A couple of readings over the past few days have prompted me to think about the role of misdirection in foreign policy. Don’t know if I’ll develop this into a column topic, so here’s what I’ve been thinking.
My former boss, Fred Barnes, wrote a while back in The Weekly Standard about the role played by misdirection in the battle plan for Iraq. Gen. Tommy Franks seems to have skillfully used false information about the likelihood of U.S. basing rights in Turkey to fool Saddam Hussein into thinking that an attack might come from that direction. He also let it slip that the American plan was to conduct a huge “shock and awe” bombing campaign before ground troops into Iraq, when in reality U.S. and British forces were positioned to invade — and ultimately did — with little advance bombing. Well worth reading in full.
A Wall Street Journal article today contains a further nugget of interesting information. A treasure trove of intelligence documents out of Saddam’s thuggery service not only establishes stronger links between his regime and terrorist attacks on the U.S. but also suggests that he didn’t activate his full battle plan against the coalition — including possible use of chemical weapons — in part because he believed assurances from French and Russian officials that the invasion would never happen, that the United Nations would intervene and stop it.
Axis of Weasel territory? Not necessarily. Obviously this message served the interests of the coalition, not those of Saddam. Perhaps we may eventually learn that all was not as it seemed at the time with regard to French and Russian intransigence.
