Readers of a certain age, say 30 and older, may remember the Niger yellowcake hoax used as a precursor to the Weapons of Mass Destruction hoax which was used as a casus belli by the Western powers, the New York Times and other media minions* to invade Iraq. For our younger readers here's
IRAQ’S WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
THE ASSESSMENT OF THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT
The Forward by the Rt. Hon. Tony Blair, MP, Prime Minister, would be funny if it weren't for the hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded (including five American quadruple amputees) and trillions of dollars thrown into the wind.
Anyhoo, enough history, here's the headline story from Nick Turse at TomDispatch:
Dressed in green military fatigues and a blue garrison cap, Colonel Major Amadou Abdramane, a spokesperson for Niger’s ruling junta, took to local television last month to criticize the United States and sever the long-standing military partnership between the two countries. “The government of Niger, taking into account the aspirations and interests of its people, revokes, with immediate effect, the agreement concerning the status of United States military personnel and civilian Defense Department employees,” he said, insisting that their 12-year-old security pact violated Niger’s constitution.
Another sometime Nigerien spokesperson, Insa Garba Saidou, put it in blunter terms: “The American bases and civilian personnel cannot stay on Nigerien soil any longer.”
The announcements came as terrorism in the West African Sahel has spiked and in the wake of a visit to Niger by a high-level American delegation, including Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee and General Michael Langley, chief of U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM. Niger’s repudiation of its ally is just the latest blow to Washington’s sputtering counterterrorism efforts in the region. In recent years, longstanding U.S. military partnerships with Burkina Faso and Mali have also been curtailed following coups by U.S.-trained officers. Niger was, in fact, the last major bastion of American military influence in the West African Sahel.
Such setbacks there are just the latest in a series of stalemates, fiascos, or outright defeats that have come to typify America’s Global War on Terror. During 20-plus years of armed interventions, U.S. military missions have been repeatedly upended across Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, including a sputtering stalemate in Somalia, an intervention-turned-blowback-engine in Libya, and outright implosions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This maelstrom of U.S. defeat and retreat has left at least 4.5 million people dead, including an estimated 940,000 from direct violence, more than 432,000 of them civilians, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project. As many as 60 million people have also been displaced due to the violence stoked by America’s “forever wars.”
President Biden has both claimed that he’s ended those wars and that the United States will continue to fight them for the foreseeable future — possibly forever — “to protect the people and interests of the United States.” The toll has been devastating, particularly in the Sahel, but Washington has largely ignored the costs borne by the people most affected by its failing counterterrorism efforts.
“Reducing Terrorism” Leads to a 50,000% Increase in… Yes!… Terrorism
Roughly 1,000 U.S. military personnel and civilian contractors are deployed to Niger, most of them near the town of Agadez at Air Base 201 on the southern edge of the Sahara desert. Known to locals as “Base Americaine,” that outpost has been the cornerstone of an archipelago of U.S. military bases in the region and is the key to America’s military power projection and surveillance efforts in North and West Africa. Since the 2010s, the U.S. has sunk roughly a quarter-billion dollars into that outpost alone....
....MUCH MORE
....David FrumFrum was a speechwriter in the Bush White House. He famously coined the phrase “axis of evil,” consisting of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, for Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address. Iraq and Iran were a peculiar axis, given that they were mortal enemies, but Frum was not hobbled by such concepts as “making sense.”
After leaving the White House, Frum co-wrote a book called “An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror.” Sadly, we did not follow his advice, and evil still besets us.
In “An End to Evil,” Frum reported that “there is overwhelming evidence that Saddam had extensive chemical and biological weapons programs.” You may not be surprised to learn that this was absolutely false.
Frum was rewarded for this performance by The Atlantic with a job there as a staff writer. This week, Frum wrote a 20th anniversary piece for the magazine, which led off with the revelation that Iraq possessed “an arsenal of chemical-warfare shells and warheads.”
You might wonder: Given that Bush and Cheney were totally vindicated by this arsenal, why did they never mention it? Are they just super-modest? This is exactly the kind of question asking that will destroy your career in the prestige media.
David Brooks
Journalist Brooks contributed an article to the Weekly Standard just after the start of the war called “The Collapse of the Dream Palaces.” You absolutely must read it; it’s one of the most bonkers things ever to appear in the English language. Its core argument is that opponents of the Iraq War had been “unable to achieve enough emotional detachment from their own political passions to see the world as it really is,” and their fantasy world was about to meet cold, hard reality. North Korean propagandists would have rejected it as too embarrassing.
The New York Times saw the quality of this work and soon afterward hired Brooks as a regular columnist.
Jeffrey Goldberg
Goldberg, then a staff writer at the New Yorker, was one of the most influential proponents of the invasion of Iraq outside of the government. His work was entered into the Congressional Record during the debate on the authorization to use military force in fall 2002. In the New Yorker, Goldberg wrote that “there is no disagreement that Iraq, if unchecked, will have [nuclear weapons] soon.” And of course, everyone knew it already had “stocks of biological and chemical weapons.”
In October 2002, Goldberg argued, “The administration is planning today to launch what many people would undoubtedly call a short-sighted and inexcusable act of aggression. In five years, however, I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.” You may recall that October 2007 came and went without a lot of celebration of this profound morality.
Jeffrey Goldberg is now the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
Judith Miller
Miller wrote or co-wrote many of the hilariously credulous New York Times articles warning readers of the terrifying threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps the funniest piece of her oeuvre was published soon after the invasion, headlined “Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, An Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert.”
It wasn’t based on Miller ever talking to this scientist. However, Miller reported, “While this reporter could not interview the scientist, she was permitted to see him from a distance.” This is always how the best journalism has always been done: watching from a distance. She soon went on TV to declare this was “more than a smoking gun. What they’ve found is a silver bullet.” Whoops!
Interestingly, Miller is one of the only people on this list to ever suffer any career damage over Iraq. She resigned/was fired in 2005, but it had more to do with her entanglement in the prosecution of Scooter Libby than her cataclysmic WMD work.
Don’t feel too bad for her, however. She went on to work for Fox and is currently a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR, you see, is devoted to helping Americans “better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States.”
Joe Biden
Biden was a Democratic senator from Delaware in the run-up to the war and chair of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee. He ran hearings making the case for the invasion and became one of the most significant Democratic voices supporting it.
Biden remains prominent in American politics.
Plus a Cast of Thousands....
One of the reasons we don't link to the Atlantic that much, they are liars.
January 2017 "My next book won’t be the non-fiction Silicon Valley exposé we desperately need (but here’s what it will be)"
Similarly, when Mark Ames showed me a document proving that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar had funded opposition groups in Ukraine right before the Maidan revolution, I assumed Omidyar – the Pez dispenser guy! – must have been duped by his friends in the State Department. Tech founders simply didn’t go around instigating military coups.
Perhaps I saw the first glimmer of the real story when I dug out the White House visitor logs and saw how many times Omidyar’s name appeared, and who he met. Or when I noticed the growing line of tech billionaires leading to the Oval Office, the Kremlin and various Saudi royal palaces....
