Who Is Lying About Iraq? A campaign of distortion aims to discredit the liberation.
BY NORMAN PODHORETZ
Among the many distortions, misrepresentations and outright falsifications that have emerged from the debate over Iraq,
one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W. Bush misled us into an immoral or unnecessary
war in Iraq by telling a series of lies that have now been definitively exposed.
What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident
truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argument alike. In this it resembles
nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up or pushed over a cliff, always spring
back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be
killed off, no matter what.
Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie that it itself really is. Although doing so will
require going over ground that I and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this well-trodden terrain may
also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim, to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that
has grown commensurately dulled.
The main "lie" that George W. Bush is accused of telling us is that Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of weapons
of mass destruction, or WMD as they have invariably come to be called. From this followed the subsidiary "lie" that Iraq under
Saddam's regime posed a two-edged mortal threat. On the one hand, we were informed, there was a distinct (or even "imminent")
possibility that Saddam himself would use these weapons against us or our allies; and on the other hand, there was the still
more dangerous possibility that he would supply them to terrorists like those who had already attacked us on 9/11 and to whom
he was linked.
This entire scenario of purported deceit was given a new lease on life by the indictment in late October of I. Lewis "Scooter"
Libby, then chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Libby stands accused of making false statements to the FBI and
of committing perjury in testifying before a grand jury that had been convened to find out who in the Bush administration
had "outed" Valerie Plame, a CIA agent married to the retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The supposed purpose of leaking
this classified information to the press was to retaliate against Mr. Wilson for having "debunked" (in his words) "the lies
that led to war."
Now, as it happens, Mr. Libby was not charged with having outed Ms. Plame but only with having lied about when and from
whom he first learned that she worked for the CIA. Moreover, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor who brought the
indictment against him, made a point of emphasizing that "this indictment is not about the war":
This indictment is not about the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war effort,
people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how
they feel or any vindication of how they feel.
This is simply an indictment that says, in a national-security investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer's identity
that may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether some person--a person, Mr. Libby--lied
or not.
No matter. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, spoke for a host of other opponents of
the war in insisting:
This case is bigger than the leak of classified information. It is about how the Bush White House manufactured
and manipulated intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge
the president. Yet even stipulating--which I do only for the sake of argument--that no weapons of mass destruction
existed in Iraq in the period leading up to the invasion, it defies all reason to think that Mr. Bush was lying when he asserted
that they did. To lie means to say something one knows to be false. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Mr.
Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.
How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA director, assured him that the case was "a slam dunk."
This phrase would later become notorious, but in using it, Mr. Tenet had the backing of all 15 agencies involved in gathering
intelligence for the United States. In the National Intelligence Estimate of 2002, where their collective views were summarized,
one of the conclusions offered with "high confidence" was that "Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical,
biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions."
The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel and--yes--France all agreed with this judgment. And
even Hans Blix--who headed the U.N. team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of
the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past--lent further
credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:
The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km [105 miles]
southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved
there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the
tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands
of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for. Mr. Blix now claims that he was only being "cautious" here, but
if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration "misled itself" in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least
lent it a helping hand.
So, once again, did the British, the French and the Germans, all of whom signed on in advance to Secretary of State
Colin Powell's reading of the satellite photos he presented to the U.N. in the period leading up to the invasion. Mr. Powell
himself and his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, now feel that this speech was the low point of his tenure as secretary
of state. But Mr. Wilkerson (in the process of a vicious attack on the president, the vice president, and the secretary of
defense for getting us into Iraq) is forced to acknowledge that the Bush administration did not lack for company in interpreting
the available evidence as it did:
I can't tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of
it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can't. I've wrestled with it. [But] when you see a satellite
photograph of all the signs of the chemical-weapons ASP--Ammunition Supply Point--with chemical weapons, and you match all
those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they're there, you have to conclude that it's a chemical
ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the UN inspectors wheeling in their white vehicles
with black markings on them to that same ASP, and everything is changed, everything is clean. . . . But George [Tenet]
was convinced, John McLaughlin [Tenet's deputy] was convinced, that what we were presented [for Powell's UN speech] was accurate. Going
on to shoot down a widespread impression, Mr. Wilkerson informs us that even the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence
and Research, known as INR, was convinced:
People say, well, INR dissented. That's a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running.
