Intellectually Incurious

There is a big political flap underway in the United States over a book called What Happened. It is a memoir of his days in the Whitehouse by former Press Secretary, Scott McLellan.

McLellan was an associate of George Bush when Bush was the Governor of Texas and he followed him to Washington. He was the second PS and fulfilled that role for a few years until he was replaced. I haven’t learned why he lost the job, but the impression left in the media is that it was not a voluntary departure.

I always chuckled at the name of his replacement, Tony Snow (who has since left the job for health reasons). I thought if gave new meaning to the term “snow job”.

Anyway, McLellan has turned on the Bush administration and made accusations about its rush to war, its ignoring intelligence pointing to another conclusion, and Rove and Scooter Libby outing Valerie Plame. This is hardly news. The public has already heard this stuff and made up its mind about it, so other than the novelty of a Bush insider rebuking him, which also is not news; e.g. Paul O’Neill, Richard Clarke, I cannot see why I would be interested in reading this book and why there is such a firestorm about it.

McLellan did savage Condoleeza Rice in the book, claiming she was too clever by half in hiding in cracks and crevices when the fickle finger of fate pointed around the room. But the media interest is not really focused on what he has to say about her, it is about the other characters in the administration.

The one thing I thought was an excellent example of the practice of his art as a wordsmith was his description of George Bush. He doesn’t call him stupid; he calls him “intellectually incurious”. That is a classic.

Dangerous conspiracy theories

I am behind the 8-ball on this one, and the fault lies with too many books to read and too little time to do it in. I just got to the Richard A. Clarke book, Against All Enemies, published in 2004. Clarke was the chief anti-terrorism expert in the White House under Clinton and George Bush, Jr. He had also worked at more junior levels but in similar work for the Reagan adminstration and George Bush, Sr. He quit his post over the obsession by the Bush administration blaming Iraq for the work of Bin Laden and al Qaeda.

He reveals that Paul Wolfowitz was convinced that Iraq was responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre. Wolfowitz, as the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, was instrumental in persuading George Bush and his cabinet that Iraq was the true culprit in 9/11, not just al Qaeda. He was not alone. Richard Perle, another neo-con and the Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee under George Bush, also bought into the Iraq version of events.

But where did this conviction come from? It turns out they were infatuated with a discredited conspiracy theory put out by author Laurie Mylroie. You can read the full tale of her involvement in shaping U.S. foreign policy here.

It is sad to consider how many people have died, Americans and Iraqis, and what a mess the Middle East has become since the invasion of Iraq, and worse, that it may have all been started by a false conspiracy theory.