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Weapons Of Mass Disappearance
The war in Iraq was based largely on intelligence about banned arms that still haven't been found. Was America's spy craft wrong — or manipulated?
By MICHAEL DUFFY

How do take your country to war when it doesn't really want to go? You could subcontract with another nation, fight on the sly and hope no one notices. But if you need a lot of troops to prevail and you would like to remind everyone in the neighborhood who's boss anyway, then what you need most is a good reason — something to stir up the folks back home.

As the U.S. prepared to go to war in Iraq last winter, the most compelling reason advanced by George W. Bush to justify a new kind of pre-emptive war was that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear, chemical and biological arms — weapons of mass destruction (WMD). "There's no doubt in my mind but that they currently have chemical and biological weapons," said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in January. "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons," said Vice President Dick Cheney in March. That Iraq might have WMD was never the only reason the Bush Administration wanted to topple Saddam. But it was the big reason, the casus belli, the public rationale peddled over and over to persuade a skeptical nation, suspicious allies and a hostile United Nations to get behind the controversial invasion. And while that sales pitch fell flat overseas, it worked better than expected at home: by late March, 77% of the public felt that invading U.S. troops would find WMD.


But eight weeks after the war's end, most of that confident intelligence has yet to pan out, and a growing number of experts think it never will. Current and former U.S. officials have begun to question whether the weapons will ever be found in anything like the quantities the U.S. suggested before the war — if found at all — and whether the U.S. gamed the intelligence to justify the invasion.

For now, WMD seems to stand for weapons of mass disappearance. Smarting from the accusations that they had cooked the books, top U.S. officials fanned out late last week to say the hunt would go on and the weapons would eventually be found. CIA officials told TIME that they would produce a round of fresh evidence for increasingly wary lawmakers as early as next week. After dispatching dozens of G.I. patrols to some 300 suspected WMD sites in Iraq over the past two months, only to come up empty-handed, the Pentagon announced last week that it will shift from hunting for banned weapons to hunting for documents and people who might be able to say where banned weapons are — or were. But it is clear that the U.S. is running out of good leads. "We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad," Lieut. General James T. Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said last week. "But they're simply not there."

Wherever they are, the missing weapons are beginning to cause trouble elsewhere. Overseas, British Prime Minister Tony Blair is under fire from critics for overstating the case for war (see related story). The accusations came at an awkward moment for Bush, as he began a seven-day diplomatic trip to smooth over relations in Europe and seek peace in the Middle East. Moreover, mistrust about the Iraqi intelligence was growing just as the Administration began to make a similar case against Iran. In order to defend the credibility of his agency, CIA Director George Tenet took the unusual step of issuing a statement last Friday dismissing suggestions that the CIA politicized its intelligence. "Our role is to call it like we see it, to tell policymakers what we know, what we don't know, what we think and what we base it on. That's the code we live by." Asked to translate, an intelligence official explained that if there was a breakdown on the Bush team, it wasn't at the agency. "There's one issue in terms of collecting and analyzing intelligence," he said. "Another issue is what policymakers do with that information. That's their prerogative."

One of the oldest secrets of the secret world is that intelligence work involves as much art as science. While it is difficult, dangerous and expensive to snoop on our enemies with satellite cameras, hidden bugs and old-fashioned dead drops, knowing what all that information really means is the true skill of intelligence work. The information is often so disparate and scattershot that it amounts to little without interpretation.

And interpretation has long been the speciality of the hard-liners who fill so many key foreign-policy posts in the Bush Administration. Unlike his father, who ran the CIA briefly in the mid-'70s and prided himself on revitalizing an embattled spy corps, George W. Bush dotted his foreign-policy team with people who have waged a private war with the CIA for years, men who are disdainful of the way the agency gathers secrets — and what it makes of them. Working mainly out of the Pentagon, the hard-liners have long believed that America's spy agency was a complacent captive of the two parties' internationalist wings, too wary and risk averse, too reliant on gadgets and too slow to see enemies poised to strike.

