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. * *

[Eugenius]

Interesting that you ask whether there is a religious overtone against lying. *I have always found it intriguing that there is no "thou shalt not lie" commandment.

I also tend to agree with your statement that arguments are often emotionally based, rather than being factual. *I have discovered for myself that it is pointless to listen for a politician's reasons for advocating a certain course of action. *Instead, it is important to learn all the facts, and then form an independent opinion as to whether such a course of action is warranted, or necessary. *I, for one, have always supported the war in Iraq, though never for the reasons that Bush commonly states.

[Freedom Tower]

Kay: Clues Exist on Anthrax, Missiles Still in Iraq

Monday, October 06, 2003

WASHINGTON — Weapons hunters in Iraq are pursuing tips that point to the possible presence of anthrax (search) and Scud missiles (search) still hidden in the country, the chief searcher said Sunday.

David Kay (search) told Congress last week that his survey team had not found nuclear, biological or chemical weapons so far. But he argued against drawing conclusions, saying he expects to provide a full picture on Iraq's weapons programs in six months to nine months.

While lacking physical evidence for the presence anthrax or Scuds, Kay said tips from Iraqis are motivating the search for them.

Critics, including many in Congress, say Kay's findings do not support most of the Bush administration's prewar assertions that the United States faced an imminent, serious threat from Iraq's Saddam Hussein because of widespread and advanced Iraqi weapons programs.

President Bush has said the U.S.-led war on Iraq was justified despite the failure to find weapons.

Kay reported that searchers found a vial of live botulinum (search) bacteria that had been stored since 1993 in an Iraqi scientist's refrigerator. The bacteria make botulinum toxin, which can be used as a biological weapon, but Kay has offered no evidence that the bacteria had been used in a weapons program.

The live bacteria was among a collection of "reference strains" of biological organisms that could not be used to produce biological warfare agents.

Kay said Sunday the same scientist told investigators that he was asked to hide another much larger cache of strains, but "after a couple of days he turned them back because he said they were too dangerous. He has small children in the house."

Kay said the cache "contains anthrax and that's one reason we're actively interested in getting it." Kay, speaking on "Fox News Sunday," did not say whether the anthrax was live or a strain used only for anthrax research.

Before the war, Iraqis said they had destroyed their supply of anthrax. Inspectors haven't found any and Iraqis haven't been able to provide evidence to satisfy investigators that they did destroy it. Experts note that old supplies of anthrax would have degraded by now.

While the Bush administration argued before taking the country to war that Iraq's arsenal posed an imminent threat, much of what Kay discovered is that Iraq had interest in such weapons and was researching some agents.



Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., said Kay's report shows Saddam's clear intent to develop chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. He said, however, that the administration didn't tell the public the whole truth.

"There is some evidence that the Bush administration exaggerated unnecessarily," he told "Fox News Sunday." Lieberman, a presidential candidate, said the exaggeration "did discredit what was otherwise a very just cause of fighting tyranny and terrorism."

Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell have contended the vial of botulinum bacteria that Kay's team found is one strong piece of evidence of Saddam's weapons intent.

Searches have been unsuccessful for the kind of long-range Scud missiles the Iraqis fired at Saudi Arabia and Israel in 1991. Many were destroyed during and after the Persian Gulf War, but the Bush administration had accused Iraq of continuing to hide Scuds.

Kay said there are indications there may still be Scuds even though Iraq declared it got rid of them in the early 1990s.

"We have Iraqis now telling us that they continued until 2001, early 2002, to be capable of mixing and preparing Scud missile fuel. Scud missile fuel is only useful in Scud missiles," he said. "Why would you continue to produce Scud missile fuel if you didn't have Scuds? We're looking for the Scuds."

Kay's report to Congress said the information on fuel production came from Iraqi sources and has not been confirmed with documents or physical evidence.

Weapons hunters still are looking for chemical weapons at scores of large ammunition storage sites throughout Iraq. Because of the size of the depots, searchers have examined only 10 of 130 sites so far, Kay said.

"These are sites that contain -- the best estimate is between 600,000 and 650,000 tons of arms," he said. "That's about one-third of the entire ammunition stockpile of the much larger U.S. military."

The Iraqis stored chemical weapons, often unmarked, among conventional munitions, so "you really have to examine each one," Kay said. He said 26 sites are on a critical list to be examined quickly.

[Freedom Tower]

White House Highlights Progress on Iraq

Wednesday, October 08, 2003

WASHINGTON — The White House launched a public relations campaign on Wednesday, sending out National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice to describe the details of the interim report by chief weapons inspector in Iraq David Kay.

Rice told a foreign policy forum in Chicago that Saddam Hussein harbored ambitions to use unconventional weapons despite their not having been found yet.

More importantly, Kay, whose team has been on the ground for three months, "is finding proof that Iraq never disarmed and never complied with U.N. inspectors."

In fact, Rice suggested, if the U.N. Security Council knew last winter what Kay's group has uncovered now, it never would have rejected the U.S. call for war.

"Right up until the end, Saddam lied to the Security Council. And let there be no mistake, right up to the end, Saddam Hussein continued to harbor ambitions to threaten the world with weapons of mass destruction and to hide his illegal weapons activity," she told the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.

Press Secretary Scott McClellan said the increase in speeches by Bush and his senior advisers is the president's way of fulfiling his promise to keep Americans informed about the war on terrorism.

"This is a time when we are accelerating our efforts on a number of fronts and as we do, it's important to keep the American people informed," presidential spokesman Scott McClellan said.

But, privately, aides say Rice's speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations marks the launch of a public relations campaign to counteract what officials see as largely negative media coverage of Kay's report on the hunt for Iraq's chemical and biological weapons. Bush himself said he is determined to break through what he called "the filter" that deprives Americans of a true sense of the accomplishments in Iraq.

Kay spent two days on Capitol Hill last week in closed door meetings with legislators who said they were generally impressed with Kay's remarks despite the fact that no actual weapons of mass destruction have been found.

Still, polls suggest fewer and fewer people feel reconstruction efforts in Iraq are going well, and Democrats have increased their attacks on the administration.

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., said the multi-billion dollar post-war reconstruction effort shows that Iraq was never the threat it appeared to be.



"Some people are not opposed to fixing that which we bombed and which we destroyed," Waters said. "But to go in and create an infrastructure that they have never had is a hard pill to swallow for the American public."

Part of the public's hesitation comes from the growing number of U.S. military casualties. Three more U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq this week, adding to the number killed since the war ended, though not all from hostile action.

In the meantime, Democrats are criticizing the administration's $87 billion supplemental budget request for Iraq as a proposed U.N. Security Council resolution intended to generate more international support falters.

"Why should American troops take virtually every risk and the American taxpayer pay virtually every cost of what is happening in Iraq?" asked House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

Turkey has offered troops to take the load off U.S. forces, but the Iraqi Governing Council opposes having its neighbors on Iraqi soil.

Rice reported that Kay did find that Saddam Hussein had continued dozens of activities related to weapons of mass destruction and the inspectors found indications that he had committed chemical weapons tests on people.

"Today, in Iraq, the killing fields are yielding up their dead," she said.

Rice also seemed to indicate that the prior Bush administration had not finished its task when it originally went to war.

"You don't leave a man with those ambitions, with that technology, with that history, with those weapons, with that ability to pull this all together with $3 billion in illegal revenues every year. You don't leave that threat in the middle of the Middle East," she said.

Rice challenged the notion that Bush took the world to war in Iraq, saying that since the Gulf War ended 12 years ago, the United States and Britain maintained large naval forces in the Persian Gulf and enforced two no fly zones over Iraq.

It was "hardly a state of peace," she said.

The security adviser also said that while no evidence yet exists linking Saddam Hussein to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the possibility of a future attack "beyond the scale of 9-11 ... could not be put aside."

Bush will give his own spin on the Kay report in an address to Thursday to National Guardsmen in New Hampshire. Friday is Vice President Cheney's turn in a speech in Washington.

The PR campaign continues with high-profile trips to Iraq by Cabinet secretaries to illustrate areas of progress, such as the reopening of schools and the introduction of a new currency.

Bush at times will reach beyond the Washington media to try to drive his point home with regional and local press corps, the officials said. The United States is also beefing up press operations in Baghdad to provide more live video opportunities and greater access to U.S. and Iraqi officials.

Bush will devote all of his Saturday radio addresses in October to Iraq and will sit down for a series of interviews with regional media Monday to press his case.

Fox News' Wendell Goler and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

[ZippyTheChimp]

October 9, 2003

Is Condi Gaslighting Rummy?

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

It's easy to see why the Bush crowd is getting so tetchy.

The itch to ditch officials who fritter away the public trust is growing, as Arnold and his broom bear down on Sacramento.

And we know now that our first pre-emptive war was launched basically because Iraq had . . . a vial of Botox?

Just about the scariest thing the weapons hunter David Kay could come up with was a vial of live botulinum, hidden in the home of an Iraqi biological weapons scientist.

This has very dire implications for Beverly Hills and the East Side of Manhattan, areas awash in vials of Botox, the botulinum toxin that can either be turned into a deadly biological weapon or a pricey wrinkle smoother.

And it may have dire implications for the Pentagon and White House if Americans come to believe that their trust was betrayed when the president and his team spread the impressions that Saddam was about to blow us up and that he was behind the 9/11 attacks.

It doesn't help to have a former-NATO-commander-turned-presidential-contender running around telling the country that the Bush dream team is a bunch of dunces. Or a former-diplomat-turned-angry-husband-of-an-outed-spy running around telling the country that the Bush dream team is a bunch of backstabbing lawbreakers who are dead wrong on Iraq.

The administration that never let you see it sweat is sweating, as two of its control freaks openly tug over control. The president's foreign policy duenna and his grumpy grampy over at the Pentagon are suddenly mud wrestling.

Women who are discouraged at the ascension of Conan the Barbarian in Cal-ee-fornia can take heart. In this delicious gender-bender, Condoleezza Rice triumphs as the macho infighter, driving Rummy into a diva-like meltdown.

The trigger was Monday's coverage of the Iraq Stabilization Group (a.k.a. Fat Chance Group); the group is a desperate bid to get a grip on Baghdad before the campaign starts by transferring power for postwar Iraq from the Pentagon to the national security adviser's office inside the White House.

Condi used a trick she learned from Rummy: pre-emption. She outflanked the famous Washington infighter by talking about the new alignment to The New York Times before he had a chance to object.

It was the first time the chesty defense czar — who had tried to freeze out the softies at State, which the Pentagon sneeringly refers to as "the Department of Nice" — had been downgraded by the president and outmaneuvered by a colleague.

"And because he is a cantankerous egomaniac," one longtime Rummy watcher said, "he compounded his own problems by acknowledging it in public, further undermining his own stature."

President Bush clearly realizes that Mr. Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz have gotten him into a fine mess. He wants his trusted Mother Hen, as he calls Condi, the woman who probably spends as much time with him as Laura — weekends at Camp David, vacations at the ranch, workouts at the gym — to make it all better. This will be the first time Ms. Rice, a Soviet expert who has functioned mostly so far as First Chum, will have her reputation on the line.

Some Republicans worry that it's risky to move accountability for postwar Iraq closer to the Oval Office because then there's no one else to blame.

In a meeting with foreign reporters on Tuesday in Colorado Springs, Rummy made no effort to mask his displeasure, saying he had not been consulted, even though Condi said he had, and cattily referring to the "little committees" of the N.S.C. When a German broadcast reporter pressed the defense secretary, he hissed: "I said I don't know. Isn't that clear? You don't understand English?"

One of Rumsfeld's Rules is: "Avoid public spats. When a Department argues with other government agencies in the press, it reduces the President's options." Hmm.

Maybe Rummy hasn't brushed up lately on the Washington rulebook he wrote in the 1970's — after his stints as President Gerald Ford's chief of staff and secretary of defense. Otherwise, he might have recalled this Rumsfeld rule before he bullied the world and ripped up Iraq: "It is easier to get into something than to get out of it."



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

Rumsfeld 'Roller Coaster' Ride Takes Downward Turn

Sun Oct 12, 9:59 AM ET - Reuters

By Will Dunham


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked recently to explain why he is taking such heat after enjoying "rock-star popularity" not too long ago among his admirers following U.S. military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Well, that's life, isn't it?" Rumsfeld told reporters.

"Life's a roller coaster."

In the roller coaster ride of Washington politics, Rumsfeld appears to be on a downward trajectory, according to U.S. officials and analysts.

They cite as evidence President Bush's formation of an interagency Iraq Stabilization Group headed by Condoleezza Rice, the White House national security adviser, to coordinate policy in Iraq, until now largely an in-house operation for Rumsfeld's Pentagon.

"You have to view this as just taking Rumsfeld down a notch," Brookings Institution defense analyst Michael O'Hanlon said. "It certainly reflects a little bit less confidence in Rumsfeld. I think it would be pretty hard to portray it any other way. ... Rumsfeld's star has dimmed just a little."

Rumsfeld has exerted considerable muscle in molding U.S. national security and foreign policy, often reaching into realms ordinarily left to other parts of the government such as the State Department and the CIA.

His detractors inside and outside the administration are wondering whether Rumsfeld's frosty relations with Congress, alienation of U.S. allies, bruising battles with Secretary Colin Powell's State Department and stubborn refusal to change course in postwar Iraq are finally catching up with him.

"I wonder how long he's going to have his job," said one administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "He's become a bit of a political liability."

The White House has given Rumsfeld a public expression of confidence, although that does not always guarantee the safety of a Cabinet secretary's job.

Republican consultant Charlie Black said he did not think Bush was dissatisfied with Rumsfeld or poised to fire him, but did not rule out Rumsfeld leaving the administration if Bush is re-elected in November 2004.

"From everything I see and observe and hear from people, I think he's perfectly safe," Black said.

No one doubts Rumsfeld's continuing clout. Even with the organizational change, instituted amid mounting public concern about the cost of efforts in Iraq in terms of U.S. money and lives, the White House said the Pentagon retains primary responsibility in Iraq policy.

A HUMBLING EXPERIENCE

Rumsfeld initially displayed annoyance over the announcement of Rice's Iraq Stabilization Group and said Bush never talked to him about it beforehand, then later clarified that he did not believe the White House was going behind his back to diminish his power. O'Hanlon said Rumsfeld's public complaints only drew attention to the situation "and he essentially contributed to his own humbling."

Even before the U.S.-led invasion that toppled President Saddam Hussein, Bush assigned Rumsfeld, rather than Powell, the lead role in postwar Iraq. But the six months since the fall of Baghdad have been difficult ones, with the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq facing continued guerrilla attacks while ordinary Iraqis complain about lingering lawlessness in some places and slowness in restoring basic services.

Critics have questioned the quality of the Pentagon's postwar planning, anticipation of problems and speed in addressing them. In fact, some House of Representatives Republicans, displeased with Rumsfeld's progress in Iraq, recently contemplated giving Powell rather than Rumsfeld control over the $20.3 billion Bush is seeking for Iraqi reconstruction.

Defense analyst Charles Pena of the Cato Institute said if things were going really well in Iraq, the White House would not be making any changes.

"But what's driving the train is an election a year away," Pena said.

"The White House is looking at the poll numbers. The president's approval rating, not just on Iraq but everything else, has been in steady decline since May 1 (when he declared major combat over in Iraq). Whereas previously Iraq and the war on terrorism were seen by the political operators in the White House as what would win the president re-election, they are now seen as what could lose this election for the president."

Defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute said Rumsfeld's actual policy influence has not receded.

Thompson said the White House, despite assuming more responsibility for Iraq decisions, has made no policy changes. He noted U.S. policy will continue to be administered on the ground in Iraq primarily by the Defense Department.

And Thompson said Rumsfeld remains very much in harmony ideologically with Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney on national security issues -- much more so than Powell.

Copyright © 2003 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

[Freedom Tower]

Army Letter-Writing Campaign Draws Criticism


Tuesday, October 14, 2003

WASHINGTON — A battalion commander took it upon himself to provide form letters for his troops to send to their hometown newspapers, the White House said Tuesday.

The identical letters, which were discovered in a series of Gannett publications (search) over the weekend, paint a glowing picture of progress in Iraq and say U.S. forces are being welcomed with open arms there.

The series of letters-to-the-editor from soldiers in Iraq raised questions about whether the Bush administration has tried to get troops on the ground to join in on a newly-launched public relations campaign in which the administration is trying to promote positive developments in Iraq.

The White House launched its campaign last week to counter what President Bush called a negative "filter" in the mainstream press that has prevented the good news in Iraq from reaching the American public.

On Monday, Bush spoke one-on-one with reporters from smaller news organizations. He said not only is the press not presenting a full picture, but he is willing to go around it.

"We'd like the people to know the truth about what's going on. I am mindful of the filter through which some news travels and sometimes you have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people," Bush said.

On Tuesday, Press Secretary Scott McClellan sidestepped questions about whether the president believes "the truth" is being told by major press outlets, but said it certainly isn't getting the notice it deserves.

"There is a part of the story that is not getting the attention that we believe it should receive. But on the security front, we are continuing to make important progress there as well because we're taking the fight to the Saddam [Hussein] holdouts, the remnants of the former regime. We are taking the fight to the foreign terrorists," McClellan said.

Officials at the Pentagon and the White House have said the administration was not involved in the letter-writing campaign by some soldiers in Company A, 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment (search). The letters, bearing the names and signatures of soldiers on the ground in the city of Kirkuk (search), were written by some of the unit's officers. They were then forwarded to the military's "Hometown News Release Program," based at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

The Hometown News Release Program (search) encourages soldiers to write their local newspapers to announce promotions and personal milestones as well as other slice-of-life stories.



"Think about how terrific it would be for your family to see their loved one's "story" in print," the program's Web site reads, adding that "more than 500,000 releases are mailed annually to 10,000-plus daily and weekly newspapers across the country, promoting the accomplishments of more than 150,000 military personnel."

Staffers with the program forward the letters to the papers, but it is up to the newspaper to publish the letters or discard them.

According to news reports, the identical letters were discovered in various papers owned by the same companies. Some soldiers said that their platoon sergeant asked them to sign the letters if they agreed, and so they did. Others said they were not aware their names were on the letters until family back home congratulated them on having their letters published, reported USA Today.

The Hometown News Release Program was not meant for letters to the editor, officials at the Pentagon told Fox News. But sending an opinion letter does not necessarily violate the rules of the program.

However, officials said they do believe that sending such letters violates common sense.

"What they did wasn't illegal, but it also didn't live up to the intent of the program," a senior defense official said. "They didn't maliciously do anything wrong. What they did was within their rights, but they shouldn't have used this program to do it. This wasn't the venue.

"It would have been better still if each [serviceman] had written and signed his own letter," the official added.

The U.S. military's public affairs office in Baghdad has slapped the 503rd Regiment on the wrist, telling the unit not to send anymore of them, but no action will be taken against the 503rd. Officials said the Pentagon considers the matter closed.

Fox News' Wendell Goler, Bret Baier and Ian McCaleb contributed to this report.

[Kris]

October 15, 2003

Holding Our Noses

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

I haven't written about Iraq lately because, frankly, it felt like shooting fish in a barrel.

It was sporting to write columns opposing the war back in January, when the White House was conjuring enough Iraqi anthrax "to kill several million people," as well as hordes of cheering Iraqis casting flowers on our soldiers. These days, with that anthrax as elusive as Saddam himself, with the people we've liberated busy killing us, with the bill for Iraq coming in at $90,000 a minute — well, criticizing the war just seems too easy, like aiming a bomb at Bambi.

So I won't do it.

In any case, the real question that confronts us now is not whether invading Iraq was the height of hubris, but this: Given that we are there, how do we make the best of it?

I'm afraid that too many in my dovish camp think that just because we shouldn't have invaded, we also shouldn't stay — or at least we shouldn't help Mr. Bush pay the bill. Mr. Bush's $87 billion budget request for Iraq and Afghanistan is getting pummeled on Capitol Hill this week, partly because people are angry at being misled and patronized by this administration.

Granted, some elements of the budget (like much of our Iraq operation) seem too rooted in our own expectations. In northern Iraq, U.S. engineers reported that it would take $50 million to bring a cement factory in the area to Western standards. The U.S. general there, lacking that kind of money, found some Iraqis who got it going again for $80,000.

And people like those in my hometown of Yamhill, Ore., have trouble understanding why the administration wants to buy Iraqis new $50,000 garbage trucks. On my last visit, I was struck how Oregonians, seeing their local school programs slashed, resent having to subsidize Iraq. That resentment runs deep: the latest USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll shows Americans opposing the Iraq budget request, 57 to 41 percent.

So my fear is that we will now compound our mistake of invading Iraq by refusing to pay for our occupation and then pulling out our troops prematurely. If Iraq continues to go badly, if Democrats continue to hammer Mr. Bush for his folly, if Karl Rove has nightmares of an election campaign fought against a backdrop of suicide bombings in Baghdad, then I'm afraid the White House may just declare victory and retreat.

In that case, Iraq would last about 10 minutes before disintegrating into a coup d'etat or a civil war.

Couldn't happen, you say? We let Afghanistan fall apart after the victory over the Soviet-backed government in 1992. We let Somalia disintegrate after our pullout in 1993-94. And right now, incredibly, the administration is letting Afghanistan fall apart all over again.

If that happens in Iraq, American credibility will be devastated, Al Qaeda will have a new base for operations, and Iraqis will be even worse off than they were in the days of Saddam Hussein.

Hmm. Who knows? In that event, Saddam might return as the warlord of Tikrit.

How do we reduce the chance that Iraq will collapse? First, by holding our noses and passing the president's budget request for Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraqis I've interviewed are often suspicious of U.S. intentions ("You're planning to steal our oil!"), but they're willing to give us a chance if we can stop rapes and get factories open. Slashing that budget — or turning it into a loan to be repaid with oil revenues — would destroy the Iraqi economy and convince many wavering Iraqis that we are conquerors who are best dealt with by blowing us up.

We can also shore up Iraq by arranging an early transfer of sovereignty back to Iraqis, as Kofi Annan and others have suggested — a move the administration initially sputtered about but now seems to accept. Sure, it may be only a symbolic gesture, but anyone who says symbols don't matter doesn't understand nationalism.

The greatest foreign policy mistake the U.S. has made over the last half-century has been its obliviousness to nationalism. Today as well, plenty of ordinary Iraqis would prefer to be misruled by Iraqis than ruled by Americans.

Above all, to stave off catastrophe in Iraq, we must keep our troops there and provide security, for that is the glue that keeps Iraq together. I believe that President Bush was wrong to go into Iraq, but he's right about staying there.


Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[amigo32]

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=15817

Bill Berkowitz
WorkingForChange
10.15.03

Bush's good news offensive

Series of orchestrated happy-talk media events can't hide daily reality of U.S. soldiers and Iraqis killed and wounded

It appears I spoke too soon. In a recent column, I wrote that President Bush's campaign to spread the good news about Iraq was on its last legs. In reality, Phase One of Operation Good News appears to have played poorly, but in the past week the administration has bounced back with a series of high-profile speeches and piercing jabs at the media.

On Friday, October 10, vice president Dick Cheney wowed a Heritage Foundation audience with a reminder that the war on terrorism still has a long way to go. The following day, President Bush's weekly radio address focused on some of the everyday successes of the occupation. By Tuesday, the president was giving interviews to regional television outlets, sidestepping what he believes is the major networks' predilection for reporting only the bad news. At the same time, form letters in support of the administration's policy in Iraq -- purported to be written by soldiers in Iraq -- were published in a batch of newspapers around the country.

By the end of the first days of the new PR offensive, several public opinion polls showed the president regaining some of his lost support.

The good news offensive

According to Reuters, President Bush's weekly radio address "hailed the launch of the country's new currency as a sign of economic promise." Removing the image of Saddam Hussein from the Iraqi dinar was "helping Iraqis to rebuild their economy after a long era of corruption and misrule," Bush said. "For three decades, Iraq's economy served the interest only of its dictator and his regime. The new currency symbolizes Iraq's reviving economy."

"With our assistance, Iraqis are building the roads and ports and railways necessary for commerce," said Bush. "We have helped to establish an independent Iraqi central bank. Working with the Iraqi Governing Council, we are establishing a new system that allows foreign investors to confidently invest capital in Iraq's future."

The vice president showed up at the Washington, DC-based Heritage Foundation to remind his buds that we are still deeply involved with the war on terrorism. Characterized by The New York Times' Maureen Dowd as a "masterpiece of demagogy," Cheney stirred up his audience by telling them that "Terrorists are doing everything they can to gain even deadlier means of striking us. From the training manuals we found in the caves of Afghanistan to the interrogations of terrorists that we've captured, we have learned of their ambitions to develop or acquire chemical, biological or nuclear weapons."

The vice president once again trucked out the administration's many unproven assertions, including the ones that Saddam Hussein "had an established relationship with Al Qaeda, providing training to Al Qaeda members in... poisons, gases, and making conventional bombs." It is clear that when you're in the middle of a handsomely designed PR campaign, the truth matters little.

By Tuesday, ABC News.com was reporting that the president had tired of the "filter" of news reports coming from Iraq and he was attempting to "go around the press... through television outlets that do not routinely cover the White House."

"There's a sense that people in America aren't getting the truth," he told Hearst-Argyle Television. "I'm mindful of the filter through which some news travels, and sometimes you just have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people."

It has also been reported that first lady Laura Bush may be enlisted for the new offensive.

What's next? Might the president pop up as an umpire during the World Series or a referee on Monday Night Football? Will he don an apron and cook up one of his specialty dishes with Emeril? Turn up hawking the 12-inch President George W. Bush Elite Force Aviator doll complete with naval aviator flight uniform on the Home Shopping Network? Will the first couple show up on Friends, The Simpsons or Queer Eye for the Straight Guy?

The reality of bad news

Wherever he and the vice president choose to perform their rhetorical jujitsu, you can bet they won't mention any of the following:

# On October 14, a 3rd Armored Calvary Regiment soldier was found dead in the Euphrates River near Hadithah and two 1st Armored Division soldiers were killed in the Kadhimyah district of Baghdad. On October 13, four British soldiers were wounded in two separate explosions in Basra; a US soldier was killed and another wounded when their Bradley fighting vehicle hit a landmine near Baiji, 220 kilometers north of Baghdad; one 4th Infantry Division soldier was killed and two were wounded in a mid-morning attack; one Fourth Infantry Division soldier was killed in Tikrit at 1:15 PM; U.S. soldiers were ambushed northeast of Baghdad, killing two and wounding two.

# Three hundred and thirty-two U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq since the March 20 invasion -- nine since October 9. More than 1,830 soldiers have been wounded since the start of the war -- an average of nearly nine a day. To my knowledge, the president has made just one visit to see the wounded.

# The military recently launched an investigation into the unusual number of suicides among U.S. military personnel in Iraq. To date, according to USA Today, at least 11 soldiers and three Marines have committed suicide and another dozen deaths are under investigation. Another 478 soldiers have been sent home from Iraq for mental-health issues.

The number of suicides has caused the Army to be concerned," Lt. Col. Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, psychiatrist at the Army's Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Md., told USA Today. "They are ... looking at the stresses on the troops, how well the troops are coping and how well the basic principles of battlefield psychiatry are working," Ritchie added.

# According to the Associated Press, there have been at least eight major bombings in Iraq since May:

"Oct. 12: A suicide car bomber attacked the Baghdad Hotel in downtown Baghdad, killing himself and one other person, at least 32 were wounded.

Oct. 9: A suicide bomber drove his Oldsmobile into a police station in Baghdad's Sadr City district, killing himself and nine other people.

Sept. 25: A planted bomb damaged a hotel housing the offices of NBC News, killing a Somali guard and slightly injuring an NBC sound technician.

Sept. 22: A suicide car bomber struck a police checkpoint outside U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, killing himself and an Iraqi policeman who stopped him, and wounding 19 people.

Sept. 9: A suicide bomber targeted a U.S. intelligence compound in northern Iraq, killing three people and seriously wounding four American intelligence officers.

Aug. 29: A car bomb explodes outside a mosque in the Shiite Muslim holy city of Najaf, killing more than 85 people including Shiite leader Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim.

Aug. 19: A truck bomber struck at the headquarters of the United Nations at the Canal Hotel, killing 23 people, including the top U.N. envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

Aug. 7: A car bomb shattered a street outside the walled Jordanian Embassy, killing at least 19 people including two children."

The form letter flap

Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, the commander of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment, has now acknowledged that he orchestrated the bogus letter writing campaign. The letters -- all written in the same words -- discussed the successes the soldiers experienced in rebuilding Iraq: "The quality of life and security for the citizens has been largely restored, and we are a large part of why that has happened.

"The majority of the city has welcomed our presence with open arms," the letters read.

Prior to Lt. Col. Caraccilo's admission, an investigation by Washington state-based newspaper, The Olympian, found that the form letters "describing their successes rebuilding Iraq" had appeared "in newspapers across the country as U.S. public opinion on the mission sour[ed]." Lt. Col. Caraccilo emailed ABC News that the letter was drafted by his staff and he edited it and reviewed it and then provided it to the soldiers. "Every soldier who signed that letter did so after a careful read," he said. "Some, who could find the time, decided to send their own versions, while others chose not to take part in the initiative."

Putting 'bad news' in perspective

Counterspin Central put the administration's whining about wanting to hear more good news from Iraq in perspective:

"What if, on September 11, 2001...someone had told us:

'Hey...things are not so bad in the United States. You have the world's largest economy. The most powerful military in the world. A thriving Democracy, clean water, a good health system. Stop focusing on one TINY part of the United States [The New York/Washington D.C./Pennsylvania triangle], where a measly 3000 people were killed...and tens of billions of dollars in destruction was caused... by terrorist attacks using hijacked commercial aircraft.'

Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His WorkingForChange column Conservative Watch documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the American Right.

(c) 2003 Working Assets Online. All rights reserved

Opinions expressed on this site are not necessarily those of Working Assets, nor is Working Assets responsible for objectionable material accessed via links from this site.

[Kris]

October 22, 2003

BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'IMPERIAL AMERICA'

A Double-Barreled Attack on American War Policy

By CHARLES A. KUPCHAN

"IMPERIAL AMERICA
The Bush Assault on the World Order"
By John Newhouse
194 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.

As the burdens of stabilizing Iraq mount, many Americans are wondering whether their government has gone off course. John Newhouse's indictment of President Bush's foreign policy thus appears at an opportune moment, offering a lucid and accessible account of how he says the administration has done more to imperil the United States than to enhance its security.

Mr. Newhouse begins with the ideas that inform policy, exposing the dangers in the Bush doctrine's twin pillars of preventive war and pre-eminence. By embracing the principle of prevention, Mr. Bush risks mayhem by setting a precedent that individual countries can decide for themselves when to start a war against a suspected threat.

The author says that a doctrine of prevention also hampers democratic oversight by making decisions of war and peace depend on intelligence information not open to public scrutiny. (Several of the intelligence reports that Mr. Bush made public to justify the Iraq war were of dubious reliability.) Mr. Newhouse additionally points out that Mr. Bush's penchant for prevention skews priorities, soaking up resources to rebuild Iraq that should be spent countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

A doctrine of American pre-eminence is similarly problematic. The United States does have uncontested military dominance, but Mr. Bush's exaggeration of "the role and utility of raw military power" has fueled his dismissive attitude toward allies. An illusory sense of omnipotence has also made the administration underestimate the importance of diplomacy, leading to the uncompromising stances that have cost the United States so much good will abroad.

