One of the nation’s leading pollsters, Andrew Kohut of the Pew
Research Center, wrote a few weeks ago that among Americans “there is
little potential support for the use of force against Iran.” This month
the White House has continued to emphasize that it is committed to seeking
a diplomatic solution. Yet the U.S. government is very likely to launch a
military attack on Iran within the next year. How can that be?
In the run-up to war, appearances are often deceiving. Official
events may seem to be moving in one direction while policymakers are
actually headed in another. On their own timetable, White House
strategists implement a siege of public opinion that relies on escalating
media spin. One administration after another has gone through the motions
of staying on a diplomatic track while laying down flagstones on a path to
war.
Several days ago President Bush said that “the doctrine of prevention
is to work together to prevent the Iranians from having a nuclear
weapon” -- and he quickly added that “in this case, it means diplomacy.”
On April 12 the Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, urged the U.N.
Security Council to take “strong steps” in response to Iran’s announcement
of progress toward enriching uranium. Bush and Rice were engaged in a
timeworn ritual that involves playacting diplomacy before taking military
action.
Seven years ago, President Clinton proclaimed that a U.S.-led NATO
air war on Yugoslavia was starting because all peaceful avenues for
dealing with the Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, had reached dead
ends. The Clinton administration and the major U.S. media outlets failed
to mention that Washington had handed Milosevic a poison-pill ultimatum in
the fine print of the proposed Rambouillet accords -- with Appendix B
stipulating that NATO troops would have nearly unlimited run of the entire
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
Recent decades of American history are filled with such faux
statesmanship: greasing the media wheels and political machinery for
military interventions in Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Central America
and the Middle East. But the current administration’s eagerness to use
“diplomacy” as a prop for going to war has been unusually brazen.
On Jan. 31, 2003 -- five days before the ballyhooed speech by
then-Secretary of State Colin Powell to the U.N. Security Council -- the
president held a private Oval Office meeting with Tony Blair. Summing up
the discussion, which occurred nearly two months before the invasion of
Iraq, the British prime minister’s chief foreign policy adviser David
Manning noted in a memo: “Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged
around the military planning.” Meanwhile, President Bush and his top aides
were still telling the public that they were pursuing all diplomatic
channels in hopes of preventing war.
Pundits have often advised presidents to use diplomatic maneuvers as
virtual shams in order to legitimize the coming warfare. Charles
Krauthammer blew his stack in mid-November 1998 when U.N. Secretary
General Kofi Annan seemed to make progress in averting a U.S. missile
strike against Iraq. “It is perfectly fine for an American president to
mouth the usual pieties about international consensus and some such,”
Krauthammer wrote in Time magazine. “But when he starts believing them, he
turns the Oval Office over to Kofi Annan and friends.”
In late summer 2002, with momentum quickening toward an Iraq
invasion, Newsweek foreign affairs columnist Fareed Zakaria urged the Bush
administration to recognize the public-relations value of allowing U.N.
weapons inspectors to spend some time in Iraq. “Even if the inspections do
not produce the perfect crisis,” he wrote optimistically, “Washington will
still be better off for having tried because it would be seen to have made
every effort to avoid war.”
When reality can’t hold a candle to perception, then reality is apt
to become imperceptible. And in matters of war and peace, when powerful
policy wonks in Washington effectively strive for appearances to be
deceiving, the result is a pantomime of diplomacy that’s scarcely like the
real thing. When the actual goal is war, the PR task is to make a show of
leaving no diplomatic stone unturned.
That kind of macabre ritual was underway on April 10 when the White
House press secretary, Scott McClellan, told reporters: “The president has
made it very clear that we’re working with the international community to
find a diplomatic solution when it comes to the Iranian regime and its
pursuit of nuclear weapons.” The quote appeared the next morning in a New
York Times news article under a headline that must have pleased the war
planners at the White House: “Bush Insists on Diplomacy in Confronting a
Nuclear Iran.”
Ambrose Bierce defined diplomacy as “the patriotic act of lying for
one’s country.” But there is nothing less patriotic than lying to one’s
country -- especially when the result is a war that could have been
avoided if honesty had substituted for mendacity.
__________________________
Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy
(
www.accuracy.org) and author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and
Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” (
www.warmadeeasy.com).
