Washington’s
War-Makers Aren’t “in a Bubble,” They’re in a Bunker
By Norman Solomon
February 12, 2013 "Information Clearing House" - I encountered a disturbing version last week while debating Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Largely, Wilkerson blamed deplorable war policies on a “bubble” that surrounds top officials. That’s not just faulty history; it also offers us very misleading guidance in the present day.
By Norman Solomon
February 12, 2013 "Information Clearing House" - I encountered a disturbing version last week while debating Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Largely, Wilkerson blamed deplorable war policies on a “bubble” that surrounds top officials. That’s not just faulty history; it also offers us very misleading guidance in the present day.
During our debate on Democracy
Now, Wilkerson said: “What’s happening with drone
strikes around the world right now is, in my opinion, as
bad a development as many of the things we now condemn
so readily, with 20/20 hindsight, in the George W. Bush
administration. We are creating more enemies than we’re
killing. We are doing things that violate international
law. We are even killing American citizens without due
process. . .”
But why does this happen?
“These things are happening because of that bubble that
you just described,” Colonel Wilkerson told host Amy
Goodman. “You can’t get through that bubble” to top
foreign-policy officials, “penetrate that bubble and
say, ‘Do you understand what you’re doing, both to
American civil liberties and to the rest of the world’s
appreciation of America, with these increased drone
strikes that seem to have an endless vista for future?’”
Wilkerson went on: “This is incredible. And yet, I know
how these things happen. I know how these bubbles create
themselves around the president and cease and stop any
kind of information getting through that would alleviate
or change the situation, make the discussion more
fundamental about what we’re doing in the world.”
Such a “bubble” narrative encourages people to believe
that reaching the powerful war-makers with information
and moral suasion is key — perhaps the key — to
ending terrible policies. This storyline lets those
war-makers off the hook — for the past, present and
future.
Hours after my debate with Wilkerson, I received an
email from Fernando Andres Torres, a California-based
journalist and former political prisoner in Chile under
the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Referring
to Wilkerson as “that bubble guy,” the email said: “Who
they think they are? No accountability? Or do they think
the government bubble gives them immunity for all the
atrocities they commit? Not in the people’s memory.”
Later in the day, Torres sent me another note: “Not sure
if we can call it a bubble, ’cause a bubble is easy to
break; they were in a lead bunker from where the bloody
consequences of their action can pass unnoticed.”
Wilkerson’s use of the bubble concept is “a tautology, a
contradiction implicit,” wrote the co-editor of
DissidentVoice.org, Kim Petersen, in an article analyzing
the debate. “Often people escape culpability through
being outside the loop. After all, how can one
be blamed for what one does not know because one was not
privy to the information. Can one credibly twist this
situation as a defense? Wilkerson and other Bush
administration officials were in the loop –
privy to information that other people are denied — and
yet Wilkerson, in a strong sense, claims to be a victim
of being in a bubble.”
In
that case, the onus is shared by those inside and
outside the bubble. Wilkerson said as much when I
mentioned that a decade ago, during many months before
the invasion, my colleagues and I at the Institute for
Public Accuracy helped to document — with large numbers
of news releases and public reports — that the Bush
administration’s claims about Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction were full of holes.
From there, our debate swiftly went down a rabbit hole,
as Wilkerson took me to task for not getting through the
bubble that surrounded him as chief of staff for
Secretary of State Powell. “I didn’t see a single one of
your reports,” Wilkerson said. “So, nobody called me
from your group. Nobody tried to get in — nobody tried
to get into my office and talk to me from your group.
Other groups did, but your group never got into my
office, never called me on the phone — never talked to
me. Other groups did. Why didn’t you?. . . You didn’t
call. . . You didn’t call. . . You did not call.”
Non-apology apologies have been a forte of former
impresarios of the Iraq war. It speaks volumes that Col.
Wilkerson has been more apologetic than most of them.
The scarcity of genuine public remorse is in sync with
the absence of legal accountability or political
culpability.
The partway apologies are tethered to notable
narcissism. It’s still mainly about them, the
seasoned ones who have worked in top echelons of
government, whose self-focus is enduring. At the same
time, scarcely a whisper can be heard about renouncing
the prerogative to launch aggressive war.
So, when faced with occasional media questions about
Powell’s WMD speech to the U.N. Security Council six
weeks before the Iraq invasion, both Wilkerson and
Powell routinely revert to the same careful phrasing
about their own life sagas. Interviewed by CNN in 2005,
after his three years as Secretary of State Powell’s
chief of staff, Wilkerson described his key role in
preparing that speech as “the lowest point in my life.”
Last week, in our debate, he called the U.N.
presentation “the lowest point in my professional and
personal life.”
As
for Colin Powell, guess what? That U.N. speech was “a
low point in my otherwise remarkable career,” he told
AARP’s magazine in 2006. Yet the U.N. speech gave
powerful propaganda support for the invasion that began
the Iraq war — a war that was also part of Powell’s
“otherwise remarkable career.”
So, too, a dozen years earlier, was the Gulf War that
Powell presided over as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff in early 1991. On the same day that the Associated
Press cited estimates from Pentagon sources that the
six-week war had killed 100,000 Iraqi people, Powell
told an interviewer: “It’s really not a number I’m
terribly interested in.”
The illustrious and sturdy bow on the entire political
package is immunity — a reassuring comfort to retired
and present war leaders alike. Former Bush officials and
current Obama officials have scant reason to worry that
their conduct of war might one day put them in a
courtroom dock. They’ve turned their noses up at
international law, lowered curtains on transparency and
put some precious civil liberties in a garbage compactor
with the president’s hand on the switch.
Normalizing silence and complicity is essential fuel for
endless war. With top officials relying on their own
exculpatory status, a grim feedback loop keeps spinning
as the increasingly powerful warfare state runs
roughshod over the principle of consent of the governed.
Top officials dodge responsibility — and pay no penalty
— for lying the country into, and into continuing,
horrendous wars and other interventions.
Without an honest reckoning of what did
and didn’t happen in the lead-up to the Iraq war, a
pernicious message comes across from Wilkerson, Powell
and many others: of course we
stuck it out and followed orders, we had private doubts
but fulfilled our responsibilities to maintain public
support for the war.
It’s a kind of role modeling that further corrodes the
political zeitgeist. The upshot is that people at the
top of the U.S. government — whether in 2003 or 2013 —
have nothing to lose by going along with the program for
war. In a word: impunity.
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