Mr. Newhouse notes that America's standing abroad will begin to recover "only if and when Washington softens its approach to the world by becoming less unilateral and threatening and more inclined to operate with sensitivity to the views of others."

Mr. Newhouse next moves from principle to practice, cataloging the unwelcome effects of Mr. Bush's doctrinal excesses. His critique of the Iraq war contends that Mr. Bush predicated military action on faulty assumptions, bungled prewar diplomacy at the United Nations and failed to prepare for postwar reconstruction. The Democrats come in for their own criticism when he says they were "intimidated, reluctant to take on a president who had with some skill made national security the consuming issue."

In the strongest section of "Imperial America" Mr. Newhouse recounts the lost opportunities arising from Mr. Bush's fixation on Saddam Hussein. The list is long and troubling.

At its top is Pakistan, a country that "is likely to stand out in the years ahead as the single most dangerous place in today's world" because of a volatile mix of nuclear weapons, political instability, terrorist networks and Islamic radicalism, but Washington focused instead on the lesser danger that emanated from Baghdad. The same goes for North Korea. Despite Pyongyang's open efforts to build nuclear weapons, Mr. Bush played down that threat to keep Americans focused on the impending campaign against Iraq.

Meanwhile, Mr. Newhouse contends, the Bush administration missed a chance to recast relations with Iran, a country whose intellectual and social capital gives it the potential to anchor regional stability. After the events of Sept. 11, the Iranian government supported — although tentatively — the American campaign in Afghanistan, and moderates in Tehran were gaining ground against the radical clerics. Nonetheless Mr. Bush branded Iran a member of the axis of evil, undercutting the reformers and scuttling chances for rapprochement between Washington and Tehran.

These lost opportunities are all the more worrisome against the backdrop of the damage that Mr. Bush has done to the Atlantic alliance, Mr. Newhouse says. With the United States and its key partners in Europe already drifting apart before the Iraq war, it remains to be seen whether the alliance survives the strategic rift that has opened across the Atlantic.

Mr. Newhouse's account of the political and ideological sources of these strategic missteps is less compelling than his critique of American policy. He tends to assign a false uniformity to Mr. Bush and his advisers, lumping them together (except Secretary of State Colin L. Powell) as hawkish neoconservatives.

Mr. Newhouse insists, for example, that Mr. Bush "arrived in Washington a convinced unilateralist." But Mr. Bush hails from America's inward-looking heartland, explaining why, before Sept. 11, his isolationist instincts were far more pronounced than his appetite for global dominion. The heartland's distaste for imperial adventure is one of the main reasons Mr. Bush's popularity is now lagging.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, may both be conservative hawks. But Mr. Rumsfeld, it has been reported, holds a more circumscribed notion of America's role in the world and shares little of Mr. Wolfowitz's enthusiasm for an expansive American effort to bring democracy and pluralism to the greater Middle East. Their disagreements over the scope of the American mission in Iraq contributed to the inadequacy of planning for postwar stabilization.

Mr. Newhouse might have drawn more heavily on his long and distinguished career as a journalist to explore these differences and shed more light on the internal workings of Mr. Bush's foreign policy team. The White House's tight-fisted approach to the flow of information keeps it on message but leaves the American people in the dark about how policy is formulated and how much influence is wielded by key players like Vice President Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser.

Americans need to know more about what goes on behind the scenes if they are to act on Mr. Newhouse's ominous warning that "American military power is constantly growing, although the country's overall security may be declining, if only because its priorities are skewed and unbalanced."

Charles A. Kupchan is a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Freedom Tower]

Rumsfeld Memo Questions U.S. Terror Fight

Wednesday, October 22, 2003

WASHINGTON — The United States faces "a long, hard slog" in the fight against Al Qaeda, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in a pointed memo raising questions about the future of the war on terrorism.

Rumsfeld said the U.S.-led coalitions would win in Afghanistan and Iraq, but so far have had mixed results. He wrote that the United States "has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis" but has made "somewhat slower progress" tracking down top Taliban leaders who sheltered Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

"My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?" Rumsfeld wrote.

The defense secretary also raised the possibility of creating a new team or agency in the federal government specifically to fight terrorism worldwide.

The Pentagon released a copy of the memo, dated Oct. 16 and first reported by USA Today on Wednesday. The memo was addressed to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz (search), Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers (search) and two of their deputies. In it, Rumsfeld offered a much more stark assessment of the global war on terrorism than he often gives publicly.

"It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog," he wrote.

The top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (search), Joe Biden of Delaware, said the memo "is a little different than the sort of self-assurance that was communicated to us in Congress."

"This is the first sort of introspection that I have even whiffed coming out of the civilian side of the Defense Department," Biden told reporters on Capitol Hill.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan, traveling with President Bush in Australia, voiced support for Rumsfeld. "That's exactly what a strong and capable secretary of defense like Secretary Rumsfeld should be doing," said McClellan.

"The president has always said it will require thinking differently. It's a different type of war," McClellan said.

Bush talked about the war on terrorism with reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Canberra, where he planned to discuss it with Prime Minister John Howard.

"I've always felt that there's a tendency of people to kind of seek a comfort zone and hope that the war on terror is over," Bush said. "And I view it as a responsibility of the United States to remind people of our mutual obligations to deal with the terrorists."



Rumsfeld's spokesman, Larry Di Rita, told reporters the memo was meant to raise "big questions that deserve big thinking" and preserve a sense of urgency about where the war is heading.

Rumsfeld wrote "we are just getting started" in battling Ansar al-Islam (search), an Iraq-based terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda.

And he asked: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"

Madrassas are Islamic religious schools. Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials say some schools run by radical groups indoctrinate students to join in an anti-American holy war.

Rumsfeld's memo raises the possibility of creating "a private foundation to entice radical madrassas to a more moderate course" and questions how to block the funding of the extremist schools.

Sounding a theme Rumsfeld repeatedly has voiced in the past two years, the memo says the Defense Department is too big and slow to effectively fight small groups of terrorists.

"An alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere," Rumsfeld wrote.

This article is exactly true. Everyone who says that the war has gone too far is 100% wrong. It hasn't yet gone far enough. There are still terrorists being trained and recruited in the Phillipines, Chechnya, Kashmir, some parts of Africa, and over much of the Middle East. Until people stop complaining and criticizing and let this President fight the terrorists we probably will not solve any of these problems. If the President said he wanted to send troops into the Northern Pakistan border with Afghanistan, where many think Bin Laden is hiding, people would probably complain they want the war to be over. It's the same case if he would want to go after one of the many terrorist groups in Iran, Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad in Syria, Abu Sayyaf in the Phillipines. People would protest. If people really want to stop terrorists they have to stop whining about the war taking too long. Because it will never be completed if they keep whining.

[Jasonik]

Rumsfeld's memo raises the possibility of creating "a private foundation to entice radical madrassas to a more moderate course" and questions how to block the funding of the extremist schools.
And this won't cause a backlash? How can we insure funding won't be funnelled by corrupt clerics, etc.

Sounding a theme Rumsfeld repeatedly has voiced in the past two years, the memo says the Defense Department is too big and slow to effectively fight small groups of terrorists.
CYA!

"An alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere," Rumsfeld wrote.
A secret worldwide terror fighting force... with full Patriot act priveleges and classified clearance? I'm not even a terrorist and I'm terrified. :shock:

[Freedom Tower]

That's funny, I'm more afraid of terrorists than people trying to protect me from terrorists. In fact, I am grateful to people trying to fight terrorists. Not only that, but if our current military is too big and bulky to do the anti-terrorist job then I would hope there'd be a change. After all when you have a problem you should do something to fix it instead of whine and complain. If we need a more nimble military or a seperate institution to fight terrorists then we should create that institution. The Homeland Security Department is new and great for defending against terrorism, however in the case of terrorists the best defense is a good offense. We need to improve our anti-terrorist capabilities for the offensive side of the war. I'm surprised this hasn't happened sooner.

[ZippyTheChimp]

And he asked: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"

I think it's rather hypocritical for Rumsfeld to worry about dissuading potential terrorists when he was the chief architect of the recruiting slogan. He may be trying to distance himself from a difficult situation.

[NYatKNIGHT]

Times article: Rumsfeld Draws Republicans' Ire

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/24/politics/24RUMS.html?hp

[Freedom Tower]

"The chief architect of the recruiting slogan"? Are you suggesting that the head of the US military is trying to sponsor terrorists to fight against his army and country? I'm confused as to what you are trying to say.

[ZippyTheChimp]

No.

[Freedom Tower]

OK, well I'm glad that's not what you meant, but do you mind telling me what you did mean? I can't argue unless I can decipher first ;) I'm automatically assuming we'll argue because we disagree on this topic so much. So whatever the meaning is, I'll probably wind up disagreeing with it, but can you please explain it first?

[ZippyTheChimp]

Rumsfeld (correctly) states that part of the war against terrorism involves stopping people from becoming terrorists. Killing or capturing terrorists will never win this war as long as there are others willing to take their place.

One of the recruiting slogans used by Bin Laden was the presence of US forces in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf war - the infidels are in the holy land. It doesn't matter that their presence was beneficial; it's easy to convince impressionable people that the Great Satan is the cause of their problems. The Saudi ruling hierarchy allowed this rhetoric to deflect criticism from their own corrupt government.

That situation is developing in Iraq today. The borders were not secured (maybe it's unrealistic to think they could have been), so terrorists are entering the country, recruiting among the population. Drive the conquering infidels out of your country. Some people will still blame Americans when a car bomb kills Iraqis instead of US soldiers. They will rationalize that all this chaos didn't exist under Saddam Hussein, and now does with Americans in the country. Once that happens, they are a step closer to becoming terrorists themselves.

Rumsfeld is the architect because he was the major proponent of this war that was going to remove a major threat to our security. If he believed at the time that these problems would develop, he did not relate that to the American people, or at least to members of Congress. There are Republicans in the Armed Forces Committee who have become increasingly upset with Rumsfeld's you don't have a need to know attitude.

In regard to his memo: Sometimes documents are "leaked" by the originator, to disguise the intent of the information becoming public. Rumsfeld may be saying, "Don't blame me, I told you so."

[Freedom Tower]

Yes, obviously stopping the recruitment of terrorists is just as important as killing or capturing them. However, I would not use that as an excuse not to do what is necessary. Some could argue that if we fought terrorits in Afghanistan that more Arabs would be angry. Maybe they were, but it was a necessary step in the war on terror, just like Iraq. Had we not gone into either of those countries we'd probably be a lot worse off today. There would be even more terrorists and more attacks at home. Obviously we must stop the recruitment but we can't be afraid to do what is necessary. It's too bad though, it seems that many Muslims in the middle east believe everything Al Jazeera tells them. I see propoganda stations like them as being the real problem. Instead of stopping our war on terror, I think we should shut down terrorist propoganda centers.

[ZippyTheChimp]

From Reuters:

Bush Says Americans Not Misled on Iraq Campaign

Tue Oct 28, 2:25 PM ET

By Steve Holland

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Struggling to maintain public support for his Iraq policy, President Bush vowed on Tuesday U.S. forces would not leave Iraq and said he never misled Americans about the difficulties of occupying the country.

During a subdued Rose Garden news conference, Bush tempered his oft-stated refrain that major progress is being made in Iraq nearly six months after standing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and declaring major combat operations over.

"Iraq is dangerous, and it's dangerous because terrorists want us to leave, and we're not leaving," he said.

The president sought to drive home a "stay the course" message a day after suicide bombers drove carloads of explosives into five buildings around Baghdad, killing 35 people and wounding 230 in the bloodiest day since President Saddam Hussein was ousted in April.

The extent of the coordinated attacks stunned the White House as Bush strove to maintain Americans' backing for keeping U.S. forces in Iraq to create conditions for a democratic government and search for alleged weapons of mass destruction that the war was fought over and that have not been found.

Reflecting some sensitivity, Bush said it was not White House staff who put up a "Mission Accomplished" banner on the Abraham Lincoln during his May 1 appearance, adding it was the aircraft carrier's staff who hung the sign because the ship itself was concluding a long overseas mission.

"My statement was a clear statement, basically recognizing that this phase of the war for Iraq was over, and there was a lot of dangerous work," he said.

Bush, under fire from Democratic presidential candidates who said he needs to put forward a plan to stabilize Iraq, said the strategy for dealing with attacks was to increase security around potential targets with blockades and checkpoints and keep U.S. strike forces ready to move against the guerrillas.

"But as well, we've got to make sure that not only we harden targets but that we get actionable intelligence to intercept the missions before they begin. That means more Iraqis involved in the intelligence-gathering systems in their countries, so that they are active participants in securing the country from further harm," he said.

Bush seemed to be using the news conference to underscore that much hard work remains in Iraq, a day after he told reporters that the guerrilla attacks should be seen as a sign of progress because they show the desperation of those trying to drive out the Americans.

"It's dangerous, and it's tough," he said.

Bush, who has complained in the past that foreign militants were crossing into Iraq from Syria and Iran to take up arms against U.S. forces, said he expected those two countries to enforce border controls to stop infiltrators, but toned down his rhetoric against them.

"We're working closely with those countries to let them know that we expect them to enforce borders, prevent people from coming across borders if, in fact, we catch them doing that," he said.

Bush gave no sign that he intends to either withdraw some U.S. troops or send in more as some military analysts have suggested. Asked about increasing troop strength, Bush said he constantly asks Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld if this was needed and has been told there are sufficient forces there.

He said Army Gen. John Abizaid, the top commander for U.S. forces in Iraq, "makes the decision as to whether or not he needs more troops."

Bush also defended the $20 billion in reconstruction money for Iraq he has proposed. Some members of Congress want to make some of the money in loans instead of grants.

Bush said this would saddle the Iraqi people with unnecessary debt, and he compared the situation to postwar Japan, saying the United States has a close relationship with Japan now because of postwar assistance.

Copyright © 2003 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved


That's great. Blame the military.
Live by the photo-op; die by the photo-op.

[ZippyTheChimp]

From CBS News 60 Minutes

Bush Sought ‘Way’ To Invade Iraq?

Jan. 11, 2004

A year ago, Paul O'Neill was fired from his job as George Bush's Treasury Secretary for disagreeing too many times with the president's policy on tax cuts.

Now, O'Neill - who is known for speaking his mind - talks for the first time about his two years inside the Bush administration. His story is the centerpiece of a new book being published this week about the way the Bush White House is run.

Entitled "The Price of Loyalty," the book by a former Wall Street Journal reporter draws on interviews with high-level officials who gave the author their personal accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and documents.

But the main source of the book was Paul O'Neill. Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports.

Paul O'Neill says he is going public because he thinks the Bush Administration has been too secretive about how decisions have been made.

Will this be seen as a “kiss-and-tell" book?

“I've come to believe that people will say damn near anything, so I'm sure somebody will say all of that and more,” says O’Neill, who was George Bush's top economic policy official.

In the book, O’Neill says that the president did not make decisions in a methodical way: there was no free-flow of ideas or open debate.

At cabinet meetings, he says the president was "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible connection," forcing top officials to act "on little more than hunches about what the president might think."

This is what O'Neill says happened at his first hour-long, one-on-one meeting with Mr. Bush: “I went in with a long list of things to talk about, and I thought to engage on and as the book says, I was surprised that it turned out me talking, and the president just listening … As I recall, it was mostly a monologue.”

He also says that President Bush was disengaged, at least on domestic issues, and that disturbed him. And he says that wasn't his experience when he worked as a top official under Presidents Nixon and Ford, or the way he ran things when he was chairman of Alcoa.

O'Neill readily agreed to tell his story to the book's author Ron Suskind – and he adds that he's taking no money for his part in the book.

Suskind says he interviewed hundreds of people for the book – including several cabinet members.

O'Neill is the only one who spoke on the record, but Suskind says that someone high up in the administration – Donald Rumsfeld - warned O’Neill not to do this book.

Was it a warning, or a threat?

“I don't think so. I think it was the White House concerned,” says Suskind. “Understandably, because O'Neill has spent extraordinary amounts of time with the president. They said, ‘This could really be the one moment where things are revealed.’"

Not only did O'Neill give Suskind his time, he gave him 19,000 internal documents.

“Everything's there: Memoranda to the President, handwritten "thank you" notes, 100-page documents. Stuff that's sensitive,” says Suskind, adding that in some cases, it included transcripts of private, high-level National Security Council meetings. “You don’t get higher than that.”

And what happened at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting is one of O'Neill's most startling revelations.

“From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.

“From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime,” says Suskind. “Day one, these things were laid and sealed.”

As treasury secretary, O'Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked.

"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this,’" says O’Neill. “For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.”

And that came up at this first meeting, says O’Neill, who adds that the discussion of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting two days later.

He got briefing materials under this cover sheet. “There are memos. One of them marked, secret, says, ‘Plan for post-Saddam Iraq,’" adds Suskind, who says that they discussed an occupation of Iraq in January and February of 2001.

Based on his interviews with O'Neill and several other officials at the meetings, Suskind writes that the planning envisioned peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals, and even divvying up Iraq's oil wealth.

He obtained one Pentagon document, dated March 5, 2001, and entitled "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield contracts," which includes a map of potential areas for exploration.

“It talks about contractors around the world from, you know, 30-40 countries. And which ones have what intentions,” says Suskind. “On oil in Iraq.”

During the campaign, candidate Bush had criticized the Clinton-Gore Administration for being too interventionist: "If we don't stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And I'm going to prevent that."

“The thing that's most surprising, I think, is how emphatically, from the very first, the administration had said ‘X’ during the campaign, but from the first day was often doing ‘Y,’” says Suskind. “Not just saying ‘Y,’ but actively moving toward the opposite of what they had said during the election.”

The president had promised to cut taxes, and he did. Within six months of taking office, he pushed a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts through Congress.
But O'Neill thought it should have been the end. After 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, the budget deficit was growing. So at a meeting with the vice president after the mid-term elections in 2002, Suskind writes that O'Neill argued against a second round of tax cuts.

“Cheney, at this moment, shows his hand,” says Suskind. “He says, ‘You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due.’ … O'Neill is speechless.”

”It was not just about not wanting the tax cut. It was about how to use the nation's resources to improve the condition of our society,” says O’Neill. “And I thought the weight of working on Social Security and fundamental tax reform was a lot more important than a tax reduction.”

Did he think it was irresponsible? “Well, it's for sure not what I would have done,” says O’Neill.

The former treasury secretary accuses Vice President Dick Cheney of not being an honest broker, but, with a handful of others, part of "a praetorian guard that encircled the president" to block out contrary views. "This is the way Dick likes it," says O’Neill.

Meanwhile, the White House was losing patience with O'Neill. He was becoming known for a series of off-the-cuff remarks his critics called gaffes. One of them sent the dollar into a nosedive and required major damage control.

Twice during stock market meltdowns, O'Neill was not available to the president: He was out of the country - one time on a trip to Africa with the Irish rock star Bono.

“Africa made an enormous splash. It was like a road show,” says Suskind. “He comes back and the president says to him at a meeting, ‘You know, you're getting quite a cult following.’ And it clearly was not a joke. And it was not said in jest.”

Suskind writes that the relationship grew tenser and that the president even took a jab at O'Neill in public, at an economic forum in Texas.

The two men were never close. And O'Neill was not amused when Mr. Bush began calling him "The Big O." He thought the president's habit of giving people nicknames was a form of bullying. Everything came to a head for O'Neill at a November 2002 meeting at the White House of the economic team.

“It's a huge meeting. You got Dick Cheney from the, you know, secure location on the video. The President is there,” says Suskind, who was given a nearly verbatim transcript by someone who attended the meeting.

He says everyone expected Mr. Bush to rubber stamp the plan under discussion: a big new tax cut. But, according to Suskind, the president was perhaps having second thoughts about cutting taxes again, and was uncharacteristically engaged.

“He asks, ‘Haven't we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut's gonna do it again,’” says Suskind.

“He says, ‘Didn’t we already, why are we doing it again?’ Now, his advisers, they say, ‘Well Mr. President, the upper class, they're the entrepreneurs. That's the standard response.’ And the president kind of goes, ‘OK.’ That's their response. And then, he comes back to it again. ‘Well, shouldn't we be giving money to the middle, won't people be able to say, ‘You did it once, and then you did it twice, and what was it good for?’"

But according to the transcript, White House political advisor Karl Rove jumped in.

“Karl Rove is saying to the president, a kind of mantra. ‘Stick to principle. Stick to principle.’ He says it over and over again,” says Suskind. “Don’t waver.”

In the end, the president didn't. And nine days after that meeting in which O'Neill made it clear he could not publicly support another tax cut, the vice president called and asked him to resign.

With the deficit now climbing towards $400 billion, O'Neill maintains he was in the right.

But look at the economy today.

“Yes, well, in the last quarter the growth rate was 8.2 percent. It was terrific,” says O’Neill. “I think the tax cut made a difference. But without the tax cut, we would have had 6 percent real growth, and the prospect of dealing with transformation of Social Security and fundamentally fixing the tax system. And to me, those were compelling competitors for, against more tax cuts.”

While in the book O'Neill comes off as constantly appalled at Mr. Bush, he was surprised when Stahl told him she found his portrait of the president unflattering.

“Hmmm, you really think so,” asks O’Neill, who says he isn’t joking. “Well, I’ll be darned.”

“You're giving me the impression that you're just going to be stunned if they attack you for this book,” says Stahl to O’Neill. “And they're going to say, I predict, you know, it's sour grapes. He's getting back because he was fired.”
“I will be really disappointed if they react that way because I think they'll be hard put to,” says O’Neill.

Is he prepared for it?

“Well, I don't think I need to be because I can't imagine that I'm going to be attacked for telling the truth,” says O’Neill. “Why would I be attacked for telling the truth?”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan was asked about the book on Friday and said "The president is someone that leads and acts decisively on our biggest priorities and that is exactly what he'll continue to do."


© MMIII, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved.

[LuPeRcALiO]

ironic title--sounds like O'Neill couldn't get what he was asking. Oh well, one more gaffe.

[Kris]

January 12, 2004

Bush Sought to Oust Hussein From Start, Ex-Official Says

By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 — President Bush was focused on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq from the start of his administration, more than seven months before the terrorist attacks that he later cited as the trigger for a more aggressive foreign policy, Paul H. O'Neill, Mr. Bush's first Treasury secretary, said in an interview broadcast on Sunday.

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," Mr. O'Neill said in an interview with the CBS program "60 Minutes."

Mr. O'Neill, who was dismissed by Mr. Bush more than a year ago over differences on economic policy, said Iraq was discussed at the first National Security Council meeting after Mr. Bush's inauguration. The tone at that meeting and others, Mr. O'Neill said, was "all about finding a way to do it," with no real questioning of why Mr. Hussein had to go or why it had to be done then. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap," Mr. O'Neill said.

Mr. O'Neill gave the interview to "60 Minutes" to promote a new book, "The Price of Loyalty," by Ron Suskind. Mr. O'Neill cooperated extensively on the book, turning over 19,000 documents from his two years as Treasury secretary, including transcripts of National Security Council meetings, Mr. Suskind told "60 Minutes."

Mr. O'Neill also gave an interview to Time magazine, which quoted him as casting doubt on the strength of the evidence Mr. Bush cited in making the case for war with Iraq.

"In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction," Mr. O'Neill told Time, speaking of his tenure in the administration. "There were allegations and assertions by people. But I've been around a hell of a long time, and I know the difference between evidence and assertions and illusions or allusions and conclusions that one could draw from a set of assumptions.

"To me there is a difference between real evidence and everything else," he continued. "And I never saw anything in the intelligence that I would characterize as real evidence."

Mr. O'Neill, a former chairman of Alcoa, served in the Nixon and Ford administrations and was close to Vice President Dick Cheney and Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman. Mr. O'Neill had a rocky tenure as Treasury secretary. His departure came after he made it clear he differed with the White House over the need for more tax cuts. In his typically blunt style, he made no effort at the time to pretend he was not angry and hurt over being forced out.

But the account of his service to Mr. Bush, as given to Mr. Suskind, whose book is to be published Tuesday, is the first by a former senior Bush administration official. It is sure to fuel questions from Mr. Bush's political opponents about the administration's rationale for invading Iraq, and to focus new attention on Mr. Bush's management style and the balance in the White House between politics and policy.

A White House spokesman, Ken Lisaius, said on Sunday night that the administration "simply is not in the business of doing book reviews."

Mr. Lisaius said the book and the interviews appeared to be "an attempt to justify the former secretary's own opinions instead of the results this administration has achieved on behalf of the American people."

In the interviews and in excerpts from the book, Mr. O'Neill described Mr. Bush as hard to read and seemingly disengaged from the details of many policy debates. He portrayed Mr. Cheney as unwilling to serve the role of honest broker during those debates.

In the interviews on Sunday, Mr. O'Neill did not describe in depth the early discussions about removing Mr. Hussein from power. Mr. Suskind told "60 Minutes" that he had documents dating from before Sept. 11, 2001, showing planning for the aftermath of a war with Iraq, covering peacekeeping forces, war crimes tribunals and Iraqi oil fields.

Since the Clinton administration, the official position of the United States, backed by bipartisan votes in Congress, has been to call for "regime change" in Iraq. Even before taking office, Mr. Bush had spoken to exiled Iraqi opponents of Mr. Hussein about his desire to drive the Iraqi leader from power.

But the administration has disclosed few details of its early thinking about war with Iraq and did not publicly raise the prospect of such a war seriously until August 2002.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[NYatKNIGHT]

September 11 was almost too convenient for Bush.

[ZippyTheChimp]

I think I have to read the book, to get it all in context.

[DominicanoNYC]

I think I have to read the book, to get it all in context.
I'm really interested in this book my-self. I've been anti-war, but I thought that 9-11 was the cause. It's insulting how Bush would use 9-11 as an excuse to go to war.

[Kris]

February 9, 2004

Mr. Bush's Version

When Americans choose a president, their most profound consideration is whether a candidate can make the wisest possible decisions when it comes to war. In the case of George W. Bush, they will not only judge whether the invasion of Iraq was the right decision, but what our president has brought away from that experience. If there were misjudgments about the nature of Iraq's weapons programs or in the ways the administration presented that intelligence to the public, we need to know whether he recognizes them and has learned from them. Yesterday, in an interview with NBC's Tim Russert, after a week in which it became obvious to most Americans that the justifications for the war were based on flawed intelligence, Mr. Bush offered his reflections, and they were far from reassuring. The only clarity in the president's vision appears to be his own perfect sense of self-justification.

Right now, the questions average Americans are asking about Iraq seem much clearer than the ones Mr. Bush is willing to confront. People want to know why American intelligence was so wrong about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Mr. Bush didn't have a consistent position on this pivotal issue. At some points during his Oval Office interview, he seemed to be admitting that he had been completely wrong when he told the public just before the war started that the intelligence left "no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." At other moments he suggested the weapons might still be hidden somewhere, or that they may have been transported to another country. At times he depicted himself as having been misled by intelligence reports. But he insisted that George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, was doing a good job and deserved to keep his job.

Average Americans are also asking themselves whether invading Iraq would have seemed like the right decision if we knew then what we know now. Mr. Bush doesn't seem willing to even take on this critical question. He repeatedly referred to Saddam Hussein as a dangerous madman, without defining the threat that even a madman, without any weapons of mass destruction, posed to the United States. At one point, his reasoning seemed to be that even if the dictator did not have the feared weapons, he could have started manufacturing them on a moment's notice. To bolster his position, he cited David Kay, the American weapons inspector, as reporting that "Saddam Hussein was dangerous with the ability to make weapons." In fact, Mr. Kay said that Iraq's weapons program seemed to have ground to a halt under the pressure of the United Nations inspections and sanctions that Mr. Bush and his staff disdained last year. Mr. Kay said Saddam Hussein retained only the basic ability to restart weapons programs if that pressure were removed.

At other times, the president seemed to argue that the invasion was necessary simply to demonstrate that Americans did not back down from a fight. "In my judgment, when the United States says there will be serious consequences, and if there isn't serious consequences, it creates adverse consequences," he said. Although Mr. Bush tried to portray himself as a man who exhausted every peaceful solution, the "serious consequences" were threatened in a United Nations resolution in late 2002 that Mr. Bush was forced to seek to mollify nervous allies after the decision to have a war was essentially made.

Mr. Bush's explanation of how he reconciled the current activities in Iraq with his 2000 campaign rejection of "nation building" was simply silly. (American troops are building a nation in Iraq, he said, but they are also "fighting a war so that they can build a nation.") And it's very hard to take seriously Mr. Bush's contention that he was not surprised by the intensity of the resistance in Iraq.

The president was doing far more yesterday than rolling out the administration's spin for the next campaign. He was demonstrating how he is likely to think if confronted with a similar crisis in the future. The fuzziness and inconsistency of his comments suggest he is still relying on his own moral absolutism, that in a dangerous world the critical thing is to act decisively, and worry about connecting the dots later. Mr. Bush said repeatedly that he went to the United Nations seeking a diplomatic alternative to war. In fact, the United States rejected all diplomatic alternatives at the time, severely damaging relations with some of its most important and loyal allies. "I believe it is essential that when we see a threat, we deal with those threats before they become imminent," he said. "It's too late if they become imminent."

Another question average Americans will be asking themselves this election year is whether the Bush administration, which wanted to invade Iraq even before Sept. 11, manipulated the intelligence reports to frighten Congress and the public into supporting the idea. The president's claim yesterday that Congress had access to exactly the same intelligence he had was inaccurate, and his comments about the new commission he has appointed to look into intelligence gathering made it clear that he has no intention of having his administration's actions included in the probe.

Some of Mr. Bush's comments yesterday raise questions even more disturbing than the idea that senior administration members might have misled the nation about the intelligence on Iraq. The nation obviously needs a leader who is always alert to the threat of terrorism from abroad. But it cannot afford to have one who responds to the trauma of 9/11 by overreacting to the possibility of danger. In the coming campaign, Mr. Bush, who described himself as a "war president," is going to have to show the country that he is capable of distinguishing real threats from false alarms, and has the courage to tell the nation the truth about something as profound as war. Nothing in the interview offered much hope in that direction.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

February 15, 2004

OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Thief of Baghdad

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON

In the Ford White House, Dick Cheney's Secret Service name was Backseat, because he was the model of an unobtrusive staffer, the perfect unflashy deputy chief of staff for that lord of the bureaucratic dance, Donald Rumsfeld.

As James Mann writes in his new book, "The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet," Mr. Cheney started out supervising such lowly matters as fixing a stopped-up drain in a White House bathroom sink; getting a headrest for Betty Ford's helicopter seat; and sorting out which salt shakers — the regular ones or, as he put it, the "little dishes of salt with funny little spoons" — would be best for stag dinners in the president's private quarters.

Rummy's alter ego rose quickly, though, because he seemed to have no ego. Good old Dick could be counted on to be the man behind the man, a butler to power. The new President Bush, a tabula rasa in foreign affairs, put himself in Mr. Cheney's hands.

But W. had barely settled into the Oval when Backseat clambered into the front seat. Retracing the rush to war, the names Cheney and Chalabi are entwined in bold relief.

Back when Dick Cheney was fiddling with salt shakers, Ahmad Chalabi, a smooth-talking and wealthy young Iraqi M.I.T. graduate, was founding the Petra Bank in Jordan.

As Mr. Cheney moved up in the capital, Mr. Chalabi was tripped up in Jordan by a small matter of embezzlement from his own bank. Jordanian officials have said that the crime rocked their economy and that they paid $300 million to depositors to cover the bank's losses. By the time Mr. Chalabi was convicted and received a sentence of 22 years of hard labor, he was a fugitive in London.

