The Selling of the Iraq War: The First
Casualty
By John B. Judis and Spencer Ackerman*
New Republic
June 30, 2003
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy.
Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of
secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a
result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence
agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be
insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher
reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to
investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The
democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated
to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more
important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United
States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to
a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its
allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its
support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct
access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep
interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the
intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration
represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an
informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether
or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did
when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States
should go to war with Iraq.
From late August 2002 to mid-March of this year, the
Bush administration made its case for war by focusing on the threat posed
to the United States by Saddam Hussein's nuclear, chemical, and
biological weapons and by his purported links to the Al Qaeda terrorist
network. Officials conjured up images of Iraqi mushroom clouds over U.S.
cities and of Saddam transferring to Osama bin Laden chemical and
biological weapons that could be used to create new and more lethal
September elevenths. In Nashville on August 26, 2002, Vice President Dick
Cheney warned of a Saddam "armed with an arsenal of these weapons of
terror" who could "directly threaten America's friends
throughout the region and subject the United States or any other nation
to nuclear blackmail." In Washington on September 26, Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed he had "bulletproof" evidence
of ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda. And, in Cincinnati on October 7,
President George W. Bush warned, "The Iraqi dictator must not be
permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and
diseases and gases and atomic weapons." Citing Saddam's association
with Al Qaeda, the president added that this "alliance with
terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving
any fingerprints."
Yet there was no consensus within the American
intelligence community that Saddam represented such a grave and imminent
threat. Rather, interviews with current and former intelligence officials
and other experts reveal that the Bush administration culled from U.S.
intelligence those assessments that supported its position and omitted
those that did not. The administration ignored, and even suppressed,
disagreement within the intelligence agencies and pressured the CIA to
reaffirm its preferred version of the Iraqi threat. Similarly, it
stonewalled, and sought to discredit, international weapons inspectors
when their findings threatened to undermine the case for war.
Three months after the invasion, the United States may
yet discover the chemical and biological weapons that various governments
and the United Nations have long believed Iraq possessed. But it is
unlikely to find, as the Bush administration had repeatedly predicted, a
reconstituted nuclear weapons program or evidence of joint exercises with
Al Qaeda--the two most compelling security arguments for war. Whatever is
found, what matters as far as American democracy is concerned is whether
the administration gave Americans an honest and accurate account of what
it knew. The evidence to date is that it did not, and the cost to U.S.
democracy could be felt for years to come.
The Battle Over Intelligence
Fall 2001-Fall 2002
The Bush administration decided to go to war with Iraq
in the late fall of 2001. At Camp David on the weekend after the
September 11 attacks, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz floated the
idea that Iraq, with more than 20 years of inclusion on the State
Department's terror-sponsor list, be held immediately accountable. In his
memoir, speechwriter David Frum recounts that, in December, after the
Afghanistan campaign against bin Laden and his Taliban sponsors, he was
told to come up with a justification for war with Iraq to include in
Bush's State of the Union address in January 2002. But, in selling the
war to the American public during the next year, the Bush administration
faced significant obstacles.
In the wake of September 11, 2001, many Americans had
automatically associated Saddam's regime with Al Qaeda and
enthusiastically backed an invasion. But, as the immediate horror of
September 11 faded and the war in Afghanistan concluded successfully (and
the economy turned downward), American enthusiasm diminished. By
mid-August 2002, a Gallup poll showed support for war with Saddam at a
post-September 11 low, with 53 percent in favor and 41 percent
opposed--down from 61 percent to 31 percent just two months before. Elite
opinion was also turning against war, not only among liberal Democrats
but among former Republican officials, such as Brent Scowcroft and
Lawrence Eagleburger. In Congress, even conservative Republicans such as
Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott and House Majority Leader Dick Armey
began to express doubts that war was justified. Armey declared on August
8, 2002, "If we try to act against Saddam Hussein, as obnoxious as
he is, without proper provocation, we will not have the support of other
nation-states who might do so."
Unbeknownst to the public, the administration faced
equally serious opposition within its own intelligence agencies. At the
CIA, many analysts and officials were skeptical that Iraq posed an
imminent threat. In particular, they rejected a connection between Saddam
and Al Qaeda. According to a New York Times report in February 2002, the
CIA found "no evidence that Iraq has engaged in terrorist operations
against the United States in nearly a decade, and the agency is also
convinced that President Saddam Hussein has not provided chemical or
biological weapons to Al Qaeda or related terrorist groups."
