Keller wagered that Bush would win a second U.N. vote authorizing the invasion. However, facing overwhelming defeat in the Security Council, Bush pulled the draft resolution and opted instead for his "coalition of the willing."
Keller envisioned scenes on Al Jazeera showing "American soldiers being welcomed by Iraqis as liberators. The illicit toxins are unearthed and destroyed. Persecuted Kurds and Shiites suppress the urge for clan vengeance." Events didn't exactly work out that way.
What's also remarkable about Keller's article is that he joined the war-hawks club with full knowledge that he was advocating violations of international law.
"Almost all of the hesitant hawks go out of their way to disavow Mr. Bush's larger agenda for American power even as they salute his plan to use it in Iraq," Keller wrote. "What his admirers call the Bush Doctrine is so far a crude edifice built of phrases from speeches and strategy documents, reinforced by a pattern of discarded treaties and military deployment.
"It consists of a determination to keep America an unchallenged superpower, a willingness to forcibly disarm any country that poses a gathering threat and an unwillingness to be constrained by treaties or international institutions that don't suit us perfectly."
So, even knowing that the Iraq invasion would be illegal -- that it would involve "discarded treaties" and rejection of international standards "that don't suit us perfectly" -- Keller embraced it.
Further, he understood that the endorsement of Bush's actions by himself and other mainstream media figures would strengthen Bush's hand in violating the law with impunity, by providing him public-relations cover.
"Thanks to all these grudging allies, Mr. Bush will be able to claim, with justification, that the coming war is a far cry from the rash, unilateral adventure some of his advisers would have settled for," Keller wrote.
As Keller was settling in with his "hawk club" in those heady days of late 2002-early 2003, the Bush administration was further buying off the New York Times and other major media outlets with the Pentagon's plan to embed approved journalists with U.S. troops.
Victoria Clarke, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, later boasted that the embedding idea worked like a charm in getting the mainstream media to switch to full-steam-ahead support for Bush's invasion.
(Ironically, the Times dispatched reporter Judith Miller to travel with a special military unit searching for Iraq's WMD, a false justification for the war that Miller and the Times had promoted.)
In last Sunday's article about Assange, Keller continued to reflect the compromises that the Times apparently feels it must make in positioning itself vis-Ã -vis the Washington powers-that-be.
He reduced many issues relating to WikiLeaks to political side-taking, calling the Guardian newspaper in the UK "openly left leaning," while explaining how his paper must worry about criticism from "conservatives," such as when it divulged Bush's warrantless wiretapping in December 2005.
However, Keller failed to mention that the Times' warrantless wiretap disclosure came only after the newspaper's top brass had agreed to keep the illegal monitoring secret for more than a year, until after Bush had safely secured a second term.
The Times only published the story in December 2005 because its reporter James Risen was about to reveal the secret in his own book, State of War, which was coming out in January 2006.
However, at least Keller did tell the truth when he acknowledged that "leaking" of classified information happens all the time with much of it "authorized."
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