Two Bush aides in particular, Rumsfeld and his Pentagon deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, have a long record of questioning the assumptions, methods and conclusions of the CIA. Wolfowitz was a member of the famous B Team, created in the mid-'70s by the CIA, then headed by Bush's father, to double-check the work of the CIA's line analysts about the military strength of the Soviet Union. Filled with many hard-liners who now work in the younger Bush's Administration, the B Team was spoiling back then for bigger defense budgets and a more aggressive foreign policy. It found many of the CIA's conclusions about the Soviet Union softheaded and naive. Its final report helped launch the Reagan-era defense buildup of the 1980s. Rumsfeld also chaired a bipartisan commission in 1998 set up by Congress to assess the pace of rogue states' missile efforts, which concluded that the CIA wouldn't be able to gather intelligence quickly enough to meet the unseen threats posed by Iran, Iraq and North Korea. That dire prediction — reinforced by a North Korean missile launch a month later — turbocharged the nation's push to build a $100 billion missile shield, now under construction.

The hard-liners' staunch beliefs were powerfully bolstered after 9/11; they quickly concluded that the CIA failed to anticipate the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. And they were not reassured by the CIA's performance after 9/11 either. By last fall, Rumsfeld had grown so impatient with the CIA's equivocal explanations of the Iraq problem that he set up his own mini-CIA at the Pentagon called the Office of Special Plans. It was hatched and designed, as a former U.S. official puts it, to get "the intelligence he wanted."

Several current and former military officers who saw all the relevant data through this spring charge that the Pentagon took the raw data from the CIA and consistently overinterpreted the threat posed by Iraq's stockpiles. "There was a predisposition in this Administration to assume the worst about Saddam," a senior military officer told TIME. This official, recently retired, was deeply involved in planning the war with Iraq but left the service after concluding that the U.S. was going to war based on bum intelligence. "They were inclined to see and interpret evidence a particular way to support a very deeply held conviction," the officer says. "I just think they felt there needed to be some sort of rallying point for the American people. I think they said it sincerely, but I also think that at the end of the day, we'll find out their interpretations of the intelligence were wrong." Another official, an Army intelligence officer, singled out Rumsfeld for massaging the facts. "Rumsfeld was deeply, almost pathologically distorting the intelligence," says the officer. Rumsfeld told a radio audience last week that the "war was not waged under any false pretense." And an aide flat-out rejects the idea that intelligence was hyped to support the invasion. "We'd disagree very strongly with that," said Victoria Clarke, the chief Pentagon spokeswoman.

Over the past two weeks, TIME has interviewed several dozen current and former intelligence officials and experts at the Pentagon and CIA and on Capitol Hill to try to understand how the public version of the intelligence got so far ahead of the evidence. The reporting suggests that from the start the process was more deductive than empirical. According to these officials, three factors were at work:

--TREATING THE WORST-CASE SCENARIO AS FACT. One official said the process often went this way: the agency would send to the Pentagon three ways to interpret one piece of information, such as a new satellite photo or telephone intercept, and the Pentagon would always opt for the most dire explanation. This inclination accounts in part for the controversial conclusion by the Defense Department that Iraq's aluminum tubes were for the production of uranium for nuclear weapons. Seasoned experts at the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California disagreed, but their view — the most expert government interpretation available — was either ignored or overruled. "They made a decision to turn a blind eye to other explanations," says David Albright, a former International Atomic Energy Agency arms inspector who now heads the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. "If the Pentagon said the worst-case assessment is that within a short period of time Iraq could build nuclear weapons, we'd agree with that. But we have trouble when they start portraying the worst-case scenario as fact. And I think that's the case here."

--GLOSSING OVER AMBIGUITIES. Before the war, one of the little-stated but central realities of U.S. intelligence gathering in Iraq was that it was never great in the first place. It often depended on defectors with personal agendas and tall tales that some U.S. officials were eager to believe. Saddam went to extreme lengths to hide and deceive, and while those habits can help make an argument for invasion, they made for poor intelligence on all kinds of weapons programs. That was one reason it took the U.S. so long to unveil its data in the first place: it was fuzzy and subjective. A civilian intelligence official who continues to see all the intelligence said, "It was always, on its face, ambiguous. There were lots of indications of WMD and some signs of deceptions and efforts to hide. But when you probed and asked tough questions, the body language and attitude of the analysts was always, 'We're not sure. We think, but we're not sure.' Now if you want to conclude that Saddam is a big problem, then you don't necessarily probe and ask all the tough questions."