CIA analysts also generally endorsed the findings of
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which concluded that,
while serious questions remained about Iraq's nuclear program--many
having to do with discrepancies in documentation--its present
capabilities were virtually nil. The IAEA possessed no evidence that Iraq
was reconstituting its nuclear program and, it seems, neither did U.S.
intelligence. In CIA Director George Tenet's January 2002 review of
global weapons-technology proliferation, he did not even mention a
nuclear threat from Iraq, though he did warn of one from North Korea. The
review said only, "We believe that Iraq has probably continued at
least low-level theoretical R&D [research and development] associated
with its nuclear program." This vague determination didn't reflect
any new evidence but merely the intelligence community's assumption that
the Iraqi dictator remained interested in building nuclear weapons. Greg
Thielmann, the former director for strategic proliferation and military
affairs at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research
(INR), tells The New Republic, "During the time that I was office
director, 2000 to 2002, we never assessed that there was good evidence
that Iraq was reconstituting or getting really serious about its nuclear
weapons program."
The CIA and other intelligence agencies believed Iraq
still possessed substantial stocks of chemical and biological weapons,
but they were divided about whether Iraq was rebuilding its facilities
and producing new weapons. The intelligence community's uncertainty was
articulated in a classified report from the Defense Intelligence Agency
(DIA) in September 2002. "A substantial amount of Iraq's chemical
warfare agents, precursors, munitions, and production equipment were
destroyed between 1991 and 1998 as a result of Operation Desert Storm and
UNSCOM [United Nations Special Commission] actions," the agency
reported. "There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is
producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or where Iraq has--or
will--establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities."
Had the administration accurately depicted the
consensus within the intelligence community in 2002--that Iraq's ties
with Al Qaeda were inconsequential; that its nuclear weapons program was
minimal at best; and that its chemical and biological weapons programs,
which had yielded significant stocks of dangerous weapons in the past,
may or may not have been ongoing--it would have had a very difficult time
convincing Congress and the American public to support a war to disarm
Saddam. But the Bush administration painted a very different, and far
more frightening, picture. Representative Rush Holt, a New Jersey
Democrat who ultimately voted against the war, says of his discussions
with constituents, "When someone spoke of the need to invade, [they]
invariably brought up the example of what would happen if one of our
cities was struck. They clearly were convinced by the administration that
Saddam Hussein--either directly or through terrorist connections--could
unleash massive destruction on an American city. And I presume that most
of my colleagues heard the same thing back in their districts." One
way the administration convinced the public was by badgering CIA Director
Tenet into endorsing key elements of its case for war even when it
required ignoring the classified findings of his and other intelligence
agencies.
As a result of its failure to anticipate the September
11 attacks, the CIA, and Tenet in particular, were under almost continual
attack in the fall of 2001. Congressional leaders, including Richard
Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee,
wanted Tenet to resign. But Bush kept Tenet in his job, and, within the
administration, Tenet and the CIA came under an entirely different kind
of pressure: Iraq hawks in the Pentagon and in the vice president's
office, reinforced by members of the Pentagon's semi-official Defense
Policy Board, mounted a year-long attempt to pressure the CIA to take a
harder line against Iraq--whether on its ties with Al Qaeda or on the
status of its nuclear program.
A particular bone of contention was the CIA's analysis
of the ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda. In the immediate aftermath of
September 11, former CIA Director James Woolsey, a member of the Defense
Policy Board who backed an invasion of Iraq, put forth the theory--in
this magazine and elsewhere--that Saddam was connected to the World Trade
Center attacks. In September 2001, the Bush administration flew Woolsey
to London to gather evidence to back up his theory, which had the support
of Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, then the Defense Policy Board chairman.
While Wolfowitz and Perle had their own long-standing and complex reasons
for wanting to go to war with Iraq, they and other administration
officials believed that, if they could tie Saddam to Al Qaeda, they could
justify the war to the American people. As a veteran aide to the Senate
Intelligence Committee observes, "They knew that, if they could
really show a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, then their
objective, ... which was go in and get rid of Hussein, would have been a
foregone conclusion."
But this theory immediately encountered resistance
from the CIA and other intelligence agencies. Woolsey's main piece of
evidence for a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda was a meeting that was
supposed to have taken place in Prague in April 2001 between lead
September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official.
But none of the intelligence agencies could place Atta in Prague on that
date. (Indeed, receipts and other travel documents placed him in the
United States.) An investigation by Czech officials dismissed the claim,
which was based on a single unreliable witness. The CIA was also
receiving other information that rebutted a link between Iraq and Al
Qaeda. After top Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah was captured in March 2002,
he was debriefed by the CIA, and the results were widely circulated in
the intelligence community. As The New York Times reported, Zubaydah told
his captors that bin Laden himself rejected any alliance with Saddam.
