Deep Throat Returns: Insider Notes from the Pentagon

Ready to Go to War?

31 January 2003

Some people wonder if the military is ready to go to war. Hell yeah we are! We have everything we need!

We have certainty. President Bush said he’d be happy if Saddam just left Iraq, but he says the departure of Saddam and his inner circle would NOT automatically avert war. "No matter how Mr. Saddam is dealt with, the goal of disarming Iraq still stays the same, regardless of who is in charge of the government."

Translation: We will occupy Baghdad because that’s the plan. Something else that stays the same is our promise to Turkey (along with bags of cash in the form of loan guarantees) that “Iraq would remain one country and that any war would prevent efforts by Kurds or Shiites to create their own states.”

One more certainty – Kurds and Shias will get to die. Not that this is a new concept for either them or us.

We have leadership: Rummy is the senior civilian in charge of everything from the number of bullets sent to the war zones to the number of bullets on an OSD Action Memorandum. He is the epitome of modern civilian leadership. His charming brutality, aimed laser-like at anyone who questions either his logic or his facts, just makes him more special.

Translation: Rumsfeld is not skilled in delegation of responsibility, nor is he gifted in the area of complex analysis. As someone who in his first days in office here requested Dictaphones be brought back “just like when I was here before,” he’s simply not the forward looking 21^st century military leader he wants to be. Quoting Churchill, while lending gravitas with just a touch of cuteness, isn’t going to resolve our Secretary’s glaring deficiencies.

We have resources: The Pentagon budget is rising some 33% in the next six years, to an annual budget of $484 billion – actually topping $400 billion by next year, according to Bloomberg.com! Whoa, baby, defense contractors can hire more retired guys and life is going to be good!

Translation: The industrial-congressional-military complex is the big winner in any and all wars, conflicts and threat scenarios. While these guys are not going to leave the country for a villa in the Bahamas, you can bet they own plenty of them. Smarter folks than me know this, and have for some time. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler recorded it perfectly in his speech in 1935, called War is a Racket .

We have moral clarity: We – the neoconservative “new right” coalition of evangelical Christians with the slightly more practical Likud-leaning Zionists in the NSC, White House and the E-Ring – are quite simply right. Period. Those who oppose Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush and Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, and Feith are wrong. It doesn’t get much clearer than that. Iraq is important not only for its oil, but because, in its current form, it serves as a direct barrier to the neo-conservative vision of Israel’s security and projection of U.S. power throughout that part of the world.

Translation: It isn’t just a war about the evil Saddam and radical Islam and oil, it’s a holy war for a narrowly and literally interpreted vision of biblical prophecy. Rapture, anyone? And you thought the hunt for Bin Laden was the real deal!

Yeah, it looks like we have everything a good American could want to go out and make a preemptive war, far from home, armed with nukes. We have certainty, leadership, resources and moral clarity.

Too bad we don’t have enough hard truth, cold logic, and unemotional evaluation of motives. Too bad we can’t yet decide the real reason for war in Iraq (it’s either finding WMD, removing Hussein, or creating a new democratic model in the Middle East, starting in Baghdad – it used to be because Iraq helped Bin Laden or tried to whack Pops, but whatever). Too bad we don’t have enough congressional and local debate about war in general, this war in particular, and the purpose and intent of the United States Constitution.

And it’s really too bad that we don’t have enough detailed practical planning for the day after, serviceable chem-bio suits, and red-blooded American boys and girls to die for Washington.