1 Boring Old Man

Recently, I wrote about Paul Wolfowitz and Michael Ledeen, two of the architects of the Iraq debacle. It’s incomplete without Laurie Mylroie, though her public prominance has faded. She was a darling of A.E.I. in the Clinton years. After her book with Judith Miller [Saddam Hussein & the Crisis in the Gulf] in 1990, she wrote Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America in 2000. It was further out in right field. She proposed that Hussein was behind the first bombing attempt on the World Trade Centers, the Oklahoma City bombing, and most of the other world ills. She was a favorite of Scooter Libby while they were at A.E.I. together, his former wife worked with Mylroie. But her tour de force was Bush Vs the Beltway: How the CIA & the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror in 2003. It’s important because it is a window into the attitude of the neoconservatives towards the C.I.A. They thought the C.I.A. was misdirecting the U.S. toward Al Qaeda and away from the real culprits, Iraq and Iran. As in the P.N.A.C. letter to Clinton in 1998, there was a strongly held belief that the C.I.A. was a "liberal" group, an enemy. Indeed, on September 13, 2001, just two days after the attack on 911, Mylroie published an oped piece in the Wall Street Journal called The Iraqi Connection: Did Osama bin Laden act alone? Not likely. This is the attitude that made it easy for the Administration to ignore the C.I.A.’s evaluation of the Niger Forgeries, the I.N.C., etc. Such assertions seem ludicrous now, but at the time, she had a powerful influence in the circle that included the whole gang from A.E.I. who had been imported into Bush’s Administration.

After the allegations of WMD’s and chemical/biological weapons were exposed as mythology, one might have thought that she would go into a convent, but she’s still at it, writing for the American Spectator. She’s on a kick about  captured documents from Iraq that prove her earlier assertions [1][2]. Dr. Mylroie is a Harvard trained Political Scientist. Her parents were both Holocaust Survivors. Her current bio lists her as a Fellow at A.E.I. [but leaves out Bush vs. the Beltway], and she’s listed as a member of The Committee on the Present Danger, where she says:

This was the battle-cry of the Neoconservatives that took over our foreign policy in 2000. When mentioned in the blogs, she’s referred to as a crack-pot or conspiracy theorist, but she’s actually a person who had a very strong influence on the foreign policy of the Bush Administration. And she continues to agitate about Iran. She’s right up there with Michael Ledeen and Paul Wolfowitz if we ever give out warmongering awards…