Editorial Contact: 
Gordon Mitchell		Peg Chalus
(412) 624-8531		(412) 624-2887
gordonm@pitt.edu	peggyc@pitt.edu

– FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE –

PETITION DRIVE TARGETS BUSH ADVISOR 
KARL ROVE

Debaters Oppose Administration Strategy for Public Debate on War

PHOENIX, Arizona, Cross Examination Debate Association national championship tournament, Arizona State University, March 20-25, 2003

ATLANTA, Georgia, National Debate Tournament national championship tournament,
Emory University, April 3-7, 2003

The American intercollegiate debate community has been dedicated to the pursuit of open deliberation on timely policy issues for centuries. The basis of debate practice is openness in argumentation—a willingness to allow the best argument to win, rather than relying on force or power to overwhelm opponents. Some members of the debate community have articulated disappointment with the Bush administration’s strategy for convincing American and world publics of the need for a preventive military first-strike on Iraq, and are joining in a petition drive to highlight the inadequacy of the Bush administration’s approach to gaining consent for war.

Karl Rove, senior political advisor to George W. Bush, was an avid high school debater in Salt Lake City, Utah. Rove’s tactics as a debater appear to have influenced his strategy as a political advisor. James Moore and Wayne Slater have detailed the roots of Rove’s political strategy in their book Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2003):

Debaters kept their arguments on 3 X 5 cards, which they carried about in shoeboxes or metal containers. Rove had the most impressive collection of debate cards at Olympus High. If his teammates had a shoebox filled with the cards, Rove carried two, which he plunked down on the table in an ominous display of force. By his senior year, the arsenal had swelled to 5 or 10 boxes. Rove figured that if two or three boxes unnerved an opposing team, why not something truly overwhelming? Why not a table full of cards? Why not buy them by the thousands and wheel them in on hand-carts? Why not throw the fear of God into the enemy before the debate even began? The thing was, the thing nobody knew was, that the cards were mostly fake. “We went out and bought thousands, if not tens of thousands, of debate cards,” says debate partner Emil Langeland, now a lawyer in Salt Lake City. “Everybody was using 3 X 5 cards. And we decided we'd better have 4 X 6 – a little bigger than the next guy. And we had shoeboxes, a table full. We would come in and set up those boxes with file cards in them, color-coded, with tabs sticking up, and there were literally thousands and thousands of them. And you know what? There wasn't a thing on 99 percent of them. If they gave us a 4 X 4 table, we'd make it a 4 X 8 table and we'd stack this information – what appeared to be information – on the table. We'd lay out all these papers. The reality was that the core of our attack or strategy was on 20 or 30 cards. We never used much more than that. But we'd just hand truck them in, then go back out into the hall and hand truck another set in and set them up on the table almost to the point where you couldn't see us. It was all psychological, to psych out your opponent.” Rove didn't just want to win, he wanted his opponents destroyed. His worldview was clear even then: There was his team and the other team, and he would make the other team pay. He would defeat them, slaughter them, and humiliate them. He would win by any means, but he would win (118-119).

Rove’s strategy of totally destroying the opposition in debate competition is mirrored in the American ‘win at all costs’ approach to public diplomacy. The Bush administration has tried to overload public spheres of deliberation with evidence that links Iraq to weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, yet key evidence has turned out to be fabricated or plagiarized in this rhetorical campaign. 

•	Niger forgery. Evidence used by the Bush administration to demonstrate Iraq’s noncompliance with the nuclear materials section of UN Security Council Resolution 1441 turned out to be based on forged documents. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) has asked the FBI to investigate who forged the letters and why U.S. intelligence officials did not authenticate them before claiming them as proof of Iraqi noncompliance. In a letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller, Rockefeller wrote “there is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.”
•	Plagiarized British dossier. In his February 5 speech to the UN Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell lauded a British government report as "a fine paper." Yet this paper turned out to be a mosaic of old open source material previously published. The British dossier, entitled "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation," plagiarized long stretches of a paper by Ibrahim al-Marashi, a postgraduate student at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. The British report drew heavily from al-Marashi's account of Mukhabarat, the Iraqi directorate of general intelligence. However, where al-Marashi listed among the Mukhabarat's duties "aiding opposition groups in hostile regimes," the British authors substituted the more incriminating phrase "supporting terrorist organizations in hostile regimes.
•	Baseless aluminum tubes charges. UN weapons inspector Hans Blix and former IAEA expert adviser David Albright both reject the Bush administration’s claim that Iraq’s attempt to acquire aluminum tubes was driven by a desire to build uranium enrichment centrifuges for its nuclear program, yet administration officials continued to rely on such discredited evidence.

In addition to these evidentiary inadequacies, the administration's broader strategy to coalesce a “coalition of the willing” utilizes manipulative foreign policy tools that rely on coercion rather than democratic processes of deliberation.

•	Utilizing financial leverage to induce cooperation circumvents the will of citizens abroad. The United States’ manipulation of loans and grants to potential collaborators as a way to “buy off” other countries’ dissent by leveraging power in international finance frustrates democratic participation. Reliance on a business marketing model for public diplomacy rigs communicative exchanges in a way that forecloses freewheeling argumentative give-and-take.
•	Demonizing countries that resist the push for war polarizes conflict and lessens the possibility of a united post-war effort for reconstruction. High-ranking European Union officials have indicated that generating support for funding the reconstruction of Iraq will face difficulty because of the perception that the United States has used heavy-handed tactics to gain assent for preventive military intervention.
•	Spying activity against United Nations delegates, documented in the so-called “Koza memo” generates suspicion about U.S. tactics to persuade Security Council members to go along with resolutions advancing the cause of war. Surveillance techniques could be utilized to gain unfairly acquired weight in negotiations. 

These techniques are at odds with the fundamental tenets of democratic deliberation that rely on transparency, honesty, and public argumentation to gain assent from allies. Deception in wartime has long been accepted as a legitimate military strategy. However, expanded deception programs designed to manipulate domestic and allied public opinion raise a different set of strategic dilemmas. While deception strategies may be effective as military levers deployed to complicate enemy planning, they are less useful as weapons of mass communications—propaganda tools designed to influence public opinion in public spheres. To be truly effective, any strategy to defuse terrorism in this way requires that the political legitimacy of U.S. policies be established in international public spheres. This process is best accomplished through fair and open public debate, rather than deceptive and manipulative methods exercised by the Bush Administration.

Petitions will be circulated and collected at the two national championships of the intercollegiate debate community. The national championships represent a culmination of the season's competitive debating activity that has focused on the topic of multilateralism as a foreign policy approach. Over 250 teams from across the country will unite on these two separate occasions to deliberate about the future direction of United States’ policy. The petition drive will take place during free time at the tournament, with debaters and organizers available for comment. After the tournaments, debaters will deliver the petition to Karl Rove and ask that the Bush Administration reconsider immediately its argumentative strategies of winning consent for preventive military interventions.