Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (31 page)

All the way back to Parson Weems, presidents have been in some way fictionalized, but the modern presidency now takes place in the place where art is defined almost solely by commerce, and a place where the president is the only fungible product. In a way that would have shaken Madison down to the buckles on his shoes, the presidency became the government’s great gravitational source, around which every other part of the political culture orbited, and it became the face of government in the popular culture.

Actual presidents—and people who wanted to be the actual president—caught on quickly. The pursuit of the presidency is now a contest of narratives. Create your own and get it on the market fast, before someone—possibly your opponent, but probably the media—creates one for you. Poor Al Gore learned this lesson far too late. The successful narrative is judged only by how well it sells. Its essential truth becomes merely a byproduct. The Third Great Premise now dominates the marketplace of narratives, which is not necessarily the same as the marketplace of ideas. If enough people believe that Gore said he’d invented the Internet, or that George Bush is a cowboy, then those are facts, even though Gore never said it and Bush is afraid of horses. If people devoutly hate Gore for saying what he
never said, or profoundly like Bush for being what he isn’t, then that becomes the truth.

In 1960, Nixon had lost to the first thoroughly novelized presidency, that of John F. Kennedy. The New Frontier was a fairly conventional political narrative; nothing sells in America like the notion that we have to pick up ourselves and start anew. But, like William Kotzwinkle cobbling together E.T.’s libido, historians and journalists and other scribbling hangers-on fell all over themselves to fill in the elided details of the television photoplay. The idea of the cool and ironic Jack Kennedy, who used to run with the Rat Pack in Vegas, turning mushy over a piece of treacle like
Camelot
is on its face preposterous. But it sold well enough to define, in shorthand, everything from Pablo Casals playing in the East Room to the Cuban missile crisis, which was decidedly not a time for happy-ever-aftering.

The apotheosis of the modern novelized presidency was that of Ronald Reagan. He and his people created a remarkable and invulnerable narrative around him, so complete and whole that it managed to survive, relatively intact, until Reagan’s death in 2004, when what was celebrated in lachrymose detail was not his actual biography but what had been created out of it over the previous forty years. To mention his first marriage, to Jane Wyman, during the obsequies was not merely in bad taste, but seemed irrelevant, as though it had happened to someone else besides the deceased.

Reagan’s people maintained their basic story line even through the perilous comic opera of the Iran-Contra scandal. The country learned that Reagan had arranged to sell missiles to the people who sponsored anti-American terrorism in the Middle East, in order to finance pro-American terrorism in Latin America, and that on one occasion, he sent an important official to Teheran with a Bible and a cake. The country learned
this without laughing its beloved, befuddled chief executive out of office. Ol’ Dutch, what a card.

When Karl Rove (or whoever) talked to Ron Suskind about the contempt he felt for the “reality-based community,” and how his administration would create its own reality for the rest of us to study, he wasn’t saying anything groundbreaking. People in his job had been doing that for years. What he had was a monumental event to act upon. When September 11 happened, and it was clear that events moved whether people wanted them to or not, the country swung radically behind a president who, somehow, was not a part of “the government,” but a quasi-official king and father. It was said that irony died on September 11; but cynicism was what fell most loudly.

Suddenly, “the government” was us again. Of course, “the government” largely was defined as the president, whom we were accustomed to treat as our common property. Dan Rather told David Letterman that he would “line up” wherever George Bush told him to line up. This attitude of wounded deference obtained for nearly three years. The Iraq war happened because the people who’d wanted it all along were uniquely positioned to create a narrative about why it should happen, and seized the right moment for its release date.

In short, all the outside checks on what Paul Pillar saw within the government were gone. Events were becoming novelized, and the wrong people were filling in the elided details; the relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq, which didn’t exist in fact, existed within the prevailing narrative. The Iraqi nuclear program was an established threat, as real as Jack Kennedy’s love for the scores of Lerner and Loewe. Public opinion, which Madison said “sets bounds for every government,” was in no condition to set any limits whatsoever. It needed a narrative, and the people who were selling the war gave the country what
screenwriters call a through-line, from Ground Zero through Kabul to Baghdad.

“We are talking here about national moods,” says Paul Pillar. “And, of course, 9/11 was the big event here in suddenly bringing about a change in the national mood. It became far more belligerent, far more inclined to strike out somewhere, and so it was the perfect environment for something like going to war on automatic pilot in Iraq to work. Politically, it wouldn’t have been possible without 9/11 at all.

“We are talking about people who had a basis for thinking they were smarter than just about anyone else they met. So, sure, if we’re going to manipulate an issue like the weapons thing, or even distort things about the terrorist connections, if it helps bring about a result I believe with all my intellectual firepower is right for the country, then so be it. If there are a few misrepresentations along the line, that doesn’t matter.”

“THE
fact is,” Carl Ford, Jr., says, leaning across a round, cluttered table in an office in another part of Washington, “there were all kinds of opportunities to speak up. The fact was that—those people in CIA and in the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency]? I didn’t hear them, and there were plenty of opportunities for my analysts who were out there among them, just among the leaders like I was, and they didn’t hear [the CIA and DIA people speak up], either. The fact was we felt like we were just spitting into the wind.

“There were those like Paul Pillar who, if he talks about weapons of mass destruction, I said, ‘Paul, where were you?’ Because he was in a position where he could have spoken up. It’s not a case in which the intelligence community has a significant
impact and they want to cry about the fact that policymakers don’t listen to them. They want to say, ‘Well, I tried and they wouldn’t let me do it.’ Bullshit. The fact is that they couldn’t convince anyone that they were right simply because they were smart. Because that’s not the way the world works.”