During the early 90's, when Mr. Cheney was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Mr. Chalabi was in a full courtship press with Washington's conservative and journalistic elites. He saw them as a springboard for his triumphant return to Iraq.

After 9/11, his passionate desire to take out Saddam coincided with that of conservatives. All they needed for their belli was a casus, so Mr. Chalabi obligingly conned the neocons.

He hoodwinked his pals Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle into believing Iraq would be a flowery cakewalk to democracy.

A wily expert in the politics of the bazaar, he knew he had to sell his scheme on what was good for Americans and their security. He was happy to funnel information to the vice president that painted a picture of Saddam hunkered on a hair-raising stockpile of W.M.D. His group, the Iraqi National Congress, tried to spin our government and media through its "information collection program." Intelligence officials now say that the prewar information provided to Washington by this group was suspect and useless, even disinformation.

But here's the wild thing: the propaganda program was underwritten by U.S. government funds. So Americans paid Ahmad Chalabi to gull them into a war that is costing them a billion a week — and a precious human cost. Cops dealing with their snitches check out the information better than the Bush administration did.

Mr. Chalabi's séances swayed the political set, the intelligence set and the journalistic set. In an effect Senator Bob Graham dubs "incestuous amplification," the bogus stories spewed by Iraqi exiles and defectors ricocheted through an echo chamber of government and media, making it sound as if multiple, reliable sources were corroborating the same story. Rather, one self-interested source was replicating like computer spam.

The C.I.A. was stung to find out its analysts had mistakenly thought that Iraq weapons information had been confirmed by multiple sources, when it came from only a single source; that analysts had relied on a fabricating Iraqi defector and spin material from Iraqi exiles; and that this blather made its way into documents and speeches used by the Bush administration to justify war. George Tenet ordered a major change in procedure last week, removing barricades so that analysts can know more about the identities of clandestine agents' sources, and their possible motives.

But even incestuous amplification could not have drowned out reality if Bush officials had not glommed onto the Chalabi flummery for their own reasons — to feed their fantasies about refashioning America's power, psyche and military, and making over the Middle East in our image.

Swept up in big dreams, the foreign policy dream team became dupes in Ahmad Chalabi's big con.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[maroualle]

Peace to the ones in Iraq right now, bring them back home.....the Somalia fiasco should never be forgotten.

[JCDJ]

Yes, obviously stopping the recruitment of terrorists is just as important as killing or capturing them. However, I would not use that as an excuse not to do what is necessary. Some could argue that if we fought terrorits in Afghanistan that more Arabs would be angry. Maybe they were, but it was a necessary step in the war on terror, just like Iraq. Had we not gone into either of those countries we'd probably be a lot worse off today. There would be even more terrorists and more attacks at home. Obviously we must stop the recruitment but we can't be afraid to do what is necessary. It's too bad though, it seems that many Muslims in the middle east believe everything Al Jazeera tells them. I see propoganda stations like them as being the real problem. Instead of stopping our war on terror, I think we should shut down terrorist propoganda centers.

First, I'll state that I question whether the wars in Afghanistan were "the necessary thing to do" or not, but let's say it is. It's inevitable that waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq will make people of those countires angry at us, to make an understatement. That's how people become driven to terrorism, when they find a reason to see us as the devil. Despite our "smart bombs" mistakes are made, and innocent people are killed. Are we to expect that a child orphaned by one of our tomohawk missiles will rationalize "The Americans are just defending themselves in the fight against terrorism", or some guy's wife and children are killed by stray fire will rationalize "It was only a mistake, the Americans didn't mean it." No, there will be masses of disgruntled people affected by this violence who will become completely obsessed with our destruction. Bombing where we think Al-Quieda might be might hinder the terrorists, or at worst it might not, but there is no doubt that it will strengthen their future following. Do we want to hand the recieving end of this much larger vendetta down to our next generation?

[JCDJ]

Did I mention that according to sources an average of 2,000 civilians were killed in Iraq in the first month of the war? Imagine how screwed we'll be in the future if the families of those 2,000 people in that month alone decide to act out of their anger? By the way, our country's government, and major news stations have avoided venturing guesses or estimations as to the number of civilians killed, so outside sources are all that anyone can go on.

[maroualle]

[quote=" Do we want to hand the recieving end of this much larger vendetta down to our next generation?

The anger is not only valid for iraki's next generation but, helas, for many other generation.

For an european (most of us) the US dream is still alive.
For the muslim world, it's the opposite i'm afraid....

[ZippyTheChimp]

March 19, 2004

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

The Price of Freedom in Iraq

By DONALD H. RUMSFELD

WASHINGTON

This week, as we mark the one-year anniversary of the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, it is useful to recount why we have fought. Not long ago I visited South Korea, just as the Korean government was debating whether to send troops to Iraq. In Seoul, I was interviewed by a Korean journalist who was almost certainly too young to have firsthand recollection of the Korean War. She asked me, "Why should Koreans send their young people halfway around the globe to be killed or wounded in Iraq?"

As it happened, I had that day visited a Korean War memorial, which bears the names of every American soldier killed in the war. On it was the name of a close friend of mine from high school, a wrestling teammate, who was killed on the last day of the war. I said to the reporter: "It's a fair question. And it would have been fair for an American to ask, 50 years ago, `Why should young Americans go halfway around the world to be killed or wounded in Korea?' "

We were speaking on an upper floor of a large hotel in Seoul. I asked the woman to look out the window — at the lights, the cars, the energy of the vibrant economy of South Korea. I told her about a satellite photo of the Korean peninsula, taken at night, that I keep on a table in my Pentagon office. North of the demilitarized zone there is nothing but darkness — except a pinprick of light around Pyongyang — while the entire country of South Korea is ablaze in light, the light of freedom.

Korean freedom was won at a terrible cost — tens of thousands of lives, including more than 33,000 Americans killed in action. Was it worth it? You bet. Just as it was worth it in Germany and France and Italy and in the Pacific in World War II. And just as it is worth it in Afghanistan and Iraq today.

Today, in a world of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and states that sponsor the former and pursue the latter, defending freedom means we must confront dangers before it is too late. In Iraq, for 12 years, through 17 United Nations Security Council resolutions, the world gave Saddam Hussein every opportunity to avoid war. He was being held to a simple standard: live up to your agreement at the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf war; disarm and prove you have done so. Instead of disarming — as Kazakhstan, South Africa and Ukraine did, and as Libya is doing today — Saddam Hussein chose deception and defiance.

Repeatedly, he rejected those resolutions and he systematically deceived United Nations inspectors about his weapons and his intent. The world knew his record: he used chemical weapons against Iran and his own citizens; he invaded Iran and Kuwait; he launched ballistic missiles at Iran, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain; and his troops repeatedly fired on American and British aircraft patrolling the no-flight zones.

Recognizing the threat, in September 2002 President Bush went to the United Nations, which gave Iraq still another "final opportunity" to disarm and to prove it had done so. The next month the president went to Congress, which voted to support the use of force if Iraq did not.

And, when Saddam Hussein passed up that final opportunity, he was given a last chance to avoid war: 48 hours to leave the country. Only then, after every peaceful option had been exhausted, did the president and our coalition partners order the liberation of Iraq.

Americans do not come easily to war, but neither do Americans take freedom lightly. But when freedom and self-government have taken root in Iraq, and that country becomes a force for good in the Middle East, the rightness of those efforts will be just as clear as it is today in Korea, Germany, Japan and Italy.

As the continuing terrorist violence in Iraq reminds us, the road to self-governance will be challenging. But the progress is impressive. Last week the Iraqi Governing Council unanimously signed an interim Constitution. It guarantees freedom of religion and expression; the right to assemble and to organize political parties; the right to vote; and the right to a fair, speedy and open trial. It prohibits discrimination based on gender, nationality and religion, as well as arbitrary arrest and detention. A year ago today, none of those protections could have been even imagined by the Iraqi people.

Today, as we think about the tens of thousands of United States soldiers in Iraq — and in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world fighting the global war on terrorism — we should say to all of them: "You join a long line of generations of Americans who have fought freedom's fight. Thank you."

Donald H. Rumsfeld is the secretary of defense.


March 19, 2004

OP-ED COLUMNIST

Taken for a Ride

By PAUL KRUGMAN

"Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." So George Bush declared on Sept. 20, 2001. But what was he saying? Surely he didn't mean that everyone was obliged to support all of his policies, that if you opposed him on anything you were aiding terrorists.

Now we know that he meant just that.

A year ago, President Bush, who had a global mandate to pursue the terrorists responsible for 9/11, went after someone else instead. Most Americans, I suspect, still don't realize how badly this apparent exploitation of the world's good will — and the subsequent failure to find weapons of mass destruction — damaged our credibility. They imagine that only the dastardly French, and now maybe the cowardly Spaniards, doubt our word. But yesterday, according to Agence France-Presse, the president of Poland — which has roughly 2,500 soldiers in Iraq — had this to say: "That they deceived us about the weapons of mass destruction, that's true. We were taken for a ride."

This is the context for last weekend's election upset in Spain, where the Aznar government had taken the country into Iraq against the wishes of 90 percent of the public. Spanish voters weren't intimidated by the terrorist bombings — they turned on a ruling party they didn't trust. When the government rushed to blame the wrong people for the attack, tried to suppress growing evidence to the contrary and used its control over state television and radio both to push its false accusation and to play down antigovernment protests, it reminded people of the broader lies about the war.

By voting for a new government, in other words, the Spaniards were enforcing the accountability that is the essence of democracy. But in the world according to Mr. Bush's supporters, anyone who demands accountability is on the side of the evildoers. According to Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, the Spanish people "had a huge terrorist attack within their country and they chose to change their government and to, in a sense, appease terrorists."

So there you have it. A country's ruling party leads the nation into a war fought on false pretenses, fails to protect the nation from terrorists and engages in a cover-up when a terrorist attack does occur. But its electoral defeat isn't democracy at work; it's a victory for the terrorists.

Notice, by the way, that Spain's prime minister-elect insists that he intends to fight terrorism. He has even said that his country's forces could remain in Iraq if they were placed under U.N. control. So if the Bush administration were really concerned about maintaining a united front against terrorism, all it would have to do is drop its my-way-or-the-highway approach. But it won't.

For these denunciations of Spain, while counterproductive when viewed as foreign policy, serve a crucial domestic purpose: they help re-establish the political climate the Bush administration prefers, in which anyone who opposes any administration policy can be accused of undermining the fight against terrorism.

This week the Bush campaign unveiled an ad accusing John Kerry of, among other things, opposing increases in combat pay because he voted against an $87 billion appropriation for Iraq. Those who have followed this issue were astonished at the ad's sheer up-is-down-ism.

In fact, the Bush administration has done the very thing it falsely accuses Mr. Kerry of doing: it has tried repeatedly to slash combat pay and military benefits, provoking angry articles in The Army Times with headlines like "An Act of `Betrayal.' " Oh, and Mr. Kerry wasn't trying to block funds for Iraq — he was trying to force the administration, which had concealed the cost of the occupation until its tax cut was passed, to roll back part of the tax cut to cover the expense.

But the bigger point is this: in the Bush vision, it was never legitimate to challenge any piece of the administration's policy on Iraq. Before the war, it was your patriotic duty to trust the president's assertions about the case for war. Once we went in and those assertions proved utterly false, it became your patriotic duty to support the troops — a phrase that, to the administration, always means supporting the president. At no point has it been legitimate to hold Mr. Bush accountable. And that's the way he wants it.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

March 20, 2004

BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'DISARMING IRAQ'

Blix Blames Politicians, Not Intelligence, for Iraq

By MICHAEL O'HANLON

According to the jacket flap of Hans Blix's new book, Mr. Blix is arguably the only key player to emerge from the Iraq crisis "with his integrity intact." Whether or not that is true, this is a good book and a useful memoir, clearly describing the process leading up to last March's invasion of Iraq from the perspective of the United Nations employee charged with trying to verifiably disarm Saddam Hussein's regime.

As is well known, Mr. Blix was not happy with the United States and Britain's decision to go to war, seeing the invasion as premature and perhaps unnecessary. Unlike his former colleague David Kay, he does not place primary blame for the rush to war on the world's intelligence services. Rather, he convincingly places the responsibility where it belongs, squarely on the backs of political leaders.

"I am not suggesting that Blair and Bush spoke in bad faith," he writes, "but I am suggesting that it would not have taken much critical thinking on their own part or the part of their close advisers to prevent statements that misled the public." Continuing his critique of Washington's and London's prewar diplomacy, he writes, "It is an interesting notion that when a small minority has been rebuffed by a strong majority, it is the majority that has failed the test."

Mr. Blix's main argument will not come as a surprise to those who followed last year's debate. He claims that the United Nations weapons inspections that resumed in November 2002 after a four-year hiatus were working reasonably well and certainly had not run their course when the United States and Britain decided to invade Iraq. While recognizing that the demise of Mr. Hussein's regime removed a monster from power, he also argues that the world could have lived with a defanged Baathist regime.

Mr. Blix may be too multilateralist and legalistic for many, including me. But his book makes clear that he is not simply naïve or categorically opposed to the use of force. He understands that the world could not inspect Iraq forever, and his thinking on what should have happened in 2002-03 is neatly summarized in the book's introductory chapter:

"Without a military buildup by the U.S. in the summer of 2002, Iraq would probably not have accepted a resumption of inspections. However, if we assume this buildup and the return of inspectors, it is conceivable that a moderate continued buildup, continued inspections with no denials of access, and a guarantee of large-scale interviews with technical people in Iraq could have shown in time that there were no weapons of mass destruction. It would surely have been difficult to persuade both inspectors and the world, let alone the U.S., but if there had not been hopeful results by, say July 2003, it seems likely that a majority in the Security Council might have been ready to authorize armed action, which could have started with U.N. legitimacy after the summer heat — and revealed that there were no weapons."

In reviewing what he and his colleagues were able to do in Iraq from November 2002 through March 2003, he generally gives the Iraqis high marks for allowing quick and unconditional access to all sites. He criticizes them for often failing to make weapons scientists available for interviews without minders present; for resisting inspectors' demands that reconnaissance planes like the U-2 be assured safe passage in Iraqi airspace; for failing to provide more documentation about what they had done with stocks of chemical and biological agents, which he himself thought might well still exist; and for possessing illegal stocks of Al Samoud 2 missiles.

But the United States and Britain receive ample criticism too: for exaggerating the dependability and accuracy of their intelligence, for insisting that Iraq possessed mobile biological weapons factories and nuclear weapons programs when in fact it did not, for trusting the reports of defectors too much and for disparaging the track record and the future potential of weapons inspections.

While his narrative is generally accurate, his analysis suffers from some problems. He gives too little weight to the fact that Mr. Hussein impeded inspections for more than a decade after the Persian Gulf war (to say nothing of Mr. Hussein's massacres of his own people, attempted assassination of former President George H. W. Bush and occasional aggressive moves toward Kuwait and Kurdistan). His suggestion that the United States never really worried about Iraq before 9/11, and that it might have been vigilant to a fault after, ignores the fact that the Clinton administration and many independent analysts were indeed seriously concerned about Mr. Hussein.

Mr. Blix's observation that inspections, which cost $80 million a year, should have been given more time to work before an $80 billion-a-year military solution was adopted ignores his own earlier observation that the inspections would never have had a chance without a large military buildup that was itself costing billions a month even before the invasion. And his depiction of the previous policy of containment as low cost ignores the harm it did to the Iraqi people as well as to the image of America in the Arab world. In fact, by keeping United States military forces in Saudi Arabia for so long, containment policy gave Al Qaeda a rallying cry.

Mr. Blix's confidence that the Security Council would eventually have done the right thing if only Washington and London had been more patient and reasonable is also overstated. He fails to acknowledge that France was visibly and vocally bent on constraining American power as much as it was on disarming Iraq. Not only that, Germany's Gerhard Schröder made strong, categorical opposition to a possible Iraq war the centerpiece of his re-election campaign in 2002.

But to understand how they are seen abroad Americans should read this book. Indeed, its critique of how Washington handled the Iraq crisis is genteel and fair compared with how most observers overseas have viewed the matter.

Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

DISARMING IRAQ
By Hans Blix
285 pages. Pantheon Books. $24.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

Excerpts from 60 Minutes interview with Richard Clarke

Did Bush Press For Iraq-9/11 Link?

March 21, 2004

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, President Bush ordered his then top anti-terrorism adviser to look for a link between Iraq and the attacks, despite being told there didn't seem to be one.

The charge comes from the adviser, Richard Clarke, in an exclusive interview on 60 Minutes.

The administration maintains that it cannot find any evidence that the conversation about an Iraq-9/11 tie-in ever took place. (see following article)

Clarke also tells CBS News Correspondent Lesley Stahl that White House officials were tepid in their response when he urged them months before Sept. 11 to meet to discuss what he saw as a severe threat from al Qaeda.

"Frankly," he said, "I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism. He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."

Clarke went on to say, "I think he's done a terrible job on the war against terrorism."

The No. 2 man on the president's National Security Council, Stephen Hadley, vehemently disagrees. He says Mr. Bush has taken the fight to the terrorists, and is making the U.S. homeland safer.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Clarke says that as early as the day after the attacks, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for retaliatory strikes on Iraq, even though al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan.

Clarke suggests the idea took him so aback, he initally thought Rumsfeld was joking.

Clarke is due to testify this week before the special panel probing whether the attacks were preventable.

His allegations are also made in a book, "Against All Enemies," which is being published Monday by Free Press, a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster. Both CBSNews.com and Simon & Schuster are units of Viacom.

Clarke helped shape U.S. policy on terrorism under President Reagan and the first President Bush. He was held over by President Clinton to be his terrorism czar, then held over again by the current President Bush.

In the 60 Minutes interview and the book, Clarke tells what happened behind the scenes at the White House before, during and after Sept. 11.

When the terrorists struck, it was thought the White House would be the next target, so it was evacuated. Clarke was one of only a handful of people who stayed behind. He ran the government's response to the attacks from the Situation Room in the West Wing.

"I kept thinking of the words from 'Apocalypse Now,' the whispered words of Marlon Brando, when he thought about Vietnam. 'The horror. The horror.' Because we knew what was going on in New York. We knew about the bodies flying out of the windows. People falling through the air. We knew that Osama bin Laden had succeeded in bringing horror to the streets of America," he tells Stahl.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.

"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to Stahl. "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.

"Initially, I thought when he said, 'There aren't enough targets in-- in Afghanistan,' I thought he was joking.

"I think they wanted to believe that there was a connection, but the CIA was sitting there, the FBI was sitting there, I was sitting there saying we've looked at this issue for years. For years we've looked and there's just no connection."

Clarke says he and CIA Director George Tenet told that to Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Clarke then tells Stahl of being pressured by Mr. Bush.

"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.

"I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'

"He came back at me and said, "Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report."

Clarke continued, "It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, 'Will you sign this report?' They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, 'Wrong answer. ... Do it again.'

"I have no idea, to this day, if the president saw it, because after we did it again, it came to the same conclusion. And frankly, I don't think the people around the president show him memos like that. I don't think he sees memos that he doesn't-- wouldn't like the answer."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Clarke was the president's chief adviser on terrorism, yet it wasn't until Sept. 11 that he ever got to brief Mr. Bush on the subject. Clarke says that prior to Sept. 11, the administration didn't take the threat seriously.

"We had a terrorist organization that was going after us! Al Qaeda. That should have been the first item on the agenda. And it was pushed back and back and back for months.

"There's a lot of blame to go around, and I probably deserve some blame, too. But on January 24th, 2001, I wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice asking for, urgently -- underlined urgently -- a Cabinet-level meeting to deal with the impending al Qaeda attack. And that urgent memo-- wasn't acted on.

"I blame the entire Bush leadership for continuing to work on Cold War issues when they back in power in 2001. It was as though they were preserved in amber from when they left office eight years earlier. They came back. They wanted to work on the same issues right away: Iraq, Star Wars. Not new issues, the new threats that had developed over the preceding eight years."

Clarke finally got his meeting about al Qaeda in April, three months after his urgent request. But it wasn't with the president or cabinet. It was with the second-in-command in each relevant department.

For the Pentagon, it was Paul Wolfowitz.

Clarke relates, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the United States.'

"And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy director of the CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States."

Clarke went on to add, "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda, ever."

When Stahl pointed out that some administration officials say it's still an open issue, Clarke responded, "Well, they'll say that until hell freezes over."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By June 2001, there still hadn't been a Cabinet-level meeting on terrorism, even though U.S. intelligence was picking up an unprecedented level of ominous chatter.

The CIA director warned the White House, Clarke points out. "George Tenet was saying to the White House, saying to the president - because he briefed him every morning - a major al Qaeda attack is going to happen against the United States somewhere in the world in the weeks and months ahead. He said that in June, July, August."

Clarke says the last time the CIA had picked up a similar level of chatter was in December, 1999, when Clarke was the terrorism czar in the Clinton White House.

Clarke says Mr. Clinton ordered his Cabinet to go to battle stations-- meaning, they went on high alert, holding meetings nearly every day.

That, Clarke says, helped thwart a major attack on Los Angeles International Airport, when an al Qaeda operative was stopped at the border with Canada, driving a car full of explosives.

Clarke harshly criticizes President Bush for not going to battle stations when the CIA warned him of a comparable threat in the months before Sept. 11: "He never thought it was important enough for him to hold a meeting on the subject, or for him to order his National Security Adviser to hold a Cabinet-level meeting on the subject."

Finally, says Clarke, "The cabinet meeting I asked for right after the inauguration took place-- one week prior to 9/11."

In that meeting, Clarke proposed a plan to bomb al Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan, and to kill bin Laden.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The president's new campaign ads highlight his handling of Sept. 11 -- which has become the centerpiece of his bid for re-election.

Does a person who works for the White House owe the president his loyalty? "Up to a point. When the president starts doing things that risk American lives, then loyalty to him has to be put aside," says Clarke. "I think the way he has responded to al Qaeda, both before 9/11 by doing nothing, and by what he's done after 9/11 has made us less safe. Absolutely."

Hadley staunchly defended the president to Stahl: "The president heard those warnings. The president met daily with ... George Tenet and his staff. They kept him fully informed and at one point the president became somewhat impatient with us and said, 'I'm tired of swatting flies. Where's my new strategy to eliminate al Qaeda?'"

Hadley says that, contrary to Clarke's assertion, Mr. Bush didn't ignore the ominous intelligence chatter in the summer of 2001.

"All the chatter was of an attack, a potential al Qaeda attack overseas. But interestingly enough, the president got concerned about whether there was the possibility of an attack on the homeland. He asked the intelligence community: 'Look hard. See if we're missing something about a threat to the homeland.'

"And at that point various alerts went out from the Federal Aviation Administration to the FBI saying the intelligence suggests a threat overseas. We don't want to be caught unprepared. We don't want to rule out the possibility of a threat to the homeland. And therefore preparatory steps need to be made. So the president put us on battle stations."

Hadley asserts Clarke is "just wrong" in saying the administration didn't go to battle stations.

As for the alleged pressure from Mr. Bush to find an Iraq-9/11 link, Hadley says, "We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred."

When told by Stahl that 60 Minutes has two sources who tell us independently of Clarke that the encounter happened, including "an actual witness," Hadley responded, "Look, I stand on what I said."

Hadley maintained, "Iraq, as the president has said, is at the center of the war on terror. We have narrowed the ground available to al Qaeda and to the terrorists. Their sanctuary in Afghanistan is gone; their sanctuary in Iraq is gone. Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are now allies on the war on terror. So Iraq has contributed in that way in narrowing the sanctuaries available to terrorists."
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Does Clarke think that Iraq, the Middle East and the world is better off with Saddam Hussein out of power?

"I think the world would be better off if a number of leaders around the world were out of power. The question is what price should the United States pay," says Clarke. "The price we paid was very, very high, and we're still paying that price for doing it."

"Osama bin Laden had been saying for years, 'America wants to invade an Arab country and occupy it, an oil-rich Arab country. He had been saying this. This is part of his propaganda ... we stepped right into bin Laden's propaganda," adds Clarke. "And the result of that is that al Qaeda and organizations like it, offshoots of it, second-generation al Qaeda have been greatly strengthened."

When Clarke worked for Mr. Clinton, he was known as the terrorism czar. When Mr. Bush came into office, though remaining at the White House, Clarke was stripped of his Cabinet-level rank.

Stahl said to Clarke, "They demoted you. Aren't you open to charges that this is all sour grapes, because they demoted you and reduced your leverage, your power in the White House?"

Clarke's answer: "Frankly, if I had been so upset that the National Coordinator for Counter-terrorism had been downgraded from a Cabinet level position to a staff level position, if that had bothered me enough, I would have quit. I didn't quit."

Until two years later, after 30 years in government service.

A senior White House official told 60 Minutes he thinks the Clarke book is an audition for a job in the Kerry campaign.

"I'm an independent. I'm not working for the Kerry campaign," says Clarke. "I have worked for Ronald Reagan. I have worked for George Bush the first, I have worked for George Bush the second. I'm not participating in this campaign, but I am putting facts out that I think people ought to know."

60 Minutes received a note from the Pentagon saying: "Any suggestion that the president did anything other than act aggressively, quickly and effectively to address the al Qaeda and Taliban threat in Afghanistan is absurd."

MMIV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.


Bush Aides Deny He Ignored Qaeda

WASHINGTON, March 22, 2004

The White House is disputing assertions by President Bush's former counterterrorism coordinator that the administration failed to recognize the risk of an attack by al Qaeda in the months leading up to Sept. 11, 2001.

The point-by-point rebuttal confronts claims by Richard A. Clarke in a new book, "Against All Enemies," that is scathingly critical of administration actions.

The White House said in a statement Sunday that national security deputies worked diligently between March and September 2001 to develop a strategy to attack the terror network, one that was completed and ready for Mr. Bush's approval a week before the suicide airliner hijackings.

The administration is so concerned about the charges that they released this four-page document called "Set the record straight," countering these charges point by point, reports CBS News White House Correspondent Bill Plante.

The White House said the Bush administration kept Clarke as a holdover from the Clinton era because of its concerns over al Qaeda.

"He makes the charge that we were not focused enough on efforts to root out terrorism," Bush communications director Dan Bartlett said Sunday. "That's just categorically false."

The White House statement said the president told national security adviser Condoleezza Rice early in his administration he was "'tired of swatting flies' and wanted to go on the offense against al Qaeda, rather than simply waiting to respond."

Clarke wrote that Rice appeared never to have heard of al Qaeda until she was warned early in 2001 about the terrorist organization and that she "looked skeptical" about his warnings.

"Her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before," Clarke said in the book, going on sale Monday.

Clarke said Rice — an expert on nuclear security and Russia — appeared not to recognize post-Cold War security issues and effectively demoted him within the National Security Council staff. He retired last year after 30 years in government.

Clarke, who is expected to testify Tuesday before a federal panel investigating the attacks, recounted his early meeting with Rice as support for his contention the administration failed to recognize the risk of an attack by al Qaeda. Rice has refused to meet with that panel.

Clarke said that within one week of Mr. Bush's inauguration he "urgently" sought a meeting of senior Cabinet leaders to discuss "the imminent al Qaeda threat." Clarke says his request was never taken seriously.

Rice disputes that.

"We were all very aware of the al Qaeda threat. What I asked Richard Clarke to do was develop ideas that we could use to push forward the strategies against al Qaeda," Rice told the CBS News Early Show.

Rice said Clarke's response was a list of ideas that had been around for several years.

"The president needed more," Rice said. "He needed a strategy for al Qaeda that was going to eliminate al Qaeda."

Three months later, in April 2001, Clarke met with deputy secretaries. During that meeting, he wrote, the Defense Department's Paul Wolfowitz told Clarke, "You give bin Laden too much credit," and he said Wolfowitz sought to steer the discussion to Iraq.

Clarke told CBS News' 60 minutes that immediately after the attacks on 9/11, the administration wanted to retaliate against Iraq.

"Well, (Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq. And — and we all said, 'But no, no. Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan.' And Rumsfeld said, "There aren't any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq."

Clarke says he told the president there was no connection between Iraq and al Qaeda, but that apparently wasn't what Mr. Bush wanted to hear.

"He came back at me and said 'Iraq. Saddam. Find out if there's a connection!' And in a very intimidating way — I mean, that we should come back with that answer."

Clarke's claims echoed those of another former administration official, one-time treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who in a book last year claimed overthrowing Saddam was discussed at Mr. Bush's first national security council meeting.

"It makes perfectly good sense that when you're thinking about against whom you are going to retaliate that you keep an open mind. And the president asked about Iraq," Rice told the Early Show. "It was a logical question, given our history with Iraq. But I can tell you #&151; that when we got to Camp David on Sept. 15th, it was a map of Afghanistan that was spread out on the table."

Clarke harshly criticizes Mr. Bush personally in his book, saying his decision to invade Iraq generated broad anti-American sentiment among Arabs. He recounts that the president asked him directly almost immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks to find whether Iraq was involved in the suicide hijackings.

"Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country," Clarke wrote.

He added: "One shudders to think what additional errors (Mr. Bush) will make in the next four years to strengthen the al Qaeda follow-ons: attacking Syria or Iran, undermining the Saudi regime without a plan for a successor state?"

Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman said Sunday he doesn't believe Clarke's charge that Mr. Bush — who defeated him and former Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 election — was focused more on Iraq than al Qaeda during the days after the terror attacks.

"I see no basis for it," Lieberman said on Fox News. "I think we've got to be careful to speak facts and not rhetoric."

Unlike Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell. Rice will not testify before the Sept. 11 commission.

She told the Early Show, "it is really not appropriate for me to testify in the open."

©MMIV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.

[NYatKNIGHT]

I saw this last night. It would have been shocking except this is exactly what many people suspected all along.

More psycho Rumsfeld:
"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to Stahl. "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.

The Bush attack dogs are going to tear this guy apart.

[Freedom Tower]

The guy who wrote that is just trying to make an issue. He had the same position during the Clinton administration. Meanwhile he does not complain about Clinton not responding to the USS Cole bombing, the 1993 WTC bombing, or the 1998 embassy bombings. The BUsh administration DID respond, and he makes them seem like people who dont consider al qaeda a threat. That guy can't be trusted. He was also pissed off cause they demoted him.

[Freedom Tower]

Yes, obviously stopping the recruitment of terrorists is just as important as killing or capturing them. However, I would not use that as an excuse not to do what is necessary. Some could argue that if we fought terrorits in Afghanistan that more Arabs would be angry. Maybe they were, but it was a necessary step in the war on terror, just like Iraq. Had we not gone into either of those countries we'd probably be a lot worse off today. There would be even more terrorists and more attacks at home. Obviously we must stop the recruitment but we can't be afraid to do what is necessary. It's too bad though, it seems that many Muslims in the middle east believe everything Al Jazeera tells them. I see propoganda stations like them as being the real problem. Instead of stopping our war on terror, I think we should shut down terrorist propoganda centers.

First, I'll state that I question whether the wars in Afghanistan were "the necessary thing to do" or not, but let's say it is. It's inevitable that waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq will make people of those countires angry at us, to make an understatement. That's how people become driven to terrorism, when they find a reason to see us as the devil. Despite our "smart bombs" mistakes are made, and innocent people are killed. Are we to expect that a child orphaned by one of our tomohawk missiles will rationalize "The Americans are just defending themselves in the fight against terrorism", or some guy's wife and children are killed by stray fire will rationalize "It was only a mistake, the Americans didn't mean it." No, there will be masses of disgruntled people affected by this violence who will become completely obsessed with our destruction. Bombing where we think Al-Quieda might be might hinder the terrorists, or at worst it might not, but there is no doubt that it will strengthen their future following. Do we want to hand the recieving end of this much larger vendetta down to our next generation?