"I remember reading the Abu Zubaydah debriefing last year, while the
administration was talking about all of these other reports [of a
Saddam-Al Qaeda link], and thinking that they were only putting out what
they wanted," a CIA official told the paper. Zubaydah's story, which
intelligence analysts generally consider credible, has since been
corroborated by additional high-ranking Al Qaeda terrorists now in U.S.
custody, including Ramzi bin Al Shibh and September 11 architect Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed.
Facing resistance from the CIA, administration
officials began a campaign to pressure the agency to toe the line. Perle
and other members of the Defense Policy Board, who acted as
quasi-independent surrogates for Wolfowitz, Cheney, and other
administration advocates for war in Iraq, harshly criticized the CIA in
the press. The CIA's analysis of Iraq, Perle said, "isn't worth the
paper it is written on." In the summer of 2002, Vice President
Cheney made several visits to the CIA's Langley headquarters, which were
understood within the agency as an attempt to pressure the low-level
specialists interpreting the raw intelligence. "That would freak
people out," says one former CIA official. "It is supposed to
be an ivory tower. And that kind of pressure would be enormous on these
young guys."
But the Pentagon found an even more effective way to
pressure the agency. In October 2001, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith set up a special
intelligence operation in the Pentagon to "think through how the
various terrorist organizations relate to each other and ... state
sponsors," in Feith's description. Their approach echoed the
"Team B" strategy that conservatives had used in the past:
establishing a separate entity to offer alternative intelligence analyses
to the CIA. Conservatives had done this in 1976, criticizing and
intimidating the agency over its estimates of Soviet military strength,
and again in 1998, arguing for the necessity of missile defense.
(Wolfowitz had participated in both projects; the latter was run by
Rumsfeld.) This time, the new entity--headed by Perle
protégé Abram Shulsky--reassessed intelligence already
collected by the CIA along with information from Iraqi defectors and, as
Feith remarked coyly at a press conference earlier this month, "came
up with some interesting observations about the linkages between Iraq and
Al Qaeda." In August 2002, Feith brought the unit to Langley to
brief the CIA about its findings. If the separate intelligence unit
wasn't enough to challenge the CIA, Rumsfeld also began publicly
discussing the creation of a new Pentagon position, an undersecretary for
intelligence, who would rival the CIA director and diminish the authority
of the agency.
In its classified reports, the CIA didn't diverge from
its initial skepticism about the ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam. But,
under pressure from his critics, Tenet began to make subtle concessions.
In March 2002, Tenet told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the
Iraqi regime "had contacts with Al Qaeda" but declined to
elaborate. He would make similar ambiguous statements during the
congressional debate over war with Iraq.
The intelligence community was also pressured to
exaggerate Iraq's nuclear program. As Tenet's early 2002 threat
assessments had indicated, U.S. intelligence showed precious little
evidence to indicate a resumption of Iraq's nuclear program. And, while
the absence of U.N. inspections had introduced greater uncertainty into
intelligence collection on Iraq, according to one analyst, "We still
knew enough, [and] we could watch pretty closely what was
happening."
These judgments were tested in the spring of 2002,
when intelligence reports began to indicate that Iraq was trying to
procure a kind of high-strength aluminum tube. Some analysts from the CIA
and DIA quickly came to the conclusion that the tubes were intended to
enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon through the kind of gas-centrifuge
project Iraq had built before the first Gulf war. This interpretation
seemed plausible enough at first, but over time analysts at the State
Department's INR and the Department of Energy (DOE) grew troubled. The
tubes' thick walls and particular diameter made them a poor fit for
uranium enrichment, even after modification. That determination,
according to the INR's Thielmann, came from weeks of interviews with
"the nation's experts on the subject, ... they're the ones that have
the labs, like Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where people really know
the science and technology of enriching uranium." Such careful study
led the INR and the DOE to an alternative analysis: that the
specifications of the tubes made them far better suited for artillery
rockets. British intelligence experts studying the issue concurred, as
did some CIA analysts.