That's all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios. In explaining its dissent on Iraq's
nuclear program, the INR had, as stated in the NIE of 2002, expressed doubt about:
Iraq's efforts to acquire aluminum tubes [which are] central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its
nuclear-weapons program. . . . INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge
rotors . . . in Iraq's nuclear-weapons program. But, according to Wilkerson:
The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and
by God, we did it to this rpm, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were
not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments? In
short, and whether or not it included the secret heart of Hans Blix, "the consensus of the intelligence community," as Mr.
Wilkerson puts it, "was overwhelming" in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Saddam definitely had an arsenal
of chemical and biological weapons, and that he was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nuclear capability
that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981.
Additional confirmation of this latter point comes from Kenneth Pollack, who served in the National Security Council under
Clinton. "In the late spring of 2002," Pollack has written:
I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors
from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq.
One of the senior people put a question to the group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret
centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility
for separating uranium isotopes). No wonder, then, that another conclusion the NIE of 2002 reached with "high
confidence" was that "Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile
material." (Hard as it is to believe, let alone to reconcile with his general position, Joseph C. Wilson IV, in a speech he
delivered three months after the invasion at the Education for Peace in Iraq Center, offhandedly made the following remark:
"I remain of the view that we will find biological and chemical weapons and we may well find something that indicates that
Saddam's regime maintained an interest in nuclear weapons.")
But the consensus on which Mr. Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed
in the Clinton administration. Here is Bill Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:
If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat
posed by Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction program. Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking
in 1998:
Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders
of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat
we face. Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out
assertion about Saddam:
He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983. Finally, Mr.
Clinton's secretary of defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained "absolutely convinced"
of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.
Nor did leading Democrats in Congress entertain any doubts on this score. A few months after Mr. Clinton and his people
made the statements I have just quoted, a group of Democratic senators, including such liberals as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle,
and John Kerry, urged the President "to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect
Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq's refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs."
Nancy Pelosi, the future leader of the Democrats in the House, and then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, added
her voice to the chorus:
Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat
to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process. This Democratic drumbeat
continued and even intensified when Mr. Bush succeeded Mr. Clinton in 2001, and it featured many who would later pretend to
have been deceived by the Bush White House. In a letter to the new president, a group of senators led by Bob Graham declared:
There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that
biological, chemical, and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf war status. In addition, Saddam continues
to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles
that will threaten the United States and our allies. Sen. Carl Levin also reaffirmed for Mr. Bush's benefit what
he had told Mr. Clinton some years earlier:
Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of
the United Nations, and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them. Senator Hillary
Rodham Clinton agreed, speaking in October 2002:
In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild
his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid,
comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members. Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the
Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed as well:
There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will
likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . . We also should remember we have always underestimated
the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction. Even more striking were the sentiments
of Bush's opponents in his two campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:
We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country. And
here is Mr. Gore again, in that same year:
Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will
continue for as long as Saddam is in power. Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:
I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force--if necessary--to disarm
Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat
to our security. Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later employ against Mr. Bush
after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by Sens. Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:
Kennedy: "We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."
Byrd: "The last U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some
stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical-
and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons."
Liberal politicians like these were seconded by the mainstream media, in whose columns a very different tune would
later be sung. For example, throughout the last two years of the Clinton administration, editorials in the New York Times
repeatedly insisted that "without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants
within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again."
The Times was also skeptical of negotiations, pointing out that it was "hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention
of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country's salvation."
So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001 with this admonition:
Of all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous--or more urgent--than the situation
in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete
unraveling of a decade's efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass
destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where] intelligence photos . . .
show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.
