CommonDreams: Paradigm Lost: Iraq, 9/11, and the Protection of Belief

"In a now darkly hilarious Washington Post column by Jim Hoagland ("CIA's New Old Iraq File," October 20, 2002), the pundit lit into the CIA for spurning all the abundant evidence of the Saddam/Osama connection. "Imagine that Saddam Hussein has been offering terrorist training and other lethal support to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda for years. You can't imagine that? Sign up over there," sneered Hoagland, "you can be a Middle East analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency."
Yet a ray of hope beamed down for the uncooperative analysts. "As President Bush's determination to overthrow the Iraqi dictator has become evident to all," Hoagland enthused, "some analysts out at Langley are now willing to evaluate incriminating evidence against the Iraqis and call it just that." Bright young agents were "challenging the agency's long-standing and deeply flawed analysis of Iraq," held by "analysts who do not want, any more than the rest of us, to acknowledge that they have been profoundly and damagingly mistaken." Except for the occasional bright spot -- here Hoagland admiringly cites the mythical Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles that might pop over to New York at any minute and spray the populace with nerve gas or bubonic plague -- "it is no surprise that Bush has until now relied little on the Langley agency for his information on Iraq."
Hoagland's stern conclusion: "There is simply no way to reconcile what the CIA has said on the record and in leaks with the positions Bush has taken on Iraq."
True enough. Likewise, there was no way for 17th-century bishops to reconcile what could be seen through Galileo's telescope with Church doctrine. Reconciliation was achieved through the threatened torture, forced recanting and exile of Galileo, and a belief system was preserved. That Hoagland was not alone in seeking such reconciliation between what the CIA was finding and what the president wanted to be found became clear when CIA analysts started complaining to colleagues and Congressmen of official pressure to find more than there was to be had in the ephemeral "links" between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
In the Orwellian twilight where Safire, Hoagland et al are now forced to dwell, truth is lies, freedom is slavery, and any re-evaluation of their previous beliefs and tale-spinning is double-plus ungood. Safire notes approvingly the rapid back-pedaling and down-playing by the Commission chairmen of their staff report in the face of "Dick Cheney's outraged objection" -- just like those CIA analysts who had "become willing to evaluate incriminating evidence" due to Bush's "determination." As with the president-is-above-the-law torture advisories from the Justice and Defense Departments that have now been officially retracted as "over-broad," to be replaced with what we really meant to say, the truth is what is to be found after the authorities slap it down, pummel it about the head, rework it, and let us know when it's okay to look.
A single, innocent sentence from the September 27, 2002, edition of the New York Times (under the headline "Rumsfeld Says U.S. Has 'Bulletproof' Evidence of Iraq's Links to Al Qaeda") underlines the psychological desolation that awaits those who believed in the war and the urgent causes they were given for it; a single sentence now heavily freighted with unintended poignancy:
"The administration had set aside serious efforts to prove this link in favor of a strategy that focused on what it contends is the threat from Iraq posed by weapons of mass destruction."
The believers have watched as all the truths they were told and in which they were fully invested have cracked and crumbled. For the true believer, the pain is too great, and the implications -- what we have done, and why we really did it -- cannot be endured. They must either wait to have their leaders re-frame their reality for them yet again, or drink the Kool-Aid."