But top officials at the CIA and DIA did not. As the
weeks dragged on, more and more high-level intelligence officials
attended increasingly heated interagency bull sessions. And the CIA-DIA
position became further and further entrenched. "They clung so
tenaciously to this point of view about it being a nuclear weapons
program when the evidence just became clearer and clearer over time that
it wasn't the case," recalls a participant. David Albright of the
Institute for Science and International Security, who had been asked to
provide the administration with information on past Iraqi procurements,
noticed an anomaly in how the intelligence community was handling the
issue. "I was told that this dispute had not been mediated by a
competent, impartial technical committee, as it should have been
according to accepted practice," he wrote on his organization's
website this March. By September 2002, when the intelligence agencies
were preparing a joint National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Saddam's
weapons of mass destruction, top CIA officials insisted their opinion
prevail. Says Thielmann, "Because the CIA is also the head of the
entire U.S. intelligence community, it becomes very hard not to have the
ultimate judgment being the CIA's judgment, rather than who in the
intelligence community is most expert on the issue."
By the fall of 2002, when public debate over the war
really began, the administration had created consternation in the
intelligence agencies. The press was filled for the next two months with
quotes from CIA officials and analysts complaining of pressure from the
administration to toe the line on Iraq. Says one former staff member of
the Senate Intelligence Committee, "People [kept] telling you first
that things weren't right, weird things going on, different people
saying, 'There's so much pressure, you know, they keep telling us, go
back and find the right answer,' things like that." For the most
part, this pressure was not reflected in the CIA's classified reports,
but it would become increasingly evident in the agency's declassified
statements and in public statements by Tenet. The administration hadn't
won an outright endorsement of its analysis of the Iraqi threat, but it
had undermined and intimidated its potential critics in the intelligence
community.
The Battle In Congress
Fall 2002
The administration used the anniversary of September
11, 2001, to launch its public campaign for a congressional resolution
endorsing war, with or without U.N. support, against Saddam. The opening
salvo came on the Sunday before the anniversary in the form of a leak to
Judith Miller and Michael R. Gordon of The New York Times regarding the
aluminum tubes. Miller and Gordon reported that, according to
administration officials, Iraq had been trying to buy tubes specifically
designed as "components of centrifuges to enrich uranium" for
nuclear weapons. That same day, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and national security
adviser Condoleezza Rice appeared on the political talk shows to trumpet
the discovery of the tubes and the Iraqi nuclear threat. Explained Rice,
"There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam]
can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a
mushroom cloud." Rumsfeld added, "Imagine a September eleventh
with weapons of mass destruction. It's not three thousand--it's tens of
thousands of innocent men, women, and children."
Many of the intelligence analysts who had participated
in the aluminum-tubes debate were appalled. One described the feeling to
TNR: "You had senior American officials like Condoleezza Rice saying
the only use of this aluminum really is uranium centrifuges. She said
that on television. And that's just a lie." Albright, of the
Institute for Science and International Security, recalled, "I
became dismayed when a knowledgeable government scientist told me that
the administration could say anything it wanted about the tubes while
government scientists who disagreed were expected to remain quiet."
As Thielmann puts it, "There was a lot of evidence about the Iraqi
chemical and biological weapons programs to be concerned about. Why
couldn't we just be honest about that without hyping the nuclear account?
Making the case for active pursuit of nuclear weapons makes it look like
the administration was trying to scare the American people about how
dangerous Iraq was and how it posed an imminent security threat to the
United States."
In speeches and interviews, administration officials
also warned of the connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. On September
25, 2002, Rice insisted, "There clearly are contacts between Al
Qaeda and Iraq. ... There clearly is testimony that some of the contacts
have been important contacts and that there's a relationship there."
On the same day, President Bush warned of the danger that "Al Qaeda
becomes an extension of Saddam's madness." Rice, like Rumsfeld--who
the next day would call evidence of a Saddam-bin Laden link
"bulletproof"--said she could not share the administration's
evidence with the public without endangering intelligence sources. But
Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who chaired the Senate Intelligence
Committee, disagreed. On September 27, Paul Anderson, a spokesman for
Graham, told USA Today that the senator had seen nothing in the CIA's
classified reports that established a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, in fact, was the
greatest congressional obstacle to the administration's push for war.
Under the lead of Graham and Illinois Senator Richard Durbin, the
committee enjoyed respect and deference in the Senate and the House, and
its members could speak authoritatively, based on their access to
classified information, about whether Iraq was developing nuclear weapons
or had ties to Al Qaeda. And, in this case, the classified information
available to the committee did not support the public pronouncements
being made by the CIA.