All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable doubt that Mr. Bush was telling what he believed
to be the truth about Saddam's stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the fallback charge that Mr. Bush lied by exaggerating
or hyping the intelligence presented to him. Why on earth would he have done so when the intelligence itself was so compelling
that it convinced everyone who had direct access to it, and when hardly anyone in the world believed that Saddam had, as he
claimed, complied with the 16 resolutions of the Security Council demanding that he get rid of his weapons of mass destruction?
Another fallback charge is that Mr. Bush, operating mainly through Mr. Cheney, somehow forced the CIA into telling
him what he wanted to hear. Yet in its report of 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, while criticizing the
CIA for relying on what in hindsight looked like weak or faulty intelligence, stated that it "did not find any evidence that
administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's
weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.
The March 2005 report of the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission, which investigated intelligence failures on
Iraq, reached the same conclusion, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's pre-war
assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . . Analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure
cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments."
Still, even many who believed that Saddam did possess WMD, and was ruthless enough to use them, accused Mr. Bush of telling
a different sort of lie by characterizing the risk as "imminent." But this, too, is false: Mr. Bush consistently rejected
imminence as a justification for war. Thus, in the State of the Union address he delivered only three months after 9/11,
Mr. Bush declared that he would "not wait on events while dangers gather" and that he would "not stand by, as peril draws
closer and closer." Then, in a speech at West Point six months later, he reiterated the same point: "If we wait for threats
to materialize, we will have waited too long." And as if that were not clear enough, he went out of his way in his State of
the Union address in 2003 (that is, three months before the invasion), to bring up the word "imminent" itself precisely in
order to repudiate it:
Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced
their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge,
all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein
is not a strategy, and it is not an option. What of the related charge that it was still another "lie" to suggest,
as Mr. Bush and his people did, that a connection could be traced between Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda terrorists who had
attacked us on 9/11? This charge was also rejected by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrary to how its findings were
summarized in the mainstream media, the committee's report explicitly concluded that al Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative,
if informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam. The report of the bipartisan 9/11 commission came to the
same conclusion, as did a comparably independent British investigation conducted by Lord Butler, which pointed to "meetings
. . . between senior Iraqi representatives and senior al-Qaeda operatives."
Which brings us to Joseph C. Wilson, IV and what to my mind wins the palm for the most disgraceful instance of all.
The story begins with the notorious 16 words inserted--after, be it noted, much vetting by the CIA and the State Department--into
Bush's 2003 State of the Union address:
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from
Africa. This is the "lie" Mr. Wilson bragged of having "debunked" after being sent by the CIA to Niger in 2002
to check out the intelligence it had received to that effect. Mr. Wilson would later angrily deny that his wife had recommended
him for this mission, and would do his best to spread the impression that choosing him had been the vice president's idea.
But Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, through whom Mr. Wilson first planted this impression, was eventually forced to
admit that "Cheney apparently didn't know that Wilson had been dispatched." (By the time Mr. Kristof grudgingly issued this
retraction, Mr. Wilson himself, in characteristically shameless fashion, was denying that he had ever "said the vice president
sent me or ordered me sent.") And as for his wife's supposed nonrole in his mission, here is what Valerie Plame Wilson wrote
in a memo to her boss at the CIA:
My husband has good relations with the PM [the prime minister of Niger] and the former minister of mines . . .,
both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity. More than a year after his return, with the help
of Mr. Kristof, and also Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, and then through an op-ed piece in the Times under his own
name, Mr. Wilson succeeded, probably beyond his wildest dreams, in setting off a political firestorm.
In response, the White House, no doubt hoping to prevent his allegation about the 16 words from becoming a proxy for the
charge that (in Mr. Wilson's latest iteration of it) "lies and disinformation [were] used to justify the invasion of Iraq,"
eventually acknowledged that the president's statement "did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address."
As might have been expected, however, this panicky response served to make things worse rather than better. And yet it was
totally unnecessary--for the maddeningly simple reason that every single one of the 16 words at issue was true.
