The War in Iraq

[Kris]

May 6, 2003

Missing in Action: Truth

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

When I raised the Mystery of the Missing W.M.D. recently, hawks fired barrages of reproachful e-mail at me. The gist was: "You *&#*! Who cares if we never find weapons of mass destruction, because we've liberated the Iraqi people from a murderous tyrant."

But it does matter, enormously, for American credibility. After all, as Ari Fleischer said on April 10 about W.M.D.: "That is what this war was about."

I rejoice in the newfound freedoms in Iraq. But there are indications that the U.S. government souped up intelligence, leaned on spooks to change their conclusions and concealed contrary information to deceive people at home and around the world.

Let's fervently hope that tomorrow we find an Iraqi superdome filled with 500 tons of mustard gas and nerve gas, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 29,984 prohibited munitions capable of delivering chemical agents, several dozen Scud missiles, gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, 18 mobile biological warfare factories, long-range unmanned aerial vehicles to dispense anthrax, and proof of close ties with Al Qaeda. Those are the things that President Bush or his aides suggested Iraq might have, and I don't want to believe that top administration officials tried to win support for the war with a campaign of wholesale deceit.

Consider the now-disproved claims by President Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger so it could build nuclear weapons. As Seymour Hersh noted in The New Yorker, the claims were based on documents that had been forged so amateurishly that they should never have been taken seriously.

I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted — except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.

"It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year," one insider said.

Another example is the abuse of intelligence from Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein and head of Iraq's biological weapons program until his defection in 1995. Top British and American officials kept citing information from Mr. Kamel as evidence of a huge secret Iraqi program, even though Mr. Kamel had actually emphasized that Iraq had mostly given up its W.M.D. program in the early 1990's. Glen Rangwala, a British Iraq expert, says the transcript of Mr. Kamel's debriefing was leaked because insiders resented the way politicians were misleading the public.

Patrick Lang, a former head of Middle Eastern affairs in the Defense Intelligence Agency, says that he hears from those still in the intelligence world that when experts wrote reports that were skeptical about Iraq's W.M.D., "they were encouraged to think it over again."

"In this administration, the pressure to get product `right' is coming out of O.S.D. [the Office of the Secretary of Defense]," Mr. Lang said. He added that intelligence experts had cautioned that Iraqis would not necessarily line up to cheer U.S. troops and that the Shiite clergy could be a problem. "The guys who tried to tell them that came to understand that this advice was not welcome," he said.

"The intelligence that our officials was given regarding W.M.D. was either defective or manipulated," Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico noted. Another senator is even more blunt and, sadly, exactly right: "Intelligence was manipulated."

The C.I.A. was terribly damaged when William Casey, its director in the Reagan era, manipulated intelligence to exaggerate the Soviet threat in Central America to whip up support for Ronald Reagan's policies. Now something is again rotten in the state of Spookdom. *

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

May 6, 2003
Man on Horseback
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Gen. Georges Boulanger cut a fine figure; he looked splendid in uniform, and magnificent on horseback. So his handlers made sure that he appeared in uniform, astride a horse, as often as possible.

It worked: Boulanger became immensely popular. If he hadn't lost his nerve on the night of the attempted putsch, French democracy might have ended in 1889.

We do things differently here — or we used to. Has "man on horseback" politics come to America?

Some background: the Constitution declares the president commander in chief of the armed forces to make it clear that civilians, not the military, hold ultimate authority. That's why American presidents traditionally make a point of avoiding military affectations. Dwight Eisenhower was a victorious general and John Kennedy a genuine war hero, but while in office neither wore anything that resembled military garb.

Given that history, George Bush's "Top Gun" act aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln — c'mon, guys, it wasn't about honoring the troops, it was about showing the president in a flight suit — was as scary as it was funny.

Mind you, it was funny. At first the White House claimed the dramatic tail-hook landing was necessary because the carrier was too far out to use a helicopter. In fact, the ship was so close to shore that, according to The Associated Press, administration officials "acknowledged positioning the massive ship to provide the best TV angle for Bush's speech, with the sea as his background instead of the San Diego coastline."

A U.S.-based British journalist told me that he and his colleagues had laughed through the whole scene. If Tony Blair had tried such a stunt, he said, the press would have demanded to know how many hospital beds could have been provided for the cost of the jet fuel.

But U.S. television coverage ranged from respectful to gushing. Nobody pointed out that Mr. Bush was breaking an important tradition. And nobody seemed bothered that Mr. Bush, who appears to have skipped more than a year of the National Guard service that kept him out of Vietnam, is now emphasizing his flying experience. (Spare me the hate mail. An exhaustive study by The Boston Globe found no evidence that Mr. Bush fulfilled any of his duties during that missing year. And since Mr. Bush has chosen to play up his National Guard career, this can't be shrugged off as old news.)

Anyway, it was quite a show. Luckily for Mr. Bush, the frustrating search for Osama bin Laden somehow morphed into a good old-fashioned war, the kind where you seize the enemy's capital and get to declare victory after a cheering crowd pulls down the tyrant's statue. (It wasn't much of a crowd, and American soldiers actually brought down the statue, but it looked great on TV.)

Let me be frank. Why is the failure to find any evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear weapons program, or vast quantities of chemical and biological weapons (a few drums don't qualify — though we haven't found even that) a big deal? Mainly because it feeds suspicions that the war wasn't waged to eliminate real threats. This suspicion is further fed by the administration's lackadaisical attitude toward those supposed threats once Baghdad fell. For example, Iraq's main nuclear waste dump wasn't secured until a few days ago, by which time it had been thoroughly looted. So was it all about the photo ops?

Well, Mr. Bush got to pose in his flight suit. And given the absence of awkward questions, his handlers surely feel empowered to make even more brazen use of the national security issue in future.

Next year — in early September — the Republican Party will hold its nominating convention in New York. The party will exploit the time and location to the fullest. How many people will dare question the propriety of the proceedings?

And who will ask why, if the administration is so proud of its response to Sept. 11, it has gone to such lengths to prevent a thorough, independent inquiry into what actually happened? (An independent study commission wasn't created until after the 2002 election, and it has been given little time and a ludicrously tiny budget.)

There was a time when patriotic Americans from both parties would have denounced any president who tried to take political advantage of his role as commander in chief. But that, it seems, was another country. *


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

May 13, 2003

The China Syndrome

By PAUL KRUGMAN


A funny thing happened during the Iraq war: many Americans turned to the BBC for their TV news. They were looking for an alternative point of view — something they couldn't find on domestic networks, which, in the words of the BBC's director general, "wrapped themselves in the American flag and substituted patriotism for impartiality."

Leave aside the rights and wrongs of the war itself, and consider the paradox. The BBC is owned by the British government, and one might have expected it to support that government's policies. In fact, however, it tried hard — too hard, its critics say — to stay impartial. America's TV networks are privately owned, yet they behaved like state-run media.

What explains this paradox? It may have something to do with the China syndrome. No, not the one involving nuclear reactors — the one exhibited by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation when dealing with the government of the People's Republic.

In the United States, Mr. Murdoch's media empire — which includes Fox News and The New York Post — is known for its flag-waving patriotism. But all that patriotism didn't stop him from, as a Fortune article put it, "pandering to China's repressive regime to get his programming into that vast market." The pandering included dropping the BBC's World Service — which reports news China's government doesn't want disseminated — from his satellite programming, and having his publishing company cancel the publication of a book critical of the Chinese regime.

Can something like that happen in this country? Of course it can. Through its policy decisions — especially, though not only, decisions involving media regulation — the U.S. government can reward media companies that please it, punish those that don't. This gives private networks an incentive to curry favor with those in power. Yet because the networks aren't government-owned, they aren't subject to the kind of scrutiny faced by the BBC, which must take care not to seem like a tool of the ruling party. So we shouldn't be surprised if America's "independent" television is far more deferential to those in power than the state-run systems in Britain or — for another example — Israel.

A recent report by Stephen Labaton of The Times contained a nice illustration of the U.S. government's ability to reward media companies that do what it wants. The issue was a proposal by Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to relax regulations on media ownership. The proposal, formally presented yesterday, may be summarized as a plan to let the bigger fish eat more of the smaller fish. Big media companies will be allowed to have a larger share of the national market and own more TV stations in any given local market, and many restrictions on "cross-ownership" — owning radio stations, TV stations and newspapers in the same local market — will be lifted.

The plan's defects aside — it will further reduce the diversity of news available to most people — what struck me was the horse-trading involved. One media group wrote to Mr. Powell, dropping its opposition to part of his plan "in return for favorable commission action" on another matter. That was indiscreet, but you'd have to be very naïve not to imagine that there are a lot of implicit quid pro quos out there.

And the implicit trading surely extends to news content. Imagine a TV news executive considering whether to run a major story that might damage the Bush administration — say, a follow-up on Senator Bob Graham's charge that a Congressional report on Sept. 11 has been kept classified because it would raise embarrassing questions about the administration's performance. Surely it would occur to that executive that the administration could punish any network running that story.

Meanwhile, both the formal rules and the codes of ethics that formerly prevented blatant partisanship are gone or ignored. Neil Cavuto of Fox News is an anchor, not a commentator. Yet after Baghdad's fall he told "those who opposed the liberation of Iraq" — a large minority — that "you were sickening then; you are sickening now." Fair and balanced.

We don't have censorship in this country; it's still possible to find different points of view. But we do have a system in which the major media companies have strong incentives to present the news in a way that pleases the party in power, and no incentive not to. *


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

May 13, 2003

Europe Won't Be Fooled Again

By OLIVIER ROY

PARIS

After months of cold war with the United Nations, the United States put forth a draft resolution last week to give the international body oversight of efforts to rebuild Iraq. Although this might help the United Nations gain back some credibility, Washington's effort was clearly intended as a peace offering to its former "Old Europe" allies. While the offer is certainly genuine, it is unlikely to thaw relations with Russia, France, Germany and Turkey. The problem is that the Bush administration, while ostensibly trying to get its traditional friends on board, continues to dissemble about where the train is headed.

To understand the problem, one has to consider what the Europeans were presented with in the build-up to war. Beyond polemics and misgivings, the basic problem was that Washington's stated war goals were not logically coherent, and its more intellectually compelling arguments were usually played down or denied.

The official war objectives given to the allies were these: destruction of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction; fighting terrorism; getting rid of a tyrant. The Europeans responded that there were no operational weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that the inspections could have maintained the status quo at a lesser cost than a military campaign; Saddam Hussein was in no way integral to Al Qaeda, which had shifted to Pakistan (as shown by all the recent arrests); and, yes, Saddam Hussein was a bloody tyrant, but who decided not to finish him off in 1991?