In the late summer of 2002, Graham had requested from
Tenet an analysis of the Iraqi threat. According to knowledgeable
sources, he received a 25-page classified response reflecting the
balanced view that had prevailed earlier among the intelligence
agencies--noting, for example, that evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program
or a link to Al Qaeda was inconclusive. Early that September, the
committee also received the DIA's classified analysis, which reflected
the same cautious assessments. But committee members became worried when,
midway through the month, they received a new CIA analysis of the threat
that highlighted the Bush administration's claims and consigned
skepticism to footnotes. According to one congressional staffer who read
the document, it highlighted "extensive Iraqi chem-bio programs and
nuclear programs and links to terrorism" but then included a
footnote that read, "This information comes from a source known to
fabricate in the past." The staffer concluded that "they didn't
do analysis. What they did was they just amassed everything they could
that said anything bad about Iraq and put it into a document."
Graham and Durbin had been demanding for more than a
month that the CIA produce an NIE on the Iraqi threat--a summary of the
available intelligence, reflecting the judgment of the entire
intelligence community--and toward the end of September, it was
delivered. Like Tenet's earlier letter, the classified NIE was balanced
in its assessments. Graham called on Tenet to produce a declassified
version of the report that could guide members in voting on the
resolution. Graham and Durbin both hoped the declassified report would
rebut the kinds of overheated claims they were hearing from
administration spokespeople. As Durbin tells TNR, "The most
frustrating thing I find is when you have credible evidence on the
intelligence committee that is directly contradictory to statements made
by the administration."
On October 1, 2002, Tenet produced a declassified NIE.
But Graham and Durbin were outraged to find that it omitted the
qualifications and countervailing evidence that had characterized the
classified version and played up the claims that strengthened the
administration's case for war. For instance, the intelligence report
cited the much-disputed aluminum tubes as evidence that Saddam
"remains intent on acquiring" nuclear weapons. And it claimed,
"All intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons
and that these tubes could be used in a centrifuge enrichment
program"--a blatant mischaracterization. Subsequently, the NIE
allowed that "some" experts might disagree but insisted that
"most" did not, never mentioning that the DOE's expert analysts
had determined the tubes were not suitable for a nuclear weapons program.
The NIE also said that Iraq had "begun renewed production of
chemical warfare agents"--which the DIA report had left pointedly in
doubt. Graham demanded that the CIA declassify dissenting portions.
In response, Tenet produced a single-page letter. It
satisfied one of Graham's requests: It included a statement that there
was a "low" likelihood of Iraq launching an unprovoked attack
on the United States. But it also contained a sop to the administration,
stating without qualification that the CIA had "solid reporting of
senior-level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a
decade." Graham demanded that Tenet declassify more of the report,
and Tenet promised to fax over additional material. But, later that
evening, Graham received a call from the CIA, informing him that the
White House had ordered Tenet not to release anything more.
That same evening, October 7, 2002, Bush gave a major
speech in Cincinnati defending the resolution now before Congress and
laying out the case for war. Bush's speech brought together all the
misinformation and exaggeration that the White House had been
disseminating that fall. "The evidence indicates that Iraq is
reconstituting its nuclear weapons program," the president declared.
"Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and
other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich
uranium for nuclear weapons." Bush also argued that, through its
ties to Al Qaeda, Iraq would be able to use biological and chemical
weapons against the United States. "Iraq could decide on any given
day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or
individual terrorists," he warned. If Iraq had to deliver these
weapons on its own, Bush said, Iraq could use the new unmanned aerial
vehicles (UAVs) that it was developing. "We have also discovered
through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned
aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological
weapons across broad areas," he said. "We are concerned that
Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the
United States." This claim represented the height of absurdity.
Iraq's UAVs had ranges of, at most, 300 miles. They could not make the
flight from Baghdad to Tel Aviv, let alone to New York.
After the speech, when reporters pointed out that
Bush's warning of an imminent threat was contradicted by Tenet's
statement the same day that there was little likelihood of an Iraqi
attack, Tenet dutifully offered a clarification, explaining that there
was "no inconsistency" between the president's statement and
his own and that he had personally fact-checked the president's speech.
He also issued a public statement that read, "There is no question
that the likelihood of Saddam using weapons of mass destruction against
the United States or our allies ... grows as his arsenal continues to
build."
Five of the nine Democrats on the Senate Intelligence
Committee, including Graham and Durbin, ultimately voted against the
resolution, but they were unable to convince other committee members or a
majority in the Senate itself. This was at least in part because they
were not allowed to divulge what they knew: While Graham and Durbin could
complain that the administration's and Tenet's own statements
contradicted the classified reports they had read, they could not say
what was actually in those reports.