That is, British intelligence had assured the CIA that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy enriched uranium from the
African country of Niger. Furthermore--and notwithstanding the endlessly repeated assertion that this assurance has now been
discredited--Britain's independent Butler commission concluded that it was "well-founded." The relevant passage is worth quoting
at length:
a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in 1999.
b. The British government had intelligence from several different sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose
of acquiring uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger's exports, the intelligence was credible.
c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as opposed to having sought, uranium, and the British
government did not claim this. As if that were not enough to settle the matter, Mr. Wilson himself, far from
challenging the British report when he was "debriefed" on his return from Niger (although challenging it is what he now never
stops doing), actually strengthened the CIA's belief in its accuracy. From the Senate Intelligence Committee report:
He [the CIA reports officer] said he judged that the most important fact in the report [by Mr. Wilson] was that
Niger officials admitted that the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Niger prime minister believed
the Iraqis were interested in purchasing uranium. And again:
The report on [Mr. Wilson's] trip to Niger . . . did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger
uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original CIA reports on the uranium
deal. This passage goes on to note that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research--which (as
we have already seen) did not believe that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop nuclear weapons--found support in Mr. Wilson's
report for its "assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq." But if so, this, as the
Butler report quoted above points out, would not mean that Iraq had not tried to buy it--which was the only claim made
by British intelligence and then by Mr. Bush in the famous 16 words.
The liar here, then, was not Mr. Bush but Mr. Wilson. And Mr. Wilson also lied when he told the Washington Post that he
had unmasked as forgeries certain documents given to American intelligence (by whom it is not yet clear) that supposedly contained
additional evidence of Saddam's efforts to buy uranium from Niger. The documents did indeed turn out to be forgeries; but,
according to the Butler report:
The forged documents were not available to the British government at the time its assessment was made, and so
the fact of the forgery does not undermine [that assessment]. More damning yet to Mr. Wilson, the Senate Intelligence
Committee discovered that he had never laid eyes on the documents in question:
[Mr. Wilson] also told committee staff that he was the source of a Washington Post article . . . which
said, "among the envoy's conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because 'the dates were wrong and the names
were wrong.' " Committee staff asked how the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the "dates were
wrong and the names were wrong" when he had never seen the CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in
the reports. To top all this off, just as Mr. Cheney had nothing to do with the choice of Mr. Wilson for the mission
to Niger, neither was it true that, as Mr. Wilson "confirmed" for a credulous New Republic reporter, "the CIA circulated [his]
report to the Vice President's office," thereby supposedly proving that Cheney and his staff "knew the Niger story was a flat-out
lie." Yet--the mind reels--if Mr. Cheney had actually been briefed on Mr. Wilson's oral report to the CIA (which he was not),
he would, like the CIA itself, have been more inclined to believe that Saddam had tried to buy yellowcake uranium from
Niger.
So much for the author of the best-selling and much-acclaimed book whose title alone--"The Politics of Truth: Inside the
Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity"--has set a new record for chutzpah.
But there is worse. In his press conference on the indictment against Mr. Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald insisted that lying
to federal investigators is a serious crime both because it is itself against the law and because, by sending them on endless
wild-goose chases, it constitutes the even more serious crime of obstruction of justice. By those standards, Mr. Wilson--who
has repeatedly made false statements about every aspect of his mission to Niger, including whose idea it was to send him and
what he told the CIA upon his return; who was then shown up by the Senate Intelligence Committee as having lied about the
forged documents; and whose mendacity has sent the whole country into a wild-goose chase after allegations that, the more
they are refuted, the more they keep being repeated--is himself an excellent candidate for criminal prosecution.
And so long as we are hunting for liars in this area, let me suggest that we begin with the Democrats now proclaiming that
they were duped, and that we then broaden out to all those who in their desperation to delegitimize the larger policy being
tested in Iraq--the policy of making the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for democracy--have consistently used
distortion, misrepresentation and selective perception to vilify as immoral a bold and noble enterprise and to brand as an
ignominious defeat what is proving itself more and more every day to be a victory of American arms and a vindication of American
ideals.
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