I hope you're not serious. if you are then you really need to learn a little about the world. Im not even gonna respond to that nonsense. Terrorists mass murdered 3,000 Americans, if you think they should not be punished then all I can say to you is that you should have been there on 911. The war in afghanistsan was 100% necessary to protect americans, and punish those responisble for the attacks. It is inevitable in any war that a certain number of civilians will be killed. Does that mean we should never defend ourselves from mass murdering psycopaths, obviously you think so. I dont know where you live cough -Al qaeda training camp -cough, or what station you watch cough - al jazeera - cough or what your motives are. But tyring to scare americans into not fighting terrorists by saying even more people will be angry at them for their actions sounds an awful lot like Senior al qaeda leader's messages. Thats all i have to say to you

[Freedom Tower]

Did I mention that according to sources an average of 2,000 civilians were killed in Iraq in the first month of the war? Imagine how screwed we'll be in the future if the families of those 2,000 people in that month alone decide to act out of their anger? By the way, our country's government, and major news stations have avoided venturing guesses or estimations as to the number of civilians killed, so outside sources are all that anyone can go on.

Did I mention that 3,000 americans were killed on 911? Hey if the US government did not respond to the attacks maybe the family membors of those 3,000 americans would have flown planes into buildings in the mideast. Why dont you take your nonsense elsewhere.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Actually, it is not nonsense. You would be right in the perfect world. In that world, all the people that commit crimes get caught and punished, there is no (ahem) colateral damage, and everyone understands intentions. But we don't live in the perfect world.

I told you last year in this forum that all Bush was doing in Iraq was building a terrorist factory. Well, that factory is in production now. There were no Al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq last March, but thanks to Bush they're there now - and killing Americans. How does Al Qaeda recruit? They tell the people that all America wants to do is invade and occupy your land. So that's exactly what we do, and validate their propaganda.

I also told you that the war would become an election year issue. Since we can't just leave Iraq, there is a danger that expedient solutions will be implimented that are tailored more toward getting Bush reelected than establishing self rule in Iraq.

Clarke said we should have been fighting in Afghanistan, not Iraq, and that's what Bush is doing now - a mad scramble to get Bin Laden, which would probably lock the election for Bush. But will that make us safer? Events in Madrid indicate otherwise.

Finally, if you're going to state that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power, you can say the same for the slease-bags running Pakistan. They not only have WMD, but were selling them to the highest bidder.

[Freedom Tower]

Actually, it is not nonsense. You would be right in the perfect world. In that world, all the people that commit crimes get caught and punished, there is no (ahem) colateral damage, and everyone understands intentions. But we don't live in the perfect world.

I told you last year in this forum that all Bush was doing in Iraq was building a terrorist factory. Well, that factory is in production now. There were no Al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq last March, but thanks to Bush they're there now - and killing Americans. How does Al Qaeda recruit? They tell the people that all America wants to do is invade and occupy your land. So that's exactly what we do, and validate their propaganda.

I also told you that the war would become an election year issue. Since we can't just leave Iraq, there is a danger that expedient solutions will be implimented that are tailored more toward getting Bush reelected than establishing self rule in Iraq.

Clarke said we should have been fighting in Afghanistan, not Iraq, and that's what Bush is doing now - a mad scramble to get Bin Laden, which would probably lock the election for Bush. But will that make us safer? Events in Madrid indicate otherwise.

Finally, if you're going to state that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power, you can say the same for the slease-bags running Pakistan. They not only have WMD, but were selling them to the highest bidder.

I agree we do not live in a perfect world, I even said that there are no wars in which all civilians will escape unharmed. Then it comes down to which wars are important enough and are so necessary that it is worth every bad thing involved. It's obvious there is debate about whether it was worth it in Iraq, some think so, some think not.

However, JCDJ was questioning the war in AFGHANISTAN. That war, both the majority of republicans and democrats agree on this!, and so do nearly all Americans, was 100% justified and necessary. It was specifically aimed at rooting out and destroying al qaeda and the taliban. While it did not get bin laden, or the #2 man, it did bring great success. The terrorist harboring government was thrown out, so were many terrorists, and many others were caught or killed. Those were undeniably the people who planned 9/11 and they deserved what they got.

In regards to Pakistan, currently IT SEEMS as if they are making much more of an effort to root out al qaeda as seen recently. But I too am becoming suspicious. First there are reports al zawahiri is there, then reports he is wounded, then dead, and now escaped :x. Whether or not pakistanis took bribes is unknown to us, but it wouldnt shock me the least. And about the selling of nuclear weapons, I agree that that is just as bad as what saddam was doing. However, the question is if Musharaff was not in power, who would be? He is one of the more responsible politicians in that country, bleieve it or not, many fundamentalists if they ever came to power would probably nuke india!

The events in madrid were horrible, but its important to remember that it hasnt happened here in the 4 years so far. Also, the response to the madrid bombings was awful. Instead of criticizing the terrorists who killed them, they criticized their government. Basically, they not only gave in to the terrorist demands - withdrawing troops from iraq, which may soon happen for spanish troops, but they also showed terrorism can win. Our response to 911 was about right, and not only did it cripple al qaeda, maybe not permanently yet, but it definately helped secure the country too. Spain on the other hand gave in to the terrorists, which is a bad precedent to set.

[DominicanoNYC]

You know what the problem is with the war in Iraq is. There were too many lies about it. One there were no WMDs, two Iraq was not harbouring any Al-Queda terrorist, and Saddam was not a threat to America.

[Kris]

March 28, 2004

FRANK RICH

Operation Iraqi Infoganda

Real journalism may be reeling, but faux journalism rocks. As an entertainment category in the cultural marketplace, it may soon rival reality TV and porn. Television is increasingly awash in fake anchors delivering fake news, some of them far more trenchant than real anchors delivering real news. Even CNBC, a financial news network, is chasing after the success of Jon Stewart; its new nightly fake newscast, presided over by a formerly funny "Saturday Night Live" fake anchor, Dennis Miller, is being promoted with far more zeal than was ever lavished on CNBC's real "News With Brian Williams."

Turn on real news shows like "Dateline NBC" and "Larry King Live," meanwhile, and you're all too likely to find Jayson Blair, the lying former reporter of The New York Times, continuing to play a reporter on TV as he fabricates earnest blather about his concern for journalistic standards. Elsewhere on the dial you'll learn that a fake news show ("The Daily Show") has been in a booking war with a real news show ("Hardball") over who would first be able to interview the real (I think) Desmond Tutu. At such absurd moments, and they are countless these days in our 24/7 information miasma, real journalism and its evil twin merge into a mind-bending mutant that would defy a polygraph's ability to sort out the lies from the truth.

This phenomenon has been good news for the Bush administration, which has responded to the growing national appetite for fictionalized news by producing a steady supply of its own. Of late it has gone so far as to field its own pair of Jayson Blairs, hired at taxpayers' expense: Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia, the "reporters" who appeared in TV "news" videos distributed by the Department of Health and Human Services to local news shows around the country. The point of these spots — which were broadcast whole or in part as actual news by more than 50 stations in 40 states — was to hype the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit as an unalloyed Godsend to elderly voters. They are part of a year-plus p.r. campaign, which, with its $124 million budget, would dwarf in size most actual news organizations.

When one real reporter, Robert Pear of The Times, blew the whistle on these TV "news" stories this month, a government spokesman defended them with pure Orwell-speak: "Anyone who has questions about this practice needs to do some research on modern public information tools." The government also informed us that Ms. Ryan was no impostor but an actual "freelance journalist." The Columbia Journalism Review, investigating further, found that Ms. Ryan's past assignments included serving as a TV shill for pharmaceutical companies in infomercials plugging FluMist and Excedrin. Given that drug companies may also be the principal beneficiaries of the new Medicare law, she is nothing if not consistent in her journalistic patrons. But she is a freelance reporter only in the sense that Mike Ditka would qualify as one when appearing in Levitra ads.

As for the mystery of Alberto Garcia's journalistic bonafides, it remains at this writing unresolved. His reporting career has not left a trace on any data bank. Perhaps he is the creation of Stephen Glass, the serial fantasist who once ruled the pages of The New Republic.

Back at Comedy Central, Jon Stewart was ambivalent about the government's foray into his own specialty, musing aloud about whether he should be outraged or flattered. One of his faux correspondents, though, was outright faux despondent. "They created a whole new category of fake news — infoganda," Rob Corddry said. "We'll never be able to keep up!" But Mr. Corddry's joke is not really a joke. The more real journalism declines, the easier it is for such government infoganda to fill the vacuum.

George W. Bush tries to facilitate this process by shutting out the real news media as much as possible. By the start of this year, he had held only 11 solo press conferences, as opposed to his father's count of 71 by the same point in his presidency. (Even the criminally secretive Richard Nixon had held 23.) Mr. Bush has declared that he rarely reads newspapers and that he prefers to "go over the heads of the filter" — as he calls the news media — and "speak directly to the people." To this end, he gave a series of interviews to regional broadcasters last fall — a holding action, no doubt, until Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia could be hired to fill that role. When the president made a rare exception last month and took questions from an actual front-line journalist, NBC's Tim Russert, his performance was so maladroit that the experiment is unlikely to be repeated anytime too soon.

There's no point in bothering with actual news people anyway, when you can make up your own story and make it stick, whatever the filter might have to say about it. No fake news story has become more embedded in our culture than the administration's account of its actions on 9/11. As The Wall Street Journal reported on its front page this week — just as the former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke was going public with his parallel account — many of this story's most familiar details are utter fiction. Mr. Bush's repeated claim that one of his "first acts" of that morning was to put the military on alert is false. So are the president's claims that he watched the first airplane hit the World Trade Center on TV that morning. (No such video yet existed.) Nor was Air Force One under threat as Mr. Bush flew around the country, delaying his return to Washington.

Yet the fake narrative of 9/11 has been scrupulously maintained by the White House for more than two years. Although the administration has tried at every juncture to stonewall the 9/11 investigative commission, its personnel, including the president, had all the time in the world for the producer of a TV movie, Showtime's "DC 9/11: Time of Crisis." The result was a scenario that further rewrote the history of that day, stirring steroids into false tales of presidential derring-do. Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow, characterized one of the movie's many elisions in Salon. To show the president continuing to sit and read with elementary school kids "while people like my husband were burning alive inside the World Trade Center towers," she wrote, "would run counter to Karl Rove's art direction and grand vision."

To shore up the Rove version of 9/11 once Richard Clarke went public with his alternative tale on last Sunday's "60 Minutes," the White House placed Condoleezza Rice on all five morning news shows the next day. The administration is confident that it can reinstate its bogus scenario — particularly given that Ms. Rice, unlike Mr. Clarke, is refusing to take the risk of reciting it under oath to the 9/11 commission.

After 9/11, similar fake-news techniques helped speed us into "Operation Iraqi Freedom." The run-up to the war was falsified by a barrage of those "modern public information tools," including 16 words of Tom Clancy-style fiction in the State of the Union. John Burns of The Times, speaking by phone from Iraq to a postmortem on war coverage sponsored by the University of California journalism school in Berkeley this month, said of the real press back then: "We failed the American public by being insufficiently critical about elements of the administration's plan to go to war." What few journalistic efforts were made to penetrate the trumped-up rationales for war were easily defeated by the administration's false news reports of impending biological attacks and mushroom clouds. To see how the faux journalism sausage was made, go to www.reform.house.gov/min , where a searchable database posted by Representative Henry Waxman identifies "237 specific misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell and National Security Adviser Rice in 125 separate public appearances."

Once the war began, the Defense Department turned a warehouse in Qatar into a TV studio, where it installed a $250,000 Central Command briefing stage, shipped from Chicago by FedEx for an additional $47,000. The set was lent authority by a real-news set designer, whose previous credits included ABC's "World News Tonight" and "Good Morning America." As for the embedded journalists who filled in the rest of the story, a candid assessment was delivered by Lt. Col. Rick Long, the former head of media relations for the Marine Corps, also speaking at Berkeley 10 days ago: "Frankly, our job is to win the war. Part of that is information warfare. So we are going to attempt to dominate the information environment. . . . Overall, we were very happy with the outcome."

The "news" of the war included its fictionalized Rambo, Pfc. Jessica Lynch, and its fictionalized conclusion, the "Mission Accomplished" celebration led by the president on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. (Mr. Bush said that the premature victory banner was the handiwork of the ship's crew when in fact it was the product of the White House scenic shop.) But for all that fake news, we still don't know such real news as how many Iraqi civilians were killed as we gave them their freedom. We are still shielded from images of American casualties, before or after they are placed in coffins.

Now that the breakdown in pre-9/11 security is threatening to dominate the real news, the administration is working overtime to overwhelm it with its latest, thematically related fake story line. Time magazine reports that employees of the Department of Homeland Security have been given the goal of providing the president "with one homeland-security photo-op a month." The Associated Press reports that the department is also hiring a "liaison to the entertainment industry" — with a salary as high as $136,000, plus benefits — "to make sure that dramatic portrayals of it are as accurate as possible." (The deadline for applications, do note, is tomorrow.) Of course "accurate" in that job description should be read as "inaccurate," since the liaison's real task, like that of the intrepid reporter Karen Ryan, will be to make sure that any actual news of our homeland security's many holes is kept on the q.t. According to E! entertainment news, we can even expect a new TV show, "D.H.S. — the Series," to which both Mr. Bush and Tom Ridge will contribute endorsements and sound bites.

When it comes to homeland security, you can be sure that the administration's faux news will always be good news — though this is the one story in which the real news can sometimes become just too intrusive to ignore.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

April 19, 2004

Airing of Powell's Misgivings Tests Ties in the Cabinet

By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON, April 18 — For more than a year, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his aides have tacitly acknowledged that he was concerned before the war about what could go wrong once American forces captured Iraq.

But Mr. Powell's apparent decision to lay out his misgivings even more explicitly to the journalist Bob Woodward for a book has jolted the White House and aggravated long-festering tensions in the Bush cabinet. Moreover, some officials said, the book has created problems for the secretary inside the administration just as the situation in Iraq is deteriorating and President Bush is plunging into his re-election drive.

Mr. Powell has not acknowledged that he cooperated with Mr. Woodward, but the book presents the secretary's reservations in such detail that it leaves little doubt. A spokesman for Mr. Powell said again Sunday that he would not comment on the book, "Plan of Attack."

Critics of Mr. Powell in the hawkish wing of the administration said they were startled by what they saw as his self-serving decision to help fill out a portrait that enhances his reputation as a farsighted analyst, perhaps at the expense of Mr. Bush. Several said the book guaranteed what they expected anyway, that Mr. Powell will not stay as secretary if Mr. Bush is re-elected.

The view expressed Sunday by people in the administration that Mr. Bush comes across as sober-minded and resolute in the book, asking for contingency plans for a war early on but not deciding to wage one until the last minute, saves Mr. Powell from any immediate difficulties that might grow from seeming to betray his confidential relationship to a president who prizes loyalty, several officials said.

"Look, a lot of people have been struck by the degree to which Secretary Powell is using this book as an opportunity — to be fair — to clarify his position on the issues," said an official. "But what this book does is muddy the water internally, which is very unfortunate and unhelpful."

Another official, who like others declined to be identified because of the political sensitivity of their criticism, accused Mr. Powell of having a habit of distancing himself from policies when they go wrong. "It's such a soap opera with him," this official said.

Democrats seized on Mr. Powell's portrayal, saying it would give them ammunition to criticize the administration for going to war without broad international backing or adequate planning for an occupation.

Throughout the day Sunday, Senator John Kerry brought up the Woodward book, mentioning it twice in his interview on "Meet the Press" on NBC and once at an outdoor rally at the University of Miami.

"Here we have a book by a reputable writer," Mr. Kerry told several thousand students at the afternoon campus rally. "We learn that the president even misled members of his own administration."

Asked if material in Mr. Woodward's book would be grist for his party, Jano Cabrera, the spokesman for the Democratic National Committee, said in an interview: "Absolutely. It's one thing for us to assert it. It's another thing for it to be stated as fact by his secretary of state."

And Steve Murphy, who managed the presidential campaign of Representative Richard A. Gephardt, said: "The strongest criticism of Bush is that he did not have a plan for the aftermath of the war. And that was exactly what Powell was pointing out to him. He is a credible source. This intensifies the backdrop between Bush and Kerry."

People close to Mr. Powell said Sunday that they had no doubt he would weather any criticism from within over his apparent cooperation with Mr. Woodward, an assistant managing editor at The Washington Post. Polls show that he is one of the most popular and best-known figures in government. The people close to him note that most people following the situation closely knew that he had misgivings about the war.

"Is the secretary going to be undercut for having been right?" asked an official close to Mr. Powell. "I don't think so. Undercut compared to who? Donald Rumsfeld? Dick Cheney? These are people who have some real problems right now. They're not reading Bob Woodward's book. They're reading the dispatches from the field."

Other officials close to Mr. Powell say his strained relations with Mr. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, and Vice President Cheney are common currency among Washington insiders, though they say the suggestion that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Powell are barely on speaking terms is highly exaggerated.

"I don't think there will be much change in his dealings with Cheney and Rumsfeld," said one person close to Mr. Powell. "People already thought it was this bad. It doesn't change things for them to find out that it really was. They know how to deal with each other, and they've been through quite a bit together."

When asked on "Fox News Sunday" about Mr. Woodward's contention that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Powell are so distant on policy matters that they do not talk, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, described the men's relationship as "friendly."

"I can tell you," she said, "I've had lunch on a number of occasions with Vice President Cheney and with Colin Powell, and they are more than on speaking terms. They're friendly."

But another official said Mr. Powell's dealings internally with Mr. Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld especially had made life difficult for people inside the administration.

"The day-to-day nattering of the Defense Department trying to take over the business of diplomacy at every level, it's just difficult to be on the inside," said an administration official who defends Mr. Powell's actions. "Every day is difficult. The byplay at the meetings is difficult."

Mr. Powell's standing around the world was less easy to measure this weekend. But a European diplomat said he thought the secretary's standing in Europe especially would only be enhanced because he would be seen as sharing the view of many there that the administration had been overly optimistic about subduing dissidents in Iraq.

For the people long familiar with Mr. Powell's thinking, his misgivings about an American occupation of Iraq, and his insistence on getting full international backing for American actions, goes back many years. So, they note, does his fighting with Mr. Cheney.

For example, Mr. Powell's memoir, "My American Journey," published in 1995 after he retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that he had opposed a final push to oust Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Persian Gulf war on the ground that an occupation would provoke a counterinsurgency and criticism among Americans.

In addition, many accounts of the planning for the first gulf war say that Mr. Cheney, then secretary of defense, opposed going to the United Nations or Congress for backing to remove Iraq from Kuwait, fearing that failure would weaken the first President Bush's administration's ability to go to war.

In 2002, Mr. Cheney was openly disdainful of Mr. Powell's insistence on getting approval of the United Nations Security Council before going to war, spreading consternation at the State Department. Mr. Powell won that argument, and President Bush authorized a bid to get a Security Council resolution supporting war.

Mr. Powell's memoir also recalls an exchange in the early 1990's, in which Mr. Powell accused Mr. Cheney — jokingly, he insisted — of being surrounded by "right-wing nuts like you." In the last year, the Woodward book says, Mr. Powell referred privately to the civilian conservatives in the Pentagon loyal to Mr. Cheney as the Gestapo.

The Woodward book also attributes to Mr. Powell the belief that although he had misgivings about going to war, it was his obligation to support the president once Mr. Bush decided to do so.

Mr. Bush told Mr. Woodward that he did not ask the secretary's opinion on whether to go to war because he thought he knew what that opinion would be: "no."

But a senior aide to Mr. Powell asserted this weekend that the secretary was not as opposed to war as some people presume, no matter what the implications in the book.

"The portrait of Powell in the Woodward book is pretty consistent with what everybody knows," the official said. "We were with the president if we had to do this. We set up an exit ramp for Saddam, and he didn't take it. Powell in the end was very comfortable knowing that."


Adam Nagourney contributed reporting from Washington for this article and Jodi Wilgoren from Miami.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Pentagon Deleted Rumsfeld Comment

Remark to Saudi About War's Certainty Is Not in Internet Transcript of Interview

by Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 21, 2004; Page A01

The Pentagon deleted from a public transcript a statement Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made to author Bob Woodward suggesting that the administration gave Saudi Arabia a two-month heads-up that President Bush had decided to invade Iraq.

At issue was a passage in Woodward's "Plan of Attack," an account published this week of Bush's decision making about the war, quoting Rumsfeld as telling Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, in January 2003 that he could "take that to the bank" that the invasion would happen.

The comment came in a key moment in the run-up to the war, when Rumsfeld and other officials were briefing Bandar on a military plan to attack and invade Iraq, and pointing to a top-secret map that showed how the war plan would unfold. The book reports that the meeting with Bandar was held on Jan. 11, 2003, in Vice President Cheney's West Wing office. Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also attended.

Pentagon officials omitted the discussion of the meeting from a transcript of the Woodward interview that they posted on the Defense Department's Web site Monday. Rumsfeld told reporters at a briefing yesterday that he may have used the phrase "take that to the bank" but that no final decision had been made to go to war.

"To my knowledge, a decision had not been taken by the president to go to war at that meeting," Rumsfeld said. "There was certainly nothing I said that should have suggested that, and any suggestion to the contrary would not be accurate."

Woodward supplied his own transcript showing that Rumsfeld told him on Oct. 23, 2003: "I remember meeting with the vice president and I think Dick Myers and I met with a foreign dignitary at one point and looked him in the eye and said you can count on this. In other words, at some point we had had enough of a signal from the president that we were able to look a foreign dignitary in the eye and say you can take that to the bank this is going to happen."

The transcript made it clear that the foreign dignitary Woodward was discussing was Bandar, although Rumsfeld would not say that. "We're going to have to clean some of this up in the transcript," Rumsfeld said in the omitted passage. "We'll give you a -- I mean you just said Bandar and I didn't agree with that so we're going to have to -- I don't want to say who it is but you are going to have to go through that and find a way to clean up my language too."

All told, the Pentagon transcript omits a series of eight questions and answers, some of them just a few words each. Yesterday Rumsfeld described the deleted passages as "some banter."

Larry DiRita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, said the deletion was an honest disagreement and defense officials were reviewing the passage to determine whether to restore it to the published version.

"I had discussions with the author about passages that would be excluded from the transcript by mutual agreement, and this passage was one of those sections," he said. "It was excluded specifically because the secretary was not in a position to validate or confirm the details that the author was raising."

Woodward said: "As the transcript shows, it was not off the record. I was surprised that it was deleted because it obviously dealt with a critical issue and was important corroborating information for the book. I asked DiRita to restore it on the Pentagon Web site."

Rumsfeld's comments came on a day when fallout from the book's many disclosures continued to dominate conversations throughout Washington. Rumsfeld, who gave Woodward two lengthy interviews after Bush asked his Cabinet to cooperate, was a rare dissenter in an administration that has embraced the book despite the mixed portrayal it offers of Bush's campaign to unseat Saddam Hussein.

Stephanie Cutter, communications director for Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry, said the book "raises serious doubts about the president's planning for war with Iraq, and what his war cabinet knew or didn't know."

But Bush's closest aides, who typically resist efforts to pull back the Oval Office curtains, are actively promoting sales of the book.

"We're urging people to buy the book," White House communications director Dan Bartlett said. "What this book does is show a president who was asking the right questions and showing prudence as well as resolve during very difficult times. This book undermines a lot of the critics' charges."

An official involved in the negotiations said the administration cooperated so completely that Bush asked Cheney to grant Woodward an interview, which Cheney did, although he is not named as a source. Woodward writes in the book that information came from "more than 75 key people directly involved in the events," most of whom spoke on the condition that they not be identified.

The Pentagon posted transcripts of both Woodward interviews with Rumsfeld, and they show that Rumsfeld was more recalcitrant than other administration figures. He complained about Woodward's questions in a past meeting, saying that "almost everything you asked me was premised with an assertion that was either incomplete or wrong." Woodward is quoted as gently reminding Rumsfeld that the president "wants me to do this."

At Rumsfeld's briefing yesterday, he said that he remembered the session in Cheney's office with Bandar but that it was not unlike others "we had with any number of neighboring countries as the buildup towards the -- to support the diplomacy, the flow of forces was taking place.

"We had the obligation to try to do it in the most cost-effective and responsible way, and the way that would best fit General [Tommy R.] Franks's plans, in the event that he did in fact ultimately have to go to war," Rumsfeld said, referring to the former head of the U.S. Central Command. "That meant we had to talk to the countries in the region and work out things at ports or airfields and that type of thing."

After being handed a note later in the briefing, Rumsfeld returned to the transcript and said that it might omit "some discussion about a totally unrelated topic, and some items that were agreed between us . . . that were off the record."

"But I can say of certain knowledge that nothing was taken out that would naysay what I just indicated in my response to the question," Rumsfeld said.

"No 18-minute gap?" a reporter asked, referring to the notorious deletion from a Watergate tape.

Amid laughter, Rumsfeld said: "You can take that to the bank."


Mark Malseed contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

June 17, 2004

The Plain Truth

It's hard to imagine how the commission investigating the 2001 terrorist attacks could have put it more clearly yesterday: there was never any evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11.

Now President Bush should apologize to the American people, who were led to believe something different.

Of all the ways Mr. Bush persuaded Americans to back the invasion of Iraq last year, the most plainly dishonest was his effort to link his war of choice with the battle against terrorists worldwide. While it's possible that Mr. Bush and his top advisers really believed that there were chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq, they should have known all along that there was no link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. No serious intelligence analyst believed the connection existed; Richard Clarke, the former antiterrorism chief, wrote in his book that Mr. Bush had been told just that.

Nevertheless, the Bush administration convinced a substantial majority of Americans before the war that Saddam Hussein was somehow linked to 9/11. And since the invasion, administration officials, especially Vice President Dick Cheney, have continued to declare such a connection. Last September, Mr. Bush had to grudgingly correct Mr. Cheney for going too far in spinning a Hussein-bin Laden conspiracy. But the claim has crept back into view as the president has made the war on terror a centerpiece of his re-election campaign.

On Monday, Mr. Cheney said Mr. Hussein "had long-established ties with Al Qaeda." Mr. Bush later backed up Mr. Cheney, claiming that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a terrorist who may be operating in Baghdad, is "the best evidence" of a Qaeda link. This was particularly astonishing because the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, told the Senate earlier this year that Mr. Zarqawi did not work with the Hussein regime.

The staff report issued by the 9/11 panel says that Sudan's government, which sheltered Osama bin Laden in the early 1990's, tried to hook him up with Mr. Hussein, but that nothing came of it.

This is not just a matter of the president's diminishing credibility, although that's disturbing enough. The war on terror has actually suffered as the conflict in Iraq has diverted military and intelligence resources from places like Afghanistan, where there could really be Qaeda forces, including Mr. bin Laden.

Mr. Bush is right when he says he cannot be blamed for everything that happened on or before Sept. 11, 2001. But he is responsible for the administration's actions since then. That includes, inexcusably, selling the false Iraq-Qaeda claim to Americans. There are two unpleasant alternatives: either Mr. Bush knew he was not telling the truth, or he has a capacity for politically motivated self-deception that is terrifying in the post-9/11 world.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

Majority of Americans Now Call Iraq War a Mistake

Thu Jun 24,11:55 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For the first time since the start of the war in Iraq (news - web sites), a majority of Americans now say the U.S.-led invasion was a mistake, according to a USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll released on Thursday.

Amid continuing violence in Iraq and questions about the justification for the war, 54 percent of the 1,005 Americans polled said it was a mistake to send U.S. troops into Iraq, compared with 41 percent who held that view three weeks ago.

The findings mark the first time since Vietnam that a majority of Americans has called a major deployment of U.S. forces a mistake, USA Today reported on its Web site.

In addition, the poll found that for the first time a majority also said the war in Iraq has made the United States less safe from terrorism.

Fifty-five percent said the war has increased U.S. vulnerability, compared to a December poll in which 56 percent said the war made the United States safer.

The war's original justification was to stop Iraq deploying weapons of mass destruction. None have been found.

President Bush has also said the Iraq mission would make America safer by bringing democracy to a key country in the Middle East.

In Iraq on Thursday, insurgents killed about 100 people in a wave of attacks across the country aimed at sabotaging next week's transfer of power to an interim Iraqi government.

Despite Americans' changing attitudes toward the war, the poll found Bush in a statistical dead heat with presumptive Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry. Among likely voters, Bush edged out Kerry 48 percent to 47 percent. Three weeks ago, Kerry led 49 percent to 43 percent.

In the new poll, 60 percent of respondents said they believe the Massachusetts Democrat could handle the job of commander-in-chief, but most Americans indicated they trust Bush more in that role, 51 percent to 43 percent.

The survey, conducted Monday through Wednesday, has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Copyright © 2004 Reuters Limited.

[MidnightRambler]

In the new poll, 60 percent of respondents said they believe the Massachusetts Democrat could handle the job of commander-in-chief, but most Americans indicated they trust Bush more in that role, 51 percent to 43 percent.

I still fail to understand how any rational person could possibly believe that chickenhawks like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Ashcroft, all of whom ditched military service, would be better defenders of this country in this so-called "War On Terrorism" than a decorated WAR HERO like Kerry.

[NYatKNIGHT]

July 9, 2004

Report Says Key Assertions Leading to War Were Wrong

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The key U.S. assertions leading to the 2003 invasion of Iraq -- that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was working to make nuclear weapons -- were wrong and based on false or overstated CIA analyses, a scathing Senate Intelligence Committee report asserted Friday.

Intelligence analysts fell victim to ``group think'' assumptions that Iraq had weapons that it did not, concluded a bipartisan report. Many factors contributing to those failures are ongoing problems within the U.S. intelligence community -- which cannot be fixed with more money alone, it said.

Sen. Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican who heads the committee, told reporters that assessments that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and could make a nuclear weapon by the end of the decade were wrong.

``As the report will show, they were also unreasonable and largely unsupported by the available intelligence,'' he said.

``This was a global intelligence failure.''

The committee's ranking Democrat, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, said: ``Tragically, the intelligence failures set forth in this report will affect our national security for generations to come. Our credibility is diminished. Our standing in the world has never been lower. We have fostered a deep hatred of Americans in the Muslim world, and that will grow. As a direct consequence, our nation is more vulnerable today than ever before.''

The report repeatedly blasts departing CIA Director George Tenet, accusing him of skewing advice to top policy-makers with the CIA's view and elbowing out dissenting views from other intelligence agencies overseen by the State or Defense departments. It faulted Tenet for not personally reviewing Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, which contained since-discredited references to Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium in Africa.

White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, traveling with President Bush on a campaign trip Friday, said the committee's report essentially ``agrees with what we have said, which is we need to take steps to continue strengthening and reforming our intelligence capabilities so we are prepared to meet the new threats that we face in this day and age.''

Tenet has resigned and leaves office Sunday.

Intelligence analysts worked from the assumption that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to make more, as well as trying to revive a nuclear weapons program. Instead, investigations after the Iraq invasion have shown that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had no nuclear weapons program and no biological weapons, and only small amounts of chemical weapons have been found.

Analysts ignored or discounted conflicting information because of their assumptions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the report said.

``This 'group think' dynamic led Intelligence Community analysts, collectors and managers to both interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD program as well as ignore or minimize evidence that Iraq did not have active and expanding weapons of mass destruction programs,'' the report concluded.