--FUDGING MISTAKES. One of the most dramatic charges came from Bush in his State of the Union speech this year when he said Saddam had sought to buy uranium from an African nation, later identified as Niger. It wasn't long before the claim, lifted from a British intelligence report, was revealed to be bogus. The documents on which the charge was based were discovered to be forged and faked. But rather than withdraw the charge, the White House claimed instead that Bush omitted any reference to Niger because reports that Saddam had sought uranium had come, an official explained, "from more than one country and more than one source." The other nation, if it exists, has yet to be named. But the mystery has led the Senate Intelligence Committee to ask the CIA for an investigation.

But if the Bush team overreached, one nagging question is, Why? A defense expert who has spent 20 years watching Republicans argue about foreign policy from the inside believes the hard-liners' agenda isn't about Iraq or even oil. It's simply that the most zealous defenders of America's role in the world are congenitally disposed to overreact to every threat — which leads them to read too much into the intelligence. "They came in with a world view, and they looked for things to fit into it," says Lawrence Korb, who served in the Reagan Pentagon and now works at the Council on Foreign Relations. "If you hadn't had 9/11, they would be doing the same things to China."

The U.S. does appear to have one solid argument on its side: those mysterious mobile biowarfare labs. The CIA shared its findings with reporters last week about two tractor-trailer trucks seized in Iraq that it claims were designed for the production of biological weapons. The agency published a nine-page white paper on its website about the mobile labs — allegations that are very similar to charges made by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his U.N. speech on Feb. 5. President Bush pointed to the trucks last week as the best evidence yet that the intelligence wasn't overheated. And en route to Europe, Powell ventured to the back of Air Force One and explained to reporters a bit more about how the U.S. learned of the vans' purpose. "We didn't just make them up one night. Those were eyewitness accounts of people who had worked in the program and knew it was going on, multiple accounts." Powell sarcastically dismissed alternative explanations: "'Oh, it was a hydrogen-making thing for balloons.' No. There's no question in my mind what it was designed for." But even Powell acknowledged that there were no signs of pathogens in the trucks.

Top U.S. officials believe the missing weapons are so well hidden that it will take months or perhaps years to find them — an explanation that has the added virtue of giving them a lot more time. G.I.s have searched only about a third of the 900 suspected sites across the Iraqi countryside. Even the Administration's positions are in flux. Saddam, according to Rumsfeld, could have destroyed the weapons right before the war or even moved them out of the country. "I don't know the answer," Rumsfeld said last week, "and I suspect we'll find out a lot more information as we go along and keep interrogating people."

After a war, the victors always write the history, and that means they can rewrite the war's causes. Even without WMD, the mass graves discovered in Iraq prove that Saddam was a despot worthy of toppling. For many — including some in the Administration — that did not seem a sufficient reason to launch the last war. But until the missing weapons are found, it could be a long time before an American President will be able to rely on his interpretation of intelligence data to launch another war.

Reported by Perry Bacon Jr., Timothy J. Burger, James Carney, John F. Dickerson and Mark Thompson/Washington and J.F.O. McAllister/London



Copyright © 2003 Time Inc. All rights reserved.

Let's face it, when you're an obvious scumbag like Saddam, any old excuse to vanquish him would do; G.W. didn't really need much of an excuse, so he used the WMD angle. It isn't that WMD's in Iraq didn't exist, just that the administration vacillated for so long, any that were there could either be destroyed or hidden. What's mysterious to me is why Saddam didn't play ball from the beginning. What good would WMD's do him, anyway? A history has proven, if he did use them, he gets blasted off the face of the earth. If he doesn't use them, he still gets blasted off the face of the earth. Why risk self-immolation for a few weapons of no use to him anyway? Few are the nations left in the world that could effectively defend themselves from a U.S. invasion, short of using nukes, which, being unthinkable, leaves them vulnerable.