Bush, meanwhile, had no compunction about claiming
that the "evidence indicates Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear
weapons program." In the words of one former Intelligence Committee
staffer, "He is the president of the United States. And, when the
president of the United States says, 'My advisers and I have sat down,
and we've read the intelligence, and we believe there is a tie between
Iraq and Al Qaeda,' ... you take it seriously. It carries a huge amount
of weight." Public opinion bears the former staffer out. By November
2002, a Gallup poll showed 59 percent in favor of an invasion and only 35
percent against. In a December Los Angeles Times poll, Americans thought,
by a 90 percent to 7 percent margin, that Saddam was "currently
developing weapons of mass destruction." And, in an ABC/Washington
Post poll, 81 percent thought Iraq posed a threat to the United States.
The Bush administration had won the domestic debate over Iraq--and it had
done so by withholding from the public details that would have undermined
its case for war.
The Battle With The Inspectors
Winter-Spring 2003
By January 2003, American troops were massing on
Iraq's borders, and the U.N. Security Council had unanimously approved
Resolution 1441, which afforded Saddam a "final opportunity" to
disarm verifiably. The return of U.N. inspectors to Iraq after four years
had raised hopes both in the United States and abroad that the conflict
could be resolved peacefully. On January 20, French Foreign Minister
Dominique de Villepin launched a surprise attack on the administration's
war plans, declaring bluntly, "Nothing today justifies envisaging
military action." Nor was this sentiment exclusively French: By
mid-January, Gallup showed that American support for the impending war
had narrowed to 52 percent in favor of war and 43 percent opposed.
Equally important, most of the nations that had backed Resolution 1441
were warning the United States not to rush into war, and Germany, which
opposed military action, was to assume the chair of the Security Council
in February, on the eve of the planned invasion.
In his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003,
Bush introduced a new piece of evidence to show that Iraq was developing
a nuclear arms program: "The British government has learned that
Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from
Africa. ... Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities.
He clearly has much to hide."
One year earlier, Cheney's office had received from
the British, via the Italians, documents purporting to show Iraq's
purchase of uranium from Niger. Cheney had given the information to the
CIA, which in turn asked a prominent diplomat, who had served as
ambassador to three African countries, to investigate. He returned after
a visit to Niger in February 2002 and reported to the State Department
and the CIA that the documents were forgeries. The CIA circulated the
ambassador's report to the vice president's office, the ambassador
confirms to TNR. But, after a British dossier was released in September
detailing the purported uranium purchase, administration officials began
citing it anyway, culminating in its inclusion in the State of the Union.
"They knew the Niger story was a flat-out lie," the former
ambassador tells TNR. "They were unpersuasive about aluminum tubes
and added this to make their case more persuasive."
On February 5, Secretary of State Colin Powell took
the administration's case to the Security Council. Powell's presentation
was by far the most impressive the administration would make--according
to U.S. News and World Report, he junked much of what the CIA had given
him to read, calling it "bullshit"--but it was still based on a
hyped and incomplete view of U.S. intelligence on Iraq. Much of what was
new in Powell's speech was raw data that had come into the CIA's
possession but had not yet undergone serious analysis. In addition to
rehashing the aluminum-tube claims, Powell charged, for instance, that
Iraq was trying to obtain magnets for uranium enrichment. Powell also
described a "potentially ... sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al
Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist
organizations and modern methods of murder." But Powell's evidence
consisted of tenuous ties between Baghdad and an Al Qaeda leader, Abu
Musab Al Zarqawi, who had allegedly received medical treatment in Baghdad
and who, according to Powell, operated a training camp in Iraq
specializing in poisons. Unfortunately for Powell's thesis, the camp was
located in northern Iraq, an area controlled by the Kurds rather than
Saddam and policed by U.S. and British warplanes. One Hill staffer
familiar with the classified documents on Al Qaeda tells TNR, "So
why would that be proof of some Iraqi government connection to Al Qaeda?
[It] might as well be in Iran."
But, by the time Powell made his speech, the
administration had stopped worrying about possible rebukes from U.S.
intelligence agencies. On the contrary, Tenet sat directly behind Powell
as he gave his presentation. And, with the GOP takeover of the Senate,
the Intelligence Committee had passed into the hands of a docile
Republican chairman, Pat Roberts of Kansas.