Such assumptions also led analysts to inflate snippets of questionable information into broad declarations that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, the report said.

For example, speculation that the presence of one specialized truck could mean an effort to transfer chemical weapons was puffed up into a conclusion that Iraq was actively making chemical weapons, the report said.

Analysts also concluded that Iraq had a mobile biological weapons program based mainly on the since-discredited claims of one Iraqi defector code-named ``Curve Ball,'' it said. American agents did not have direct access to Curve Ball or his debriefers, but the source's information was expanded into the conclusion that Iraq had an advanced and active biological weapons program, the report said.

[ZippyTheChimp]

September 7, 2004

OP-ED COLUMNIST

A Mythic Reality

By PAUL KRUGMAN

The best book I've read about America after 9/11 isn't about either America or 9/11. It's "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning," an essay on the psychology of war by Chris Hedges, a veteran war correspondent. Better than any poll analysis or focus group, it explains why President Bush, despite policy failures at home and abroad, is ahead in the polls.

War, Mr. Hedges says, plays to some fundamental urges. "Lurking beneath the surface of every society, including ours," he says, "is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us, the kind that war alone is able to deliver." When war psychology takes hold, the public believes, temporarily, in a "mythic reality" in which our nation is purely good, our enemies are purely evil, and anyone who isn't our ally is our enemy.

This state of mind works greatly to the benefit of those in power.

One striking part of the book describes Argentina's reaction to the 1982 Falklands war. Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, the leader of the country's military junta, cynically launched that war to distract the public from the failure of his economic policies. It worked: "The junta, which had been on the verge of collapse" just before the war, "instantly became the saviors of the country."

The point is that once war psychology takes hold, the public desperately wants to believe in its leadership, and ascribes heroic qualities to even the least deserving ruler. National adulation for the junta ended only after a humiliating military defeat.

George W. Bush isn't General Galtieri: America really was attacked on 9/11, and any president would have followed up with a counterstrike against the Taliban. Yet the Bush administration, like the Argentine junta, derived enormous political benefit from the impulse of a nation at war to rally around its leader.

Another president might have refrained from exploiting that surge of support for partisan gain; Mr. Bush didn't.

And his administration has sought to perpetuate the war psychology that makes such exploitation possible.

Step by step, the fight against Al Qaeda became a universal "war on terror," then a confrontation with the "axis of evil," then a war against all evil everywhere. Nobody knows where it all ends.

What is clear is that whenever political debate turns to Mr. Bush's actual record in office, his popularity sinks. Only by doing whatever it takes to change the subject to the war on terror - not to what he's actually doing about terrorist threats, but to his "leadership," whatever that means - can he get a bump in the polls.

Last week's convention made it clear that Mr. Bush intends to use what's left of his heroic image to win the election, and early polls suggest that the strategy may be working. What can John Kerry do?

Campaigning exclusively on domestic issues won't work. Mr. Bush must be held to account for his dismal record on jobs, health care and the environment. But as Mr. Hedges writes, when war psychology makes a public yearn to believe in its leaders, "there is little that logic or fact or truth can do to alter the experience."

To win, the Kerry campaign has to convince a significant number of voters that the self-proclaimed "war president" isn't an effective war leader - he only plays one on TV.

This charge has the virtue of being true. It's hard to find a nonpartisan national security analyst with a good word for the Bush administration's foreign policy. Iraq, in particular, is a slow-motion disaster brought on by wishful thinking, cronyism and epic incompetence.

If I were running the Kerry campaign, I'd remind people frequently about Mr. Bush's flight-suit photo-op, when he declared the end of major combat. In fact, the war goes on unabated. News coverage of Iraq dropped off sharply after the supposed transfer of sovereignty on June 28, but as many American soldiers have died since the transfer as in the original invasion.

And I'd point out that while Mr. Bush spared no effort preparing for his carrier landing - he even received underwater survival training in the White House pool - he didn't prepare for things that actually mattered, like securing and rebuilding Iraq after Baghdad fell.

Will it work? I don't know. But to win, Mr. Kerry must try to puncture the myth that Mr. Bush's handlers have so assiduously created.



THE CANDIDATES

Bush and Kerry Clash Over Iraq and a Timetable

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
and DAVID E. SANGER

CLEVELAND, Sept. 6 - Senator John Kerry and President Bush clashed repeatedly over Iraq on Monday, with Mr. Kerry branding it "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" and saying he wanted all American troops home within four years, while Mr. Bush defended the war as "right for America then and it's right for America now."

Their conventions behind them, the candidates spent Labor Day, the traditional start of the fall campaign season, doing what they have done for months: trading roundhouse punches over Iraq, job losses and health care.

Mr. Kerry, who campaigned before blue-collar workers in suburban Pittsburgh and coal miners in West Virginia and in an African-American neighborhood in Cleveland, unveiled a new attack on Mr. Bush, saying voters needed to decide between the president's "wrong choices and wrong direction for America" and his own promises to create jobs, strengthen the economy and expand access to health care.

"The W stands for wrong,'' Mr. Kerry said in a riff on the president's middle initial at a labor picnic in Racine, W.Va.

But it was Mr. Kerry's responses to two questions about Iraq that set off a flurry of attacks by Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Asked his timetable for pulling troops out of Iraq, Mr. Kerry told a few hundred people in Canonsburg, Pa.: "My goal would be to get them home in my first term. And I believe that can be done." He said he would make it clear that "we do not have long-term designs to maintain bases and troops in Iraq."

Mr. Kerry has said he could replace most, but not all, American troops with foreign forces within four years by offering new inducements to other countries.

"When they talk about a coalition - that's the phoniest thing I ever heard," Mr. Kerry said of the current array of foreign soldiers deployed in Iraq. "You've got 500 troops here, 500 troops there, and it's American troops that are 90 percent of the combat casualties, and it's American taxpayers that are paying 90 percent of the cost of the war.

"It's the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," he said.

Mr. Bush has said repeatedly that it would be unwise to set a deadline for beginning or finishing a pullout of troops in Iraq. Terrorist groups, he argues, would use the date to their strategic advantage. And he often says that American troops will come home "as soon as the job is done'' without specifying the criteria for the completion of the mission.

In Poplar Bluff, Mo., Mr. Bush told supporters that Mr. Kerry couldn't make up his mind.

"After saying he would have voted for the war, even knowing everything we know today, my opponent woke up this morning with new campaign advisers and yet another new position,'' Mr. Bush said to laughter and to cries of, "Flip-flop. Flip-flop.''

"Suddenly he's against it again," Mr. Bush said. "No matter how many times Senator Kerry changes his mind, it was right for America then and it's right for America now that Saddam Hussein is no longer in power.''

Mr. Cheney, campaigning in Clear Lake, Iowa, criticized Mr. Kerry for "demeaning our allies."

"When it comes to diplomacy, it looks like John Kerry should stick to windsurfing," he said.

The exchange between Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry spotlighted how the two campaigns had honed their message on Iraq - and how they emphasize different aspects of the issue.

Mr. Bush has tried to convince crowds that he and Mr. Kerry agreed on the need to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and that Mr. Kerry's position has simply changed with the winds and the casualty numbers.

Mr. Kerry argues that the president has deliberately conflated two very different issues: whether it was right to hold Saddam Hussein accountable for his defiance of the United Nations, and whether Mr. Bush, once given that authority by the Congress, used it properly.

The essence of Mr. Kerry's argument - one he has had a difficult time making - is that Mr. Bush obtained the authority to go to war on false intelligence, and then prosecuted the war in a way that alienated allies and prolonged the insurgency.

At day's end on Monday, Mr. Kerry told thousands at a rally that Mr. Bush "wishes I have the same position he does, but as we've learned from this president, just wishing something, and saying something, doesn't make it so."

"When it comes to Iraq, I would not have done just one thing differently, I would have done everything differently from this president," he added.

Now, however, Mr. Kerry is going further, talking of the economic cost of the war and how that money could have been better spent.

"George Bush's wrongheaded, go-it-alone Iraq policy has cost you - cost you - already, over $200 billion," Mr. Kerry said in Cleveland. "That's $200 billion we're not investing in Cleveland. That's $200 billion we're not investing in our schools and in No Child Left Behind, that's $200 billion we're not investing in health care for all Americans and prescription drugs that are affordable."

It was a measure of how Iraq has overshadowed so many other issues in the campaign that it even dominated on Labor Day, the moment Mr. Bush has often used to focus attention on job creation, one of the points of vulnerability of his campaign.

That economic record, of course, is Mr. Kerry's main target, as he made clear in trying out a new speech.

"The choice in this race is very simple," Mr. Kerry said. "It's whether you want to continue to move in the wrong direction, or whether you want to turn it around and move the United States of America in the right direction and put people back to work."

"Do you want four more years of lost jobs?" he asked, as his crowd shouted, "No!"

"Do you want four more years of shipping jobs overseas and replacing them with jobs that pay you less than the jobs you have today?"

Mr. Kerry said Mr. Bush had the worst record on job creation "since Herbert Hoover." At the front-porch session in a middle-class neighborhood in Canonsburg on Monday morning, Mr. Kerry fended off pro-Bush hecklers while talking of people earning less money and paying more for health care. Lori Sheldon, 45, stirred in her seat. "You told our story," she said to him.

Her husband, Ms. Sheldon said, works on a ground crew for US Airways in Pittsburgh and fears he may be laid off in the fall. "You see those two young ladies over there? Those are my daughters," she said, beginning to sob. "I'm tired of saying no. We say no all the time."

Mr. Kerry said, "What we need is a president making choices not to reward Halliburton and a bunch of big companies, but reward the American people."

"I want you to be able to say yes to your kids," he said.

Mr. Bush's appearance in Poplar Bluff was his only one of the day. The southeastern Missouri town was so eager to hear him that more than 10,000 people, or nearly two-thirds of the population, signed a petition urging him to visit. When he agreed, the town organized one of the largest rallies of his campaign: more than 23,000 went through metal detectors, ignoring a light evening rain.

The president made a dramatic entrance, with Marine One, his helicopter, landing in a field. Though it was Labor Day, Mr. Bush only briefly touched on job creation. Picking his time frame carefully, Mr. Bush noted that "last Friday, we showed we added 144,000 new jobs in August,'' saying that was "1.7 million since August of '03.''

"The national unemployment rate has fallen to 5.4 percent,'' he said. "That is lower than the average rate of the 1970's, the 1980's and the 1990's.''

He spoke about tax simplification and farm exports with the passion of a man acutely aware that he won Missouri in 2000 by only a bit more than three percentage points and that re-election would be enormously difficult without winning it again.


David M. Halbfinger reported from Cleveland for this article and David E. Sanger from Poplar Bluff, Mo.


Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Schadenfrau]

US military deaths just topped 1,000. What a sad moment for America.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Is it true that on his radio show, Rush Limbaugh said something to the effect that 1,000 dead is not that much when you compare it to 40,000 dead in U.S. highway accidents?

[ZippyTheChimp]

September 9, 2004

For 1,000 Troops, There Is No Going Home

By MONICA DAVEY

Dixie Codner had a question for the marines who came down her gravel road, past the rows of corn and alfalfa, to tell her that her 19-year-old son, Kyle, had been killed in Iraq. Should she bring them the dress blues, still pressed and hanging neatly in his closet, for his funeral?

No need, she recalled them answering. They had dress uniforms from all the services, all sizes, waiting back at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where the bodies of American service members come home.

"What does that say?" Ms. Codner asked, as she sat at her kitchen table in Shelton, Neb., on a recent morning, fingering a thick stack of photographs that her son had sent from the desert. "How many more are they expecting? All I know is that there are 1,000 families that feel just like we do. We go to bed at night, and we don't have our children."

Like Lance Cpl. Kyle W. Codner, each of the more than 1,000 marines and soldiers, sailors and airmen killed since the United States sent troops to invade Iraq leaves behind a grieving family, a story, a unique memory of duty and sacrifice in what has become the deadliest war for Americans since Vietnam.

But along with so much personal loss, the roster of the dead tells a larger story, a portrait of a society and a military in transition, with ever-widening roles and costs for the country's part-time soldiers, women and Hispanics.

As has often been true in the United States' wars, small towns like Shelton and other rural areas suffered a disproportionate share of deaths compared with the nation's big cities. More than 100 service members who died were from California, the most for any state, but the smaller, less-populated states, many in the nation's middle - the Dakotas, Wyoming and Nebraska - recorded some of the biggest per capita losses.

In these mostly Republican-leaning states, people have begun to take painful note of the toll in Iraq. Many of the families of the dead there said they remained supportive of the war, the troops and the president. Still, with the death toll reaching 1,000 just two months before the presidential election, the somber milestone captured a central spot in the national political debate this week.

More than 70 percent of the dead were soldiers in the Army, and more than 20 percent were marines. More than half were in the lowest-paid enlisted ranks. About 12 percent were officers. Three-quarters of the troops died in hostile incidents: most often, homemade-bomb explosions, small-arms fire, rocket attacks. A quarter died in illnesses or accidents: truck and helicopter crashes and gun discharges.

On average, the service members who died were about 26. The youngest was 18; the oldest, 59. About half were married, according to the death roll, which does not include a handful yet to be identified by the Defense Department and three civilians who worked for the military.

Part-time soldiers, the guardsmen and reservists who once expected to tend to floods and hurricanes, were called to Iraq on a scale not seen through five decades of war. Increasingly, Iraq is becoming their conflict, and in growing numbers this spring and early summer, these part-time soldiers died there. Ten times as many of them died from April to July of this year as had in the war's first two months.

American women, too, have quietly drawn closer to combat than they had in half a century. At least 24 female service members died in Iraq, more than in any American conflict since World War II, a stark sign of a barrier broken.

Many Hispanics, once underrepresented in the armed forces, have fought and died in striking numbers. At least 122 Hispanics have died in Iraq, meaning that they died at a rate disproportionately high for their representation in the active forces and among the deployed troops. Among the dead were 39 service members who were not American citizens, significantly more than had died in Vietnam or Afghanistan, according to Defense Department records.

Most of the troops - 85 percent - died after President Bush declared major combat operations over on May 1, 2003. Nearly 15 percent died after the United States turned over sovereignty to Iraq's new leaders this June. The deadliest month was this April, as insurgents stepped up their attacks. Nearly as many American troops died that month as had in the initial invasion.

The Pentagon says it does not track or release estimates of the number of Iraqis killed since the war began, although some independent groups have offered widely varying estimates. (A group called Iraq Body Count said Iraqi civilian deaths exceeded 11,000.)

Among Americans, especially the relatives of service members who have died, the meaning of the toll is already a matter of feverish, sometimes bitter, debate.

Some say they view the number of deaths - and the injuries to more than 7,000 other Americans - as a tragic but unavoidable price of war, and one that seems modest beside the death toll from Vietnam, which was 58,000. About 380 troops died in the Persian Gulf war of 1991, and some 97 in Afghanistan. Any questions about the mounting numbers in Iraq, these relatives said, served as a rejection of the troops' mission, an insult to their lost soldier's work.

"The loss is there, of course, but we also know the honor and the pride," said Kelby McCrae, himself a captain in the National Guard and the son of a veteran soldier. His younger brother, Erik, was killed in June. "We're just so honored at the sacrifice he gave."

But others said they worried that their soldier's sacrifice in Iraq might be forgotten as more months pass and people grow inured to news of so many deaths, one after the next in this war.

The Guard and the Reserves: 'Weekend Warriors' Go Full Time

Eric S. McKinley was a baker and a part-time soldier. He dyed his hair strange colors and pierced his body in places his mother sometimes wished he had not. His six-year stint in the Oregon National Guard was supposed to end in April, but it was extended, and Specialist McKinley died June 13 when a bomb blew up near his Humvee near Baghdad. Specialist McKinley's father, Tom, said he was left with a haunting conviction: that guardsmen and reservists are now being asked in record numbers to fight the same lethal wars as full-time soldiers, but without the same level of training, equipment or respect. Dozens of parents and spouses of guardsmen - some who died and others still serving in Iraq - said they shared Mr. McKinley's worries as they wrestled with what the role of the nation's 1.2 million part-time service members once was and what it was becoming.

"They are not prepared for this, not emotionally and not with their gear and equipment," said Mr. McKinley, of Salem, Ore. "There's this opinion that these guys are just 'weekend warriors,' and we'll have them do all the things the regular army doesn't have time to do. But these guys are being asked to put their lives on the line just as much as everyone else. These guys are yanked from their lives, and yet they aren't treated the same."

During special training at a base in Texas before he left for Iraq, Specialist McKinley told his father that his Guard unit was getting only two meals a day, while regular units ate three. And in Iraq, on the day of his death, Specialist McKinley's fellow guardsmen said he was in a Humvee reinforced with plywood and sandbags, not real armor.

Cecil Green, a spokesman at Fort Hood where Specialist McKinley's unit trained before it left for Iraq, said all soldiers - regular and part time - were fed equally. But Col. Mike Caldwell, deputy director of the Oregon National Guard, said his troops had complained about unequal conditions during training there in months past. "There were a lot of problems in their treatment," Colonel Caldwell said. "It was deplorable. They were treated like slaves in some respects."

Thomas F. Hall, the assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs, acknowledged in a telephone interview last week that since the terrorist attacks of 2001, the nation's reserve components had been called in numbers unknown since perhaps World War II. But those part-timers sent to Iraq are trained and equipped to the same level as any active-duty troops, Mr. Hall said.

"It's no longer your father or your grandfather's Guard and Reserves," Mr. Hall said. "A lot of this is a leftover vestige from a time in which we didn't perhaps equip and train our Guard and Reserve as we need to."

Any shortages of equipment - of armored Humvees or protective gear - have been faced by all types of troops, not just guardsmen, he said. And Mr. Hall insisted that no one, not even him, could distinguish between part--s and others when it came to Iraq. "They look the same. Their standards are the same. Their training is the same," he said.

Recently home from Iraq with an injury, Specialist Andrew Cross, a member of the North Carolina National Guard, said the only difference he discerned was a little taunting. "Sure, they say stuff about you not being full time,'' Specialist Cross said, "but who cares what they say."

Specialist Cross's best friend, Specialist Daniel A. Desens, who listened to Bob Marley and Dave Matthews with him as they rolled along in their Bradleys in Iraq, was one of at least 179 guardsmen and reservists killed there, the records of those identified as of yesterday show.

Their deaths make up less than a fifth of those killed, but the timing of their deaths underscores the changing makeup of American forces in Iraq. In the first weeks of war, only a small group of reserve forces was sent to Iraq, and only a few died. The numbers grew swiftly this year, and reserves and guards now amount to about 40 percent of the forces deployed to Iraq, and maybe still more soon.

Back in Oregon, Colonel Caldwell said leaders were busy arranging more deployments for some of the state's 8,400 Army and Air National Guard troops in the coming weeks, even as gloom lingered over the headquarters. Four Oregon guardsmen, including Specialist McKinley, died in a 10-day stretch.

Nationally, Mr. Hall said, recruiters may fall 1 percent short of their goals for new Guard members when the annual count is taken at the end of September. In Oregon, Colonel Caldwell predicted direr shortfalls: 10 percent to 15 percent.

"I think it's pretty obvious what's happening," he said. "People have realized: you join the Guard in Oregon, you're going to be mobilized."

The Women: Dying, in a Role Quietly Redefined

Before she left her home in Richmond, Va., Leslie D. Jackson's Junior R.O.T.C. instructor warned her that although women might not officially be on the very front line of a ground war, they were edging ever closer - and the line itself, if ever there was one in Iraq, had grown dangerously blurry.

"I told her that even combat support roles could still take you places that maybe you should not be," said Master Sgt. Earl G. Winston Jr., who taught Private Jackson at George Wythe High School. "But she said she was ready to accept the challenge. She said she did not want her fellow soldiers, most of them men, to think that she wasn't every bit as good as them."

Private Jackson, who had talked her reluctant mother into letting her sign up for the Army when she was 17, died on May 20 in Baghdad. The truck she was transporting supplies in hit a roadside bomb. She had finished basic training eight months before, and had turned 18, making her the youngest of 24 women who have died in Iraq.

Not long before, she had sent an e-mail message to her former principal, Earl Pappy, to say that she was spending long hours driving trucks and had been unnerved at seeing a soldier killed for the first time right before her: " 'I left home as Mommy's little girl,' '' Mr. Pappy said she wrote, " 'and I'm coming back as a strong woman.'

"She told me she wouldn't be in combat, and I don't think women should be," said Viola Jackson, Private Jackson's mother. "But then again, they joined the Army, and I guess you've got to do whatever the other people are doing. I don't know. What I know is she was a sweet child."

Women make up some 10 percent of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they account for less than 3 percent of the 1,000 deaths in Iraq. Still, more women have died there than in any conflict since hundreds died in World War II - a certain if somber sign of how women's roles in the military have grown in the last decade.

More surprising, though, to advocates on both sides of a long-simmering debate over what women should and should not do in times of war has been the public's reaction to the loss of 24 women. Mostly, there has been silence.

"What it means is that our view of women has changed," said Lory Manning, director of the Women in the Military Project at the Women's Research and Education Institute in Washington and a retired 25-year veteran of the Navy.

"Within our minds, women are doing a lot of athletic things. They're SWAT team members and firefighters now. This is worldwide. So people see this as less horrible. The horror of death is equal now."

But others, like Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, an independent public policy group in Livonia, Mich., said Americans were largely oblivious to the role women were playing in Iraq and would be disturbed if they knew. Female soldiers who die receive little attention, she said, except in small hometown newspapers; the same is true of the 207 women who have been injured in Iraq.

Shortly after the war began, there were hints of the nation's discomfort when three female soldiers, including Pfc. Jessica Lynch and Specialist Shoshana Johnson, were taken hostage, and one of them, Pfc. Lori Ann Piestewa, was killed, Ms. Donnelly said. In images broadcast around the world, Specialist Johnson looked terrified, her eyes darting.

"The risk of capture is why we oppose women in combat," said Ms. Donnelly, who wants the Pentagon to reconsider the jobs close to combat that women now hold. "We're a civilized nation. Violence against women is wrong. I hope that we don't become that kind of a nation that doesn't care about this sort of thing."

Eight women died in Vietnam. Sixteen died in the first Persian Gulf war. Three died in Afghanistan. And through most of that time, people have argued over what place women should take in war.

Women have served in the American military since 1901, and others quietly did unofficial military work as early as the Revolutionary War. But in 1948, Congress adopted the Armed Forces Integration Act, which capped women at 2 percent of the services and barred them from serving on combat planes and combat ships.

After Vietnam, and the end of the draft, the restrictions on women began to fade, one by one. By 1994, women were allowed to fly combat aircraft, to serve on fighter ships but not submarines, and to fill ground jobs except those most directly on the front lines: special forces, infantry, armor, artillery. But in Iraq, the jobs that women could fill - as drivers in convoys bringing supplies to troops and as members of military police units - came under attack from homemade bombs and mortar fire, too, and the notion of a front line seemed no longer to fit the conflict.

Nearly all of the women killed were full-time soldiers in the Army. And two-thirds of them died in hostile situations, not in accidents or because of illness.

Even Ms. Manning, who supports bigger roles for women in the military, said she was surprised at the degree to which women had been included in critical operations, including patrolling checkpoints. In part, their role may have been a necessary outgrowth of cultural differences in Iraq. Female soldiers were needed when Iraqi women were searched or questioned.

Still, Ms. Donnelly and other critics say, the scars from so much change are being ignored: What will come of the children, they asked, who lose their mothers to war?

Sgt. Tatjana Reed, a single mother, was killed on July 22 when a bomb exploded near her convoy vehicle. She had signed papers leaving her 10-year-old daughter, Genevieve, in the care of relatives near her base in Germany, expecting the arrangement to be temporary.

Sergeant Reed "always said, 'What a man can do, I can do,' '' recalled her mother, Brigitte Dykty, who lives in Clarksville, Tenn. "Sometimes I wish she hadn't thought that."

The Hispanics: Underrepresented, Except on Death Rolls

Five years ago, the National Council of La Raza, an advocacy group for Hispanics, released a scathing study of Hispanics in the United States military. The central finding was that the military was not employing as many Hispanics as it should.

In 1996, the study said, Hispanics 18 to 44 made up more than 11 percent of the civilian work force but accounted for less than 7 percent of the military's active forces.

The military took notice, and the Marines, in particular, began a serious recruiting effort aimed at Spanish-speaking markets, said Lisa Navarrete, vice president of the advocacy group.

"They took it very, very seriously," Ms. Navarrete said.

By 2004, Latinos accounted for 9.2 percent of all active-duty forces and about 10 percent of those forces deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

That news came with a distinctly bittersweet edge. Of the 1,000 killed in Iraq, at least 122, or more than 12 percent, were Hispanic, according to the Defense Department, which says ethnicity was not tracked by the same measures in previous wars.

"It seems that in a time of peace, we're underrepresented," Ms. Navarrete said quietly. "In a time of war, the situation is completely changed."

One reason for the high rate of Hispanic deaths in Iraq is that Hispanics account for a particularly large segment - more than 13 percent - of the Marines, the ground troops who suffered significant losses early in the war, as well as in the uprisings of recent weeks.

Some of those who died fighting for the United States were not even citizens. At least 39 noncitizens - many, though not all, of Hispanic heritage - were among the dead. Legal residents of this country have long served in the armed forces, but records of their deaths in war are hard to find. The official Defense Department records show that one noncitizen died in military duty in Vietnam and three in Afghanistan.

In 2002, Mr. Bush issued an order shortening the waiting periods for service members and their families seeking citizenship, and Congress made those changes permanent with a law that takes effect in October. Some anti-immigration advocates said that military service alone was not a qualification for citizenship, while others worried that the changes might induce some immigrants to enlist in hopes of speedy citizenship.

"But the bottom line, whatever the casualties, is that people are going to continue to join because they have to," said Rodolfo Acuna, a professor of Chicano studies at California State University, Northridge. "They want to live better. They want to get money. They want to better themselves."

Rey David Cuervo was born in Tampico, Mexico, but his mother, Rosalba Kuhn, took him to Texas when he was 6. She was a maid in Port Isabel. He was an only boy among three sisters, the quiet one with just a handful of friends.

At age 8, she said, he went to her carrying a picture of the American flag and explained that he planned to join the American Army. "He said that this is all he wanted," she recalled not long ago. "He said if they wouldn't take him in the Army here, then he'd go back to Mexico and sign up there."

In 1999, he left for basic training.

"I was so proud," Ms. Kuhn said. "When I came here, my dreams were that I would see my kids here, see them learn the language, see them get a better life for themselves. Part of that was wanting to see my son in an American uniform."

Ms. Kuhn said she thinks of her son every day when she wakes up. She lights candles for him. She holds a hat of his under her nose and breathes it in. In the sadness, though, Ms. Kuhn said she had no anger. Her son wanted to go into the Army. He wanted to go to Iraq. He chose his future.

Private Cuervo, who once told his mother that he planned to retire from the military after 20 years and then buy a big house, died on Dec. 28, 2003, when a bomb exploded. He was 24, one of 32,000 noncitizens in the armed forces. The government granted him citizenship after he died.

The Small Towns: When the Population Is Reduced by One

There are no sidewalks along the quiet streets of Shelton, Neb., but there is red-white-and-blue bunting, a little faded now, and tattered black ribbon tied to the street posts. Not that anyone here needs to be reminded about Kyle Codner.

The nation's small towns experienced more than their share of death in Iraq, a clear reflection of their representation in the nation's military services. Not only did death arrive in disproportionate numbers in these towns, but each death seemed to echo louder and longer than it might have in a big city.

One resident here compared Corporal Codner's death on May 26 to a tornado whipping up in the Midwest and zeroing in on this town of 1,100 people.

"The word 'shock' is overused, generally," said Lynn McBride, the chairman of Shelton's village trustees and a schoolteacher. "But it understates the feelings about this. We're all in it together here, and there was a feeling that this couldn't be true."

To Shelton, Corporal Codner was the son of Dixie and Wain Codner. He was one of 19 graduates of Shelton High in 2003, and one of two to go off to the military. He was the basketball player with the blond girlfriend, each of them usually on the king and queen court. He was the clerk at J. R.'s Mini Mart. He was the kid who got his photograph taken in front of the old military tank that sits at the town's entrance, and the student named in the yearbook as "Most Likely to Kick Some Terrorist Butt."

Nebraska and a long list of states in the country's middle and South had some of the highest death rates per capita. Many of these states are considered Republican strongholds. Vermont, a Democratic-leaning state in the presidential race, had the most deaths per capita. Among swing states in the presidential race, Oregon, Maine and Iowa had heavy losses.

No one can be sure what role the deaths in Iraq will play in this election season. Nebraska has been more reliably Republican through five decades of presidential races than any other state. Still, Democrats in Nebraska say the war and the death toll of 14 is stirring political discussion.

"The Republican voting bloc is persuadable here, especially when you're talking about sending your sons and daughters to war," said Barry R. Rubin, executive director of the Nebraska Democratic Party. "One thing about Nebraska is we are very independent-minded people, and people are seriously questioning the merits of this war."

But along the streets of Shelton last weekend, most people said they backed the war, and would probably vote for Mr. Bush. Among them was Corporal Codner's best friend from childhood, Matthew S. Walter, 19 and preparing to vote in his first presidential election. "I don't think I like what John Kerry has to say,'' Mr. Walter said.

Most people interviewed said they did not see Corporal Codner's death through the prism of politics.

"I sense no bitterness or contrition whatsoever about Kyle,'' Mr. McBride said. "I've never heard any of that. I think the overall feeling is that we're grateful he died the way he did - serving his country."

About eight miles away, back at Ms. Codner's kitchen table, the Codners said they would vote against President Bush, one of the many people Ms. Codner describes as "someone without skin in the game."

She and her husband go to sleep thinking of the boy in the circle of class pictures on their living room wall, she said, and then they wake up thinking of him. In the moments when other thoughts crowd out those memories, Ms. Codner said, something always brings him back. On Friday, it was the mail. Four packages that had been sent to her son in Iraq were returned to her, unopened. A yellow form on the front of the boxes gave a curt explanation in the form of a checked box: "Deceased."

The Codners tried to discourage their son from joining the Marines during his senior year in high school, but when he complained that they were not being supportive, they tried to go along.

Wain Codner said the town's embrace helped his family the first weeks after his son's death. "The support was incredible," he said. "But then, people go on with their lives."

A few days before Corporal Codner died, he sent home a roll of film. His family developed it, then waited, hoping he would call, so he could tell them exactly what they were seeing.

The mysterious stack of pictures still sits on the kitchen table. One shows Corporal Codner, with a wide smile, beside an Iraqi child. In another, a thick automatic weapon dangles around his neck, seeming to dwarf his slim frame. Another shows just a sleeping bag and pad, arranged carefully on a concrete block. This is probably where he slept, his parents surmise, but they will never be sure.


Tom Torok and the research staff of The New York Times contributed to this report.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Edward]

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?040927ta_talk_packer
COMMENT
THE POLITICAL WAR
by George Packer
Issue of 2004-09-27
Posted 2004-09-20

Earlier this year, the United States Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D., hired a team of independent experts to go to Iraq and evaluate the agency’s programs there. The experts came back with a mixed review that included plenty of reason for worry: the reconstruction of Iraq was taking place in an ad-hoc fashion, without a consistent strategy, without the meaningful participation or advice of Iraqis, within paralyzing security constraints, and amid unrealistic claims of success. But something happened to the report on the way to publication. U.S.A.I.D. kept sending parts of it back for revision, draft after draft, weeding out criticism, until the agency finally approved a version for internal use which one member of the team called “a whitewash” of his findings. Another expert said, “It’s so political, everything going on out there. They just didn’t want to hear any bad news.” Pointing out that some of the numbers posted on the agency’s Web site were overly optimistic, he concluded, “They like to make their sausage their way.”

