She's no Ellsberg. I have just read through the so-called "New Pentagon Papers" by Karen Kwiatkowski published by Salon last week. First, the revelations contained in this piece do not warrant comparison to the remarkable act of courage of Daniel Ellsberg thirty years ago. The article is largely a rehashing of the well-known history of the Office of Special Plans and the biographies of the key-players within it. There are few surprises in this much-touted release. Much of the information is contained in the better researched and written piece in Mother Jones by Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, "The Lie Factory". Granted, Kwiatkowski is one of the primary sources of information for that article, but that only reinforces the claim that "The New Pentagon Papers" is superfluous. Its purpose will be to serve as a primary source for journalists and historians who need an eyewitness to quote.

The most interesting part comes at the end, where Kwiatkowski concludes by saying:

War is generally crafted and pursued for political reasons, but the reasons given to the Congress and to the American people for this one were inaccurate and so misleading as to be false. Moreover, they were false by design. Certainly, the neoconservatives never bothered to sell the rest of the country on the real reasons for occupation of Iraq -- more bases from which to flex U.S. muscle with Syria and Iran, and better positioning for the inevitable fall of the regional ruling sheikdoms. Maintaining OPEC on a dollar track and not a euro and fulfilling a half-baked imperial vision also played a role. These more accurate reasons for invading and occupying could have been argued on their merits -- an angry and aggressive U.S. population might indeed have supported the war and occupation for those reasons. But Americans didn't get the chance for an honest debate.

On this point, I agree with Kwiatkowski. However, unlike her, I do not have a problem with the real reasons behind going to war. I think that Saddam was a dangerous threat to his people and the region and that Western states have a moral obligation to punish and, if need be, remove, such dictators (and if you choose to call that imperialism, so be it). The democratisation of the Middle East can certainly begin with the replacement of the Ba'athist regime with a republic based on a liberal constitution (democracy may have to wait a while). Where I am torn, however, is on the question of the gap between what the government knows and what the government admits. Liberal empires can be a good thing - they can benefit all within the empire. But you can't sell a war on that argument. Americans used to go to war on principle, but that attitude changed during the twentieth century. Now, Americans only go to war when they absolutely have to, i.e. when they are themselves in danger. I do not like being lied to, and I blame the lack of international support for the war on the Bush administration because of their policy of duplicity and the misleading emphasis on certain aspects of the truth and the omission of other aspects. Ideally, they would have told the truth and the people would have supported them. Unfortunately I do not know if that is a realistic scenario. It raises important questions about the rights of an administration to pursue a war that a majority of its citizens do not support. Those are the hard decisions that a government must make for the good of the nation and the world. I believe in ideological transparency - a candidate or a party should say what it believes in and then unashamedly seek to implement that agenda. Hopefully the nation's citizens and the international community would follow. That is where I have my complaints with the Iraq War - the way it was done, not why it was done.