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Beyond
smearing a decorated war hero who disagrees with them,
the Bush crowd is accusing the Democrats of rewriting
history when they claim they were misled by the
administration in the run-up to the Iraqi War. In the
administration’s version of history, everyone had the
same intelligence, and reached the same conclusions.
Here’s
where Bush and friends get hoisted on their own petard.
History was indeed rewritten, but it was the Bush
administration that did it. Between 2001 and the fall of
2002, Iraq was transformed from little more than an
irritant to the single biggest threat to democracy in
existence. To see how dramatically the administration
tried to spin intelligence and recreate history, we need
only look at their own words, beginning in early 2001.
Here’s
what Colin Powell had to say about Iraq in February of
2001:
"He
[Hussein] has not developed any significant capability
with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is
unable to project conventional power against his
neighbors."
Rumsfeld
had this to say on Fox news on February 12, 2001:
"Iraq
is probably not a nuclear threat at this time."
CIA
Director George Tenet concluded in a report to Congress
on February 7, 2001:
"We
do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the
period since Desert Fox to reconstitute its WMD
programs."
Or
listen to Condoleezza Rice on July 29, 2001:
"But
in terms of Saddam Hussein being there, let's remember
that his country is divided, in effect. He does not
control the northern part of his country. We are able
to keep arms from him. His military forces have not
been rebuilt."
In
little more than a year, this relatively sanguine
assessment of Iraq and Hussein was replaced with
hysterical renderings of mushroom clouds, immediate
threats, and al Qaeda links. And no, it was not 911 that
changed things. As Richard Clarke and Paul O’Neill
revealed, 911 provided an excuse to launch a war the
administration had been spoiling for all along, but it
was not the reason for the Iraq invasion.
So
what changed? Not much. Basically, the administration
stopped telling the truth and launched a sophisticated
psyops (psychological operations, essentially
propaganda) campaign directed at Congress and the
American people. As with any psyops effort, they
withheld information, distorted it, and when necessary
created it. In short, they rewrote history and lied
while doing it.
The
key components to this effort were creation of the
Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon, and the White
House Iraqi Group. OSP provided cherry-picked and
distorted intelligence; WHIG used it to conduct the
propaganda campaign.
The
case for war rested on two assertions. First, we
"knew" Iraq had links to al Qaeda; and second,
we "knew" they had WMDS and were likely to use
them. Let’s examine each in turn to see who knew what
and when they knew it.
The
al Qaeda Link that Wasn’t
In
trying to make the case for a link between al Qaeda and
Hussein, the administration relied heavily on two
stories. It’s now clear they knew the intelligence
didn’t support either one, they knew it didn’t as
early as February of 2002, and they hid that fact from
Congress and the American people.
The
first "proof" they used was the testimony of
one Ibn al-Shaykh al Libi – a captured al Qaeda
commander who claimed Iraq was training al Qaeda in the
use of chemical and biological weapons.
A
Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary (known as a
DITSUM in governmentese) cast strong doubts on al
Libi’s claims in February of 2002. Reportedly, al Libi
flunked a lie detector test, and he has since admitted
his testimony was false. A CIA memo in January of 2003
also debunked al Libi’s testimony, yet throughout 2002
and 2003 the administration continued to present what
they knew to be unreliable fiction as fact with
Congress, at the UN and in statements to the American
people.
Perhaps
it was not a coincidence that the OSP propaganda effort
was set up shortly after the White House received the
DITSUM undercutting their claims.
The
administration’s only other bit of
"intelligence" linking al Qaeda with Iraq was
the purported meeting in Czechoslovakia between Mohammad
Atta and "senior Iraqi officials." This was
shown to be phony nearly as soon as it was reported. The
FBI and the CIA had evidence that Atta was in Florida at
the time the meeting was supposed to have taken place.
But
Cheney and others in the administration continued to
hawk the meeting as gospel. Interestingly, when the 911
Commission confirmed that the meeting never took place,
Cheney – who now claims "we all had the same
intelligence," sang a different tune. He said then,
that he "probably" had more information than
the 911 Commission.
The
Bush administration used this "if you knew what we
knew" theme throughout the run-up to the Iraqi war,
but now, suddenly, we were all operating from the same
song book. Well, if we do a quick logic check, there are
only three possibilities here: either they were lying
then, or they’re lying now, or they were lying then
and they’re lying now.
The
WMDs That Weren’t
Let’s
start with chemical and biological weapons. The
administration relied heavily on a source known as
Curveball, an Iarqi expatriate who turned himself into
German intelligence and was never directly interviewed
by American intelligence. As reported in the Los Angeles
Times, the German intelligence agency, BDN,
characterized Curveball as emotionally unstable, and
told the US that his information was second hand, vague,
and unreliable. Yet the administration presented
Curveball as a reliable source, and presented his
concoctions to Congress and the American people without
caveats. While it’s true that the US was not alone in
believing Iraq had chemical and biological weapons,
prior to the 2002 psyops campaign, both the US and our
allies heavily caveated their findings, and – more
importantly – most believed Hussein would not use them
for fear of reprisals. Indeed, the National Intelligence
Estimate (NIE) prepared at Senator Bob Graham’s
request, concluded that Hussein was unlikely to use any
WMDs (unless he was attacked).