For Old Europe, the poverty of the official American arguments gave rise to suspicion that there was a hidden agenda. European public opinion endorsed the idea that the war was about oil, a claim that fed into the good old anti-imperialist reflex from Cairo to Paris.

That oil argument was of course wrong. But that is not to say these Europeans were mistaken about the United States having a broader agenda. And, in fact, there had always been a not-so-hidden agenda, one explicitly expressed by many professional thinkers at the American Enterprise Institute, for example. The idea is that the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate is America's most worrisome foreign entanglement, and can be broken only if the overall existing order in the Middle East is shaken up first.

In this sense, the rationale for the military campaign in Iraq was not that Iraq was the biggest threat but, on the contrary, that it was the weakest and hence the easiest to take care of. The invasion was largely aimed at demonstrating America's political will and commitment to go to war. Reshaping the Middle East does not mean changing borders, but rather threatening existing regimes through military pressure and destabilizing them with calls for democratization.

After Baghdad's fall, Tehran, Damascus and Riyadh should understand that America is back. The Israelis, for their part, are now insisting that the Iranian nuclear program be dealt with immediately. Pentagon officials hint that Syria is the next target. The idea is to force Damascus and Tehran to cut off terrorist groups like Hezbollah, which means depriving both regimes of their ideological legitimacy, which in turn would weaken their grips on their populations. Is it simply a coincidence that the draft resolution on Iraq went to the Security Council just as Secretary of State Colin Powell was heading to Jerusalem?

This American agenda is very risky and full of pitfalls, but it is logical, perhaps laudable, and should have been put on the table. At least then the real issues could have been debated.

The problem is that no American official ever bothered to express the real motivation to the usual allies. One reason for this partial disclosure may have been that the consensus in Washington was built only on the lesser aspect — removing Saddam Hussein. But the broader, regional plan could at least have been privately conveyed by President Bush to his European counterparts. It was not. Mr. Bush does not like to travel and meet his peers, in contrast to his father and Ronald Reagan. No private contacts were maintained where ideas could be put forward without being couched in official statements.

The State Department consistently referred only to the restricted agenda (terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and tyranny) and systematically dismissed any idea of a broader agenda. Any European diplomat or expert who addressed American officials about the broader goals being discussed in the many think tanks close to the Pentagon — democratization, reshaping the Middle East, getting to Iran and Syria after Baghdad — were told that such debates did not reflect official views.

Would Europe have accepted the real agenda? Certainly not. But at least the debate would have been based on the relevant issue: does it make sense to reshape the Middle East through military pressure?

Thus there is no reason for Old Europe to repent today. To join a coalition means, at the very least, being told about the whole strategy and not just being enlisted blindly in battle. Europe has its own concerns: pacifist public opinion, proximity to the Middle East, a large population of Muslim citizens far more vocal than that of the United States.

The fact is, the Bush administration's long-term agenda will be very difficult without real allies and an international umbrella. The situation in Iraq will soon remind the American public that United States troops are, in legal terms, an army of occupation. Hence last week's United Nations olive branch. Unless the traditional allies and the United Nations are given a real role, America will be obliged to rule Iraq for years and to keep tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of troops there.

Washington has claimed that it can create a friendly, democratic and stable Iraq within two years. Forget it: achieve two of those adjectives and consider yourselves lucky. There is no democracy without nationalism, and the Iraqis will sooner or later challenge the American presence. The United States cannot stand alone when dealing with the driving force in the Middle East. This is neither Islamism nor the appetite for democracy, but simply nationalism — whether it comes in the guise of democracy, secular totalitarianism or Islamic fervor.

Olivier Roy is a specialist on the Islamic world at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Lightning Homer]

"There is no democracy without nationalism, [...]

Who sayed that ? A french Hitler ? Most of nationalist governments on this planet are far from democracy !

[...] and the Iraqis will sooner or later challenge the American presence. "

Well, boys, I think we're getting quite used to ingratitude, aren't we ?

"The United States cannot stand alone when dealing with the driving force in the Middle East."

If nobody else cares, America won't have another choice than stand alone. Thanks to God, we have Great Britain and Poland on our side !

"This is neither Islamism nor the appetite for democracy, but simply nationalism — whether it comes in the guise of democracy, secular totalitarianism or Islamic fervor."

In his country (France), nationalism has a name : Jean-Marie Le Pen. That's what that guy calls democracy ?

"Olivier Roy is a specialist on the Islamic world at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique."

No wonder. And he's also a sucker...



(Edited by Lightning Homer at 1:43 pm on June 5, 2003)

[ZippyTheChimp]

There is no democracy without nationalism

That certainly wasn't the case in this country. The sense of America the Nation did not develop until after the Civil War.

Democracy in a diverse place like Iraq won't happen unless their is separation of religion and government.

I agree with the author's assessment of Administration diplomacy.

[Lightning Homer]

"Democracy in a diverse place like Iraq won't happen unless their is separation of religion and government."

Separation of religion and state isn't a warranty of democracy. Saddam Husseïn wasn't religious afterall.

If the majority want a religious state, it would be thoroughly antidemocratic not to let them get what they want.

Some religions are not uncompatible with democracy and freedom (thanks be to God).

(Edited by Lightning Homer at 3:39 pm on May 14, 2003)

[ZippyTheChimp]

Quote: from Lightning Homer on 7:14 am on May 14, 2003
Separation of religion and state isn't a warranty of democracy. Saddam Husseïn wasn't religious afterall.

I didn't say democracy would evolve from the separation. I said it would be impossible without it.



There are non religious dictatorships in the world, but there is not one theocracy-democracy.

[TLOZ Link5]

Errr...what about Iran, Zippy?

[ZippyTheChimp]

Iran is a good example of what I am saying. It is described as an Islamic Republic. The two key figures are the elected
President, Mohammad Khatami, and the Islamic Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Iranian constitution states that the president is the head of the government, but also that the ayatollah, appointed by a council of clerics, derives his authority from Allah which gives him rule over the government.

This contradiction is the Iranian attempt to form a theocratic democracy, and is the source of conflict between the president and the ayatollah. Democratic reforms can only happen at the expense of religious power.

Iran may be closer to a true democracy than any other Middle East country. Bush sure helped them along with the "Axis of Evil" label.

[Lightning Homer]

There are non religious dictatorships in the world, but there is not one theocracy-democracy.

Ha-haaaaaaaa, there's at least one or two, buddy !
And it's no Iran...

TLOZ, did you smoke crack ? :biggrin:

[ZippyTheChimp]

Dammit Homer. Not fair. I've got other things to do today.

I hope it's bigger than Brooklyn.

I guess technically, there are no democracies, only republics.

http://www.cqpress.com/context/articles/epr_theo.html

[TLOZ Link5]

Quote: from Lightning Homer on 3:19 am on May 15, 2003

TLOZ, did you smoke crack ? :biggrin:


Not to my knowledge. *:biggrin:

[ZippyTheChimp]

So are you going to tell us the one or two?

[Lightning Homer]

Nope ! 'till you guess one of those, then I'll give ya the second one... :biggrin:

[ZippyTheChimp]

Keep grinning, but don't hold your breath.

[Kris]

May 30, 2003

Save Our Spooks

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

On Day 71 of the Hunt for Iraqi W.M.D., yesterday, once again nothing turned up.

Maybe we'll do better on Day 72. But we might have better luck searching for something just as alarming: the growing evidence that the administration grossly manipulated intelligence about those weapons of mass destruction in the runup to the Iraq war.

A column earlier this month on this issue drew a torrent of covert communications from indignant spooks who say that administration officials leaned on them to exaggerate the Iraqi threat and deceive the public.

"The American people were manipulated," bluntly declares one person from the Defense Intelligence Agency who says he was privy to all the intelligence there on Iraq. These people are coming forward because they are fiercely proud of the deepest ethic in the intelligence world — that such work should be nonpolitical — and are disgusted at efforts to turn them into propagandists.

"The Al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S.," notes Greg Thielmann, who retired in September after 25 years in the State Department, the last four in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. "And the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things."

The outrage among the intelligence professionals is so widespread that they have formed a group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, that wrote to President Bush this month to protest what it called "a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions."

"While there have been occasions in the past when intelligence has been deliberately warped for political purposes," the letter said, "never before has such warping been used in such a systematic way to mislead our elected representatives into voting to authorize launching a war."

Ray McGovern, a retired C.I.A. analyst who briefed President Bush's father in the White House in the 1980's, said that people in the agency were now "totally demoralized." He says, and others back him up, that the Pentagon took dubious accounts from émigrés close to Ahmad Chalabi and gave these tales credibility they did not deserve.

Intelligence analysts often speak of "humint" for human intelligence (spies) and "sigint" for signals intelligence (wiretaps). They refer contemptuously to recent work as "rumint," or rumor intelligence.

"I've never heard this level of alarm before," said Larry Johnson, who used to work in the C.I.A. and State Department. "It is a misuse and abuse of intelligence. The president was being misled. He was ill served by the folks who are supposed to protect him on this. Whether this was witting or unwitting, I don't know, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt."

Some say that top Pentagon officials cast about for the most sensational nuggets about Iraq and used them to bludgeon Colin Powell and seduce President Bush. The director of central intelligence, George Tenet, has been generally liked and respected within the agency ranks, but in the last year, particularly in the intelligence directorate, people say that he has kowtowed to Donald Rumsfeld and compromised the integrity of his own organization.

"We never felt that there was any leadership in the C.I.A. to qualify or put into context the information available," one veteran said. "Rather there was a tendency to feed the most alarming tidbits to the president. Often it's the most ill-considered information that goes to the president.

"So instead of giving the president the most considered, carefully examined information available, basically you give him the garbage. And then in a few days when it's clear that maybe it wasn't right, well then, you feed him some more hot garbage."

The C.I.A. is now examining its own record, and that's welcome. But the atmosphere within the intelligence community is so poisonous, and the stakes are so high — for the credibility of America's word and the soundness of information on which we base American foreign policy — that an outside examination is essential.

Congress must provide greater oversight, and President Bush should invite Brent Scowcroft, the head of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a man trusted by all sides, to lead an inquiry and, in a public report, suggest steps to restore integrity to America's intelligence agencies. *


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company


May 30, 2003

Waggy Dog Stories

By PAUL KRUGMAN

An administration hypes the threat posed by a foreign power. It talks of links to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism; it warns about a nuclear weapons program. The news media play along, and the country is swept up in war fever. The war drives everything else — including scandals involving administration officials — from the public's consciousness.

The 1997 movie "Wag the Dog" had quite a plot.

Although the movie's title has entered the language, I don't know how many people have watched it lately. Read the screenplay. If you don't think it bears a resemblance to recent events, you're in denial.

The Iraq war was very real, even if its Kodak moments — the toppling of the Saddam statue, the rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch — seem to have been improved by editing. But much of the supposed justification for the war turns out to have been fictional.

