THE PLOY

Talk about putting one over on the American people.  This one takes the cake, it really does.  Did you hear anyone even mention the White House Iraq Group until recently? Did you have a clue about who they were or what they were about?   Luckily, Scooter Libby screwed up somehow and got himself indicted, and now we know. Talk about a con job.

It seems that the White House Iraq Group was quite an impressive bunch with an even more impressive job. They had to sell the entire population of the United States a really big dose of snake oil in a very short time.  I kid you not.  That really was their assignment, and boy did they ever carry it out in style!

The WHIG group met secretly, as is so characteristic of the Bush White House, and that might explain why so little was known about them. They worked with the diligence and dedication of any fawning Bush task force and they ultimately succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.  Despite its reputation, WHIG snake oil was not as difficult a sell to Americans as one might imagine, especially after 9/11.  Good salespeople know their market.

The group was organized in the summer of 2002, when the nation was still reeling from the events of 9/11 and was largely distracted by the war against the Taliban.  In charge of the set-up was Andrew Card, the WH Chief of Staff. Chairman of the committee was Karl Rove, then Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush. Together, these two opportunistic charlatans gathered the very best and most successful spin doctors ever assembled in one place, and the plan was set in motion.

The goal was to market a new brand of snake oil developed by the neocons who had come into power in 2000. With practiced confidence, they came together to sell the American people something they really didn’t want. They plotted to sell them a war.

Let me run that by you one more time: In August of 2002, six men and three women got together in Washington, D.C. to devise a plan that would sell the invasion of Iraq to the people of this country.  It’s totally mind-boggling, but that is exactly what they did.

But this is not a TvNewsLIES scoop.  The story is not new. The WHIG group was first identified in a Washington Post article in 2003. So why were people not screaming in the streets? But, we digress…

THE PLOTTERS

The nine merchants of death were chosen with care. Some had high visibility while others worked in the background, but all were insiders with keys to the White House kingdom. Not unlike the cast of Mission Impossible, each brought a singular skill to the table. But unlike the high-minded characters in the series, the WHIGs were engaged in a nefarious and despicable scheme to delude a nation.

Here, then, is a list of the men and women who teamed up to sell us a war:

• Karl Rove: then Senior Advisor to the President; now Deputy White House Chief of Staff in charge of policy.
• Andrew Card: White House Chief of Staff
• Condoleezza Rice: then National Security Advisor; now Secretary of State
• Mary Matalin: political strategist and consultant; formerly an advisor to the President
• Karen Hughes: then counselor to the President; now Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy
• Stephen Hadley: then Deputy National Security Advisor; now National Security Advisor
• Lewis (Scooter) Libby: then Chief of Staff and assistant for National Security Affairs to Dick Cheney; now resigned; founding member of Project for a New American Century
• James R. Wilkinson: Deputy National Security Advisor for Communication
• Nicholas E. Calio: Senior Vice-President for Global Government Affairs at Citigroup

This infamous array of accomplished Americans did their dirty work in the House of the People.  They sat in OUR White House trying to devise a way to betray us all.  That’s probably the most insulting aspect of it all.

Understand that this unearthly cabal was formed to use its cunning and its expertise to draw the United States into an illegal, immoral, and ultimately failed war against Iraq. And keep in mind as well that it worked like a charm.

THE PITCH

The WHIG group met to formulate a plan that would convince an unsuspecting public that invading Iraq was vital to their own security. They were plotting their strategy even as George Bush was assuring the nation that military action was a last resort in his foreign policy.  They were coordinating their sales pitch months before George Bush so brazenly sold Congress their impeachable lies.  The WHIGs knew that planning ahead was an effective sales policy.

Duping Congress was easy; selling the war to the majority of Americans was a bit more challenging. In order to break down any resistance to an invasion that was already a done deal, the WHIG pros knew exactly what they had to do.

The primary strategy in their plan was to escalate the rhetoric about the danger that Iraq posed to the US. They would saturate the news networks with their fabricated tales of nuclear stockpiles and chemical weapons.  They would sell their ominous warnings of mushroom clouds and weapons of mass destruction with a vengeance. They would provide the fodder for propaganda speeches that the President would read to the nation, and that the Secretary of State would deliver to the United Nations.

And of course, they would cleverly establish a damning link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, and more deviously – between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

The case for war was being professionally packaged, hyped and sold.

The perfect forum for publicizing the WHIG wares was theirs for the asking.  News networks opened their arms to the war mongers and shamefully competed for their participation. Not a single voice of dissent was permitted by the corporate media, as the WHIG promotion for war was broadcast to every home in the nation for months on end.

Fast forward now to March of 2003. The time between had been filled with WHIG members and their spokesmen - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz, Chalabi, Kristol and other cohorts – spewing WHIG mantras day after day.  The snake oil sales people were anywhere and everywhere, pushing the war and selling it well.

They did such a good job that after only seven months of snake oil sales the Bush regime was able to launch Shock and Awe. The bombardment of Baghdad was hailed as the first step in a War against Terror.  The snake oil had taken effect.

The WHIGs had suckered most of the nation into cheering the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom. They had conned the American people into asking their God to bless the country that was raining daisy cutters and 500 pound bombs on other human beings.  They truly believed that by going to war with Iraq, George Bush was going to save them from imminent annihilation.  Snake oil, in the right hands, can be smooth, sedating and seductive.

And so, without a single headline to expose their crimes, the White House Iraq Group sold the nation a war. Without a single investigative report about the lies and deceptions of their sales techniques, the WHIGs accomplished their mission.  Without a single newscaster to question the hoax that had been perpetrated on the nation, the WHIG members could congratulate themselves for a job well done.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

THE PAYOFF

This group should have made headlines across the nation. It did not.  It was given far less coverage than any high profile wife slaying of the day. The work of the White House Iraq Group should have been exposed by every news network in the nation before the 2004 election. It was not.

The people of the United States had the right to know. They did not.

Even now, with the WHIG group uncovered as a result of Plamegate, there is no discernable outrage over their mission.  The lies that led us to war do not appear to disturb the nation as a whole. A secret plot to frighten the American people into supporting a war seems almost commonplace. So they lied.  Not a big deal.

If that is how it is, the nation is lost. If cynicism and apathy rule the day, there is no more America is we knew it. If the WHIG group passes into history as an acceptable agency of government, there is nothing at all left for us to hope for

Not surprisingly, the corporate media have remained compliantly unresponsive.  They have not made this hoax an issue for discussion or exposure. The pundits and reporters refer to the WHIGs with no special concern or curiosity. They existed, they did their job, and we went to war.  End of story.

But it is not the end of the story.  This administration has three more years to go. The war shows no signs of abating. At this moment, the chaos and the deaths in Iraq are rarely newsworthy, and the policy set in motion by the WHIG machinery moves ever forward. WHIG efforts have paid off handsomely.

The full payoff, however, is yet to come. Condoleezza Rice recently said she would not rule out the possibility of a US military presence in Iraq for another ten years. The media made very little of that remark. War is hell – deal with it.

Thousands more will die in the war that the White House Iraq Group was hired to promote. It seems fairly certain that no members of the group will be held accountable for their despicable deeds. They were hired guns who have a great deal of blood on their hands, but they know that blood washes off. Snake oil does not.

So be it.  We’ve put the story out again. Share it if you wish.  Make others aware of the wool that was so expertly pulled over their eyes.  One has to wonder why there is so much indifference and complacency in light of such subterfuge.

Maybe it’s the snake oil.