This would be a minor footnote in the history of the Iraq war, if only the entire story didn’t read the same. President Bush has been making the sausage his way from the beginning, and his way is to politicize. He forced a congressional vote on the war just before the 2002 midterm elections. He trumpeted selective and misleading intelligence. He displayed intense devotion to classifying government documents, except when there was political advantage in declassifying them. He fired or sidelined government officials and military officers who told the American public what the Administration didn’t want it to hear. He released forecasts of the war’s cost that quickly became obsolete, and then he ignored the need for massive expenditures until a crucial half year in Iraq had been lost. His communications office in Baghdad issued frequently incredible accounts of the progress of the war and the reconstruction. He staffed the occupation with large numbers of political loyalists who turned out to be incompetent. According to Marine officers and American officials in Iraq, he ordered and then called off critical military operations in Falluja against the wishes of his commanders, with no apparent strategic plan. He made sure that blame for the abuses at Abu Ghraib settled almost entirely on the shoulders of low-ranking troops. And then, in the middle of the election campaign, he changed the subject.

No one can now doubt the effectiveness of the President’s political operation. Here’s one measure: between May and September, the number of Iraq stories that made page 1 of the Times and the Washington Post dropped by more than a third. During the same period, the percentage of Americans who support the President’s handling of the war increased. It’s the mark of a truly brilliant reëlection campaign that these trends at home are occurring against a background of ever-increasing violence and despair in Iraq. The latest reports from mainstream think tanks, such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies, show every indicator of progress moving in the wrong direction. In July, the National Intelligence Council issued a classified and quite gloomy analysis of Iraq which had no effect on the President’s rhetoric or on his policy. After a year and a half of improvising and muddling through, there seems to be no clear way forward and no good way out. But because the President—as his chief of staff, Andrew Card, recently said—regards Americans as ten-year-old children, don’t expect to hear an honest discussion about any of this from the White House. (The President’s party, however, is trying to force congress to vote, just before the election, on a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning—no doubt to bring the country a little closer to victory in Iraq.)

The problem with making sausage the President’s way—other than the fact that it deceives the public, precludes a serious debate, bitterly divides the body politic when war requires unity, exposes American soldiers to greater risk, substitutes half measures for thoroughgoing efforts, and insures that no one will be held accountable for mistakes that will never be corrected—is that it doesn’t work. What determines success in this war is what happens in Iraq and how Iraqis perceive it. If U.S.A.I.D. releases a report that prettifies the truth, officials here might breathe easier for a while, but it won’t speed up the reconstruction of Iraq. Covering up failures only widens the gap in perception between Washington and Baghdad—which, in turn, makes Washington less capable of grasping the reality of Iraq and responding to it. Eventually, the failures announce themselves anyway—in a series of suicide bombings, a slow attrition of Iraqi confidence, a sudden insurrection. War, unlike budget forecasts and campaign coverage, is quite merciless with falsehood.

In refusing to look at Iraq honestly, President Bush has made defeat there more likely. This failing is only the most important repetition of a recurring theme in the war against radical Islam: the distance between Bush’s soaring, often inspiring language and the insufficiency of his actions. When he speaks, as he did at the Republican Convention, about the power of freedom to change the world, he is sounding deep notes in the American political psyche. His opponent comes nowhere close to making such music. But if Iraq looks nothing like the President’s vision—if Iraq is visibly deteriorating, and no one in authority will admit it—the speeches can produce only illusion or cynicism. In what may be an extended case of overcompensation, so much of the President’s conduct in the war has become an assertion of personal will. Bush’s wartime hero, Winston Churchill, offered his countrymen nothing but blood, toil, tears, and sweat. Bush offers optimistic forecasts, permanent tax cuts, and his own stirring resolve.

As the campaign moves toward its finish, Senator Kerry seems unable to point any of this out, let alone exploit it. On Iraq, he has said almost everything possible, which makes it difficult for him to say anything. It’s understandable that the war fills him with ambivalence. The President’s actions have led the country into a blind alley; there’s no new strategy for Kerry to propose, and the press should stop insisting that he come up with one when the candidate who started the war feels no such obligation. But the Senator has allowed the public to think that the President, against all the evidence of his record, will fight the war in Iraq and the larger war against radical Islam with more success. If Kerry loses the election, this will be the reason.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Freedom is on the march...
G W Bush

[fioco]

Is it coming, or going?

[Schadenfrau]

It's not marching anymore: it's sprinting away.

[ZippyTheChimp]

October 3, 2004

How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence

By DAVID BARSTOW, WILLIAM J. BROAD and JEFF GERTH

In 2002, at a crucial juncture on the path to war, senior members of the Bush administration gave a series of speeches and interviews in which they asserted that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program. Speaking to a group of Wyoming Republicans in September, Vice President Dick Cheney said the United States now had "irrefutable evidence" - thousands of tubes made of high-strength aluminum, tubes that the Bush administration said were destined for clandestine Iraqi uranium centrifuges, before some were seized at the behest of the United States.

Those tubes became a critical exhibit in the administration's brief against Iraq. As the only physical evidence the United States could brandish of Mr. Hussein's revived nuclear ambitions, they gave credibility to the apocalyptic imagery invoked by President Bush and his advisers. The tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs," Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, explained on CNN on Sept. 8, 2002. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

But almost a year before, Ms. Rice's staff had been told that the government's foremost nuclear experts seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons, according to four officials at the Central Intelligence Agency and two senior administration officials, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity. The experts, at the Energy Department, believed the tubes were likely intended for small artillery rockets.

The White House, though, embraced the disputed theory that the tubes were for nuclear centrifuges, an idea first championed in April 2001 by a junior analyst at the C.I.A. Senior nuclear scientists considered that notion implausible, yet in the months after 9/11, as the administration built a case for confronting Iraq, the centrifuge theory gained currency as it rose to the top of the government.

Senior administration officials repeatedly failed to fully disclose the contrary views of America's leading nuclear scientists, an examination by The New York Times has found. They sometimes overstated even the most dire intelligence assessments of the tubes, yet minimized or rejected the strong doubts of nuclear experts. They worried privately that the nuclear case was weak, but expressed sober certitude in public.

One result was a largely one-sided presentation to the public that did not convey the depth of evidence and argument against the administration's most tangible proof of a revived nuclear weapons program in Iraq.

Today, 18 months after the invasion of Iraq, investigators there have found no evidence of hidden centrifuges or a revived nuclear weapons program. The absence of unconventional weapons in Iraq is now widely seen as evidence of a profound intelligence failure, of an intelligence community blinded by "group think," false assumptions and unreliable human sources.

Yet the tale of the tubes, pieced together through records and interviews with senior intelligence officers, nuclear experts, administration officials and Congressional investigators, reveals a different failure.

Far from "group think," American nuclear and intelligence experts argued bitterly over the tubes. A "holy war" is how one Congressional investigator described it. But if the opinions of the nuclear experts were seemingly disregarded at every turn, an overwhelming momentum gathered behind the C.I.A. assessment. It was a momentum built on a pattern of haste, secrecy, ambiguity, bureaucratic maneuver and a persistent failure in the Bush administration and among both Republicans and Democrats in Congress to ask hard questions.

Precisely how knowledge of the intelligence dispute traveled through the upper reaches of the administration is unclear. Ms. Rice knew about the debate before her Sept. 2002 CNN appearance, but only learned of the alternative rocket theory of the tubes soon afterward, according to two senior administration officials. President Bush learned of the debate at roughly the same time, a senior administration official said.

Last week, when asked about the tubes, administration officials said they relied on repeated assurances by George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, that the tubes were in fact for centrifuges. They also noted that the intelligence community, including the Energy Department, largely agreed that Mr. Hussein had revived his nuclear program.

"These judgments sometimes require members of the intelligence community to make tough assessments about competing interpretations of facts," said Sean McCormack, a spokesman for the president.

Mr. Tenet declined to be interviewed. But in a statement, he said he "made it clear" to the White House "that the case for a possible nuclear program in Iraq was weaker than that for chemical and biological weapons." Regarding the tubes, Mr. Tenet said "alternative views were shared" with the administration after the intelligence community drafted a new National Intelligence Estimate in late September 2002.

The tubes episode is a case study of the intersection between the politics of pre-emption and the inherent ambiguity of intelligence. The tubes represented a scientific puzzle and rival camps of experts clashed over the tiniest technical details in secure rooms in Washington, London and Vienna. The stakes were high, and they knew it.

So did a powerful vice president who saw in 9/11 horrifying confirmation of his long-held belief that the United States too often naïvely underestimates the cunning and ruthlessness of its foes.

"We have a tendency - I don't know if it's part of the American character - to say, 'Well, we'll sit down and we'll evaluate the evidence, we'll draw a conclusion,' " Mr. Cheney said as he discussed the tubes in September 2002 on the NBC News program "Meet the Press."

"But we always think in terms that we've got all the evidence,'' he said. "Here, we don't have all the evidence. We have 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent. We don't know how much. We know we have a part of the picture. And that part of the picture tells us that he is, in fact, actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons."

Joe Raises the Tube Issue

Throughout the 1990's, United States intelligence agencies were deeply preoccupied with the status of Iraq's nuclear weapons program, and with good reason.

After the Persian Gulf war in 1991, arms inspectors discovered that Iraq had been far closer to building an atomic bomb than even the worst-case estimates had envisioned. And no one believed that Saddam Hussein had abandoned his nuclear ambitions. To the contrary, in one secret assessment after another, the agencies concluded that Iraq was conducting low-level theoretical research and quietly plotting to resume work on nuclear weapons.

But at the start of the Bush administration, the intelligence agencies also agreed that Iraq had not in fact resumed its nuclear weapons program. Iraq's nuclear infrastructure, they concluded, had been dismantled by sanctions and inspections. In short, Mr. Hussein's nuclear ambitions appeared to have been contained.

Then Iraq started shopping for tubes.

According to a 511-page report on flawed prewar intelligence by the Senate Intelligence Committee, the agencies learned in early 2001 of a plan by Iraq to buy 60,000 high-strength aluminum tubes from Hong Kong.

The tubes were made from 7075-T6 aluminum, an extremely hard alloy that made them potentially suitable as rotors in a uranium centrifuge. Properly designed, such tubes are strong enough to spin at the terrific speeds needed to convert uranium gas into enriched uranium, an essential ingredient of an atomic bomb. For this reason, international rules prohibited Iraq from importing certain sizes of 7075-T6 aluminum tubes; it was also why a new C.I.A. analyst named Joe quickly sounded the alarm.

At the C.I.A.'s request, The Times agreed to use only Joe's first name; the agency said publishing his full name could hinder his ability to operate overseas.

Joe graduated from the University of Kentucky in the late 1970's with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, then joined the Goodyear Atomic Corporation, which dispatched him to Oak Ridge, Tenn., a federal complex that specializes in uranium and national security research.

Joe went to work on a new generation of centrifuges. Many European models stood no more than 10 feet tall. The American centrifuges loomed 40 feet high, and Joe's job was to learn how to test and operate them. But when the project was canceled in 1985, Joe spent the next decade performing hazard analyses for nuclear reactors, gaseous diffusion plants and oil refineries.

In 1997, Joe transferred to a national security complex at Oak Ridge known as Y-12, his entry into intelligence work. His assignment was to track global sales of material used in nuclear arms. He retired after two years, taking a buyout with hundreds of others at Oak Ridge, and moved to the C.I.A.

The agency's ability to assess nuclear intelligence had markedly declined after the cold war, and Joe's appointment was part of an effort to regain lost expertise. He was assigned to a division eventually known as Winpac, for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control. Winpac had hundreds of employees, but only a dozen or so with a technical background in nuclear arms and fuel production. None had Joe's hands-on experience operating centrifuges.

Suddenly, Joe's work was ending up in classified intelligence reports being read in the White House. Indeed, his analysis was the primary basis for one of the agency's first reports on the tubes, which went to senior members of the Bush administration on April 10, 2001. The tubes, the report asserted, "have little use other than for a uranium enrichment program."

This alarming assessment was immediately challenged by the Energy Department, which builds centrifuges and runs the government's nuclear weapons complex.

The next day, Energy Department officials ticked off a long list of reasons why the tubes did not appear well suited for centrifuges. Simply put, the analysis concluded that the tubes were the wrong size - too narrow, too heavy, too long - to be of much practical use in a centrifuge.

What was more, the analysis reasoned, if the tubes were part of a secret, high-risk venture to build a nuclear bomb, why were the Iraqis haggling over prices with suppliers all around the world? And why weren't they shopping for all the other sensitive equipment needed for centrifuges?

All fine questions. But if the tubes were not for a centrifuge, what were they for?

Within weeks, the Energy Department experts had an answer.

It turned out, they reported, that Iraq had for years used high-strength aluminum tubes to make combustion chambers for slim rockets fired from launcher pods. Back in 1996, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency had even examined some of those tubes, also made of 7075-T6 aluminum, at a military complex, the Nasser metal fabrication plant in Baghdad, where the Iraqis acknowledged making rockets. According to the international agency, the rocket tubes, some 66,000 of them, were 900 millimeters in length, with a diameter of 81 millimeters and walls 3.3 millimeters thick.

The tubes now sought by Iraq had precisely the same dimensions - a perfect match.

That finding was published May 9, 2001, in the Daily Intelligence Highlight, a secret Energy Department newsletter published on Intelink, a Web site for the intelligence community and the White House.

Joe and his Winpac colleagues at the C.I.A. were not persuaded. Yes, they conceded, the tubes could be used as rocket casings. But that made no sense, they argued in a new report, because Iraq wanted tubes made at tolerances that "far exceed any known conventional weapons." In other words, Iraq was demanding a level of precision craftsmanship unnecessary for ordinary mass-produced rockets.

More to the point, those analysts had hit on a competing theory: that the tubes' dimensions matched those used in an early uranium centrifuge developed in the 1950's by a German scientist, Gernot Zippe. Most centrifuge designs are highly classified; this one, though, was readily available in science reports.

Thus, well before Sept. 11, 2001, the debate within the intelligence community was already neatly framed: Were the tubes for rockets or centrifuges?

Experts Attack Joe's Case

It was a simple question with enormous implications. If Mr. Hussein acquired nuclear weapons, American officials feared, he would wield them to menace the Middle East. So the tube question was critical, yet none too easy to answer. The United States had few spies in Iraq, and certainly none who knew Mr. Hussein's plans for the tubes.

But the tubes themselves could yield many secrets. A centrifuge is an intricate device. Not any old tube would do. Careful inquiry might answer the question.

The intelligence community embarked on an ambitious international operation to intercept the tubes before they could get to Iraq. The big break came in June 2001: a shipment was seized in Jordan.

At the Energy Department, those examining the tubes included scientists who had spent decades designing and working on centrifuges, and intelligence officers steeped in the tricky business of tracking the nuclear ambitions of America's enemies. They included Dr. Jon A. Kreykes, head of Oak Ridge's national security advanced technology group; Dr. Duane F. Starr, an expert on nuclear proliferation threats; and Dr. Edward Von Halle, a retired Oak Ridge nuclear expert. Dr. Houston G. Wood III, a professor of engineering at the University of Virginia who had helped design the 40-foot American centrifuge, advised the team and consulted with Dr. Zippe.

On questions about nuclear centrifuges, this was unambiguously the A-Team of the intelligence community, many experts say.

On Aug. 17, 2001, weeks before the twin towers fell, the team published a secret Technical Intelligence Note, a detailed analysis that laid out its doubts about the tubes' suitability for centrifuges.

First, in size and material, the tubes were very different from those Iraq had used in its centrifuge prototypes before the first gulf war. Those models used tubes that were nearly twice as wide and made of exotic materials that performed far better than aluminum. "Aluminum was a huge step backwards," Dr. Wood recalled.

In fact, the team could find no centrifuge machines "deployed in a production environment" that used such narrow tubes. Their walls were three times too thick for "favorable use" in a centrifuge, the team wrote. They were also anodized, meaning they had a special coating to protect them from weather. Anodized tubes, the team pointed out, are "not consistent" with a uranium centrifuge because the coating can produce bad reactions with uranium gas.

In other words, if Joe and his Winpac colleagues were right, it meant that Iraq had chosen to forsake years of promising centrifuge work and instead start from scratch, with inferior material built to less-than-optimal dimensions.

The Energy Department experts did not think that made much sense. They concluded that using the tubes in centrifuges "is credible but unlikely, and a rocket production is the much more likely end use for these tubes." Similar conclusions were being reached by Britain's intelligence service and experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency, a United Nations body.

Unlike Joe, experts at the international agency had worked with Zippe centrifuges, and they spent hours with him explaining why they believed his analysis was flawed. They pointed out errors in his calculations. They noted design discrepancies. They also sent reports challenging the centrifuge claim to American government experts through the embassy in Vienna, a senior official said.

Likewise, Britain's experts believed the tubes would need "substantial re-engineering" to work in centrifuges, according to Britain's review of its prewar intelligence. Their experts found it "paradoxical" that Iraq would order such finely crafted tubes only to radically rebuild each one for a centrifuge. Yes, it was theoretically possible, but as an Energy Department analyst later told Senate investigators, it was also theoretically possible to "turn your new Yugo into a Cadillac."

In late 2001, intelligence analysts at the State Department also took issue with Joe's work in reports prepared for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Joe was "very convinced, but not very convincing," recalled Greg Thielmann, then director of strategic, proliferation and military affairs in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

By year's end, Energy Department analysts published a classified report that even more firmly rejected the theory that the tubes could work as rotors in a 1950's Zippe centrifuge. These particular Zippe centrifuges, they noted, were especially ill suited for bomb making. The machines were a prototype designed for laboratory experiments and meant to be operated as single units. To produce enough enriched uranium to make just one bomb a year, Iraq would need up to 16,000 of them working in concert, a challenge for even the most sophisticated centrifuge plants.

Iraq had never made more than a dozen centrifuge prototypes. Half failed when rotors broke. Of the rest, one actually worked to enrich uranium, Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, who once ran Iraq's centrifuge program, said in an interview last week.

The Energy Department team concluded it was "unlikely that anyone" could build a centrifuge site capable of producing significant amounts of enriched uranium "based on these tubes." One analyst summed it up this way: the tubes were so poorly suited for centrifuges, he told Senate investigators, that if Iraq truly wanted to use them this way, "we should just give them the tubes."

Enter Cheney

In the months after Sept. 11, 2001, as the Bush administration devised a strategy to fight Al Qaeda, Vice President Cheney immersed himself in the world of top-secret threat assessments. Bob Woodward, in his book "Plan of Attack," described Mr. Cheney as the administration's new "self-appointed special examiner of worst-case scenarios," and it was a role that fit.

Mr. Cheney had grappled with national security threats for three decades, first as President Gerald R. Ford's chief of staff, later as secretary of defense for the first President Bush. He was on intimate terms with the intelligence community, 15 spy agencies that frequently feuded over the significance of raw intelligence. He knew well their record of getting it wrong (the Bay of Pigs) and underestimating threats (Mr. Hussein's pre-1991 nuclear program) and failing to connect the dots (Sept. 11).

As a result, the vice president was not simply a passive recipient of intelligence analysis. He was known as a man who asked hard, skeptical questions, a man who paid attention to detail. "In my office I have a picture of John Adams, the first vice president," Mr. Cheney said in one of his first speeches as vice president. "Adams liked to say, 'The facts are stubborn things.' Whatever the issue, we are going to deal with facts and show a decent regard for other points of view."

With the Taliban routed in Afghanistan after Sept. 11, Mr. Cheney and his aides began to focus on intelligence assessments of Saddam Hussein. Mr. Cheney had long argued for more forceful action to topple Mr. Hussein. But in January 2002, according to Mr. Woodward's book, the C.I.A. told Mr. Cheney that Mr. Hussein could not be removed with covert action alone. His ouster, the agency said, would take an invasion, which would require persuading the public that Iraq posed a threat to the United States.

The evidence for that case was buried in classified intelligence files. Mr. Cheney and his aides began to meet repeatedly with analysts who specialized in Iraq and unconventional weapons. They wanted to know about any Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda and Baghdad's ability to make unconventional weapons.

"There's no question they had a point of view, but there was no attempt to get us to hew to a particular point of view ourselves, or to come to a certain conclusion," the deputy director of analysis at Winpac told the Senate Intelligence Committee. "It was trying to figure out, why do we come to this conclusion, what was the evidence. A lot of questions were asked, probing questions."

Of all the worst-case possibilities, the most terrifying was the idea that Mr. Hussein might slip a nuclear weapon to terrorists, and Mr. Cheney and his staff zeroed in on Mr. Hussein's nuclear ambitions.

Mr. Cheney, for example, read a Feb. 12, 2002, report from the Defense Intelligence Agency about Iraq's reported attempts to buy 500 tons of yellowcake, a uranium concentrate, from Niger, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report. Many American intelligence analysts did not put much stock in the Niger report. Mr. Cheney pressed for more information.

At the same time, a senior intelligence official said, the agency was fielding repeated requests from Mr. Cheney's office for intelligence about the tubes, including updates on Iraq's continuing efforts to procure thousands more after the seizure in Jordan.

"Remember," Dr. David A. Kay, the chief American arms inspector after the war, said in an interview, "the tubes were the only piece of physical evidence about the Iraqi weapons programs that they had."

In March 2002, Mr. Cheney traveled to Europe and the Middle East to build support for a confrontation with Iraq. It is not known whether he mentioned Niger or the tubes in his meetings. But on his return, he made it clear that he had repeatedly discussed Mr. Hussein and the nuclear threat.

"He is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time," Mr. Cheney asserted on CNN.

At the time, the C.I.A. had not reached so firm a conclusion. But on March 12, the day Mr. Cheney landed in the Middle East, he and other senior administration officials had been sent two C.I.A. reports about the tubes. Each cited the tubes as evidence that "Iraq currently may be trying to reconstitute its gas centrifuge program."

Neither report, however, mentioned that leading centrifuge experts at the Energy Department strongly disagreed, according to Congressional officials who have read the reports.

What White House Is Told

As the Senate Intelligence Committee report made clear, the American intelligence community "is not a level playing field when it comes to the competition of ideas in intelligence analysis."

The C.I.A. has a distinct edge: "unique access to policy makers and unique control of intelligence reporting," the report found. The Presidential Daily Briefs, for example, are prepared and presented by agency analysts; the agency's director is the president's principal intelligence adviser. This allows agency analysts to control the presentation of information to policy makers "without having to explain dissenting views or defend their analysis from potential challenges," the committee's report said.

This problem, the report said, was "particularly evident" with the C.I.A.'s analysis of the tubes, when agency analysts "lost objectivity and in several cases took action that improperly excluded useful expertise from the intelligence debate." In interviews, Senate investigators said the agency's written assessments did a poor job of describing the debate over the intelligence.

From April 2001 to September 2002, the agency wrote at least 15 reports on the tubes. Many were sent only to high-level policy makers, including President Bush, and did not circulate to other intelligence agencies. None have been released, though some were described in the Senate's report.

Several senior C.I.A. officials insisted that those reports did describe at least in general terms the intelligence debate. "You don't go into all that detail but you do try to evince it when you write your current product," one agency official said.

But several Congressional and intelligence officials with access to the 15 assessments said not one of them informed senior policy makers of the Energy Department's dissent. They described a series of reports, some with ominous titles, that failed to convey either the existence or the substance of the intensifying debate.

Over and over, the reports restated Joe's main conclusions for the C.I.A. - that the tubes matched the 1950's Zippe centrifuge design and were built to specifications that "exceeded any known conventional weapons application." They did not state what Energy Department experts had noted - that many common industrial items, even aluminum cans, were made to specifications as good or better than the tubes sought by Iraq. Nor did the reports acknowledge a significant error in Joe's claim - that the tubes "matched" those used in a Zippe centrifuge.

The tubes sought by Iraq had a wall thickness of 3.3 millimeters. When Energy Department experts checked with Dr. Zippe, a step Joe did not take, they learned that the walls of Zippe tubes did not exceed 1.1 millimeters, a substantial difference.

"They never lay out the other case," one Congressional official said of those C.I.A. assessments.

The Senate report provides only a partial picture of the agency's communications with the White House. In an arrangement endorsed by both parties, the Intelligence Committee agreed to delay an examination of whether White House descriptions of Iraq's military capabilities were "substantiated by intelligence information." As a result, Senate investigators were not permitted to interview White House officials about what they knew of the tubes debate and when they knew it.

But in interviews, C.I.A. and administration officials disclosed that the dissenting views were repeatedly discussed in meetings and telephone calls.

One senior official at the agency said its "fundamental approach" was to tell policy makers about dissenting views. Another senior official acknowledged that some of their agency's reports "weren't as well caveated as, in retrospect, they should have been." But he added, "There was certainly nothing that was hidden."

Four agency officials insisted that Winpac analysts repeatedly explained the contrasting assessments during briefings with senior National Security Council officials who dealt with nuclear proliferation issues. "We think we were reasonably clear about this," a senior C.I.A. official said.

A senior administration official confirmed that Winpac was indeed candid about the differing views. The official, who recalled at least a half dozen C.I.A. briefings on tubes, said he knew by late 2001 that there were differing views on the tubes. "To the best of my knowledge, he never hid anything from me," the official said of his counterpart at Winpac.

This official said he also spoke to senior officials at the Department of Energy about the tubes, and a spokeswoman for the department said in a written statement that the agency "strongly conveyed its viewpoint to senior policy makers."

But if senior White House officials understood the department's main arguments against the tubes, they also took into account its caveats. "As far as I know," the senior administration official said, "D.O.E. never concluded that these tubes could not be used for centrifuges."

A Referee Is Ignored

Over the summer of 2002, the White House secretly refined plans to invade Iraq and debated whether to seek more United Nations inspections. At the same time, in response to a White House request in May, C.I.A. officials were quietly working on a report that would lay out for the public declassified evidence of Iraq's reported unconventional weapons and ties to terror groups.

That same summer the tubes debate continued to rage. The primary antagonists were the C.I.A. and the Energy Department, with other intelligence agencies drawn in on either side.

Much of the strife centered on Joe. At first glance, he seemed an unlikely target. He held a relatively junior position, and according to the C.I.A. he did not write the vast majority of the agency's reports on the tubes. He has never met Mr. Cheney. His one trip to the White House was to take his family on the public tour.

But he was, as one staff member on the Senate Intelligence Committee put it, "the ringleader" of a small group of Winpac analysts who were convinced that the tubes were destined for centrifuges. His views carried special force within the agency because he was the only Winpac analyst with experience operating uranium centrifuges. In meetings with other intelligence agencies, he often took the lead in arguing the technical basis for the agency's conclusions.

"Very few people have the technical knowledge to independently arrive at the conclusion he did," said Dr. Kay, the weapons inspector, when asked to explain Joe's influence.

Without identifying him, the Senate Intelligence Committee's report repeatedly questioned Joe's competence and integrity. It portrayed him as so determined to prove his theory that he twisted test results, ignored factual discrepancies and excluded dissenting views.

The Senate report, for example, challenged his decision not to consult the Energy Department on tests designed to see if the tubes were strong enough for centrifuges. Asked why he did not seek their help, Joe told the committee: "Because we funded it. It was our testing. We were trying to prove some things that we wanted to prove with the testing." The Senate report singled out that comment for special criticism, saying, "The committee believes that such an effort should never have been intended to prove what the C.I.A. wanted to prove."

Joe's superiors strongly defend his work and say his words were taken out of context. They describe him as diligent and professional, an open-minded analyst willing to go the extra mile to test his theories. "Part of the job of being an analyst is to evaluate alternative hypotheses and possibilities, to build a case, think of alternatives," a senior agency official said. "That's what Joe did in this case. If he turned out to be wrong, that's not an offense. He was expected to be wrong occasionally."

Still, the bureaucratic infighting was by then so widely known that even the Australian government was aware of it. "U.S. agencies differ on whether aluminum tubes, a dual-use item sought by Iraq, were meant for gas centrifuges," Australia's intelligence services wrote in a July 2002 assessment. The same report said the tubes evidence was "patchy and inconclusive."

There was a mechanism, however, to resolve the dispute. It was called the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee, a secret body of experts drawn from across the federal government. For a half century, Jaeic (pronounced jake) has been called on to resolve disputes and give authoritative assessments about nuclear intelligence. The committee had specifically assessed the Iraqi nuclear threat in 1989, 1997 and 1999. An Energy Department expert was the committee's chairman in 2002, and some department officials say the C.I.A. opposed calling in Jaeic to mediate the tubes fight.

Not so, agency officials said. In July 2002, they insist, they were the first intelligence agency to seek Jaeic's intervention. "I personally was concerned about the extent of the community's disagreement on this and the fact that we weren't getting very far," a senior agency official recalled.

The committee held a formal session in early August to discuss the debate, with more than a dozen experts on both sides in attendance. A second meeting was scheduled for later in August but was postponed. A third meeting was set for early September; it never happened either.

"We were O.B.E. - overcome by events," an official involved in the proceedings recalled.

White House Makes a Move

"The case of Saddam Hussein, a sworn enemy of our country, requires a candid appraisal of the facts," Mr. Cheney said on Aug. 26, 2002, at the outset of an address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in Nashville.

Warning against "wishful thinking or willful blindness," Mr. Cheney used the speech to lay out a rationale for pre-emptive action against Iraq. Simply resuming United Nations inspections, he argued, could give "false comfort" that Mr. Hussein was contained.

"We now know Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," he declared, words that quickly made headlines worldwide. "Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon. Just how soon, we cannot really gauge. Intelligence is an uncertain business, even in the best of circumstances."

But the world, Mr. Cheney warned, could ill afford to once again underestimate Iraq's progress.

"Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and seated atop 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten America's friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail."

A week later President Bush announced that he would ask Congress for authorization to oust Mr. Hussein. He also met that day with senior members of the House and Senate, some of whom expressed concern that the administration had yet to show the American people tangible evidence of an imminent threat. The fact that Mr. Hussein gassed his own people in the 1980's, they argued, was not sufficient evidence of a threat to the United States in 2002.

President Bush got the message. He directed Mr. Cheney to give the public and Congress a more complete picture of the latest intelligence on Iraq.

In his Nashville speech, Mr. Cheney had not mentioned the aluminum tubes or any other fresh intelligence when he said, "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." The one specific source he did cite was Hussein Kamel al-Majid, a son-in-law of Mr. Hussein's who defected in 1994 after running Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. But Mr. Majid told American intelligence officials in 1995 that Iraq's nuclear program had been dismantled. What's more, Mr. Majid could not have had any insight into Mr. Hussein's current nuclear activities: he was assassinated in 1996 on his return to Iraq.

The day after President Bush announced he was seeking Congressional authorization, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, traveled to Capitol Hill to brief the four top Congressional leaders. After the 90-minute session, J. Dennis Hastert, the House speaker, told Fox News that Mr. Cheney had provided new information about unconventional weapons, and Fox went on to report that one source said the new intelligence described "just how dangerously close Saddam Hussein has come to developing a nuclear bomb."

Tom Daschle, the South Dakota Democrat and Senate majority leader, was more cautious. "What has changed over the course of the last 10 years, that brings this country to the belief that it has to act in a pre-emptive fashion in invading Iraq?" he asked.