The war was justified to the public by links between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. No evidence of the Qaeda link has ever surfaced, and no W.M.D.'s that could have posed any threat to the U.S. or its allies have been found.

The failure to find W.M.D.'s has been described as an "intelligence failure," but this ignores the fact that intense pressure was placed on intelligence agencies to tell the Bush and Blair administrations what they wanted to hear. Even before the war began we learned of such pratfalls as the presentation of a plagiarized, decade-old report about Iraqi capabilities as hot new intelligence, and the use of crudely forged documents as evidence of a nuclear program.

Last fall the former head of the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism efforts warned that "cooked intelligence" was finding its way into official pronouncements. This week a senior British intelligence official told the BBC that under pressure from Downing Street, a dossier on Iraqi weapons had been "transformed" to make it "sexier" — uncorroborated material from a suspect source was added to make the threat appear imminent.

It's now also clear that George W. Bush had no intention of reaching a diplomatic solution. According to The Financial Times, White House sources confirm that the decision to go to war was reached in December: "A tin-pot dictator was mocking the president. It provoked a sense of anger inside the White House," a source told the newspaper.

Administration officials are now playing down the whole W.M.D. issue. Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, recently told Vanity Fair that the decision to emphasize W.M.D.'s had been taken for "bureaucratic reasons . . . because it was the one reason everyone could agree on." But it was the W.M.D. issue that stampeded the Senate into giving Mr. Bush carte blanche to wage war.

For the time being, the public doesn't seem to care — or even want to know. A new poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes finds that 41 percent of Americans either believe that W.M.D.'s have been found, or aren't sure. The program's director suggests that "some Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance." And three-quarters of the public thinks that President Bush showed strong leadership on Iraq.

So what's the problem? Wars fought to deal with imaginary threats have real consequences. Just as war critics feared, Al Qaeda has been strengthened by the war. Iraq is in chaos, with a rising death toll among American soldiers: "We have reports of skirmishes throughout the central region," a Pentagon official told The Los Angeles Times.

Meanwhile, the administration has just derived considerable political advantage from a war waged on false premises. At best, that sets a very bad precedent. At worst. . . . "You want to win this election, you better change the subject. You wanna change this subject, you better have a war," explains Robert DeNiro's political operative in "Wag the Dog." "It's show business."

A final note: Showtime is filming a docudrama about Sept. 11. The producer is a White House insider, working in close consultation with Karl Rove. The script shows Mr. Bush as decisive and eloquent. "In this movie," The Globe and Mail reports, "Mr. Bush delivers long, stirring speeches that immediately become policy." And we can be sure that the script doesn't mention the bogus story about a threat to Air Force One that the White House floated to explain Mr. Bush's movements on the day of the attack. Hey, it's show business.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

(Edited by Christian Wieland at 5:15 am on May 30, 2003)

[dbhstockton]

Oh yeah -- Theocracy-Democracy. *Are you being cute and including the UK in that category (the monarchy still has some traditional authority over the church). *Or do you have some better idea?

[Lightning Homer]

Ah, sorry...
You so clever ! :biggrin:

[Kris]

June 4, 2003

Because We Could

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The failure of the Bush team to produce any weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.'s) in Iraq is becoming a big, big story. But is it the real story we should be concerned with? No. It was the wrong issue before the war, and it's the wrong issue now.

Why? Because there were actually four reasons for this war: the real reason, the right reason, the moral reason and the stated reason.

The "real reason" for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. Afghanistan wasn't enough because a terrorism bubble had built up over there — a bubble that posed a real threat to the open societies of the West and needed to be punctured. This terrorism bubble said that plowing airplanes into the World Trade Center was O.K., having Muslim preachers say it was O.K. was O.K., having state-run newspapers call people who did such things "martyrs" was O.K. and allowing Muslim charities to raise money for such "martyrs" was O.K. Not only was all this seen as O.K., there was a feeling among radical Muslims that suicide bombing would level the balance of power between the Arab world and the West, because we had gone soft and their activists were ready to die.

The only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble. Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world. And don't believe the nonsense that this had no effect. Every neighboring government — and 98 percent of terrorism is about what governments let happen — got the message. If you talk to U.S. soldiers in Iraq they will tell you this is what the war was about.

The "right reason" for this war was the need to partner with Iraqis, post-Saddam, to build a progressive Arab regime. Because the real weapons of mass destruction that threaten us were never Saddam's missiles. The real weapons that threaten us are the growing number of angry, humiliated young Arabs and Muslims, who are produced by failed or failing Arab states — young people who hate America more than they love life. Helping to build a decent Iraq as a model for others — and solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — are the necessary steps for defusing the ideas of mass destruction, which are what really threaten us.

The "moral reason" for the war was that Saddam's regime was an engine of mass destruction and genocide that had killed thousands of his own people, and neighbors, and needed to be stopped.

But because the Bush team never dared to spell out the real reason for the war, and (wrongly) felt that it could never win public or world support for the right reasons and the moral reasons, it opted for the stated reason: the notion that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that posed an immediate threat to America. I argued before the war that Saddam posed no such threat to America, and had no links with Al Qaeda, and that we couldn't take the nation to war "on the wings of a lie." I argued that Mr. Bush should fight this war for the right reasons and the moral reasons. But he stuck with this W.M.D. argument for P.R. reasons.

Once the war was over and I saw the mass graves and the true extent of Saddam's genocidal evil, my view was that Mr. Bush did not need to find any W.M.D.'s to justify the war for me. I still feel that way. But I have to admit that I've always been fighting my own war in Iraq. Mr. Bush took the country into his war. And if it turns out that he fabricated the evidence for his war (which I wouldn't conclude yet), that would badly damage America and be a very serious matter.

But my ultimate point is this: Finding Iraq's W.M.D.'s is necessary to preserve the credibility of the Bush team, the neocons, Tony Blair and the C.I.A. But rebuilding Iraq is necessary to win the war. I won't feel one whit more secure if we find Saddam's W.M.D.'s, because I never felt he would use them on us. But I will feel terribly insecure if we fail to put Iraq onto a progressive path. Because if that doesn't happen, the terrorism bubble will reinflate and bad things will follow. Mr. Bush's credibility rides on finding W.M.D.'s, but America's future, and the future of the Mideast, rides on our building a different Iraq. We must not forget that. *


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

June 4, 2003

Bomb and Switch

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

Before 9/11, the administration had too little intelligence on Al Qaeda, badly coordinated by clashing officials.

Before the Iraq invasion, the administration had too much intelligence on Saddam, torqued up by conspiring officials.

As Secretary of State Colin Powell prepared to make his case for invading Iraq to the U.N. on Feb. 5, a friend of his told me, he had to throw out a couple of hours' worth of sketchy intelligence other Bush officials were trying to stuff into his speech.

U.S. News & World Report reveals this week that when Mr. Powell was rehearsing the case with two dozen officials, he became so frustrated by the dubious intelligence about Saddam that he tossed several pages in the air and declared: "I'm not reading this. This is $%&*#."

First America has no intelligence. Then it has $%&*# intelligence.

So this is progress?

For the first time in history, America is searching for the reason we went to war after the war is over.

As The Times's James Risen reports, a bedrock of the administration's weapons case — the National Intelligence Estimate that concluded that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking nukes — is itself being reassessed. The document is at the center of a broad prewar-intelligence review, being conducted by the C.I.A. to see whether the weapons evidence was cooked.

Conservatives are busily offering a bouquet of new justifications for a pre-emptive attack on Iraq that was sold as self-defense against Saddam's poised and thrumming weapons of mass destruction.

Pressed by reporters about whether Tony Blair and President Bush were guilty of hyperbole — Mr. Blair's foreign secretary claimed Saddam could deploy chemical and biological weapons in 45 minutes — Senator John McCain replied, "The American people support what the president did, whether we find those weapons or not, and they did so the day they saw 9- and 10-year-old boys coming out of a prison in Baghdad."

Senator Pete Domenici noted that experts thought that Saddam's overthrow might pave the way for the Middle East road map to work. "For those kind of experts to say that has changed the dynamics in the Middle East, sufficient that we might get peace, seems to me to outweigh all the questions about did we have every bit of evidence that we say we had or not," he said.

In a Vanity Fair interview, Paul Wolfowitz said another "almost unnoticed but huge" reason for war was to promote Middle East peace by allowing the U.S. to take its troops out of Saudi Arabia — Osama's bête noir. But it was after the U.S. announced it would pull its troops from Saudi Arabia that a resurgent Qaeda struck a Western compound, killing eight Americans.

And it was after the U.S. tried to intimidate other foes by stomping on Saddam that Iran and North Korea ratcheted up their nukes. Iran and North Korea actually do have scary nuclear programs, but if we express our alarm to the world now, will we be accused of crying Wolfowitz?

A new Pew survey of 21 nations shows a deepening skepticism toward the U.S. "The war had widened the rift between Americans and Western Europeans, further inflamed the Muslim world, softened support for the war on terrorism, and significantly weakened global public support for the pillars of the post-World War II era — the U.N. and the North Atlantic alliance," said Pew's director, Andrew Kohut.

Brits may be more upset with Mr. Blair than Americans are with Mr. Bush because they have the quaint idea that even if you think war was a good idea, you should level with the public about your objectives.

The Bush crowd practiced bait and switch, leaving many Americans with the impression that Saddam was involved in 9/11.

When James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director and current Pentagon adviser, appeared on "Nightline" five days after 9/11 and suggested that America had to strike Iraq for sponsoring terrorism, Ted Koppel rebutted: "Nobody right now is suggesting that Iraq had anything to do with this. In fact, quite the contrary."

Mr. Woolsey replied: "I don't think it matters. I don't think it matters." The Republicans will have to follow the maxim of Robert Moses, the autocratic New York builder who never let public opinion get in the way of his bulldozing: "If the ends don't justify the means, what does?" *


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

June 5, 2003

Iraq's Weapons: A Vital Inquiry (4 Letters)

To the Editor:

Thomas L. Friedman ("Because We Could," column, June 4) argues that whether or not Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction "was the wrong issue before the war, and it's the wrong issue now."

But can a war, especially a war of choice, that was justified primarily on misleading or erroneous grounds ever be considered legitimate in a democratic society?

And can an administration that deceives the American people on a matter with such great political, economic and security implications be trusted to serve the public interest on any other issue?

JOHN S. DUFFIELD
Decatur, Ga., June 4, 2003
•
To the Editor:

Thomas L. Friedman ("Because We Could," column, June 4) illustrates in plain language the correctness and necessity of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

But more important, he points out the divide in what the Bush administration saw fit to sell to the American people and what the true and correct motivations behind invading Iraq were.

