less safe.

I think that the Iraq war, like the Lebanese war, made both Israel and America less safe.