As Powell cited U.S. intelligence supporting his claim
of a reconstituted nuclear weapons program in Iraq, Jacques Baute
listened intently. Baute, the head of the IAEA's Iraq inspections unit,
had been pestering the U.S. and British governments for months to share
their intelligence with his office. Despite repeated assurances of
cooperation, TNR has learned that Baute's office received nothing until
the day before Powell's presentation, when the U.S. mission in Vienna
provided the IAEA with an oral briefing while Baute was en route to New
York, leaving no printed material with the nuclear inspectors. As IAEA
officials recount, an astonished Baute told his aides, "That won't
do. I want the actual documentary evidence." He had to register his
complaints through a United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and
Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) channel before receiving the documents
the day Powell spoke. It was an incident that would characterize
America's intelligence-sharing with the IAEA.
After a few weeks of traveling back and forth between
Baghdad and Vienna, Baute sat down with the dozen or so pages of U.S.
intelligence on Saddam's supposed nuclear procurements--the aluminum
tubes, the Niger uranium, and the magnets. In the course of a day, Baute
determined, like the ambassador before him, that the Niger document was
fraudulent. Though the "president" of Niger made reference to
his powers under the constitution of 1965, Baute performed a quick Google
search to learn that Niger's latest constitution was drafted in 1999.
There were other obvious mistakes--improper letterhead, an obviously
forged signature, a letter from a foreign minister who had not been in
office for eleven years. Baute also made quick work of the aluminum
tubes. He assembled a team of experts--two Americans, two Britons, and a
German--with 120 years of collective experience with centrifuges. After
reviewing tens of thousands of Iraqi transaction records and inspecting
Iraqi front companies and military production facilities with the rest of
the IAEA unit, they concluded, according to a senior IAEA official, that
"all evidence points to that this is for the rockets"--the same
conclusion reached by the State and Energy Departments. As for the
magnets, the IAEA cross-referenced Iraq's declarations with intelligence
from various member states and determined that nothing in Iraq's magnet
procurements "pointed to centrifuge enrichment," in the words
of an IAEA official with direct knowledge of the effort. Rather, the
magnets were for projects as disparate as telephones and short-range
missiles. Baute, who according to a senior IAEA official was in
"almost daily" contact with the American diplomatic mission in
Vienna, was surprised at the weakness of the U.S. evidence. In one
instance, Baute contacted the mission after discovering the Niger
document forgeries and asked, as this official described it, "Can
your people help me understand if I'm wrong? I'm not ready to close the
book on this file. If you've got any other evidence that might be
authentic, I need to see it, and I'll follow up." Eventually, a
response came: The Americans and the British were not disputing the
IAEA's conclusions; no more evidence would be provided.
On March 7, IAEA Director-General Mohammed ElBaradei
delivered Baute's conclusions to the Security Council. But, although the
United States conceded most of the IAEA's inconvenient judgments behind
closed doors, Vice President Cheney publicly assaulted the credibility of
the organization and its director-general. "I think Mr. ElBaradei
frankly is wrong," Cheney told Tim Russert on NBC's "Meet the
Press" on March 16. "I think, if you look at the track record
of the International Atomic Energy Agency and this kind of issue,
especially where Iraq's concerned, they have consistently underestimated
or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason
to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in the
past." Incredibly, Cheney added, "We believe [Saddam] has, in
fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."
Cheney was correct that the IAEA had failed to uncover
Iraq's covert uranium-enrichment program prior to the Gulf war. But,
before the war, the IAEA was not charged with playing the role of a
nuclear Interpol. Rather, until the passage of Resolution 687 in 1991,
the IAEA was merely supposed to review the disclosures of member states
in the field of nuclear development to ensure compliance with the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty. By contrast, in the '90s, the IAEA mounted more
than 1,000 inspections in Iraq, mostly without advance warning; sealed,
expropriated, or destroyed tons of nuclear material; and destroyed
thousands of square feet of nuclear facilities. In fact, its activities
formed the baseline for virtually every intelligence assessment regarding
Iraq's nuclear weapons program.
UNMOVIC Chairman Hans Blix received similar treatment
from American officials--even though he repeatedly told the Security
Council that the Iraqis had yet to account for the chemical and
biological weapons they had once possessed, a position that strengthened
the U.S. case for war. According to The Washington Post, in early 2002
Wolfowitz ordered a CIA report on Blix. When the report didn't contain
damning details, Wolfowitz reportedly "hit the ceiling." And,
as the inspections were to begin, Perle said, "If it were up to me,
on the strength of his previous record, I wouldn't have chosen Hans
Blix." In his February presentation, Powell suggested that Blix had
ignored evidence of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons production.
After stalling for months, the United States finally shared some of its
intelligence with UNMOVIC. But, according to UNMOVIC officials, none of
the intelligence it received yielded any incriminating discoveries.
