Analysis by Bill Berkowitz

OAKLAND, California, Dec 22 2005 (IPS) — If the fact that millions turned out to vote in the recent elections in Iraq was considered a victory for the George W. Bush administration, the joy was short-lived in Washington, as early election returns showed that the country will likely be in the hands of Shiite and Sunni religious parties for at least the next four years.

At home, news that Pres. Bush had authorised the spying on thousands of U.S. citizens since the advent of his “war on terror” – an action that may have been illegal – was bouncing around the news wires, circulating in blogs, occupying editorial writers and op-ed columnists, and taking up a fair amount of time on cable television’s 24/7 news channels.

Despite the media attention these stories are receiving, most of the U.S. public – especially the millions in New York City struggling to get to work each day during the just ended mass transit strike – appear to have given up connecting the “war on terror” dots.

In the weeks following 9/11, the Bush administration set out on a multi-pronged project: cleanse Afghanistan of the Taliban and capture or kill al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden, while at the same time develop a narrative for regime change in Iraq.

The administration’s “why we need to invade Iraq” storyline was a trilogy made up of three basic rationales, whose centerpiece consisted of “slam dunk” information that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and would not hesitate to use them. The administration also claimed that Hussein’s Iraq had close ties with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda, while insinuating that Iraq was involved in 9/11.

“Nobody needed access to privileged gossip or a talent for interpreting aerial reconnaissance photographs to know that the president wanted a war in Iraq, that he possessed the means to get what he wanted (a cowed legislature , an accommodating press, an inert electorate), and that it didn’t matter what reasons were given for the blitzkrieg – exporting democracy, winning World Wars III or IV, saving Israel, protecting America, bring the Christian faith to heathen Islam, etc. – as long as they came wrapped with the ribbon of the American flag,” Lewis H. Lapham, the editor of Harper’s, writes in the January 2006 edition of the magazine.

But that was then, and this is now.

These days, scandals involving administration operatives and its surrogates tend to overlap each other. The human rights abuses at Abu Graib and Guantanamo morph into sending alleged terrorists to secret prisons in torture-friendly countries.

When you think you’ve got a handle on Plamegate – the outing of Central Intelligence Agency agent Valerie Plame by administration officials as a way of paying back her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, for debunking the Bush administration’s story on Iraq seeking uranium from Niger – along comes a raft of stories describing the disgraceful activities of longtime Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

The indictment of Rep. Tom DeLay, a powerful Texas Republican, got lost in the president’s abysmal performance during the run-up to, and aftermath of, Hurricane Katrina.

While certainly not a strategy designed by the White House, when scandals are piled upon scandals they tend to disappear down a rabbit hole. Then the United States can do what it does best when overwhelmed by government malfeasance: move on to something else. Interestingly enough, however, a number of powerful Washington insiders are not choosing to merely move on. Instead, they are speaking out about the debacle in Iraq.

Brent Scowcroft, former national security advisor to the first President George H.W. Bush and who opposed the second Gulf War, cut loose on his old comrade, Vice President Dick Cheney, in a piece in The New Yorker magazine.

In late October, Senator John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president in 2004, told an audience at Georgetown University that “knowing now the full measure of the Bush administration’s duplicity and incompetence, I doubt there are many members of Congress who would give them the authority they have abused so badly”.

No one – perhaps other than hawkish Congressman John Murtha who shocked the administration with his call for a measured pullout of troops from Iraq as quickly as feasible – stirred up the cauldron as did Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005.

In mid-October, Colonel Wilkerson told a rapt audience at the New America Foundation that while every government has its unique and often idiosyncratic gestalt, never had he witnessed such aberrant behaviour like that taking place with the Bush administration.

“What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues that made decisions the bureaucracy did not know were being made,” he said.

“And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn’t know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.”

All these critiques – however belated – were welcomed by anti-war activists. And while Colonel Wilkerson’s harsh critique earned him “a moment in the sun of the New York Times’ op-ed page”, Harper’s Lewis Lapham reported, his remarks, like those of the others, didn’t really deal with how the U.S. came to declare war on Iraq.

While it may be more comfortable to point to bureaucratic failures, and intelligence agencies that didn’t communicate with each other, Lapham suggests that in reality, the war in Iraq was a “swindle” – designed, marketed and carried out by an administration that lied to make it happen.

Now, the Bush administration is being accused of spying on U.S. citizens as part of a secret surveillance programme ordered by Pres. Bush after 9/11. Congressional Democrats are ablaze with indignation, and there is a bipartisan call for an inquiry into the matter by the Senate.

Civil libertarians are outraged and the media is engaged. Some are using the “I” word – impeachment. Only time will tell how this matter will play itself out. If history is our guide, expect something new and saucy to knock this scandal off the front pages sometime soon.