Dubya’s pig ignorance was what failed him, not his dubious pronouncements

Charlie McCreevy was a great man for quoting himself.

It used to send his Cabinet colleagues right around the bend. Partly because they were never sure he actually had delivered the pearl which had subsequently been proven to be beyond price.

They suspected he mightn’t have, but they didn’t have the energy, whatever about the venom, to go back through the media files to prove him wrong. They just gritted their teeth. The habit became known as “doing a McCreevy”.

I don’t often do a McCreevy. Mainly because I can’t remember what I said yesterday, never mind three or five years ago, but also because I don’t say that much that’s worth quoting. Even by me.

The one exception happened this week, four years ago. As a guest on a Vincent Browne radio programme, I listened to one or more American analysts discussing the invasion of Iraq. One of them predicted it would be a fast and dirty war and that American forces would be speedily withdrawn, leaving Iraq, its surrounding area and the world in general better off. Not so, I said.

This would be President George W Bush’s Vietnam. It would last for years and, however high he might have regarded his own confected image as the world leader in the fight against terrorism, he would — as the body bags were brought home — learn that invading Iraq on spurious grounds would destroy his presidency and whatever legacy he planned for himself.

Watching the TV footage of the American protests on the fourth birthday of the invasion, this weekend, was inescapably reminiscent of the Vietnam years.

America may not currently have a media figure as authoritative and courageous as Walter Cronkite, the man who markedly turned Middle America against that earlier war, but it has something better: a multiplicity of media sources reaching all of America and slowly eroding confidence in the nation’s handling of Iraq.

Some of those sources are indirect. Recent exposés of the Walter Reed military hospital have shocked US parents whose sons and daughters are fighting in Iraq.

No parent wants to imagine the possibility of their child returning from the theatre of war injured or disabled, but — up to the last few weeks — they had at least the comforting belief that the State would demonstrate its gratitude for their courage by giving them the best medical treatment and rehabilitation.

Television pictures of filthy, run-down and ill-equipped hospital facilities have changed all that.

He who lives by the media sword dies by the media sword. George Bush lived by the media sword.

Media bought him from the outset. In his first presidential campaign, the journalists travelling with the candidates made instinctive human judgments. It was fun to travel with Dubya.

It was not fun to travel with his opponent. One wit defined the difference as being a choice between a man who talked as if English was his second language, and a man who talked as if English was everybody else’s second language.

In a choice between someone who emits malapropisms on a daily basis and someone who lectures in a high-minded way, media went for the man with the malapropisms.

Media also bought the notion that Saddam Hussein was tied into al-Qaida, and, therefore, had to be stopped developing the weapons of mass destruction the administration maintained were to be found under every rug in Iraq.

Not only did media buy this combination of lies, in some cases they were the sources for the belief within the White House that such was the reality. A weird feedback loop was established which suited everybody just fine. For a while.

It was also difficult to argue against the demolition of a despot and the installation of democracy in Iraq.

“Bringing stability and unity to a free Iraq will not be easy,” the president acknowledged, while ignoring intelligence which indicated that this was the understatement of a lifetime.

At the time, the State Department’s Iraq analyst, a man named Wayne White, who’d spent several decades working in the Middle East, set about addressing the question of precisely how easy it would be to bring democracy to the area.

He found, when he analysed the available data, that, quite apart from the governments in the region, including that of Saddam Hussein, the ordinary people tended to support militant Islam and were uninterested in issues like women’s rights.

Social, political and sectarian problems would destabilise the region for years after. Even the most successful US action, particularly amid the ensuing chaos, was unlikely to see the emergence of democracy. What was very likely to emerge, on the other hand, was anti-Americanism.

The administration ignored his report. Just as it ignored intelligence that cast doubt on Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. Just as it ignored predictions that, rather than costing $20 billion (€15bn), as the White House budget chief claimed, the war was going to set the American economy back to the tune of $1.2 trillion. Any input which ran counter to the Cheney/Rumsfeld direction was spiked.

The most powerful nation in the world was, at the time, being governed by a group who decided to wage war on the basis of rumour-mongering and forged documentation produced by sources whose bona fides would not, and did not, withstand the most cursory examination.

Within that group was a man whose personal credibility was high: Colin Powell. Put in the position of explaining to the world in a PowerPoint presentation why America had to go to war, Powell removed some of the unproven and unsupportable claims from his script.

He nonetheless included visuals which demonstrated nothing, but which were accepted — on both sides of the Atlantic — as “powerful” and “persuasive.” The acceptance was driven by two factors. The first was pig ignorance.

The commentators who found the visuals persuasive had no means of judging whether they showed plants devoted to the production of nuclear weapons or travellers’ encampments.

The second factor was Powell’s own perceived truthfulness and reputation for civilised dissent. Powell lacked the moral courage to resign when he should have resigned, and his nuanced opposition to the invasion was not just ineffectual, but contributory.

Saddam was executed. No weapons of mass destruction were found. The oft-stated nexus between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida evaporated.

The stream of body bags began and continued, inexorably. President George W Bush appeared in photo opportunities claiming success.

A CIA agent was outed and lost her job because her husband criticised what had been going on.

And when, in April of this year, George Bush was asked about the mistakes he had made, this is how he characterised those mistakes.

“Saying ‘bring it on’, kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people. I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner, you know, ‘wanted dead or alive’, that kind of talk.

“I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted, and so I learned from that.”

His only mistake, in other words, was less than felicitous communication.