If there's any drawback to our involvement--beyond the obvious, like loss of life and destruction of cities--it's that it's a selective involvement. It isn't like Iraq is the only nation in the world to kill and subjugate its own people. As you and I have discussed elsewhere, Iraq was an easy, obvious target. WHY Iraq was invaded is fairly irrelevant; it was pretty much a fait accompli that it was going down, if only to make a statement about U.S. power. Well, the statement was made, but it remains to be seen if Iraq will be any better a nation to live in after Saddam than it was before. That part of the world is a fucking mess, and probably always will be. In time, this action could look relatively inconsequential.

ED

Ed Bishop wrote:G.W. didn't really need much of an excuse, so he used the WMD angle.

Since WMD was apparently the main reason for going to war (and was either untrue or vastly overstated), it seems clear that he did need an excuse. "You see, Dick, I really want to take that bitch out, but right now I don't have a good reason to. How can we trick the American People into thinking this is justified?"

It isn't that WMD's in Iraq didn't exist, just that the administration vacillated for so long, any that were there could either be destroyed or hidden.

The reasoning for war was that Iraq had weapons that they would either use against us, or sell to others to use against us. The war was to eliminate this "threat". It was NOT about programs that Iraq may or may not have had 10 years ago. As we can (more clearly) see now, that "threat" wasn't there. Iraq didn't use any such weapons when we attacked them, nor have any been found. Not even traces of the chemical agents used to make them.

What's mysterious to me is why Saddam didn't play ball from the beginning. What good would WMD's do him, anyway? A history has proven, if he did use them, he gets blasted off the face of the earth. If he doesn't use them, he still gets blasted off the face of the earth. Why risk self-immolation for a few weapons of no use to him anyway?

That's assuming he actually had any WMD. Which doesn't seem very likely at this point.

What's mysterious to me is why Saddam didn't play ball from the beginning.

My feeling is that Saddam liked the situation he was in. The UN sanctions gave him a perfect alibi for his starving populace. "Hey, it's not my fault, it's the sanctions." Meanwhile, he sold enough oil on the black market to keep him well-stocked on palaces and berets. Under normal conditions, the secular Baath regime would have been under serious threat from more fundmentalist Islamist factions, but the martyrdom conferred on Saddam by the sanctions stifled that, too. He became more popular with the Islamists by "standing up to the West."

The last thing Saddam wanted was for the sanctions to end. Unfortunately, you can only play that string out so long, it appears, under the current environment. So he was then left with the choice of either complying fully with the UN, looking like a wimp in front of the Arab world, and losing his shield of victimhood, or letting the US come in and take his regime down, going out like a hero (and hiding out with a fat bank account -- many billions of dollars by most estimates). Simple choice, if you don't give a damn about your people, which he obviously didn't.

Few are the nations left in the world that could effectively defend themselves from a U.S. invasion, short of using nukes, which, being unthinkable, leaves them vulnerable.

I really, really, hope nuclear countries like North Korea, India and Pakistan find the use of nukes "unthinkable." I'm not yet convinced, though.

Ryan

Luke, here's a follow-up article...

U.S. Hunt for Iraqi Banned Weapons Slows Mon Jun 9, 5:40 PM ET

By DAFNA LINZER, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.S. military units assigned to track down Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have run out of places to look and are getting time off or being assigned to other duties, even as pressure mounts on President Bush (news - web sites) to explain why no banned arms have been found.

After nearly three months of fruitless searches, weapons hunters say they are now waiting for a large team of Pentagon (news - web sites) intelligence experts to take over the effort, relying more on leads from interviews and documents.


"It doesn't appear there are any more targets at this time," said Lt. Col. Keith Harrington, whose team has been cut by more than 30 percent. "We're hanging around with no missions in the foreseeable future."


Over the past week, his and several other teams have been taken off assignment completely. Rather than visit suspected weapons sites, they are brushing up on target practice and catching up on letters home.


Of the seven Site Survey Teams charged with carrying out the search, only two have assignments for the coming week — but not at suspected weapons sites.