Much of the criticism the United States has garnered abroad has come not because Saddam Hussein enjoyed widespread sympathy but because the Bush administration handled many aspects of the process of freeing Iraq from Saddam Hussein's deadly grip so clumsily.

From botched diplomacy to overhype of the wrong issues, President Bush's policies deserve many of the critiques they are getting.

Nothing, however, can apologize for the many innocent deaths that Saddam Hussein was responsible for, and the world should be glad to be rid of him and hope for a brighter future for Iraq and its people.

MICHAEL JACOBSON
Athens, Ohio, June 4, 2003
•
To the Editor:

Thomas L. Friedman feels that it is not necessary to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to justify the war but only to "preserve the credibility of the Bush team, the neocons, Tony Blair and the C.I.A." ("Because We Could," column, June 4).

No, Mr. Friedman, finding those weapons is necessary to preserve the open societies you claim are worth defending from the "terrorism bubble."

Such societies will ultimately be more damaged by lying governments than by any amount of terrorism.

You cannot defend an open society by rendering that society no longer open.

JANE H. GRANT
Pound Ridge, N.Y., June 4, 2003
•
To the Editor:

Thomas L. Friedman (column, June 4) reminds us that "America's future, and the future of the Mideast, rides on our building a different Iraq." He adds, "We must not forget that."

The outlook is not good: we have already forgotten it in Afghanistan.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

(Edited by Christian Wieland at 2:40 pm on June 6, 2003)

[Kris]

June 6, 2003

Cloaks and Daggers

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

On Day 78 of the Search for Iraqi W.M.D., yesterday, once again nothing turned up.

Spooks are spitting mad at the way their work was manipulated to exaggerate the Iraqi threat, and they are thus surprisingly loquacious (delighting those of us in journalism). They emphasize that even if weapons of mass destruction still turn up, there is a fundamental problem —not within the intelligence community itself, but with senior administration officials — particularly in the Pentagon.

"As an employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency, I know how this administration has lied to the public to get support for its attack on Iraq," one of my informants rages. Some others see a pattern not so much of lying as of self-delusion — and of subjecting the intelligence agencies to those delusions.

One has to take the outrage among the spooks with a few grains of salt because the intelligence folks have been on the losing end of a power struggle with the Pentagon. But that's the problem: the Pentagon has become the 800-pound gorilla of the Bush administration, playing a central role in foreign policy and intelligence as well as military matters.

"The basic problem here is that O.S.D. [Office of the Secretary of Defense] has become too powerful," noted Patrick Lang, a former senior official in the Defense Intelligence Agency.

One step came in the Clinton administration, when the defense secretary gained greater control over the handling of images from spy satellites. Mr. Rumsfeld then started up his own intelligence shop in the Pentagon. The central philosophy of intelligence — that it should be sheltered from policy considerations to keep it honest — was deeply bruised.

A commission led by Brent Scowcroft suggested two years ago that intelligence functions be consolidated under the director of central intelligence. It was an excellent idea — killed by, among others, Mr. Rumsfeld.

My own limited encounters with spies reinforce the idea that intelligence needs to be digested by professionals rather than cherry-picked by ideologues. I remember one spy who would call me up periodically for lunch when I lived in China. He would pass on amazing inside tidbits about China's top leaders — and then ask for copies of classified Chinese documents I had obtained.

I kept putting him off because I wasn't going to share my documents — but I did want his scoops. Unfortunately, I could never confirm them, so they were unusable. Finally, it dawned on me that he was simply fabricating juicy tidbits so he would have something to trade.

That's the way the intelligence game sometimes operates: the information is voluminous, confusing and contradictory, and prone to abuse, and it needs to be protected from policy makers rather than massaged to make them feel good.

"The president is a very powerful guy," said Ray Close, who spent 26 years in the C.I.A. "When you sense what he wants, it's very difficult not to go out and find it."

As best I can reconstruct events, Mr. Rumsfeld genuinely felt that the C.I.A. and D.I.A. were doing a horrendous job on Iraq — after all, he was hearing much more alarming information from those close to Ahmad Chalabi. So the Pentagon set up its own intelligence unit, and it sifted through everyone else's information and goaded other agencies to come up with more alarmist conclusions.

"He's an ideologist," one man in the spy world said of Mr. Rumsfeld. "He doesn't start with the facts, even though he's quite brainy. He has a bottom line, and then he gathers facts to support the bottom line."

That is not, of course, a capital offense. Pentagon leaders should feel free to disagree strenuously with foolish judgments by the C.I.A. But for the process to work, top C.I.A. officials need to fight back. Instead, George Tenet rolled over.

"Tenet sided with the D.O.D. crowd and cut the legs out from under his own analysts," said Larry Johnson, a retired C.I.A. analyst.

Does this mean that Mr. Tenet should be fired? I don't think so. Despite his failure to stand up for his people, he should not be made a scapegoat for problems that arose primarily from the Pentagon's zealotry — and ousting him would leave O.S.D. more powerful than ever.

"There was a collective failure here," one senior person in the intelligence world said. "At the end of the day, it should not be George left out to dry." *


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

June 8, 2003

Truth Is the First Casualty. Is Credibility the Second?

By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON — There is a saying here that wars tend to be fought three times. First comes the battle over whether to go to war. Second is the war itself. Third is the battle over the war's meaning once it is over.

Two months after the fall of Baghdad, the third fight is well underway, now that the principal rationale cited by President Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell for war with Iraq — that Saddam Hussein's possession of chemical and biological weapons posed an imminent threat — remains clouded by doubt. No chemical and biological weapons have been found, and some experts say they will never be found.

Before the war, Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, ranking Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that the administration was exaggerating its case for war — a war he supported. He cited administration statements that Iraq was "on the verge" of getting nuclear weapons, when in fact it was not close. Also overstated, he said, were the existence of actual chemical and biological weapons and Iraq's links to terrorism.

"It's pretty clear that different administration officials overstated their case," said Kenneth M. Pollack, an Iraq expert at the Saban Center of the Brookings Institution and a member of the National Security Council in the Clinton administration, who was a leading advocate of going to war with Saddam Hussein.

Public opinion surveys suggest that the failure to find these weapons may have little effect on the support Americans have given to Mr. Bush and his conduct of the war, particularly since weapons experts have found evidence for what appear to have been programs and facilities to make chemical and biological arms. Still, if such weapons are not found, some historians, politicians and others worry about what might happen if Mr. Bush or a successor tried to rally American or international backing for another war — say, with Iran or North Korea — using disputed evidence to buttress the case.

So far, said John Lewis Gaddis, a professor of military history at Yale, it appears the administration's intelligence findings about the existence of weapons of mass destruction were either inaccurate or deliberately exaggerated. Either way, he said, "it has an impact on our credibility — the next time there is a crisis, our credibility is going to be questioned, just as it was for Lyndon Baines Johnson at the Gulf of Tonkin."

In 1964, the United States asserted that North Vietnamese torpedo boats carried out unprovoked attacks on two American destroyers in the gulf. Today it is known that some sort of attack did occur, which President Johnson exaggerated, perhaps unintentionally, in his quest for a Congressional resolution that authorized what turned out to be a steady escalation of the Vietnam War. Along with the military's countless claims that the war was being won, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution led to the "credibility gap" that became the president's downfall.

The lesson would appear to be that while false or overblown pretexts for war can work, they may also backfire if a war turns bad.

In 1898, the battleship Maine blew up in Havana Harbor. The blast killed 260 crew members and provoked Congress to declare war on Spain. Historians now generally agree that the explosion was an accident and that President William McKinley and Congress surely did not know the truth at the time. And historians argue that the American march toward becoming a global power would have occurred with or without the Spanish-American War.

This episode contrasts with a well-known case of a deliberate distortion that led to war. In 1870, Kaiser Wilhelm I sent Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Prussia a report on his conversation with a French diplomat. Bismarck edited the message to make it seem more provocative than it was, simply to rally German support for a war with France. Bismarck got the Franco-Prussian War, and victory.

Still, few historians would contend that a doctored report caused the rise of German nationalism and territorial aggrandizement. And the immediate provocations for a war may in any case bear little relation to its deep-seated causes. Experts, for example, still argue about whether slavery or diverging economic differences led to the Civil War.

Historians also look skeptically on the most earnest reasons for war. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson took the nation into World War I by portraying it as a crusade against autocracy, even as he allied himself with Czarist Russia and two powers, France and Britain, that were more interested in imperial expansion than democracy.

The American involvement in Iraq seems to be a case of an "overdetermined" war. Though chemical and biological weapons were the main reason presented to the public, they were never the only reason cited. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul L. Wolfowitz, in a recent interview in Vanity Fair, cited the Iraqi regime's support of terrorism and its brutal treatment of the Iraqi people as reasons for the conflict, though he said the brutality by itself would not have justified war.

Other administration officials argue that the war was about sending a message to the Muslim world that the United States will not tolerate violence against Americans or American interests. Still others argue that establishing a democratic Iraq will spread democracy and stability throughout the region, ultimately enabling Israel to live in peace.

There are those who argue that President Bush, perhaps unconsciously, was settling a score left unsettled in the Persian Gulf war by his father. And historians will surely look closely at the need of the United States to secure access to the world's largest oil reserves as a major if wholly unstated factor. [America and Iraq's oil, Page 5.]

Finally, there is politics. When the administration spoke of Iraq's "imminent threat," was it in order to wage a war in 2003 — before the next presidential election?

It may never be known what political factors went into the private thinking of Mr. Bush and his aides, but the nonexistence of chemical and biological weapons will almost certainly force historians to raise such questions.

In the Bush administration, there is a sense today that it may not matter to Americans whether such weapons are found, and that if the peace is as successful as the war, it may not matter to the world either.

"If we succeed in transforming Iraq into a successful, mostly democratic place, a lot of people will be content with that result, even if we can't find weapons of mass destruction," said a senior American official. "But if we do not succeed in Iraq as much as we want, then this issue becomes more significant."

There lies the rub. What if, after a long and unsuccessful occupation, with Americans combat casualties taking a toll on the national psyche, the question "Why are we in Iraq?" becomes the modern equivalent of "Why are we in Vietnam?" Then the issue of the rationale for the war will inevitably come back to the fore.

"I am someone who believes that Saddam Hussein did have these programs," said Samuel R. Berger, President Clinton's national security adviser, referring to the alleged Iraqi drive to make chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. "But whether the weapons were destroyed, or hidden, or we have an intelligence problem, we have to find the answer. Our credibility in the world depends on it. A democracy cannot and should not go to war under false or incorrect premises."


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

June 8, 2003

Was the Intelligence Cooked?