Or
consider the case for a nuclear threat. In the 2002
run-up to Iraq, the administration had two primary
pieces of "evidence" they used to convince
Congress and the American people that Hussein posed a
nuclear threat: the Niger yellow cake story and the
aluminum tubes they claimed could be used as centrifuges
to enrich uranium.
Neither
Congress nor the American people knew that the Italians
had warned us the Niger yellowcake story was phony, nor
did they know that Ambassador Joe Wilson had cast doubt
on the whole thing after his trip to Niger, until after
the invasion. They were also unaware that CIA Director
Tenet had warned Bush against using the story in a major
speech on Iraq the President gave in Ohio in October
2002. When the President was warned by the CIA yet again
that the intelligence did not support the yellowcake
story prior to his 2003 State of the Union Address, Bush
didn’t drop the Niger fabrication, his response was to
keep the reference and attribute it to British
intelligence, even though the Brits were using the same
documents the CIA refused to endorse.
The
Niger story was based on forged documents that were so
crude that UN analysts were able to show they were fakes
within a few hours of receiving them, using nothing more
than a Google search.
The
administration’s deceptions surrounding the aluminum
tubes were even more egregious. For example, when a
mid-level CIA analyst sought to send up a report raising
doubts about whether the now infamous aluminum tubes
could be used to enrich uranium, he was told by his
superiors not to bother because the decision to invade
had already been made.
In
fact, it turns out that the notion that the tubes could
be used to make centrifuges was being advanced primarily
by one analyst, against the weight of most of the rest
of the intelligence community and most of the nation’s
nuclear experts. Indeed, the tubes were anodized –
which would have fouled the uranium enrichment process
– they were too small, Iraq was known to have
blueprints for a superior centrifuge design that could
not have used the tubes in question, and the Iraqis were
known to use the tubes to make defensive missiles
allowed under UN sanctions. Yet the unclassified version
of the hastily prepared and barely vetted 2002 NIE,
flipped the story and gave weight to the minority
viewpoint, and reduced the many more qualified
skeptic’s concerns to footnotes.
Despite
the fact that they knew the data didn’t support their
statements, Bush, Cheney and Rice hammered home the
danger of a nuclear Iraq and characterized the
intelligence as conclusive, using such phrases as
"... we now know...", " ...there is no
doubt ...", "we know where they are ...
"it [Baghdad] could make a nuclear weapon within a
year ..."
It
Was a War of Choice, and It Was a Bad Choice
The
problem with the administration’s argument that we all
had the same intelligence is not simply that it’s not
true – it’s that only Bush chose to go to war with
that intelligence.
Let’s
suppose, for the moment, that this particular lie was
true and everybody did have the same intelligence.
Here’s
the thing, and there’s no getting around it. Virtually
no other country, nor anyone but the Bush chicken hawks,
advocated an immediate preemptive invasion of Iraq. Not
Clinton, not Blair, not Congress, nor any of our allies.
That decision was Bush’s and Bush’s alone. Bush used
the bully pulpit to bully Congress into it, and to
instill fear in the American people. At the end of the
day, the best that can be said about his decision to
invade Iraq is that it was a war of choice, it was
Bush’s choice to wage it, he went in precipitously and
without a plan, and it has turned out to be one of the
worst blunders in the history of America.
The
plain fact is, he had at least two alternatives to war,
and he had time to let them play out. With the UN
inspectors in Iraq, Hussein could not have launched an
attack without our having advance knowledge of it, even
if he’d had WMDs.
On
the one hand, Bush could have insisted that our
intelligence agencies get better information before
launching a war. Simple, and prudent.
Alternatively,
he could have relied on deterrence, diplomacy and
containment to keep Hussein in line, as we did with the
far more dangerous Soviet Union for fifty plus years, as
his father and Clinton did with Iraq, and as we are
doing now with North Korea.
We
now know that two of those efforts were successful, and
the third is likely to be. The Soviet Union was
defeated. As the 911 Commission and the Duefler report
confirm, Iraq was deterred and contained. And North
Korea appears to be heading toward a favorable outcome
since we started using diplomacy.
But
the President didn’t choose any of those options. He
chose instead to immediately send our young men and
women to war on the flimsiest of evidence, and that war
– in execution and concept – has been the single
greatest foreign policy disaster in the history of the
nation. And he misled Congress and the American people
in order to do it.
Now,
in Bush’s latest draft of history, he claims we went
to war to bring democracy to the Middle East. If
that’s true, why didn’t he wait until we were ready?
Are we to believe there was an emergency democratization
crisis?
For
all the talk of honoring our troops, we can do them no
greater disservice than to send them into a war before
every other alternative has been exhausted. And honoring
our troops means giving them all they need to wage the
war in terms of equipment, international and domestic
support, and a plan for winning the peace, as well as
waging the war. Mr. Bush had time for all of that, but
he chose not to take that time, and he put our young
soldiers at risk as a result.
The
real rewrite of history is what the administration did
to bring us to war – what’s happening now is simply
what usually happens with history – the cobwebs of
deceit are being swept aside as the clarifying lens of
time and distance reveals the truth.
John
Atcheson's writing has appeared in the Washington
Post, the Baltimore Sun, the San Jose Mercury News, the
Memphis Commercial Appeal, as well as in several policy
journals. He is currently completing an eco-thriller
novel; 'A Being Darkly Wise.'
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