Lt. Col. Ronald Haan, who runs team 6, is using the time to run his troops through a training exercise.


"At least it's keeping the guys busy," he said.


The slowdown comes after checks of more than 230 sites — drawn from a master intelligence list compiled before the war — turned up none of the chemical or biological weapons the Bush administration said it went after Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) to destroy.


Still, President Bush insisted Monday that Baghdad had a program to make weapons of mass destruction. "Intelligence throughout the decade shows they had a weapons program. I am absolutely convinced that with time, we'll find out they did have a weapons program," he said.


The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency said work will resume at a brisk pace once its 1,300-person Iraq (news - web sites) Survey Group takes over.


Ahead of the war, planners were so certain of the intelligence that the weapons teams were designed simply to secure chemical and biological weapons rather than investigate their whereabouts, as U.N. inspectors had done.


But without evidence of weapons, the CIA (news - web sites) and other intelligence agencies have begun reviewing the accuracy of information they supplied to the administration before the March invasion of Iraq. Government inquiries are being set up in Washington, London and other coalition countries to examine how possibly flawed intelligence might have influenced the decision for war.


"The smoking guns just weren't lying out in the open," said David Gai, spokesman for the Iraq Survey Group. "There's a lot more detective work that needs to be done."


The group will work more along the model of U.N. weapons inspectors.


Future sites in the search will be compiled from intelligence gathered in the field, and the teams will be reconfigured to include more civilian scientists and engineers, Gai said.


Several former U.N. inspectors from the United States, Britain and Australia, who know many of Iraq's top weapons experts, will also be brought in.


Led by Keith Dayton, a two-star general from Defense intelligence, the Iraq Survey Group is settling into headquarters in Qatar rather than Iraq. However, it will maintain a large presence of analysts and experts on the same palace grounds outside Baghdad where the weapons hunters are based.

Several dozen staffers have moved to the palace and into other buildings, now being turned into classified document centers, living quarters and office space for the Iraq Survey Group.

With prewar intelligence exhausted and senior figures from the former regime insisting Iraq hasn't had chemical or biological weapons in years, Dayton's staff will be starting from scratch.

"We've interviewed a fraction of the people who were involved. We've gone to a fraction of the sites. We've gone through a fraction of thousands and thousands and thousands of documents about this program," National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) said Sunday.

Intelligence agents and weapons hunters have been speaking with scientists and experts for the past month, but those interviews have not led the teams to any illegal weapons and none of the tips provided by Iraqis have panned out.

U.N. inspectors spent years learning the names and faces of the Iraqi weapons programs. But in postwar Iraq, the Bush administration cut the organization out of the hunt because of recent assessments that conflicted with Washington's portrayal of Saddam's weapons.

Relations soured further amid reports that U.S. troops failed to secure Iraq's largest nuclear facility from looters.

This week, a U.N. nuclear team returned to Iraq to survey the damage at Tuwaitha — where 2 tons of uranium had been stored for more than a decade. They began scanning the facility and its equipment for leaking radiation and signs of missing uranium.

One weapons team, specializing in nuclear materials, has been tasked to accompany the U.N. experts until they leave on June 25.


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=s ... led_hunt_5

Ed Bishop wrote:Let's face it, when you're an obvious scumbag like Saddam, any old excuse to vanquish him would do

If this were true, then why did Bush feel it necessary to lie? I believe the "imminent threat" excuse was the only one that Congress and the American people would have bought. You really think that Americans would have sanctioned this war and risked losing their sons in combat because Saddam tortures and murders Iraqis? Get real.

That part of the world is a fucking mess, and probably always will be. In time, this action could look relatively inconsequential.

The United States, for what I believe was the first time in its history, fought a preemtive war--a fact that cannot help but have serious consequences as well as set precedence. And to think that this [possibly] precedent-setting war had as its roots cooked intelligence and lies should leave us all ashamed and hopping mad. You seem neither, Ed. And I really can't figure out why.

Will this war prove to be "inconsequential"--a mere blip in history? Doubt it. I think there's a much greater likelihood of its having quite the opposite effect.


.