The latest vogue in Washington is the proposition that it really doesn't matter whether Saddam Hussein maintained an arsenal of unconventional weapons in recent years. American troops may not have uncovered any evidence of the weapons of mass destruction the Bush administration was warning about, the argument goes. But they have found plenty of proof that Iraq suffered under a brutal dictator who slaughtered thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of his own people, and that is reason enough to justify the invasion. We disagree. We are as pleased as anyone to see Saddam Hussein removed from power, but the United States cannot now simply erase from the record the Bush administration's dire warnings about the Iraqi weapons threat. The good word of the United States is too central to America's leadership abroad — and to President Bush's dubious doctrine of pre-emptive warfare — to be treated so cavalierly.

Like most Americans, we believed the government's repeated warnings that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction threatened the security of the world. The urgent need to disarm Saddam Hussein was the primary reason invoked for going to war in March rather than waiting to see if weapons inspectors could bring Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs under control.

It would still be premature to conclude that Iraq abandoned its efforts to manufacture and stockpile unconventional arms after the first Persian Gulf war in 1991. But after weeks of futile searching by American teams, it seems clear that Iraq was not bristling with horrific arms and that chemical and biological weapons were not readily available to frontline Iraqi forces.

America's intelligence agencies betrayed little doubt about the Iraqi threat last October when they produced a comprehensive assessment of Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction. A declassified version, while noting that Iraq was hiding large portions of its weapons programs, flatly stated: "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of U.N. restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade." The question today is whether that and other assessments were sound or were influenced by a desire to tailor intelligence findings to policy prescriptions.

By their nature, intelligence reports, in the absence of a smoking gun, are subjective exercises based on ambiguous information that is open to differing interpretations. In the case of Iraq, Washington relied largely on circumstantial data rather than spy satellite photographs or intercepted phone calls that would have proved and pinpointed the existence of unconventional weapons. But given the failure so far to find a single weapon of mass destruction, it is fair to wonder if intelligence analysts might have misread the available data, played down ambiguities or even pushed their findings too far to stay square with Bush policy on Iraq. George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, has said that the C.I.A.'s work was not compromised by politics.

These matters are properly being examined by Congressional committees and a White House advisory board on intelligence practices, as well as by the Central Intelligence Agency itself. It is also reasonable to ask if the administration's fixation on Iraq influenced the way intelligence reports were used by top officials intent on making the case for war. Careful attention should be given to examining the work of a separate Pentagon unit that was created after Sept. 11 to search for terrorist links with Iraq.

The issue goes to the heart of American leadership. Mr. Bush's belief that the United States has the right to use force against nations that it believes may threaten American security is based on the assumption that Washington can make accurate judgments about how serious such a danger is. If the intelligence is wrong, or the government distorts it, the United States will squander its credibility. Even worse, it will lose the ability to rally the world, and the American people, to the defense of the country when real threats materialize.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[NYatKNIGHT]

Captives Deny Qaeda Worked With Baghdad

By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON, June 8 — Two of the highest-ranking leaders of Al Qaeda in American custody have told the C.I.A. in separate interrogations that the terrorist organization did not work jointly with the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, according to several intelligence officials.

Abu Zubaydah, a Qaeda planner and recruiter until his capture in March 2002, told his questioners last year that the idea of working with Mr. Hussein's government had been discussed among Qaeda leaders, but that Osama bin Laden had rejected such proposals, according to an official who has read the Central Intelligence Agency's classified report on the interrogation.

In his debriefing, Mr. Zubaydah said Mr. bin Laden had vetoed the idea because he did not want to be beholden to Mr. Hussein, the official said.

Separately, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Qaeda chief of operations until his capture on March 1 in Pakistan, has also told interrogators that the group did not work with Mr. Hussein, officials said.

The Bush administration has not made these statements public, though it frequently highlighted intelligence reports that supported its assertions of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda as it made its case for war against Iraq.

Since the war ended, and because the administration has yet to uncover evidence of prohibited weapons in Iraq, the quality of American intelligence has come under scrutiny amid contentions that the administration selectively disclosed only those intelligence reports that supported its case for war.

Bill Harlow, a spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency, declined to comment on what the two Qaeda leaders had told their questioners. A senior intelligence official played down the significance of their debriefings, explaining that everything Qaeda detainees say must be regarded with great skepticism.

Other intelligence and military officials added that evidence of possible links between Mr. Hussein's government and Al Qaeda had been discovered — both before the war and since — and that American forces were searching Iraq for more in Iraq.

Still, no conclusive evidence of joint terrorist operations by Iraq and Al Qaeda has been found, several intelligence officials acknowledged, nor have ties been discovered between Baghdad and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on Washington and New York.

Between the time of the attacks and the start of the war in Iraq in March, senior Bush administration officials spoke frequently about intelligence on two fronts — the possibility of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and Baghdad's drive to develop prohibited weapons. President Bush described the war against Iraq as part of the larger war on terrorism, and argued that the possibility that Mr. Hussein might hand over illicit weapons to terrorists posed a threat to the United States.

Several officials said Mr. Zubaydah's debriefing report was circulated by the C.I.A. within the American intelligence community last year, but his statements were not included in public discussions by administration officials about the evidence concerning Iraq-Qaeda ties.

Those officials said the statements by Mr. Zubaydah and Mr. Mohammed were examples of the type of intelligence reports that ran counter to the administration's public case.

"I remember reading the Abu Zubaydah debriefing last year, while the administration was talking about all of these other reports, and thinking that they were only putting out what they wanted," one official said.

Spokesmen at the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon declined to comment on why Mr. Zubaydah's debriefing report was not publicly disclosed by the administration last year.

In recent weeks, the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, and other officials have defended the information and analysis by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies in the months before the war. They said reports were not suppressed, and were properly handled and distributed among the intelligence agencies.

The issue of the public presentation of the evidence is different from whether the intelligence itself was valid, and some officials said they believed that the former might ultimately prove to be more significant, since the Bush administration relied heavily on the release of intelligence reports to build its case, both with the American people and abroad.

"This gets to the serious question of to what extent did they try to align the facts with the conclusions that they wanted," an intelligence official said. "Things pointing in one direction were given a lot of weight, and other things were discounted."

[Kris]

June 10, 2003

Who's Accountable?

By PAUL KRUGMAN

The Bush and Blair administrations are trying to silence critics — many of them current or former intelligence analysts — who say that they exaggerated the threat from Iraq. Last week a Blair official accused Britain's intelligence agencies of plotting against the government. (Tony Blair's government has since apologized for January's "dodgy dossier." ) In this country, Colin Powell has declared that questions about the justification for war are "outrageous."

Yet dishonest salesmanship has been the hallmark of the Bush administration's approach to domestic policy. And it has become increasingly clear that the selling of the war with Iraq was no different.

For example, look at the way the administration rhetorically linked Saddam to Sept. 11. As The Associated Press put it: "The implication from Bush on down was that Saddam supported Osama bin Laden's network. Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks frequently were mentioned in the same sentence, even though officials have no good evidence of such a link." Not only was there no good evidence: according to The New York Times, captured leaders of Al Qaeda explicitly told the C.I.A. that they had not been working with Saddam.

Or look at the affair of the infamous "germ warfare" trailers. I don't know whether those trailers were intended to produce bioweapons or merely to inflate balloons, as the Iraqis claim — a claim supported by a number of outside experts. (According to the newspaper The Observer, Britain sold Iraq a similar system back in 1987.) What is clear is that an initial report concluding that they were weapons labs was, as one analyst told The Times, "a rushed job and looks political." President Bush had no business declaring "we have found the weapons of mass destruction."

We can guess how Mr. Bush came to make that statement. The first teams of analysts told administration officials what they wanted to hear, doubts were brushed aside, and officials then made public pronouncements greatly overstating even what the analysts had said.

A similar process of cherry-picking, of choosing and exaggerating intelligence that suited the administration's preconceptions, unfolded over the issue of W.M.D.'s before the war. Most intelligence professionals believed that Saddam had some biological and chemical weapons, but they did not believe that these posed any imminent threat. According to the newspaper The Independent, a March 2002 report by Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee found no evidence that Saddam posed a significantly greater threat than in 1991. But such conclusions weren't acceptable.

Last fall former U.S. intelligence officials began warning that official pronouncements were being based on "cooked intelligence." British intelligence officials were so concerned that, The Independent reports, they kept detailed records of the process. "A smoking gun may well exist over W.M.D., but it may not be to the government's liking," a source said.

But the Bush administration found scraps of intelligence suiting its agenda, and officials began making strong pronouncements. "Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons — the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have," Mr. Bush said on Feb. 8. On March 16 Dick Cheney declared, "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

It's now two months since Baghdad fell — and according to The A.P., military units searching for W.M.D.'s have run out of places to look.

One last point: the Bush administration's determination to see what it wanted to see led not just to a gross exaggeration of the threat Iraq posed, but to a severe underestimation of the problems of postwar occupation. When Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, warned that occupying Iraq might require hundreds of thousands of soldiers for an extended period, Paul Wolfowitz said he was "wildly off the mark" — and the secretary of the Army may have been fired for backing up the general. Now a force of 150,000 is stretched thin, facing increasingly frequent guerrilla attacks, and a senior officer told The Washington Post that it might be two years before an Iraqi government takes over. The Independent reports that British military chiefs are resisting calls to send more forces, fearing being "sucked into a quagmire."

I'll tell you what's outrageous. It's not the fact that people are criticizing the administration; it's the fact that nobody is being held accountable for misleading the nation into war. *


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

The administration needs spin control.

Just say WMD means Weapons of Mediocre Destruction.

[Kris]

Or Minor. Minsignificant (they shouldn't shy from enhancing the language as well).


June 13, 2003

The Vanishing Uranium

President Bush cannot be pleased to know that his State of the Union address last January included an ominous report about Iraq that turns out to have been based on forged documents. The incident is an embarrassment for Mr. Bush and for the nation, and he should now be leaning on his aides to explain how they let fabricated information about Iraq's nuclear weapons program slip into his speech. The answer might help explain whether Washington deliberately distorted intelligence to rally the nation for the war against Iraq.

In the address, Mr. Bush said the British government had learned that Saddam Hussein had recently tried to get large quantities of uranium from Africa. It is now clear that this accusation was mainly based on counterfeit papers that falsely implied that the West African nation of Niger could be supplying uranium to Iraq. The documents contained obvious factual errors that should have been readily detectable by intelligence analysts.

The Niger uranium story first started making the rounds of Western intelligence agencies late in 2001. The charges seemed plausible because Iraq was known to have been trying to enrich uranium in the late 1980's and Niger was one possible source of uranium fuel. But the supporting documents never checked out. Some bore what was alleged to be the signature of Niger's minister of energy and mines, but the man in question had been out of office many years before the sales negotiations were supposed to have taken place. And any actual sales contracts would have had to be arranged not with Niger's government, but with the international consortium that actually controls the country's entire uranium supply.