Ford is an intelligence lifer. He’d worked at CIA and in the Pentagon. He was a good friend and a longtime admirer of Vice President Dick Cheney. As events moved toward war, Ford was working at the State Department as the director of its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). A short and fiery ex-Marine who served in Vietnam, Ford had a reputation of being a very hard sell, the kind of person who flourished in cold-shower briefings like the ones Richard Clarke recalled from his time at State, in which people who brought in badly researched reports or half-baked proposals found themselves leaving the meeting room through a meat grinder. Ford felt this intellectual rigor reverse itself when it came to Iraq. The facts were whatever was malleable enough to fit into a salable narrative. The truth was sent through the meat grinder.

“On the case of the internal Iraq issues,” recalls Ford, “the policymakers really didn’t listen at all. My point is that, if we had said, ‘There are no weapons of mass destruction,’ it might have slowed them down, but I don’t think it would have had any impact on most of the people who were deciding on the war. I think that it would have made it more difficult for them to sell that war. In fact, one of the things that disturbed me the most, that eventually led to my leaving, was the sort of view that, ‘Well, okay, but if we tell the people that, if we don’t focus on weapons of mass destruction, we might not be able to sell the war.’

“That’s what a democracy is all about. You haven’t got the evidence, even if you passionately believe that they [the Iraqis] have them [WMDs], then it’s up to you to make that case. But
there was a sense that they were so certain that it didn’t really matter.”

In his job at INR, Ford was intimately involved with one of the crucial elided details in the narrative that was concocted to justify the invasion of Iraq. And because this detail fit so perfectly into the story that was being developed, all the people developing the story believed it—or so effectively pretended they did that the difference hardly mattered. It became the source of a series of the noisiest subplots of the ongoing narrative, and it was a moment of utter fiction, a passage of the purest novelization.

A little more than a month after the September 11 attacks, the Italian intelligence service handed over to the CIA’s station in Rome a sheaf of documents that had been kicking around intelligence circles for a couple of years. They involved a visit by Iraqi officials to the African country of Niger, an impoverished nation planted atop some of the finest uranium in the world. The Italians passed the same documents to British and French intelligence, as well.

One of the documents was a letter, written in French, in which the president of Niger, Mamadou Tandja, offered to sell Saddam Hussein five hundred tons a year of uranium “yellowcake,” suitable, if enriched, for use in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. This letter was why the CIA dispatched a former diplomat named Joseph Wilson to Niger in February 2002. Wilson reported back that there seemed to be no basis for the story. Nevertheless, the letter later became the basis of the famous “sixteen words”—“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium in Africa”—in George W. Bush’s prewar 2003 State of the Union speech. Watching the speech today, it is striking how Bush reads the last two of those sixteen words. He drops
his voice to a lower register. He speaks … very … slowly. All that’s missing are some ominous minor chords from a movie-house pipe organ. There seem to be bats hanging on every syllable. The war was launched three months later.

“Remember,” Ford says, “the argument for years was whether or not they had reconstituted their nuclear program. That was the single most important issue and, when that changed, the time line changed. All of a sudden, you say they’ve reconstituted their nuclear weapons program, not only do they have chemical and biological weapons, but the clock has started on when they’re going to have nuclear weapons and, if we don’t do something, they are going to build one. But, before that, if they’re not reconstituting their nuclear program, you can’t argue that you need to go in there and kick their ass.”

In July 2002 Wilson published an op-ed in the
New York Times
reiterating what he’d earlier told the CIA—that, as far as he could determine, the transaction between Niger and Iraq was the purest moonshine. In retaliation, the White House political apparatus leaked the name of Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, who was a covert CIA operative working on issues of nuclear proliferation, to a series of Washington journalists. A lengthy investigation ensued, concluding with the conviction of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby for perjury. His sentence was then commuted by President Bush. His trial opened a window into the novelization of the process by which Idiot America had taken itself to war.

And the letter that helped start the war was a clumsy, obvious fake. Skeptics with a firsthand knowledge of Niger—such as Wilson—found the whole transaction as described in the letter implausible. An international consortium strictly monitored Niger’s uranium production. There was simply no way to move five hundred tons of uranium a year around the country discreetly. It would tie up the entire nation’s trucking capacity, and
shipping these loads down the rudimentary roadways from the mines to the port cities would paralyze the country’s traffic. It was probably the most consequential forgery since the publication of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, and people all over the United States government, like Carl Ford, knew it.

“This one was not a hard one,” Ford explains. “This was one of those easy cases. You have a fragment of information that is accompanied by a couple of older fragments, and all it suggests is that somebody from Iraq may have talked to the Nigerien government about buying some yellowcake. The reports don’t say they did. They don’t say exactly when or how, and that, alone, for a long time, at least through the NIE [in 2002], became the basis for people—everybody; CIA, DIA—saying they are in fact buying yellowcake from Africa.”

The narrative had triumphed. Reality had been richly novelized with details that people made up to fill in the inconvenient gaps in the actual story. A forgery had been used to reinforce untruth and wishful thinking, and the people selling it had been able to do so with full confidence that the people they were taking to war by and large hadn’t been paying attention to their government closely enough over the previous two years. Shell-shocked, the country had put itself on automatic pilot and hadn’t remembered to turn the equipment off in time. The crash came, and it was bloody and ongoing.