What's the irony here, I find, is that there is EVERY justification to stop Terrrorism with Sadaam, but no one, seems, to want to be succinct about giving the reasons for it ! Maybe it comes down to our expectation, that Politicians must Lie to get what they want.

Anyway...it's always puzzled me, how come they can't find these guys, with all of our, supposed, technology ?

Could it be, we really don't WANT to find these bad guys ?


Mike

The group will work more along the model of U.N. weapons inspectors.

So let me get this straight. We had to invade Iraq and kill thousands of civilians because what the UN inspectors were doing wasn't working. Saddam had huge steaming piles of WMDs just sitting around waiting to be dumped into nursery school water supplies in Nebraska. The UN inspectors were incompetent and endangering American freedom with their slow, methodical work. The UN kept asking us to be patient and let the inspectors do their jobs, but we just couldn't wait any longer.

We swept in, blew the crap out of the country, and found zip.

So now we're, um, doing what the inspectors did. And oh, it might take a while. Be patient. Let the inspectors do their jobs.

What's the irony here, I find, is that there is EVERY justification to stop Terrrorism with Sadaam

Which would be fine if there was any evidence that Saddam had ever committed an act of terrorism against the US, or had any plans to. Unfortunately, US intelligence couldn't come up with any such evidence.

So, the reason became that Saddam may not be planning to hit us directly, but he's got the aforementioned big steaming piles of WMDs that he could supply to actual terrorists such as al-Qaeda (to which Saddam had no documented connection other than a mutual loathing).

But it turns out those don't seem to exist, either. (Not to mention that it's much more likely al-Qaeda would get WMDs from a power than actually shares their ideology, like, say, Iran. Or Saudi Arabia.)

So, yeah, if it seemed reasonable that deposing Saddam would have a real effect on terrorism, it would make perfect sense to go after him. But I'm not convinced that's the case. (I had no problem with the Afghan action since the link was clear and unambiguous. I have a problem with the post-war involvement there, but that's a different issue.)

Ryan

Matt wrote:http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/06/26/sprj.irq.white.house/index.html

Update:

IAEA: Centrifuge parts not evidence of 'smoking gun'

U.N. watchdog: Iraq had no nuclear weapons program after '91

From Caroline McDonald
CNN

(CNN) --The International Atomic Energy Agency said Thursday the parts needed to develop a bomb program that the CIA says were found in Baghdad are not "evidence of a smoking gun" proving Iraq had a current weapons of mass destruction program.

"The findings refer to material and documents of the pre-1991 Iraqi nuclear weapons program that have been well-known to the agency," said spokesman Mark Gwozdecky.

The CIA said it has critical parts of a key piece of Iraqi nuclear technology, parts needed to develop a bomb program that were dug up in a Baghdad back yard.

The parts were unearthed by Iraqi scientist Mahdi Obeidi, who said he had hidden them in his back yard under a rosebush 12 years ago under orders from Saddam Hussein's son Qusay and Saddam's then-son-in-law, Hussein Kamel.

The parts and documents Obeidi gave the CIA were shown to CNN at CIA headquarters in Virginia.

Obeidi told CNN that the parts of a gas centrifuge system for enriching uranium were part of a highly sophisticated system that he was ordered to hide, so as to be ready to rebuild the bomb program at some time in the future.

CNN Security Correspondent David Ensor reports that under United Nations sanctions in place in 1991, the concealment of such materials -- and failure to disclose their presence -- would have constituted violations of Security Council regulations.

Gwozdecky, who said the agency has no other information about the development other than press reports, said, "The findings and comments of Obeidi appear to confirm that there has been no post-1991 nuclear weapons program in Iraq and are consistent with our reports to the [U.N.] Security Council.

"Indeed, we have always made it clear that while we have found no evidence of any ongoing nuclear weapons program in Iraq, we are not able to detect small, readily concealable items such as these."

He said the IAEA regularly reported that Iraq had successfully tested a single centrifuge before 1991.

"We knew that pre-1991 Iraq had been provided from foreign sources with a large number of original centrifuge drawings; the IAEA has only been provided with a few of these, of little technical significance.