The C.I.A. heard about at least some of these problems from a former ambassador with African experience who looked into the matter at the agency's request in early 2002. His report that Niger denied the allegations was passed along to other government agencies, including the White House. But the C.I.A. appears not to have concluded that the story was unreliable. As a result, no effort was made by administration officials to keep it out of speeches and documents dealing with Iraq, including the State of the Union address.

It remains to be seen whether Iraq pursued a nuclear weapons program in recent years. But along with the many other questions that have arisen about Iraq's unconventional arms since the end of the war, the matter of the forged documents needs to be explored fully by Congress and a White House advisory board that reviews the performance of intelligence agencies. The American people are entitled to know as much as possible about factors that influenced Washington's decision to go to war. It is especially troubling when the president is put in the position of making alarming claims about a nuclear weapons program that do not stand up to serious scrutiny.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

June 13, 2003

White House in Denial

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Let me give the White House a hand.

Condoleezza Rice was asked on "Meet the Press" on Sunday about a column of mine from May 6 regarding President Bush's reliance on forged documents to claim that Iraq had sought uranium in Africa. That was not just a case of hyping intelligence, but of asserting something that had already been flatly discredited by an envoy investigating at the behest of the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Ms. Rice acknowledged that the president's information turned out to be "not credible," but insisted that the White House hadn't realized this until after Mr. Bush had cited it in his State of the Union address.

And now an administration official tells The Washington Post that Mr. Cheney's office first learned of its role in the episode by reading that column of mine. Hmm. I have an offer for Mr. Cheney: I'll tell you everything I know about your activities, if you'll tell me all you know.

To help out Ms. Rice and Mr. Cheney, let me offer some more detail about the uranium saga. Piecing the story together from two people directly involved and three others who were briefed on it, the tale begins at the end of 2001, when third-rate forged documents turned up in West Africa purporting to show the sale by Niger to Iraq of tons of "yellowcake" uranium.

Italy's intelligence service obtained the documents and shared them with British spooks, who passed them on to Washington. Mr. Cheney's office got wind of this and asked the C.I.A. to investigate.

The agency chose a former ambassador to Africa to undertake the mission, and that person flew to Niamey, Niger, in the last week of February 2002. This envoy spent one week in Niger, staying at the Sofitel and discussing his findings with the U.S. ambassador to Niger, and then flew back to Washington via Paris.

Immediately upon his return, in early March 2002, this senior envoy briefed the C.I.A. and State Department and reported that the documents were bogus, for two main reasons. First, the documents seemed phony on their face — for example, the Niger minister of energy and mines who had signed them had left that position years earlier. Second, an examination of Niger's uranium industry showed that an international consortium controls the yellowcake closely, so the Niger government does not have any yellowcake to sell.

Officials now claim that the C.I.A. inexplicably did not report back to the White House with this envoy's findings and reasoning, or with an assessment of its own that the information was false. I hear something different. My understanding is that while Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet may not have told Mr. Bush that the Niger documents were forged, lower C.I.A. officials did tell both the vice president's office and National Security Council staff members. Moreover, I hear from another source that the C.I.A.'s operations side and its counterterrorism center undertook their own investigations of the documents, poking around in Italy and Africa, and also concluded that they were false — a judgment that filtered to the top of the C.I.A.

Meanwhile, the State Department's intelligence arm, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, independently came to the exact same conclusion about those documents, according to Greg Thielmann, a former official there. Mr. Thielmann said he was "quite confident" that the conclusion had been passed up to the top of the State Department.

"It was well known throughout the intelligence community that it was a forgery," said Melvin Goodman, a former C.I.A. analyst who is now at the Center for International Policy.

Still, Mr. Tenet and the intelligence agencies were under intense pressure to come up with evidence against Iraq. Ambiguities were lost, and doubters were discouraged from speaking up.

"It was a foregone conclusion that every photo of a trailer truck would be a `mobile bioweapons lab' and every tanker truck would be `filled with weaponized anthrax,' " a former military intelligence officer said. "None of the analysts in military uniform had the option to debate the vice president, secretary of defense and the secretary of state."

I don't believe that the president deliberately lied to the public in an attempt to scare Americans into supporting his war. But it does look as if ideologues in the administration deceived themselves about Iraq's nuclear programs — and then deceived the American public as well. *


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

June 14, 2003

The Boys Who Cried Wolfowitz

By BILL KELLER

We're now up to Day 87 of the largely fruitless hunt for Iraq's unconventional weapons. Allegations keep piling up that the Bush administration tried to scam the world into war by exaggerating evidence of the Iraqi threat. One critic has pronounced it "arguably the worst scandal in American political history." So you might reasonably ask a supporter of the war, How do you feel about that war now?

Thanks for asking.

One easy answer is that between the excavation of mass graves, which confirms that we have rid the world of a horror, and President Bush's new willingness to engage the thankless tangle of Middle East diplomacy, which raises the hope that Iraq was more than a hit-and-run exercise, the war seems to have changed some important things for the better. This is true, but not quite enough.

Another easy answer is that it's not over yet. Just as we have yet to prove that we can transform a military conquest into a real Mission Accomplished, we have yet to complete our search of a country that, as Californians must be very tired of hearing, is the size of California. This is also true, but likewise inadequate.

I supported the war, with misgivings about the haste, the America-knows-best attitude and our ability to win the peace. The deciding factor for me was not the monstrosity of the regime (routing tyrants is a noble cause, but where do you stop?), nor the opportunity to detoxify the Middle East (another noble cause, but dubious justification for a war when hardly anyone else in the world supports you). No, I supported it mainly because of the convergence of a real threat and a real opportunity.

The threat was a dictator with a proven, insatiable desire for dreadful weapons that would eventually have made him, or perhaps one of his sadistic sons, a god in the region. The fact that he gave aid and at least occasional sanctuary to practitioners of terror added to his menace. And at the end his brazen defiance made us seem weak and vulnerable, an impression we can ill afford. The opportunity was a moment of awareness and political will created by Sept. 11, combined with the legal sanction reaffirmed by U.N. Resolution 1441. The important thing to me was never that Saddam Hussein's threat was "imminent" — although Sept. 11 taught us that is not such an easy thing to know — but that the opportunity to do something about him was finite. In a year or two, we would be distracted and Iraq would be back in the nuke-building business.

Even if you throw out all the tainted evidence, there was still what prosecutors call probable cause to believe that Saddam was harboring frightful weapons, and was bent on acquiring the most frightful weapons of all. The Clinton administration believed so. Two generations of U.N. inspectors believed so. It was not a Bush administration fabrication that Iraq had, and failed to account for, massive quantities of anthrax and VX nerve gas and other biological and chemical weapons. Saddam was under an international obligation to say where the poisons went, but did not.

What the Bush administration did was gild the lily — disseminating information that ranged from selective to preposterous. The president himself gave credence to the claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium in Africa, a story that (as Seymour Hersh's investigations leave little doubt) was based on transparently fraudulent information. Colin Powell in his February performance at the U.N. insisted that those famous aluminum tubes Iraq bought were intended for bomb-making, although the technical experts at the Department of Energy had made an awfully strong case that the tubes were for conventional rocket launchers. And as James Risen disclosed in The Times this week, two top Qaeda planners in custody told American interrogators — one of them well before the war was set in motion — that Osama bin Laden had rejected the idea of working with Saddam. That inconclusive but potent evidence was kept quiet in the administration's zeal to establish a meaningful Iraqi connection to the fanatical war on America.

The motives for the dissembling varied. The hawks hyped the case (profusely) to prove we were justified in going to war, with or without allies. Mr. Powell hyped it (modestly) in the hope that the war, which he knew the president had already decided to wage, would not be a divisive, unilateral exercise. The president either believed what he wanted to believe or was given a stacked deck of information, and it's a close call which of those possibilities is scarier.

Those who say flimflam intelligence drove us to war, though, have got things backward. It seems much more likely that the decision to make war drove the intelligence.

The origins of this may be well intentioned. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the most dogged proponent of war against Iraq, is also a longtime skeptic of American institutional intelligence-gathering. He has argued over the years, from within the government and from outside, that the C.I.A. and its sister agencies often fail to place adequate emphasis on what they don't know, and that they "mirror-image" — make assumptions about what foreign regimes will do based on what we would do.

One tempting solution has been to deputize smart thinkers from outside the intelligence fraternity — a Team B — to second-guess the analysis of the A Team professionals. Mr. Wolfowitz was part of a famous 1976 Team B that attacked the C.I.A. for underestimating the Soviet threat. These days the top leadership of the Defense Department is Team B. Mr. Wolfowitz and his associates have assembled their own trusted analysts to help them challenge the established intelligence consensus.

Who would argue that the spooks' work should not stand up to rigorous cross-examination? But in practice, B-Teaming is often less a form of intellectual discipline than of ideological martial arts.

Here's how it might have worked in the Bush administration:

The A Team (actually, given the number of spy agencies that pool intelligence on major problems, it's more like the A-through-M team) prepares its analysis of, let's say, the Iraqi nuclear program. The report is cautious, equivocal and — particularly since U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998 — based on close calls about defector reports, commercial transactions and other flimsy evidence.

The B Team comes in with fresh eyes, and fresh assumptions. One assumption, another Wolfowitz mantra, is that more weight should be given to the character of the regime — in Saddam's case, his transcendent evil and megalomania. While the C.I.A. may say that we have insufficient evidence to conclude that Saddam has reconstituted his nuclear program, Team B starts from the premise that it is just the kind of thing Saddam would do, and it is dangerous to assume he didn't.

Then Team B dips into the raw intelligence and fishes out information that supports its case, tidbits that the A Team may have rejected as unreliable. The Pentagon takes this ammo to an interagency review, where it is used to beat the A Team (the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency) into submission. Maybe the agencies put up a fight, but (1) much of their own evidence is too soft to defend with great conviction, and (2) by this time the president has announced his version of the facts, and the political tide is all running in one direction.


When Team B seems to have the blessing of the boss, it goes from being a source of useful dissent to being an implement of intimidation. As formidable a figure as Mr. Powell, who resisted pressure to include the most arrant nonsense in his U.N. briefing, still ended up arguing a case he told confidants he did not entirely believe, specifically on the questions of Iraq's nuclear program and connections with Al Qaeda.

By the time a Team B version of events has been debunked, it has already served its purpose. That 1976 Team B, by assuming the most dire of Soviet intentions and overlooking the slow collapse of the Soviet economy, came up with estimates of Soviet military strength that we later learned to be ridiculously inflated. But the cold warriors who ran it succeeded in setting back détente and helped to elect Ronald Reagan. The 2003 Team B seems to have convinced most Americans that Saddam had nuclear arms and was in bed with Osama bin Laden.