A few days later, on Sept. 8., the lead article on Page 1 of The New York Times gave the first detailed account of the aluminum tubes. The article cited unidentified senior administration officials who insisted that the dimensions, specifications and numbers of tubes sought showed that they were intended for a nuclear weapons program.

"The closer he gets to a nuclear capability, the more credible is his threat to use chemical and biological weapons," a senior administration official was quoted as saying. "Nuclear weapons are his hole card."

The article gave no hint of a debate over the tubes.

The White House did much to increase the impact of The Times' article. The morning it was published, Mr. Cheney went on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" and confirmed when asked that the tubes were the most alarming evidence behind the administration's view that Iraq had resumed its nuclear weapons program. The tubes, he said, had "raised our level of concern." Ms. Rice, the national security adviser, went on CNN and said the tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs."

Neither official mentioned that the nation's top nuclear design experts believed overwhelmingly that the tubes were poorly suited for centrifuges.

Mr. Cheney, who has a history of criticizing officials who disclose sensitive information, typically refuses to comment when asked about secret intelligence. Yet on this day, with a Gallup poll showing that 58 percent of Americans did not believe President Bush had done enough to explain why the United States should act against Iraq, Mr. Cheney spoke openly about one of the closest held secrets regarding Iraq. Not only did Mr. Cheney draw attention to the tubes; he did so with a certitude that could not be found in even the C.I.A.'s assessments. On "Meet the Press," Mr. Cheney said he knew "for sure" and "in fact" and "with absolute certainty" that Mr. Hussein was buying equipment to build a nuclear weapon.

"He has reconstituted his nuclear program," Mr. Cheney said flatly.

But in the C.I.A. reports, evidence "suggested" or "could mean" or "indicates" - a word used in a report issued just weeks earlier. Little if anything was asserted with absolute certainty. The intelligence community had not yet concluded that Iraq had indeed reconstituted its nuclear program.

"The vice president's public statements have reflected the evolving judgment of the intelligence community," Kevin Kellems, Mr. Cheney's spokesman, said in a written statement.

The C.I.A. routinely checks presidential speeches that draw on intelligence reports. This is how intelligence professionals pull politicians back from factual errors. One such opportunity came soon after Mr. Cheney's appearance on "Meet the Press." On Sept. 11, 2002, the White House asked the agency to clear for possible presidential use a passage on Iraq's nuclear program. The passage included this sentence: "Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used in centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."

The agency did not ask speechwriters to make clear that centrifuges were but one possible use, that intelligence experts were divided and that the tubes also matched those used in Iraqi rockets. In fact, according to the Senate's investigation, the agency suggested no changes at all.

The next day President Bush used virtually identical language when he cited the aluminum tubes in an address to the United Nations General Assembly.

Dissent, but to Little Effect

The administration's talk of clandestine centrifuges, nuclear blackmail and mushroom clouds had a powerful political effect, particularly on senators who were facing fall election campaigns. "When you hear about nuclear weapons, this is the national security knock-out punch," said Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon who sits on the Intelligence Committee and ultimately voted against authorizing war.

Even so, it did not take long for questions to surface over the administration's claims about Mr. Hussein's nuclear capabilities. As it happened, Senator Dianne Feinstein, another Democratic member of the Intelligence Committee, had visited the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna in August 2002. Officials there, she later recalled, told her they saw no signs of a revived nuclear weapons program in Iraq.

At that point, the tubes debate was in its 16th month. Yet Mr. Tenet, of the C.I.A., the man most responsible for briefing President Bush on intelligence, told the committee that he was unaware until that September of the profound disagreement over critical evidence that Mr. Bush was citing to world leaders as justification for war.

Even now, committee members from both parties express baffled anger at this possibility. How could he not know? "I don't even understand it," Olympia Snowe, a Republican senator from Maine, said in an interview. "I cannot comprehend the failures in judgment or breakdowns in communication."

Mr. Tenet told Senate investigators that he did not expect to learn of dissenting opinions "until the issue gets joined" at the highest levels of the intelligence community. But if Mr. Tenet's lack of knowledge meant the president was given incomplete information about the tubes, there was still plenty of time for the White House to become fully informed.

Yet so far, Senate investigators say, they have found little evidence the White House tried to find out why so many experts disputed the C.I.A. tubes theory. If anything, administration officials minimized the divide.

On Sept. 13, The Times made the first public mention of the tubes debate in the sixth paragraph of an article on Page A13. In it an unidentified senior administration official dismissed the debate as a "footnote, not a split." Citing another unidentified administration official, the story reported that the "best technical experts and nuclear scientists at laboratories like Oak Ridge supported the C.I.A. assessments."

As a senior Oak Ridge official pointed out to the Intelligence Committee, "the vast majority of scientists and nuclear experts" in the Energy Department's laboratories in fact disagreed with the agency. But on Sept. 13, the day the article appeared, the Energy Department sent a directive forbidding employees from discussing the subject with reporters.

The Energy Department, in a written statement, said that it was "completely appropriate" to remind employees of the need to protect nuclear secrets and that it had made no effort "to quash dissent."

In closed hearings that month, though, Congress began to hear testimony about the debate. Several Democrats said in interviews that secrecy rules had prevented them from speaking out about the gap between the administration's view of the tubes and the more benign explanations described in classified testimony.

One senior C.I.A. official recalled cautioning members of Congress in a closed session not to speak publicly about the possibility that the tubes were for rockets. "If people start talking about that and the Iraqis see that people are saying rocket bodies, that will automatically become their explanation whenever anyone goes to Iraq," the official said in an interview.

So while administration officials spoke freely about the agency's theory, the evidence that best challenged this view remained almost entirely off limits for public debate.

In late September, the C.I.A. sent policymakers its most detailed classified report on the tubes. For the first time, an agency report acknowledged that "some in the intelligence community" believed rockets were "more likely end uses" for the tubes, according to officials who have seen the report.

Meanwhile, at the Energy Department, scientists were startled to find senior White House officials embracing a view of the tubes they considered thoroughly discredited. "I was really shocked in 2002 when I saw it was still there," Dr. Wood, the Oak Ridge adviser, said of the centrifuge claim. "I thought it had been put to bed."

Members of the Energy Department team took a highly unusual step: They began working quietly with a Washington arms-control group, the Institute for Science and International Security, to help the group inform the public about the debate, said one team member and the group's president, David Albright.

On Sept. 23, the institute issued the first in series of lengthy reports that repeated some of the Energy Department's arguments against the C.I.A. analysis, though no classified ones. Still, after more than 16 months of secret debate, it was the first public airing of facts that undermined the most alarming suggestions about Iraq's nuclear threat.

The reports got little attention, partly because reporters did not realize they had been done with the cooperation of top Energy Department experts. The Washington Post ran a brief article about the findings on Page A18. Many major newspapers, including The Times, ran nothing at all.

Scrambling for an 'Estimate'

Soon after Mr. Cheney's appearance on "Meet the Press," Democratic senators began pressing for a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, terrorism and unconventional weapons. A National Intelligence Estimate is a classified document that is supposed to reflect the combined judgment of the entire intelligence community. The last such estimate had been done in 2000.

Most estimates take months to complete. But this one had to be done in days, in time for an October vote on a war resolution. There was little time for review or reflection, and no time for Jaeic, the joint committee, to reconcile deep analytical differences.

This was a potentially thorny obstacle for those writing the nuclear section: What do you do when the nation's nuclear experts strongly doubt the linchpin evidence behind the C.I.A.'s claims that Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear weapons program?

The Energy Department helped solve the problem. In meetings on the estimate, senior department intelligence officials said that while they still did not believe the tubes were for centrifuges, they nonetheless could agree that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons capability.

Several senior scientists inside the department said they were stunned by that stance; they saw no compelling evidence of a revived nuclear program.

Some laboratory officials blamed time pressure and inexperience. Thomas S. Ryder, the department's representative at the meetings, had been acting director of the department's intelligence unit for only five months. "A heck of a nice guy but not savvy on technical issues," is the way one senior nuclear official described Mr. Ryder, who declined comment.

Mr. Ryder's position was more alarming than prior assessments from the Energy Department. In an August 2001 intelligence paper, department analysts warned of suspicious activities in Iraq that "could be preliminary steps" toward reviving a centrifuge program. In July 2002 an Energy Department report, "Nuclear Reconstitution Efforts Underway?", noted that several developments, including Iraq's suspected bid to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger, suggested Baghdad was "seeking to reconstitute" a nuclear weapons program.

According to intelligence officials who took part in the meetings, Mr. Ryder justified his department's now firm position on nuclear reconstitution in large part by citing the Niger reports. Many C.I.A. analysts considered that intelligence suspect, as did analysts at the State Department.

Nevertheless, the estimate's authors seized on the Energy Department's position to avoid the entire tubes debate, with written dissents relegated to a 10-page annex. The estimate would instead emphasize that the C.I.A. and the Energy Department both agreed that Mr. Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program. Only the closest reader would see that each agency was basing its assessment in large measure on evidence the other considered suspect.

On Oct. 2, nine days before the Senate vote on the war resolution, the new National Intelligence Estimate was delivered to the Intelligence Committee. The most significant change from past estimates dealt with nuclear weapons; the new one agreed with Mr. Cheney that Iraq was in aggressive pursuit of the atomic bomb.

Asked when Mr. Cheney became aware of the disagreements over the tubes, Mr. Kellems, his spokesman, said, "The vice president knew about the debate at about the time of the National Intelligence Estimate."

Today, the Intelligence Committee's report makes clear, that 93-page estimate stands as one of the most flawed documents in the history of American intelligence. The committee concluded unanimously that most of the major findings in the estimate were wrong, unfounded or overblown.

This was especially true of the nuclear section.

Estimates express their most important findings with high, moderate or low confidence levels. This one claimed "moderate confidence" on how fast Iraq could have a bomb, but "high confidence" that Baghdad was rebuilding its nuclear program. And the tubes were the leading and most detailed evidence cited in the body of the report.

According to the committee, the passages on the tubes, which adopted much of the C.I.A. analysis, were misleading and riddled with factual errors.

The estimate, for example, included a chart intended to show that the dimensions of the tubes closely matched a Zippe centrifuge. Yet the chart omitted the dimensions of Iraq's 81-millimeter rocket, which precisely matched the tubes.

The estimate cited Iraq's alleged willingness to pay top dollar for the tubes, up to $17.50 each, as evidence they were for secret centrifuges. But Defense Department rocket engineers told Senate investigators that 7075-T6 aluminum is "the material of choice for low-cost rocket systems."

The estimate also asserted that 7075-T6 tubes were "poor choices" for rockets. In fact, similar tubes were used in rockets from several countries, including the United States, and in an Italian rocket, the Medusa, which Iraq had copied.

Beyond tubes, the estimate cited several other "key judgments" that supported its assessment. The committee found that intelligence just as flawed.

The estimate, for example, pointed to Iraq's purchases of magnets, balancing machines and machine tools, all of which could be used in a nuclear program. But each item also had legitimate non-nuclear uses, and there was no credible intelligence whatsoever showing they were for a nuclear program.

The estimate said Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission was building new production facilities for nuclear weapons. The Senate found that claim was based on a single operative's report, which described how the commission had constructed one headquarters building and planned "a new high-level polytechnic school."

Finally, the estimate stated that many nuclear scientists had been reassigned to the A.E.C. The Senate found nothing to back that conclusion. It did, though, discover a 2001 report in which a commission employee complained that Iraq's nuclear program "had been stalled since the gulf war."

Such "key judgments" are supposed to reflect the very best American intelligence. (The Niger intelligence, for example, was considered too shaky to be included as a key judgment.) Yet as they studied raw intelligence reports, those involved in the Senate investigation came to a sickening realization. "We kept looking at the intelligence and saying, 'My God, there's nothing here,' " one official recalled.

The Vote for War

Soon after the National Intelligence Estimate was completed, Mr. Bush delivered a speech in Cincinnati in which he described the "grave threat" that Iraq and its "arsenal of terror" posed to the United States. He dwelled longest on nuclear weapons, reviewing much of the evidence outlined in the estimate. The C.I.A. had warned him away from mentioning Niger.

"Facing clear evidence of peril," the president concluded, "we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."

Four days later, on Oct. 11, the Senate voted 77-23 to give Mr. Bush broad authority to invade Iraq. The resolution stated that Iraq posed "a continuing threat" to the United States by, among other things, "actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability."

Many senators who voted for the resolution emphasized the nuclear threat.

"The great danger is a nuclear one," Senator Feinstein, the California Democrat, said on the Senate floor.

But Senator Bob Graham, then chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said he voted against the resolution in part because of doubts about the tubes. "It reinforced in my mind pre-existing questions I had about the unreliability of the intelligence community, especially the C.I.A.," Mr. Graham, a Florida Democrat, said in an interview.

At the Democratic convention in Boston this summer, Senator John Kerry pledged that should he be elected president, "I will ask hard questions and demand hard evidence." But in October 2002, when the Senate voted on Iraq, Mr. Kerry had not read the National Intelligence Estimate, but instead had relied on a briefing from Mr. Tenet, a spokeswoman said. "According to the C.I.A.'s report, all U.S. intelligence experts agree that Iraq is seeking nuclear weapons," Mr. Kerry said then, explaining his vote. "There is little question that Saddam Hussein wants to develop nuclear weapons."

The report cited by Mr. Kerry, an unclassified white paper, said nothing about the tubes debate except that "some" analysts believed the tubes were "probably intended" for conventional arms.

"It is common knowledge that Congress does not have the same access as the executive branch," Brooke Anderson, a Kerry spokeswoman, said yesterday.

Mr. Kerry's running mate, Senator John Edwards, served on the Intelligence Committee, which gave him ample opportunity to ask hard questions. But in voting to authorize war, Mr. Edwards expressed no uncertainty about the principal evidence of Mr. Hussein's alleged nuclear program.

"We know that he is doing everything he can to build nuclear weapons," Mr. Edwards said then.

On Dec. 7, 2002, Iraq submitted a 12,200-page declaration about unconventional arms to the United Nations that made no mention of the tubes. Soon after, Winpac analysts at the C.I.A. assessed the declaration for President Bush. The analysts criticized Iraq for failing to acknowledge or explain why it sought tubes "we believe suitable for use in a gas centrifuge uranium effort." Nor, they said, did it "acknowledge efforts to procure uranium from Niger."

Neither Energy Department nor State Department intelligence experts were given a chance to review the Winpac assessment, prompting complaints that dissenting views were being withheld from policy makers.

"It is most disturbing that Winpac is essentially directing foreign policy in this matter," one Energy Department official wrote in an e-mail message. "There are some very strong points to be made in respect to Iraq's arrogant noncompliance with U.N. sanctions. However, when individuals attempt to convert those 'strong statements' into the 'knock-out' punch, the administration will ultimately look foolish - i.e., the tubes and Niger!"

The U.N. Inspectors Return

For nearly two years Western intelligence analysts had been trying to divine from afar Iraq's plans for the tubes. At the end of 2002, with the resumption of United Nations arms inspections, it became possible to seek answers inside Iraq. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency immediately zeroed in on the tubes.

The team quickly arranged a field trip to the Nasser metal fabrication factory, where they found 13,000 completed rockets, all produced from 7075-T6 aluminum tubes. The Iraqi rocket engineers explained that they had been shopping for more tubes because their supply was running low.

Why order tubes with such tight tolerances? An Iraqi engineer said they wanted to improve the rocket's accuracy without making major design changes. Design documents and procurement records confirmed his account.

The inspectors solved another mystery. The tubes intercepted in Jordan had been anodized, given a protective coating. The Iraqis had a simple explanation: they wanted the new tubes protected from the elements. Sure enough, the inspectors found that many thousands of the older tubes, which had no special coating, were corroded because they had been stored outside.

The inspectors found no trace of a clandestine centrifuge program. On Jan. 10, 2003, The Times reported that the international agency was challenging "the key piece of evidence" behind "the primary rationale for going to war." The article, on Page A10, also reported that officials at the Energy Department and State Department had suggested the tubes might be for rockets.

The C.I.A. theory was in trouble, and senior members of the Bush administration seemed to know it.

Also that January, White House officials who were helping to draft what would become Secretary Powell's speech to the Security Council sent word to the intelligence community that they believed "the nuclear case was weak," the Senate report said. In an interview, a senior administration official said it was widely understood all along at the White House that the evidence of a nuclear threat was piecemeal and weaker than that for other unconventional arms.

But rather than withdraw the nuclear card - a step that could have undermined United States credibility just as tens of thousands of troops were being airlifted to the region - the White House cast about for new arguments and evidence to support it.

Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, asked the intelligence agencies for more evidence beyond the tubes to bolster the nuclear case. Winpac analysts redoubled efforts to prove that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium from Africa. When rocket engineers at the Defense Department were approached by the C.I.A. and asked to compare the Iraqi tubes with American ones, the engineers said the tubes "were perfectly usable for rockets." The agency analysts did not appear pleased. One rocket engineer complained to Senate investigators that the analysts had "an agenda" and were trying "to bias us" into agreeing that the Iraqi tubes were not fit for rockets. In interviews, agency officials denied any such effort.

According to the Intelligence Committee report, the agency also sought to undermine the I.A.E.A.'s work with secret intelligence assessments distributed only to senior policy makers. Nonetheless, on Jan. 22, in a meeting first reported by The Washington Post, the ubiquitous Joe flew to Vienna in a last-ditch attempt to bring the international experts around to his point of view.

The session was a disaster.

"Everybody was embarrassed when he came and made this presentation, embarrassed and disgusted," one participant said. "We were going insane, thinking, 'Where is he coming from?' "

On Jan. 27, the international agency rendered its judgment: it told the Security Council that it had found no evidence of a revived nuclear weapons program in Iraq. "From our analysis to date," the agency reported, "it appears that the aluminum tubes would be consistent with the purpose stated by Iraq and, unless modified, would not be suitable for manufacturing centrifuges."

The Powell Presentation

The next night, during his State of the Union address, President Bush cited I.A.E.A. findings from years past that confirmed that Mr. Hussein had had an "advanced" nuclear weapons program in the 1990's. He did not mention the agency's finding from the day before.

He did, though, repeat the claim that Mr. Hussein was trying to buy tubes "suitable for nuclear weapons production." Mr. Bush also cited British intelligence that Mr. Hussein had recently sought "significant quantities" of uranium from Africa - a reference in 16 words that the White House later said should have been stricken, though the British government now insists the information was credible.

"Saddam Hussein," Mr. Bush said that night, "has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide. The dictator of Iraq is not disarming."

A senior administration official involved in vetting the address said Mr. Bush did not cite the I.A.E.A. conclusion of Jan. 27 because the White House believed the agency was analyzing old Iraqi tubes, not the newer ones seized in Jordan. But senior officials in Vienna and Washington said the international group's analysis covered both types of tubes.

The senior administration official also said the president's words were carefully chosen to reflect the doubts at the Energy Department. The crucial phrase was "suitable for nuclear weapons production." The phrase stopped short of asserting that the tubes were actually being used in centrifuges. And it was accurate in the sense that Energy Department officials always left open the possibility that the tubes could be modified for use in a centrifuge.

"There were differences," the official said, "and we had to address those differences."

In his address, the president announced that Mr. Powell would go before the Security Council on Feb. 5 and lay out the intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs. The purpose was to win international backing for an invasion, and so the administration spent weeks drafting and redrafting the presentation, with heavy input from the C.I.A., the National Security Council and I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney's chief of staff.

The Intelligence Committee said some drafts prepared for Mr. Powell contained language on the tubes that was patently incorrect. The C.I.A. wanted Mr. Powell to say, for example, that Iraq's specifications for roundness were so exacting "that the tubes would be rejected as defective if I rolled one under my hand on this table, because the mere pressure of my hand would deform it."

Intelligence analysts at the State Department waged a quiet battle against much of the proposed language on tubes. A year before, they had sent Mr. Powell a report explaining why they believed the tubes were more likely for rockets. The National Intelligence Estimate included their dissent - that they saw no compelling evidence of a comprehensive effort to revive a nuclear weapons program. Now, in the days before the Security Council speech, they sent the secretary detailed memos warning him away from a long list of assertions in the drafts, the intelligence committee found. The language on the tubes, they said, contained "egregious errors" and "highly misleading" claims. Changes were made, language softened. The line about "the mere pressure of my hand" was removed.

"My colleagues," Mr. Powell assured the Security Council, "every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions."

He made his way to the subject of Mr. Hussein's current nuclear capabilities.

"By now," he said, "just about everyone has heard of these tubes, and we all know there are differences of opinion. There is controversy about what these tubes are for. Most U.S. experts think they are intended to serve as rotors in centrifuges used to enrich uranium. Other experts and the Iraqis themselves argue that they are really to produce the rocket bodies for a conventional weapon, a multiple rocket launcher."

But Mr. Powell did not acknowledge that those "other experts" included many of the nation's most authoritative nuclear experts, some of whom said in interviews that they were offended to find themselves now lumped in with a reviled government.

In making the case that the tubes were for centrifuges, Mr. Powell made claims that his own intelligence experts had told him were not accurate. Mr. Powell, for example, asserted to the Security Council that the tubes were manufactured to a tolerance "that far exceeds U.S. requirements for comparable rockets."

Yet in a memo written two days earlier, Mr. Powell's intelligence experts had specifically cautioned him about those very same words. "In fact," they explained, "the most comparable U.S. system is a tactical rocket - the U.S. Mark 66 air-launched 70-millimeter rocket - that uses the same, high-grade (7075-T6) aluminum, and that has specifications with similar tolerances."

In the end, Mr. Powell put his personal prestige and reputation behind the C.I.A.'s tube theory.

"When we came to the aluminum tubes," Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said in an interview, "the secretary listened to the discussion of the various views among intelligence agencies, and reflected those issues in his presentation. Since his task at the U.N. was to present the views of the United States, he went with the overall judgment of the intelligence community as reflected by the director of central intelligence."

As Mr. Powell summed it up for the United Nations, "People will continue to debate this issue, but there is no doubt in my mind these illicit procurement efforts show that Saddam Hussein is very much focused on putting in place the key missing piece from his nuclear weapons program: the ability to produce fissile material."

Six weeks later, the war began.


This article was reported by David Barstow, William J. Broad and Jeff Gerth, and was written by Mr. Barstow.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

Exclusive: Bush Wanted To Invade Iraq If Elected in 2000

Wed, 27 Oct 2004

By Russ Baker

Two years before 9/11, candidate Bush was already talking privately about attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer

Houston: Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father’s shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. “Suddenly, he’s at 91 percent in the polls, and he’d barely crawled out of the bunker.”

That President Bush and his advisers had Iraq on their minds long before weapons inspectors had finished their work – and long before alleged Iraqi ties with terrorists became a central rationale for war – has been raised elsewhere, including in a book based on recollections of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. However, Herskowitz was in a unique position to hear Bush’s unguarded and unfiltered views on Iraq, war and other matters – well before he became president.

In 1999, Herskowitz struck a deal with the campaign of George W. Bush about a ghost-written autobiography, which was ultimately titled A Charge to Keep : My Journey to the White House, and he and Bush signed a contract in which the two would split the proceeds. The publisher was William Morrow. Herskowitz was given unimpeded access to Bush, and the two met approximately 20 times so Bush could share his thoughts. Herskowitz began working on the book in May, 1999, and says that within two months he had completed and submitted some 10 chapters, with a remaining 4-6 chapters still on his computer. Herskowitz was replaced as Bush’s ghostwriter after Bush’s handlers concluded that the candidate’s views and life experiences were not being cast in a sufficiently positive light.

According to Herskowitz, who has authored more than 30 books, many of them jointly written autobiographies of famous Americans in politics, sports and media (including that of Reagan adviser Michael Deaver), Bush and his advisers were sold on the idea that it was difficult for a president to accomplish an electoral agenda without the record-high approval numbers that accompany successful if modest wars.

The revelations on Bush’s attitude toward Iraq emerged recently during two taped interviews of Herskowitz, which included a discussion of a variety of matters, including his continued closeness with the Bush family, indicated by his subsequent selection to pen an authorized biography of Bush’s grandfather, written and published last year with the assistance and blessing of the Bush family.

Herskowitz also revealed the following:

-In 2003, Bush’s father indicated to him that he disagreed with his son’s invasion of Iraq.

-Bush admitted that he failed to fulfill his Vietnam-era domestic National Guard service obligation, but claimed that he had been “excused.”

-Bush revealed that after he left his Texas National Guard unit in 1972 under murky circumstances, he never piloted a plane again. That casts doubt on the carefully-choreographed moment of Bush emerging in pilot’s garb from a jet on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003 to celebrate “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. The image, instantly telegraphed around the globe, and subsequent hazy White House statements about his capacity in the cockpit, created the impression that a heroic Bush had played a role in landing the craft.

-Bush described his own business ventures as “floundering” before campaign officials insisted on recasting them in a positive light.

Throughout the interviews for this article and in subsequent conversations, Herskowitz indicated he was conflicted over revealing information provided by a family with which he has longtime connections, and by how his candor could comport with the undefined operating principles of the as-told-to genre. Well after the interviews—in which he expressed consternation that Bush’s true views, experience and basic essence had eluded the American people —Herskowitz communicated growing concern about the consequences for himself of the publication of his remarks, and said that he had been under the impression he would not be quoted by name. However, when conversations began, it was made clear to him that the material was intended for publication and attribution. A tape recorder was present and visible at all times.

Several people who know Herskowitz well addressed his character and the veracity of his recollections. “I don’t know anybody that’s ever said a bad word about Mickey,” said Barry Silverman, a well-known Houston executive and civic figure who worked with him on another book project. An informal survey of Texas journalists turned up uniform confidence that Herskowitz’s account as contained in this article could be considered accurate.

One noted Texas journalist who spoke with Herskowitz about the book in 1999 recalls how the author mentioned to him at the time that Bush had revealed things the campaign found embarrassing and did not want in print. He requested anonymity because of the political climate in the state. “I can’t go near this,” he said.

According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush’s beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House – ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. “Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.”

Bush’s circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War. Said Herskowitz: “They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches.”

Republicans, Herskowitz said, felt that Jimmy Carter’s political downfall could be attributed largely to his failure to wage a war. He noted that President Reagan and President Bush’s father himself had (besides the narrowly-focused Gulf War I) successfully waged limited wars against tiny opponents – Grenada and Panama – and gained politically. But there were successful small wars, and then there were quagmires, and apparently George H.W. Bush and his son did not see eye to eye.

“I know [Bush senior] would not admit this now, but he was opposed to it. I asked him if he had talked to W about invading Iraq. “He said, ‘No I haven’t, and I won’t, but Brent [Scowcroft] has.’ Brent would not have talked to him without the old man’s okaying it.” Scowcroft, national security adviser in the elder Bush’s administration, penned a highly publicized warning to George W. Bush about the perils of an invasion.

Herskowitz’s revelations are not the sole indicator of Bush’s pre-election thinking on Iraq. In December 1999, some six months after his talks with Herskowitz, Bush surprised veteran political chroniclers, including the Boston Globe’s David Nyhan, with his blunt pronouncements about Saddam at a six-way New Hampshire primary event that got little notice: “It was a gaffe-free evening for the rookie front-runner, till he was asked about Saddam’s weapons stash,” wrote Nyhan. ‘I’d take ‘em out,’ [Bush] grinned cavalierly, ‘take out the weapons of mass destruction…I’m surprised he’s still there,” said Bush of the despot who remains in power after losing the Gulf War to Bush Jr.’s father…It remains to be seen if that offhand declaration of war was just Texas talk, a sort of locker room braggadocio, or whether it was Bush’s first big clinker. ”

The notion that President Bush held unrealistic or naïve views about the consequences of war was further advanced recently by a Bush supporter, the evangelist Pat Robertson, who revealed that Bush had told him the Iraq invasion would yield no casualties. In addition, in recent days, high-ranking US military officials have complained that the White House did not provide them with adequate resources for the task at hand.

Herskowitz considers himself a friend of the Bush family, and has been a guest at the family vacation home in Kennebunkport. In the late 1960s, Herskowitz, a longtime Houston Chronicle sports columnist designated President Bush’s father, then-Congressman George HW Bush, to replace him as a guest columnist, and the two have remained close since then. (Herskowitz was suspended briefly in April without pay for reusing material from one of his own columns, about legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.)

In 1999, when Herskowitz turned in his chapters for Charge to Keep, Bush’s staff expressed displeasure —often over Herskowitz’s use of language provided by Bush himself. In a chapter on the oil business, Herskowitz included Bush’s own words to describe the Texan’s unprofitable business ventures, writing: “the companies were floundering”. “I got a call from one of the campaign lawyers, he was kind of angry, and he said, ‘You’ve got some wrong information.’ I didn’t bother to say, ‘Well you know where it came from.’ [The lawyer] said, ‘We do not consider that the governor struggled or floundered in the oil business. We consider him a successful oilman who started up at least two new businesses.’ ”

In the end, campaign officials decided not to go with Herskowitz’s account, and, moreover, demanded everything back. “The lawyer called me and said, ‘Delete it. Shred it. Just do it.’ ”

“They took it and [communications director] Karen [Hughes] rewrote it,” he said. A campaign official arrived at his home at seven a.m. on a Monday morning and took his notes and computer files. However, Herskowitz, who is known for his memory of anecdotes from his long history in journalism and book publishing, says he is confident about his recollections.

According to Herskowitz, Bush was reluctant to discuss his time in the Texas Air National Guard – and inconsistent when he did so. Bush, he said, provided conflicting explanations of how he came to bypass a waiting list and obtain a coveted Guard slot as a domestic alternative to being sent to Vietnam. Herskowitz also said that Bush told him that after transferring from his Texas Guard unit two-thirds through his six-year military obligation to work on an Alabama political campaign, he did not attend any Alabama National Guard drills at all, because he was “excused.” This directly contradicts his public statements that he participated in obligatory training with the Alabama National Guard. Bush’s claim to have fulfilled his military duty has been subject to intense scrutiny; he has insisted in the past that he did show up for monthly drills in Alabama – though commanding officers say they never saw him, and no Guardsmen have come forward to accept substantial “rewards” for anyone who can claim to have seen Bush on base.

Herskowitz said he asked Bush if he ever flew a plane again after leaving the Texas Air National Guard in 1972 – which was two years prior to his contractual obligation to fly jets was due to expire. He said Bush told him he never flew any plane – military or civilian – again. That would contradict published accounts in which Bush talks about his days in 1973 working with inner-city children, when he claimed to have taken some of the children up in a plane.

In 2002, three years after he had been pulled off the George W. Bush biography, Herskowitz was asked by Bush’s father to write a book about the current president’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, after getting a message that the senior Bush wanted to see him. “Former President Bush just handed it to me. We were sitting there one day, and I was visiting him there in his office…He said, ‘I wish somebody would do a book about my dad.’ ”

“He said to me, ‘I know this has been a disappointing time for you, but it’s amazing how many times something good will come out of it.’ I passed it on to my agent, he jumped all over it. I asked [Bush senior], ‘Would you support it and would you give me access to the rest of family?’ He said yes.”

That book, Duty, Honor, Country: The Life and Legacy of Prescott Bush, was published in 2003 by Routledge. If anything, the book has been criticized for its over-reliance on the Bush family’s perspective and rosy interpretation of events. Herskowitz himself is considered the ultimate “as-told-to” author, lending credibility to his account of what George W. Bush told him. Herskowitz’s other books run the gamut of public figures, and include the memoirs of Reagan aide Deaver, former Texas Governor and Nixon Treasury Secretary John Connally, newsman Dan Rather, astronaut Walter Cunningham, and baseball greats Mickey Mantle and Nolan Ryan.