"The recovery of these items does not change our assessment of Iraq's capabilities in the area of centrifuge enrichment. However, it does add greater detail to our understanding," Gwozdecky said.

"Indeed, during the period of recent inspections, we regularly pressed the Iraqis to obtain the remaining centrifuge drawings and other documentation and information about their enrichment program."

Centrifuge parts buried in someone's back yard for twelve years hardly constitutes an imminent threat. An important find, yes, but not even close to vindicating the case for war.

All this proves is that Iraq had a nuclear program before 1991. That's news to no one.

Ryan

Bush is smart.

Get EVERYONE caught up in the conundrum of discussing something that will have NO genuine resolution, because it's ALL based on half information, half lies, half truths...meanwhile, the time clicks by, and his political reputation is undiminished.

And he gets elected again, because EVERYONE is confused and weary from talking about it ! Priceless.

Another Op Ed opinion chiming in on the subject....




Bush was just plain wrong on Iraq

June 27, 2003

BY ANDREW GREELEY

Humans tend to see what they want to see. If facts seem to challenge our preconceptions, we reject them. Thus, practically everyone in Chicago believes Sammy Sosa's explanation of the corked bat. I personally think White Sox fans put the bat in the wrong place, where Sammy picked it up by mistake. Sox fans would do anything to ruin the Cubs' season and to divert attention from their own miserable showing. Right?

Moreover, our attitude on the Martha Stewart case is shaped by our opinions about women who muscle their way to the top in the corporate world. My suspicions about her indictment are also based on the propensity of federal attorneys to promote their own careers by going after ''big fish'' with technical indictments. (Stewart ''obstructed justice'' by denying she had engaged in insider trading. Failure to confess guilt immediately is apparently a crime in itself.)

Thus, I think it is unfair to say that the Bush administration deliberately deceived the American people about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The deception was not deliberate because the president, the vice president and the secretary of defense believed with their heart and soul that Saddam Hussein was a serious threat to the United States. Indeed, the ''intellectuals'' around Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld advocated ''taking out'' Saddam even before the Supreme Court selected Bush to be president. The World Trade Center attack provided the rage among the American people to sell such an invasion.

The intelligence reports, like all such reports, were uncertain, problematic, ambiguous. The hawks in the administration saw what they wanted to see and concluded that they were right: Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, which he was ready to use; he was cooperating with al-Qaida, he had or would soon have a nuclear bomb. The hawks knew all these things were true, and had known it for some time. There were plenty of hints in the intelligence data to support what they already knew.

Remember me and the White Sox? Didn't they send a thug to torment Sammy at Camden Yards?

So the hawks ignored the weakness of the data and argued that we had to get Saddam before he got us. Preemptive war was all right because Saddam was ready, willing and able to work mass destruction on the United States. Now that most of the intelligence that confirmed their faith seems questionable, they are unable to back down and say that maybe they were wrong.

Similarly, they are unable for reasons of faith to admit that they were wrong about Iraqi reaction to our invasion. The Iraqis would dance in the streets and throw flowers at our tanks. Instead, they loot, they shoot at us, and they riot against us. The hawks can't admit that they were wrong on this subject, either.

So I do not believe that the deception was deliberate. They did not intend to lie to the American people. Rather, they wanted to prove to the American people that they were right, with little respect for the poor quality of their data.

The point is that, however sincere they were, they did deceive. They were just plain wrong. The president was just plain wrong. People who make such terrible mistakes should not be retained in office. In large corporations, officials who make similar errors in judgment are discarded (usually with a fat purse in their pocket). The whole chicken-hawk cabal should be swept out of office. In American politics, this is usually accomplished by congressional investigation. However, given the Bush administration's propensity to stonewall and cover up and the pro-administration bias of much of the media, full-scale investigation is unlikely. Despite token movements in that direction, the mantra ''national security'' will be invoked to prevent investigation. Just now the federal government can do almost anything it wants.

It must be emphasized that while lies are immoral, bad judgment at the senior level of government--being so utterly wrong--is intolerable and dangerous in a nuclear world.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/greeley/ ... eel27.html