But the consequences of crying wolf — and the belief is widespread among the dispirited spies of the A Team that the administration did exactly that — are grave. Honest, careful intelligence is our single most important weapon in the global effort against terrorism. It is also critical to winning the support of allies against nuclear proliferation, most urgently in North Korea and Iran. Already rather compelling evidence of Iran's development of nuclear weaponry is being dismissed as just more smoke from the Bush propaganda machine.

So far, the passion to investigate the integrity of American intelligence-gathering belongs mostly to the doves, whose motives are subject to suspicion and who, in any case, do not set the agenda. The pro-war Democrats are dying to change the subject to the economy. The Republicans are in no mood to second-guess a victory. Just when we really need some of that Team B spirit, the hawks have chickened out.

The truth is that the information-gathering machine designed to guide our leaders in matters of war and peace shows signs of being corrupted. To my mind, this is a worrisome problem, but not because it invalidates the war we won. It is a problem because it weakens us for the wars we still face. *


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Jasonik]

June 20, 2003

Saddam's Bombs? We'll Find Them
By KENNETH M. POLLACK

WASHINGTON
Where are Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? It's a good question, and unfortunately we don't yet have a good answer. There is hope that the capture of Abid Hamid Mahmoud al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein's closest aide, will provide the first solid clues. In any event, the mystery will be solved in good time; the search for Iraq's nonconvential weapons program has only just begun.

In the meantime, accusations are mounting that the Bush administration made up the whole Iraqi weapons threat to justify an invasion. That is just not the case — America and its allies had plenty of evidence before the war, and before President Bush took office, indicating that Iraq was retaining its illegal weapons programs.

As for allegations that some in the administration may have used slanted intelligence claims in making their case against Saddam Hussein, they seem to have merit and demand further investigation. But if the truth was stretched, it seems to have been done primarily to justify the timing of an invasion, not the merits of one.

The fact that the sites we suspected of containing hidden weapons before the war turned out to have nothing in them is not very significant. American intelligence agencies never claimed to know exactly where or how the Iraqis were hiding what they had — not in 1995, not in 1999 and not six months ago. It is very possible that the "missing" facilities, weaponized agents, precursor materials and even stored munitions all could still be hidden in places we never would have thought to look. This is exactly why, before the war, so few former weapons inspectors had confidence that a new round of United Nations inspections would find the items they were convinced Iraq was hiding.

At the heart of the mystery lies the fact that the Iraqis do not seem to have deployed any stocks of munitions filled with nonconventional weapons. Why did Saddam Hussein not hit coalition troops with a barrage of chemical and biological weapons rather than allow his regime to fall? Why did we not find them in ammunition dumps, ready to be fired?

Actually, there are many possible explanations. Saddam Hussein may have underestimated the likelihood of war and not filled any chemical weapons before the invasion. He may have been killed or gravely wounded in the "decapitation" strike on the eve of the invasion and unable to give the orders. Or he may have just been surprised by the extremely rapid pace of the coalition's ground advance and the sudden collapse of the Republican Guard divisions surrounding Baghdad. It is also possible that Iraq did not have the capacity to make the weapons, but given the prewar evidence, this is still the least likely explanation.

The one potentially important discovery made so far by American troops — two tractor-trailers found in April and May that fit the descriptions of mobile germ-warfare labs given by Iraqi defectors over the years — might well point to a likely explanation for at least part of the mystery: Iraq may have decided to keep only a chemical and biological warfare production capability rather than large stockpiles of the munitions themselves. This would square with the fact that several dozen chemical warfare factories were rebuilt after the first gulf war to produce civilian pharmaceuticals, but were widely believed to be dual-use plants capable of quickly being converted back to chemical warfare production.

In truth, this was always the most likely scenario. Chemical and biological warfare munitions, especially the crude varieties that Iraq developed during the Iran-Iraq War, are dangerous to store and handle and they deteriorate quickly. But they can be manufactured and put in warheads relatively rapidly — meaning that there is little reason to have thousands of filled rounds sitting around where they might be found by international inspectors. It would have been logical for Iraq to retain only some means of production, which could be hidden with relative ease and then used to churn out the munitions whenever Saddam Hussein gave the word.

Still, no matter what the trailers turn out to be, the failure so far to find weapons of mass destruction in no way invalidates the prewar intelligence data indicating that Iraq had the clandestine capacity to build them. There has long been an extremely strong case — based on evidence that largely predates the Bush administration — that Iraq maintained programs in weapons of mass destruction. It was this evidence, along with reports showing the clear failure of United Nations efforts to impede Iraq's progress, that led the Clinton administration to declare a policy of "regime change" for Iraq in 1998.

In 1995, for example, United Nations inspectors found Russian-made ballistic-missile gyroscopes at the bottom of the Tigris River; Jordanian officials intercepted others being smuggled into Iraq that same year. In July 1998, international inspectors discovered an Iraqi document that showed Baghdad had lied about the number of chemical bombs it had dropped during the Iran-Iraq War, leaving some 6,000 such weapons unaccounted for. Iraq simply refused to concede that the document even existed.

These episodes, and others like them, explain why many former Clinton administration officials, including myself (I was on the staff of the National Security Council in the 90's), agreed with the Bush administration that a war would likely be necessary to prevent Iraq from acquiring nuclear and other weapons. We may not have agreed with the Bush team's timing or tactics, but none of us doubted the fundamental intelligence basis of its concerns about the Iraqi threat.

As for the estimates the Bush administration presented regarding Iraq's holdings of weapons-related materials, they came from unchallenged evidence gathered by United Nations inspectors (in many cases, from records of the companies that sold the materials to Iraq in the first place). For instance, Iraq admitted importing 200 to 250 tons of precursor agents for VX nerve gas; it claimed to have destroyed these chemicals but never proved that it had done so. Even Hans Blix, the last head weapons inspector and a leading skeptic of the need for an invasion, admitted that the Iraqis refused to provide a credible accounting for these materials.

And it wasn't just the United States that was concerned about Iraq's efforts. By 2002, British, Israeli and German intelligence services had also concluded that Iraq was probably far enough along in its nuclear weapons program that it would be able to put together one or more bombs at some point in the second half of this decade. The Germans were actually the most fearful of all — in 2001 they leaked their estimate that Iraq might be able to develop its first workable nuclear device in 2004.

Nor was it just government agencies that were alarmed. In the summer of 2002 I attended a meeting with more than a dozen former weapons inspectors from half a dozen countries, along with another dozen experts on Iraq's weapons programs. Those present were asked whether they believed Iraq had a clandestine centrifuge lab operating somewhere; everyone did. Several even said they believed the Iraqis had a covert calutron program going as well. (Centrifuge and calutron operations allow a country to enrich uranium and produce the fissile material for a nuclear bomb.)


At no point before the war did the French, the Russians, the Chinese or any other country with an intelligence operation capable of collecting information in Iraq say it doubted that Baghdad was maintaining a clandestine weapons capability. All that these countries ever disagreed with the United States on was what to do about it.

Which raises the real crux of the slanted-intelligence debate: the timing of the war. Why was it necessary to put aside all of our other foreign policy priorities to go to war with Iraq in the spring of 2003? It was always the hardest part of the Bush administration's argument to square with the evidence. And, distressingly, there seems to be more than a little truth to claims that some members of the administration skewed, exaggerated and even distorted raw intelligence to coax the American people and reluctant allies into going to war against Iraq this year.

Before the war, some administration officials clearly tended to emphasize in public only the most dire aspects of the intelligence agencies' predictions. For example, of greatest importance were the estimates of how close Iraq was to obtaining a nuclear weapon. The major Western intelligence services essentially agreed that Iraq could acquire one or more nuclear bombs within about four to six years. However, all also indicated that it was possible Baghdad might be able to do so in as few as one or two years if, and only if, it were able to acquire fissile material on the black market.

This latter prospect was not very likely. The Iraqis had been trying to buy fissile material since the 1970's and had never been able to do so. Nevertheless, some Bush administration officials chose to stress the one-to-two-year possibility rather than the more likely four-to-six year scenario. Needless to say, if the public felt Iraq was still several years away from acquiring a nuclear weapon rather than just a matter of months, there probably would have been much less support for war this spring.

Moreover, before the war I heard many complaints from friends still in government that some Bush officials were mounting a ruthless campaign over intelligence estimates. I was told that when government analysts wrote cautious assessments of Iraq's capabilities, they were grilled and forced to go to unusual lengths to defend their judgments, and some were chastized for failing to come to more alarming conclusions. None of this is illegal, but it was perceived as an attempt to browbeat analysts into either changing their estimates or shutting up and ceding the field to their more hawkish colleagues.

More damning than the claims of my former colleagues has been some of the investigative reporting done since the war. Particularly troubling are reports that the administration knew its contention that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from Niger was based on forged documents. If true, it would be a serious indictment of the administration's handling of the war.

As important as this debate is, what may ultimately turn out to be the biggest concern over the Iraqi weapons program is the question of whose hands it is now in. If we do confirm that those two trailers are mobile biological warfare labs, we are faced with a tremendous problem. If the defectors' reports about the rates at which such mobile labs were supposedly constructed are correct, there are probably 22 more trailers still out there. Where are they? Syria? Iran? Jordan? Still somewhere in Iraq? Or have they found their way into the hands of those most covetous — Osama bin Laden and his confederates?

Nor can we allow our consideration of weapons of mass destruction and politicized intelligence to be a distraction from the most important task at hand: rebuilding Iraq. History may forgive the United States if we don't find the arsenal we thought we would. No one will forgive us if we botch the reconstruction and leave Iraq a worse mess than we found it.

Kenneth M. Pollack is director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and the author of "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq."

Copyright 2003*The New York Times Company

[Kris]

June 24, 2003

Truth, Lies and the War (3 Letters)

To the Editor:

The issue raised in "Bush May Have Exaggerated, but Did He Lie?" (Week in Review, June 22) is a distinction without a difference.

Exaggerating and lying are both strategies for the purpose of manipulation. Both, when exposed, lead to reduced credibility; and both contribute to feelings of cynicism and powerlessness.

If manipulated by an exaggeration or by a lie, one feels equally deceived.

It does not make the costs of a pre-emptive war more acceptable to know that it might have been justified to the American public by an exaggeration rather than a lie.

To even have a discussion on whether a president exaggerated or lied concerning war suggests that something is dreadfully wrong with current standards of leadership and the creation of public policy.
JOHN HACKENBURG
Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y., June 22, 2003

•
To the Editor:

Your parsing of the varieties of presidential deceit misses the point ("Bush May Have Exaggerated, but Did He Lie?," Week in Review, June 22).

The president of the United States, when speaking to its citizens on matters of state, is obliged to tell the truth. In that realm, he is not a salesman, and we are not potential buyers.