Aftermath
What we must not do in the face of a mortal
threat," Cheney instructed a Nashville gathering of the Veterans of
Foreign Wars in August 2002, "is give in to wishful thinking or
willful blindness." Cheney's admonition is resonant, but not for the
reasons he intended. The Bush administration displayed an acute case of
willful blindness in making its case for war. Much of its evidence for a
reconstituted nuclear program, a thriving chemical-biological development
program, and an active Iraqi link with Al Qaeda was based on what
intelligence analysts call "rumint." Says one former official
with the National Security Council, "It was a classic case of
rumint, rumor-intelligence plugged into various speeches and accepted as
gospel."
In some cases, the administration may have
deliberately lied. If Bush didn't know the purported uranium deal between
Iraq and Niger was a hoax, plenty of people in his administration
did--including, possibly, Vice President Cheney, who would have seen the
president's State of the Union address before it was delivered. Rice and
Rumsfeld also must have known that the aluminum tubes that they presented
as proof of Iraq's nuclear ambitions were discounted by prominent
intelligence experts. And, while a few administration officials may have
genuinely believed that there was a strong connection between Al Qaeda
and Saddam Hussein, most probably knew they were constructing castles out
of sand.
The Bush administration took office pledging to
restore "honor and dignity" to the White House. And it's true:
Bush has not gotten caught having sex with an intern or lying about it
under oath. But he has engaged in a pattern of deception concerning the
most fundamental decisions a government must make. The United States may
have been justified in going to war in Iraq--there were, after all, other
rationales for doing so--but it was not justified in doing so on the
national security grounds that President Bush put forth throughout last
fall and winter. He deceived Americans about what was known of the threat
from Iraq and deprived Congress of its ability to make an informed
decision about whether or not to take the country to war.
The most serious institutional casualty of the
administration's campaign may have been the intelligence agencies,
particularly the CIA. Some of the CIA's intelligence simply appears to
have been defective, perhaps innocently so. Durbin says the CIA's
classified reports contained extensive maps where chemical or biological
weapons could be found. Since the war, these sites have not yielded
evidence of any such weapons. But the administration also turned the
agency--and Tenet in particular--into an advocate for the war with Iraq
at a time when the CIA's own classified analyses contradicted the public
statements of the agency and its director. Did Tenet really fact-check
Bush's warning that Iraq could threaten the United States with UAVs? Did
he really endorse Powell's musings on the links between Al Qaeda and
Saddam? Or had Tenet and his agency by then lost any claim to the
intellectual honesty upon which U.S. foreign policy critically
depends--particularly in an era of preemptive war?
Democrats such as Durbin, Graham, and Senator Jay
Rockefeller, who has become the ranking member of the Intelligence
Committee, are now pressing for a full investigation into intelligence
estimates of the Iraqi threat. This would entail public hearings with
full disclosure of documents and guarantees of protection for witnesses
who come forward to testify. But it is not likely to happen. Senator John
Warner, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, initially called
for public hearings but recanted after Cheney visited a GOP senators'
lunch on June 4. Cheney, according to Capitol Hill staffers, told his
fellow Republicans to block any investigation, and it looks likely they
will comply. Under pressure from Democrats, Roberts, the new Intelligence
Committee chairman, has finally agreed to a closed-door hearing but not
to a public or private investigation. According to Durbin, the Republican
plan is to stall in the hope that the United States finds sufficient
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to quiet the controversy. The
controversy might, indeed, go away. Democrats don't have the power to
call hearings, and, apart from Graham and former Vermont Governor Howard
Dean, the leading Democratic presidential candidates are treating the
issue delicately given the public's overwhelming support for the war. But
there are worse things than losing an election by going too far out on a
political limb--namely, failing to defend the integrity of the country's
foreign policy and its democratic institutions. It may well be that, in
the not-too-distant future, preemptive military action will become
necessary--perhaps against a North Korea genuinely bent on incinerating
Seoul or a nuclear Pakistan that has fallen into the hands of radical
Islamists. In such a case, we the people will look to our leaders for an
honest assessment of the threat. But, next time, thanks to George W.
Bush, we may not believe them until it is too late.
----
Correction: This article originally referred to Trent
Lott as Senate majority leader in August of 2002. At the time he was
Senate minority leader. The article has been corrected to reflect that
change. We regret the error.
About the Author: John B. Judis is a senior editor at
TNR. Spencer Ackerman is an assistant editor at The New Republic.
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