There's nothing much that we can do about the endless spin that comes our way from the campaign trail. But when it comes from the Oval Office, we are obliged to denounce it loudly and clearly.
JAMES GAUER
New York, June 22, 2003

•
To the Editor:

Re "Bush May Have Exaggerated, but Did He Lie?" (Week in Review, June 22):

Critics of President Bush err when they focus on weapons of mass destruction. The real lie is about the "imminent threat" to our country. That was the stated justification for the hurry to war.
FRANK R. MORRIS
Castle Rock, Colo., June 22, 2003


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

June 24, 2003

Denial and Deception

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Politics is full of ironies. On the White House Web site, George W. Bush's speech from Oct. 7, 2002 — in which he made the case for war with Iraq — bears the headline "Denial and Deception." Indeed.

There is no longer any serious doubt that Bush administration officials deceived us into war. The key question now is why so many influential people are in denial, unwilling to admit the obvious.

About the deception: Leaks from professional intelligence analysts, who are furious over the way their work was abused, have given us a far more complete picture of how America went to war. Thanks to reporting by my colleague Nicholas Kristof, other reports in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and a magisterial article by John Judis and Spencer Ackerman in The New Republic, we now know that top officials, including Mr. Bush, sought to convey an impression about the Iraqi threat that was not supported by actual intelligence reports.

In particular, there was never any evidence linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda; yet administration officials repeatedly suggested the existence of a link. Supposed evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear program was thoroughly debunked by the administration's own experts; yet administration officials continued to cite that evidence and warn of Iraq's nuclear threat.

And yet the political and media establishment is in denial, finding excuses for the administration's efforts to mislead both Congress and the public.

For example, some commentators have suggested that Mr. Bush should be let off the hook as long as there is some interpretation of his prewar statements that is technically true. Really? We're not talking about a business dispute that hinges on the fine print of the contract; we're talking about the most solemn decision a nation can make. If Mr. Bush's speeches gave the nation a misleading impression about the case for war, close textual analysis showing that he didn't literally say what he seemed to be saying is no excuse. On the contrary, it suggests that he knew that his case couldn't stand close scrutiny.

Consider, for example, what Mr. Bush said in his "denial and deception" speech about the supposed Saddam-Osama link: that there were "high-level contacts that go back a decade." In fact, intelligence agencies knew of tentative contacts between Saddam and an infant Al Qaeda in the early 1990's, but found no good evidence of a continuing relationship. So Mr. Bush made what sounded like an assertion of an ongoing relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, but phrased it cagily — suggesting that he or his speechwriter knew full well that his case was shaky.

Other commentators suggest that Mr. Bush may have sincerely believed, despite the lack of evidence, that Saddam was working with Osama and developing nuclear weapons. Actually, that's unlikely: why did he use such evasive wording if he didn't know that he was improving on the truth? In any case, however, somebody was at fault. If top administration officials somehow failed to apprise Mr. Bush of intelligence reports refuting key pieces of his case against Iraq, they weren't doing their jobs. And Mr. Bush should be the first person to demand their resignations.

So why are so many people making excuses for Mr. Bush and his officials?

Part of the answer, of course, is raw partisanship. One important difference between our current scandal and the Watergate affair is that it's almost impossible now to imagine a Republican senator asking, "What did the president know, and when did he know it?"

But even people who aren't partisan Republicans shy away from confronting the administration's dishonest case for war, because they don't want to face the implications.

After all, suppose that a politician — or a journalist — admits to himself that Mr. Bush bamboozled the nation into war. Well, launching a war on false pretenses is, to say the least, a breach of trust. So if you admit to yourself that such a thing happened, you have a moral obligation to demand accountability — and to do so in the face not only of a powerful, ruthless political machine but in the face of a country not yet ready to believe that its leaders have exploited 9/11 for political gain. It's a scary prospect.

Yet if we can't find people willing to take the risk — to face the truth and act on it — what will happen to our democracy? *


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Jasonik]

For some, war is an unjustifiable evil; there are no circumstances under which violence is acceptable, in a word pacifism. *If that is the noble position from which one opposes US agression -kudos. *But if one uses specious and deceptive arguements to achieve this aim, (nonviolence), how does the use of manipulative information in this case trump its use in justifying war? *Imbedded within the arguements against Bush's justification is a moral judgement- the means to nonviolence do not need to be justified, for the existence of a wonderfully idealistic world in which wars don't exist will be the ultimate justification. *For the sake of honesty I wish this dovish opposition would, rather than finger wagging about deception, wag away about violence in all its forms, from oppresion to genocide. *I think it is fair to say the loudest detractors of the Iraq war would find lying to prevent a war totally acceptable.

[Kris]

There is no sign of pacifism in any of those texts. Your assumption rests on nothing objective.

[Jasonik]

Ok let me try again if Bush were prevented from being re-elected by deception or lying, that would be justifiable as a greater good.

What I am trying to hone in on, is the lack of intellectual honesty involved in most, if not all morally based arguements, and I mean of all stripes and positions. *Most things can be read two ways.

(Edited by Jasonik at 2:11 pm on June 24, 2003)

[chris]

In other words, lying to achieve a goal one believes in is a justifiable means to an end. Someone else lying to achieve a goal one disagrees with is however completely unacceptable. That being said of partisans on both the right and the left. Lying on ones own part is always acceptable, because one considers oneself to be right, and pursuing the just cause, while ones opponent is clearly wrong in priciple and therefor any lie or thier part merely exposes their unjust intent.

In a word: hypocrisy.

[Kris]

Are these pompous lectures supposed to have any relevance or are you two just frustrated that your side is under criticism?

[chris]

> ...your side is under criticism...

My side?

Your choice of words is so revealing about how partisan your position is. I'm an independent. I have no party affiliation. I did not even vote for the current administration. I was also very careful in the neutrality with which I crafted my statement, yet you will respond as you do, regardless.

It also humours me because I was realy just elaborating with Jasonik, anyway.


(Edited by chris at 9:39 pm on June 26, 2003)

[Kris]

Yes, well, if your post is restricted to such a limited public, send a personal message instead. "Your side", that is, the pro-war party - as the context suggests. You have the nerve to proclaim neutrality after a lesson on honesty, as if the latter came out of nowhere. You can conjecture hypocrisy if you want, or elaborate a trite theory, but if it bears no factual relation to the topic at hand, keep it to yourself.

[Jasonik]

I was merely questioning the 'objective' tone of the articles posted. *There seemed an air of moral indignation, and victimization in the Op-Ed pieces. *The right to question the Gov't is a much heralded way to be American, but somehow questioning unelected columnists is not beyond reproach? *I question everyone and everything, and I was not fooled by President Bush, I saw it for what it was, and is. *The amazing thing is that he got away with it in front of the whole world. Point, shame, and snicker all you want, but the post-rationalizing and Machiavellian thinking chris and I were referring to is a fact of humanity, and like it or not, quite a few people in this country don't read the Times, so you'll have to forgive them for not knowing the correct way to think.
By the way I was just as amazed at the things Clinton got away with. *I don't believe in judging anyone based on party line moral relativism, that stuff is for the birds...err sheep.

Am I advocating for a "side"?

What I was trying to do was deconstruct the fallability of arguments based on moralization. *

[ZippyTheChimp]

What I was trying to do was deconstruct the fallability of arguments based on moralization.
Some or all of the authors may be lying themselves, but I read no argument in any of the articles as to the morality of truth.

If war is to be accepted as immoral, but sometimes necessary, then truth must be viewed as the necessary data needed to make informed decisions.

*

[Jasonik]

Denial and Deception
By PAUL KRUGMAN

In particular, there was never any evidence linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda; yet administration officials repeatedly suggested the existence of a link.

Consider, for example, what Mr. Bush said in his "denial and deception" speech about the supposed Saddam-Osama link: that there were "high-level contacts that go back a decade." In fact, intelligence agencies knew of tentative contacts between Saddam and an infant Al Qaeda in the early 1990's, but found no good evidence of a continuing relationship. So Mr. Bush made what sounded like an assertion of an ongoing relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, but phrased it cagily — suggesting that he or his speechwriter knew full well that his case was shaky.

These two excerpts are from the same article. In the first, the author states "there was never any" link between Iraq an Al Qaeda, the second states, "in fact, intelligence agencies knew."

Is the author being deceptive or was the first statement a lie? *The first could be true if interpreted to mean 'never presented.' *This type of statement parsing is exactly the type Bush is criticized for, so what gives?

If one is able to notice this type of shady phraseology, that individual is not the victim of Bush's deception, or Krugman. *On the other hand if some dimwit is duped and feels betrayed, in swoop the Democrats to take advantage of this undiscerning soul and dupe them into deserting the President. *
Interesting strategy, I guess a vote is just a vote in the end. To feign the role of the truth teller and truth exposer, by twisting the truth seems disingenuous at the very least. *

Generally the arguments don't appeal to the intellect but to the emotions, maybe I'm not touchy-feely enough to buy into it.

[ZippyTheChimp]

I hate to repeat, but morality has not been the issue - not the morality of war, Bush, or the columnists.

I will draw the line on the standards used for electing a president and going to war. Elections have long since become
a joke, prime time media events run by entertainment experts. Decisions on war, at a time when the national emotional state is already elevated, should be made more carefully.

[Jasonik]

I guess my assumtion that lying is wrong because it is immoral is not shared. *I don't want to get all philosophical, but why then is lying wrong? *Isn't this what Bush is accused of?

If we don't want a President who lies, we must demand more from candidates. *How are the two separated?

[ZippyTheChimp]

Your quote:
What I am trying to hone in on, is the lack of intellectual honesty involved in most, if not all morally based arguements, and I mean of all stripes and positions. *Most things can be read two ways.
The articles posted in this thread were not morally based.
It does not mean that there is no moral component to lying.

[Jasonik]

I feel kind of stupid for belaboring this point, but I think in some way we are not speaking the same language. *
By any chance do you hold the term 'moral' to be religious? *I don't, but think of it in terms of 'social contract.' *Would 'public trust' be a more euphemistically secular term for the same thing? *Would breaching the public trust be equivalent to immoral behavior? *I think yes. *
I am in no way defending lying, or Bush's tactics, just trying to question the assumptions of columnists, and fellow forum members. *I am also trying to identify the position from which the vitriol that repeatedly excoriates Bush emmanates from. *IMO it is morally based judgement. *
I am not looking for agreeance, just a tacit acknowledgement that my reasoning is not fallacious, or an education as to why my points or lines of investigation are misguided. *I have mentioned intellectual honesty, and practice what I preach as best I can, and welcome critique. *What I will not stand for is simple dismissal. *
I like to believe the time I spend writing this is not wasted and everything discounted because I might cause examination of deeply held assuptions, that some are umcomfortable questioning. *To these people I am sorry for offending your sensibilities. *To the others, think and read with a grain of salt what I have written, just as you should everything. * *