After Herskowitz was pulled from the Bush book project, the biographer learned that a scenario was being prepared to explain his departure. “I got a phone call from someone in the Bush campaign, confidentially, saying ‘Watch your back.’ ”

Reporters covering Bush say that when they inquired as to why Herskowitz was no longer on the project, Hughes intimated that Herskowitz had personal habits that interfered with his writing – a claim Herskowitz said is unfounded. Later, the campaign put out the word that Herskowitz had been removed for missing a deadline. Hughes subsequently finished the book herself – it received largely critical reviews for its self-serving qualities and lack of spontaneity or introspection.

So, said Herskowitz, the best material was left on the cutting room floor, including Bush’s true feelings.

“He told me that as a leader, you can never admit to a mistake,” Herskowitz said. “That was one of the keys to being a leader.”

Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.

Russ Baker is an award-winning independent journalist who has been published in The New York Times, The Nation, Washington Post, The Telegraph (UK), Sydney Morning-Herald, and Der Spiegel, among many others.

http://www.guerrillanews.com/articles/article.php?id=761

[Edward]

http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/041115fa_fact
The New Yorker
Letter From Iraq
OUT ON THE STREET
by JON LEE ANDERSON
The United States’ de-Baathification program fuelled the insurgency. Is it too late for Bush to change course?
Issue of 2004-11-15
Posted 2004-11-08

On April 19, 2003, ten days after the fall of Baghdad, an advance “jump group” of Americans commanded by retired Lieutenant General Jay Garner was flown into the city to manage the occupation of Iraq. One of the first to arrive was Stephen Browning, whose previous assignment had been as director of programs on the West Coast for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Two months earlier, Browning had been summoned to Washington to join a group of experts charged with planning for postwar Iraq. Within a day or two of his arrival in Baghdad, Browning was given the job of getting the Ministry of Health up and running.

Baghdad’s hospitals were in a calamitous state. Many had been looted, and the doctors and nurses had fled. In the Shiite slum of Saddam (now Sadr) City, home to two million people, clerics and armed vigilantes loyal to the radical Shiite Moqtada al-Sadr had taken control of the medical facilities.“When I went into the Ministry of Health, there was no clear leader, no one willing to say, ‘I represent the Iraqis for the health ministry,’” Browning recalled. “Then Dr. Ali Shinan al-Janabi, an optometrist who had been a deputy minister, stepped forward. He told us that he was a member of the Baath Party. And—well, the fact is there was no one else to go to. I asked around, did a lot of research, and almost everyone I spoke to seemed to regard him as an honorable figure, even though he was a Baathist. And, after getting to know him, I came to feel he was a brave and admirable man.”

Browning decided early on that in order to get things done he needed to work with members of the Baath Party. The Party had been virtually synonymous with Saddam Hussein’s regime; it was the instrument through which Iraqis were brutalized. At the same time, its members filled jobs at every level of society and anchored the middle class. On his own initiative, Browning says, he asked Shinan to sign a letter renouncing his membership in the Baath Party. Shinan did so, and Garner named him the acting Minister of Health. “We started working together,” Browning said. “We made real progress in a very short amount of time.”

A few weeks later, Browning and Shinan held a press conference. A reporter from the BBC asked Shinan if he was a Baathist. “He said he was, but that he had signed a letter of renunciation,” Browning told me. “The BBC guy insisted, though. ‘Will you denounce the Baath Party in front of us right now?’ Ali’s response was ‘This is not an issue right now; we need to move on with the emergencies we have facing us.’ And then he said, ‘I was just doing my job.’

“The minute I heard him say that—it sounded so close to what the Nazi sympathizers said in their own defense in Germany after the Second World War—I knew how it would sound to the press outside Iraq, in the West, and I knew right then and there that Ali’s political career was finished,” Browning said. “I walked out of the conference with him hand in hand, and the next morning told him what we had to do. Ali was fine about it; he asked only that he be allowed to continue working as an optometrist. I agreed. Ali said, ‘You are my brother.’ We both had tears in our eyes.”

Still, Browning was troubled by Shinan’s refusal to denounce the Baath Party, and he asked him why he hadn’t. “He told me that if he did so in public the vengeance on his family would be catastrophic. Which is probably true. There was nobody stopping anything from happening back then—our troops weren’t much in the way of a protection force.”

Browning asked Shinan to continue to assist him, and he agreed. A few days later, he disappeared. Browning later learned that Shinan and his family had left Baghdad. By then, an assassination campaign had begun against former Baathists who were coöperating with the occupation, and also against some who weren’t. The victims of the campaign, which is ongoing, have included doctors, engineers, and teachers, sparking an exodus of Iraqi professionals to other countries.

Not long after, Garner himself was fired, and President Bush named L. Paul Bremer III as the head of what became known as the Coalition Provisional Authority. On May 16, 2003, Bremer issued a sweeping ban of the Baath Party: all senior party members were barred from public life; lower-level members were also barred, but some could appeal. In effect, Bremer had fired the entire senior civil service. The origins of the decree have never been clarified, but Coalition officials I spoke to said they believed that Bremer was following orders from the White House. A week later, he disbanded the Iraqi Army.

Browning recalled a meeting that he and other officials had with Bremer before the announcement. “Bremer walked in and announced his de-Baathification order. I said that we had established a good working relationship with technicians—not senior-level people—of the Baath Party, and I expressed my feeling that this measure could backfire. Bremer said that it was not open for discussion, that this was what was going to be done and his expectation was that we would carry it out. It was not a long meeting.”

The order had an immediate effect on Browning’s work. “We had a lot of directors general of hospitals who were very good, and, with de-Baathification, we lost them and their expertise overnight,” he told me. At the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, which was another of his responsibilities, “we were left dealing with what seemed like the fifth string. . . . Nobody who was left knew anything.”

An American special-forces officer stationed in Baghdad at the time told me that he was stunned by Bremer’s twin decrees. After the dissolution of the Army, he said, “I had my guys coming up to me and saying, ‘Does Bremer realize that there are four hundred thousand of these guys out there and they all have guns?’ They all have to feed their families.” He went on, “The problem with the blanket ban is that you get rid of the infrastructure; I mean, after all, these guys ran the country, and you polarize them. So did these decisions contribute to the insurgency? Unequivocally, yes. And we have to ask ourselves: How well did we really know how to run Iraq? Zero.”

The officer recalled that after Bremer’s decrees the looting of the city “became increasingly professional and organized, and it became not just looting but sabotage, too, and I think a lot of this had to do with the decisions that put all of these guys out of work.” In Baghdad, he saw a truck drive past him loaded with artillery shells, apparently looted from an armory. There were many such armories throughout Iraq, such as Al-Qaqaa, where three hundred and eighty tons of powerful explosives went missing. “Once these guys realized they had been shut out, they just went for it,” he said.

From the beginning, the question for the U.S. and British coalition was how to build a secure, stable, and democratic Iraq while dealing with the vacuum created by the fall of Saddam. The Baath Party, which kept its records secret, is estimated to have had between a million and two and a half million members, most of them Sunnis, like Saddam. For Iraq’s traditionally excluded and suppressed Shiite majority and for the Kurdish minority, de-Baathification was an urgent goal. But the Coalition also needed to address the fears of the newly disenfranchised Sunnis, and, on a basic level, to keep the country functioning. Given the difficulty of the project, the occupation policies were markedly lacking in pragmatism.

During that first summer, an array of Sunni tribal leaders, religious leaders, Baathists, and former intelligence officials were openly shuttling around Baghdad, lobbying the Americans for a better deal. They saw themselves as having been treated unfairly, and many hinted that they would participate in the growing revolt if they were not given a place in the “new Iraq.”

“Bremer seems to be interested only in de-Baathification,” said Dr. Baher Sami Raphael Butti, an Iraqi psychiatrist whom I met with in July, 2003. “And this is a problem, because there are many Baathists who could help, but they have been thrown away. Many are fighting because they have not received their salaries, and they feel threatened by the fundamentalist Shia. I am a Baathist, by the way, but not a dogmatic one. Most Iraqis, including the Baathists, hated Saddam. Now they are frightened about the prospect of civil war.” He went on, “We need to know what’s going to happen. There is no transparency to the American role in Iraq, and this gives rise to more rumors. We need to know more.”

In a sense, the “insurgency” began before Baghdad fell. Religious jihadis—would-be martyrs from other Arab nations—had been recruited by Saddam’s government to carry out “suicide operations” against the Americans. Many of them were young men with full beards, dressed in traditional robes. In Baghdad, where most Iraqi men were relatively clean-shaven and wore Western dress, the jihadis stood out as foreigners and were plainly visible until a few hours before the Marines arrived; a number were staying in the same hotels as Western reporters. The morning Baghdad fell, I saw about sixty of them slip away. The evidence suggests that they regrouped clandestinely under Baathist recruiters and helped to build the insurgency. Most of the Baathists I spoke to acknowledged a tactical alliance between their own resistance and the foreign Islamist militants.

In August, 2003, I spoke to Bremer at his office in one of Saddam’s old palaces inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, where the Coalition had set up its base. No one on the American side was yet using the term “insurgency” to characterize the rapidly escalating attacks against American troops in Baghdad and in cities like Falluja, in the so-called Sunni triangle. “What we’re faced with is the remnants of a Saddam regime composed of extremists and some terrorists,” Bremer told me. “Their real target is the Iraqi people.”

Bremer’s office resembled a field commander’s bivouac, with worn-looking military apparel stuffed on bookshelves. “Being an occupying power is not a comfortable thing for most Americans to comprehend, and it certainly is the case that when you are an occupying power you have not only responsibilities but, as you exercise those responsibilities, you’re going to have friction,” Bremer said. “It happens. More people get killed in New York every night than get killed in Baghdad. The fact of life is that there will never be such a thing as one hundred per cent security—it doesn’t exist.”

When I spoke to Bremer, fewer than three hundred American troops had been killed in Iraq. By last week, more than eleven hundred had lost their lives, and the insurgency had gained force. I asked Richard Haass, the head of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former State Department official, how the reëlection of President Bush might change the dynamic. “The security priority is to get the Iraqis to assume the lion’s share of that task,” he said. “That means training as many Iraqi police and security forces as quickly as you can. It also means putting as much pressure on Zarqawi’s people as you can—killing as many of them as you can.” He was referring to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist whose militant group is believed to be responsible for a series of beheadings and car bombings.

But Haass added that the Administration still had to come to terms with Iraq’s ethnic equation: “On elections, it means not just going ahead with them but persuading the Sunnis to participate. And on the military the question is whether the Administration can go after those who are using violence, who are disrupting day-to-day life, in a way that doesn’t create even more Sunni nationalist opposition.”

This summer, I visited the Supreme National Commission for De-Baathification, which occupied two floors of a concrete office block inside the Green Zone. A poster on one wall bore the simple message “Baathists=Nazis.” The director of the commission, Mithal al-Alusi, is a tall, lanky man of fifty-three who speaks English with a syrupy drawl and, even in the office, wears a pistol tucked into his belt.

Alusi is a protégé of Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, the exile group favored by the Pentagon before the war. Chalabi had been appointed chairman of the commission in September, 2003. Since then, he had lost much of his influence, in part because intelligence concerning Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which he promoted, had proved useless. In June, when sovereignty was transferred to Iyad Allawi, a rival of Chalabi’s with ties to the C.I.A., not a single member of the I.N.C. was given a post in the new government. But Chalabi’s access to the de-Baathification commission—and to the files of thousands of Baathists—gave him continued leverage. (When I saw Chalabi in Iraq this summer, he pulled out the intelligence dossier of a senior member of Allawi’s government and translated what he claimed was damaging information about him.)

The commission began its work in January, and Alusi told me that it had achieved a great deal: “Thirty-five thousand Baath Party members have left their jobs.” Alusi said that the commission was interested only in Baathists from the four highest levels of the Party, some sixty-five thousand people. The top level consisted of no more than fifty or sixty people. “Level 2 is a few hundred people, Level 3 is a few thousand, and at the fourth level there are tens of thousands,” he said. Level 4 Baathists were allowed to appeal their bans, and, so far, the commission had approved about half of the appeals. Alusi said that the commission was not inflexible; he described one instance in which seventy doctors had been sent back to work. “We expedited their cases,” he said. “We just made sure they weren’t killers.”

Alusi told me that he had been a Baathist once himself, and had worked at the Party’s top-secret academy for political cadres. He had fallen out with the regime in the seventies, however, and spent more than twenty years in exile, mostly in Germany. In August, 2002, Alusi and a few cohorts briefly seized Iraq’s Embassy in Berlin, for which they were arrested and spent thirteen months in prison. When Alusi was released, in September, 2003, he returned to Iraq, violating his parole.

I asked Alusi what Baathism had meant to him as a young man. “It was like magic,” he said. “The Baath Party gave us the opportunity to do something important.” One of the opportunities enjoyed by young Baathists was access to power. Under Saddam, the Party was melded with the secret police and the state intelligence organization. Membership was a requirement for many government jobs, and Baathists were required to inform on their neighbors, their co-workers, and one another. During one of Saddam’s hallmark purges in 1979, several ministers were handed weapons and ordered to kill colleagues whom Saddam had just declared to be “traitors.”

One of the steps in the appeals process for former Baathists was attendance at a thirty-day de-Baathification course, and I asked Alusi what model he had used for it. “I’ve studied the de-Nazification of Germany,” he said. “And I’ve e-mailed Jewish Holocaust organizations, although only one of them answered me. We’ve read a lot of books.”

A few days later, I attended a graduation ceremony in a seminar room at Baghdad University, where a hundred or so middle-aged men and women, most of them professors and doctors, sat expectantly. Alusi walked in with a half-dozen bodyguards. He took the microphone, smiled, and began to talk in a rambling fashion about how the United States had liberated Iraqis, how the Coalition was on a par with the alliance against Hitler, and how Iraq now depended upon the good will of the U.S.

Men from Alusi’s office began taping posters to the wall behind the stage. The posters showed decayed bodies and skeletons piled in unearthed mass graves, and they elicited muffled exclamations from the audience. A man raised his hand. “Why are you putting up those posters?” he asked. “Everyone here was forced to join the Baath Party. We didn’t have anything to do with those crimes.”

“These are the bodies of Iraqis,” Alusi replied. “Why shouldn’t we look at them?”

A man called out, “Mr. Alusi, I feel frightened when I see these pictures. Many people may not distinguish between the criminals who did these things and innocent people like us.”

“The Iraqi people are not idiots,” Alusi replied. “I know there are good citizens among you, but we cannot close the files, because the files are full of crimes. The problem is for those who committed crimes. What shall I do, put away the posters, omit the truth? No, we cannot. If we omit this, we omit our history.”

The man smiled politely but didn’t say anything. Alusi stood up, and the people in the room filed over to officials sitting at tables to obtain their de-Baathification certificates.

Later, Alusi told me that he had meant to be provocative. “There is a duality in Baathists,” he said. “You can find a Baathist who is a killer, but at home, with his family, he’s completely normal. It’s like they split their day into two twelve-hour blocks. When people say about someone I know to be a Baathist criminal, ‘No, he’s a good neighbor!’ I believe them. The Baath Party is like the Nazi Party, or like the Mafia. If you meet them, they are simpatico. And this is why it’s very difficult for us to do our work, which is to change—really change—Iraqi society.”

Alusi wasn’t alone in drawing analogies to the de-Nazification process in Germany after the Second World War. But the comparison is less helpful than it seems. De-Nazification was marked by ambiguities, exceptions, compromises. And, to the extent that it worked, it did so because the Nazis had so catastrophically failed. Germany was utterly defeated; millions of people had died, and its cities lay in ruins. The country was rebuilt and transformed under the U.S.-administered Marshall Plan.

In the 2003 war, Iraq’s Army was not militarily defeated, because, by and large, it did not fight. Its forces melted away. Since then, the Coalition has failed to secure the country. The U.S. occupation has galvanized a sense of national resistance and had the neat effect of making Iraq’s history seem, to many Iraqis, irrelevant. As long as American troops remain, most Iraqis will likely continue to see themselves only as victims.

In the weeks before and after the American invasion, I spent a good deal of time with a senior Baathist, an official in the Foreign Ministry named Samir Khairi, whom I had met through a mutual friend. Khairi, a tall, jovial man in his early fifties, had droopy brown eyes and a great beak of a nose that was underscored by a clipped handlebar mustache. He spoke French and English, drank Scotch, and laughed a lot, with a loud honk. Unlike most Iraqi officials I interviewed, he showed no anger at the prospect of an American invasion. Khairi invited me to dinner at his home, a brown stucco house in the upscale neighborhood of Mansour. The house was a congenial mess, with piles of papers and clothes everywhere.

Khairi told me that he had become a Baathist in 1973, when he was a student at Baghdad University. Opportunism aside, the Party offered a nationalist ideology that appealed to him. The Baath Party—baath means “renaissance” in Arabic—was founded in Syria, in 1947, as a political vehicle to promote Pan-Arabism. In the fifties, Syrian exiles and Iraqi students brought Baathism to Iraq, which was then ruled by a military government. The Baathists came to power in 1963, in a coup that was followed by a bloodbath during which Baathists arrested, tortured, and killed their rivals. In 1968, in another coup, Saddam Hussein’s wing of the Baath Party took control of the country, and in 1979 Saddam declared himself President.

In 1981, Khairi, who was finishing a Ph.D. in law and had begun editing a Baathist newspaper, was summoned to meet Saddam’s half brother Barzan al-Tikriti. Barzan was then the head of the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret police. He proposed that Khairi become the editor-in-chief of an Arabic-language magazine based in Paris, and, Khairi said, assured him that he would not be required to do intelligence work, although his magazine, Kul al-Arab (All the Arabs), would be funded by the Mukhabarat.

When Khairi speaks of his Paris years—as he often does, with great nostalgia—he refers to himself as having been a journalist. But, of course, his magazine was principally a propaganda arm of Saddam’s regime. His tenure coincided with the Iran-Iraq War, which Saddam launched in 1980. This was the period during which Saddam actually did possess weapons of mass destruction, and used them against the Iranians on the battlefield and then in the genocidal Anfal campaign against his own country’s Kurdish citizens. Khairi told me that Barzan was personally involved in the torture and execution of hundreds of Iraqis—crimes for which he is soon to stand trial.

After the first Gulf War began, in 1991, the French authorities closed Kul al-Arab, arrested Khairi as a spy, and deported him. (Khairi insists that the charges were false.) When he returned to Baghdad, he continued working for the Mukhabarat, in its Presidential Research Institute. Eventually, he became estranged from Barzan and, in 1999, was briefly imprisoned. He stayed at the research institute until late 2002, when he became the press director of the Foreign Ministry. He said that he was relieved to be free of intelligence work and that, before the war, he had hoped to be given an ambassadorship.

One day when I was at Khairi’s house, we watched a news bulletin that contained footage of a mass grave being uncovered in south-central Iraq. I asked Khairi why he hadn’t fled the country, as so many other Iraqis had done, instead of continuing to work for Saddam. “Oh, I had no choice,” he said. “I was afraid for my family. If I were to go, they’d have hurt them. And if I stayed here and didn’t do my work they could kill me anytime. They killed many people.”

I asked him how many people he thought Saddam had killed. Half a million?

“Oh no, not so many,” he replied. “Around one hundred thousand, maybe one hundred and twenty thousand, for sure.” He said this matter-of-factly, with no indication that he felt tainted by the crimes of the regime. (Khairi’s numbers were off: a likelier figure is around two hundred and fifty thousand, and estimates range much higher.)

Khairi told me he believed that the ideals of Baathism had been betrayed under Saddam Hussein, that the Party had been taken over, and that Saddam’s family held the only real power. But Khairi was part of Saddam’s apparatus and, by his own admission, was proud of the work he did. He once told me, “I did good work in strategic planning for the President, and he liked it—three times, after reading my papers, he sent me a half-million dinars as a present.”

This kind of dissociative thinking—and a certain remorselessness—was, in my experience, common among Baathists, and especially among Sunnis like Khairi. Most echoed Saddam’s justifications that the victims, who were primarily Kurds and Shiites, had betrayed the fatherland by siding with Iran, were thieves and looters, were not real Muslims, and had committed a host of other supposed crimes.

I visited Khairi frequently that spring. There were always several other guests in the house—all of them men, who would come to eat, watch Al Jazeera and CNN, and talk about the news. Khairi had been allowed to have a satellite dish, a privilege reserved for senior Baathists, and he was a generous host. His friends would complain about the looting, or about former exiles like Chalabi, but over all they were optimistic about the future. Most of them were, like Khairi, Baathist functionaries or former military officers, and they all seemed to have accepted Saddam’s fall from power as a fait accompli. Most appeared to believe that they would be receiving a summons from the C.P.A. to return to their jobs any day.

After Bremer’s decrees, however, Khairi’s optimism vanished. When I visited him, I often found him sitting around the house in the middle of the day, flipping the channels on his TV. He had been told that he was not going to get his job back, or receive a pension, and he was despondent.

In July, 2003, Khairi was arrested by American soldiers. The house in Mansour was trashed and looted; when I arrived, even the doors to the garage were gone. No one seemed to know where he was being held, and although I made inquiries with Coalition officials, I couldn’t find out anything, either.

Almost a year later, I heard that Khairi had been released and was in Amman, Jordan. I arranged to meet him there at a hotel. When he walked in, I was shocked by his appearance. He was well dressed, with carefully pressed trousers, but his face was much thinner and his eyes had dark rings around them.

On the night of July 19, 2003, Khairi said, American soldiers kicked in the front door to his house, dragged him out to the street in his pajamas, and threw him to the ground as his neighbors watched. When he asked a soldier why he was being arrested, the soldier bashed him several times with his rifle. He was left with four broken ribs.

Khairi was held in an Army detention center without food and with little water for twenty-four hours. He was then taken, with some other prisoners, to a facility in Kadhimiya, the former headquarters of Saddam’s military-intelligence service. “We were put in a cell with no toilet,” Khairi said. “We had to use the floor, like dogs.”

Khairi was interrogated by a female American soldier who had papers that had been taken from his house, including a copy of an article I had written for this magazine, in which Khairi was quoted expressing his loyalty to the Baath Party. Khairi told her about the soldier hitting him and asked to see a doctor. “She said, ‘Really,’” Khairi said, lifting his eyebrows in an imitation of a skeptical expression. A few hours later, Khairi was taken to a detention facility at the Baghdad airport, a large open-air camp with tents surrounded by razor wire. He fell asleep on the ground around 4 a.m. “I was in very bad shape,” he recalled. “I was very dirty. We’d had no water to clean ourselves.”

In the morning, the other prisoners in his tent elected Khairi to represent them in a meeting with the Red Cross, since he spoke French and English, but during the meeting he fainted. When he came to, he was taken to a medical tent, where a doctor immediately put an I.V. in each arm and began to feed him. Khairi repeated this story to me several times, emphasizing how caring the doctor had been.

A few days later, Khairi was interrogated again. “This was my most important interrogation, and it lasted about three hours.” He said that an American in civilian clothes told him, “If you don’t speak the truth, I will kill you.” Khairi went on, “He asked if when I was in Paris I had had any relations with Al Qaeda.”

At this point, Khairi laughed. “Can you imagine, Al Qaeda! I reminded him that I had returned from Paris in 1991, when there was no Al Qaeda. He didn’t like that, and said, ‘O.K., then, if not Al Qaeda, did you have relations with any other terrorist groups? Did Saddam Hussein ask you to meet or give money to any other groups?’ I asked him, ‘Which terror groups do you mean?’ And he became angry and repeated that I should answer his questions or he’d kill me.”

Khairi was then taken to a detention center in Bukka, in the desert south of Basra. Five days after he arrived, he had a heart attack. He was treated at a hospital in Basra, then returned to Bukka. There, after being held for several days in a tent, Khairi was interrogated by another officer. “For the first time, I was with somebody who was very clever. When he heard that I had been mistreated when I was arrested, he wanted to know the name of the unit that was responsible, and told me I had the right to press charges. I asked him if there was any evidence against me. He said no.”

At the end of August, Khairi’s wife was allowed to visit. She told him that his father had died after hearing of his arrest. That afternoon, Khairi had a second heart attack. He stayed at Bukka for two months and then, on November 4th, he was sent to Abu Ghraib.

When Khairi and other prisoners arrived at Abu Ghraib, he said, “the guards took everything we had brought with us from Bukka—all of our clothes, everything. They left us in our pajamas. An American soldier—a big fat guy—took the reading glasses my wife had brought to me and stomped on them. The translator said to us, ‘This is not Bukka. That was a five-star hotel. This is Abu Ghraib.’ They took my medicines. It was cold, and we slept in a tent, on the ground.”

Khairi’s heart problems became worse, and he was medevaced out of the camp twice. Khairi said that although many of the Americans he had met at the clinics where he was treated had been kind, some military policemen with German shepherds would barge in and allow their dogs to terrorize the patients. (It was only later that he learned about the torture and sexual humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.) Once, he had seen a hooded, half-naked prisoner being herded by American soldiers into a wooden trailer, and leave some time later, hobbling as if in great pain. But, he said, “I don’t know what they did to him.”

Khairi was bewildered by the demeaning treatment of Iraqi prisoners. “The young men in my tents told me they were just waiting for the day they would get out so they could fight,” he said. “In the early days at Bukka, the Shia prisoners were not too much against the Americans, but after a few months even they changed their minds. I’d say that about ninety-five per cent of the Shia I met were talking about taking revenge.”

Almost every day, there were mortar attacks, Khairi recalled. “We noticed that they only attacked the American positions inside the prison, not where the prisoners were. The Iraqis were very happy when the attacks occurred. Some of them yelled, ‘Allahu Akbar!’ and said, ‘This is God’s punishment to the Americans for their ill-treatment of us.’ Once the attacks became more frequent, they began hooding us whenever we went anywhere because the prisoners were telling their visiting relatives the Americans’ positions.”

Khairi was held at Abu Ghraib for three and a half months without seeing his family; he found out later that they had tried to see him many times, and had been told that he wasn’t there. He was finally released in February, dressed only in a hospital gown.

Last April, two months before the C.P.A. was dissolved and in the midst of a dramatic upsurge in the violence in Iraq, Paul Bremer announced measures that softened his original decree against the Baathists. He said that although “the de-Baathification policy was and is sound,” it had been “poorly implemented.” He noted the importance of getting teachers and professors back in their jobs.

Bremer’s announcement was widely interpreted as a move to give Allawi, the incoming Prime Minister, a freer hand to combat the insurgents by bringing Baathists back into government. In May, after the Marines’ siege of Falluja was suspended—it is estimated that between six hundred and eight hundred Iraqis and forty Americans died during the siege—the Coalition appointed a so-called Falluja Brigade, led by former Baathists, to broker peace. The effort failed, however, when many of the Brigade members joined the insurgents.

Since assuming office, at the end of June, Allawi has appointed a number of Baathists to senior positions—most significantly, in the military and intelligence apparatus. He has also taken steps to weaken Chalabi further. In October, after a private visit to Israel by Mithal al-Alusi, Chalabi’s ally on the de-Baathification commission, an Iraqi judge issued a warrant for Alusi’s arrest, invoking a Baathist-era law prohibiting travel to the Jewish state. Alusi telephoned me from Baghdad to say that he was determined to fight the charges. He added that Allawi’s government had cancelled the credentials for all but fifty of the two hundred members of the de-Baathification commission, suspended its funding, and dislodged its members from their offices.

Dan Senor, the former chief spokesman for the Coalition, is now in Washington, where he still speaks to Bremer regularly. At the end of August, I asked Senor how, on balance, Bremer now judged his decrees. After consulting with Bremer, Senor said, “Was it the right thing to do? Yes. We’ve had a militia problem in Iraq, but it would have been worse if we hadn’t tackled this early on. For instance, the Shia could have been an enormous stumbling block to the Coalition if they had been uncoöperative, and yet we had clerics in their mosques telling people to forgo violence! And this was a tremendous support to the Coalition. If we had held back on de-Baathification, some have argued that the Sunni insurgency would not have been as bad, but, in the complete picture, the fact that this meant so much to the Shia was crucial.”

At the time we spoke, the Marines were engaged in bloody confrontation with Moqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite militia in Najaf. But Coalition officials I spoke to argued that Najaf was, with the media’s encouragement, a distraction from the greater threat posed by Zarqawi. However, in addition to Zarqawi’s group there are many Sunni guerrilla cells also operating in Falluja, as well as in the cities of Ramadi, Samarra, Baquba, and Mosul. Those cells are composed mostly of Iraqis, and, according to Baathists and to American officers I spoke with, at least some of them are funded and organized by former Baathists.

Senor said, “The problems we have today with the Sunni insurgency I don’t attribute solely to de-Baathification. These are not people who are simply up in arms because they are out of a job. We were always under the impression that the violence was being organized by people fundamentally opposed to our vision of Iraq. They were not people we could win over.”

This is a point of contention with Baathists, as well as with many non-Baathists. In Amman, I spoke to Mudher Khairbit, a wealthy Iraqi businessman who is a senior sheikh of the Dulaimi, a Sunni tribe heavily involved in guerrilla activity in and around Falluja and Ramadi. He told me that although he was not a Baathist he believed that the ban had been a mistake. Khairbit said, “By banning the Baath Party, the Americans made it more powerful, more popular.”

In Baghdad, I had attended a Friday prayer session at a mosque led by Imam Abdul Salaam Daud al-Qubeisi, a prominent Sunni cleric. He sermonized against the American “occupiers” while lauding “heroic resistance fighters” in Falluja and Ramadi. A few days later, I visited Qubeisi at his house. He portrayed the resistance as a spontaneous uprising by ordinary Iraqis. “Before, the Iraqi people didn’t think they were able to confront the American troops, but the hatred they feel encourages them to show resistance,” he said. “What makes matters worse is that Bremer deals with Iraq as if it were Afghanistan. This is a big mistake. Al Qaeda’s members were fighting outside their own countries, but the Iraqi soldiers are not. They are in their own homeland. No Iraqis went to New York to hit it.”

I asked Qubeisi if he advocated the killing of American soldiers. His reply was ambiguous: “We have a code: He who is not fighting cannot sit in judgment of someone who does. Perhaps he is defending his family and his honor.”

When I saw Khairi in Amman in June, he was living in a rented room on money that he had borrowed from his brother, and was looking for a job. He said that he had left Iraq after learning that a Shiite group had put his name on a death list. For now, he was part of the growing exodus of educated Iraqis. “Everyone who can leave is leaving,” he said. “All the good people.”

Much of the Baathist opposition was being mounted, Khairi said, by the new exiles. He predicted that, when the Americans handed over control of Iraq’s cities to the new Iraqi security forces, later that month, the Baath Party would “return and attack those policemen.” (Since then, hundreds of Iraqi policemen, National Guardsmen, and recruits have been killed in near-daily attacks.) He added, “The Americans must get over their problem with the Baath Party. We cannot change our name just to please them.” He talked about the outbreak of a civil war in Iraq if the Americans continued to favor Shiites over the Sunnis.

Khairi helped me to arrange a meeting with Samir Sheikhly, a former mayor of Baghdad, who, I had been told, was one of the key people in the underground Baath Party leadership. Sheikhly had been a senior member of the regime until 1991, when he fell out with Saddam and was put under house arrest. Sheikhly was arrested by the Americans in June, 2003, and spent four and a half months in prison.

When we met, Sheikhly told me, “Many Baathists welcomed the arrival of the Americans. They didn’t fear the Americans when they came. If they had, they would have resisted, and it would have been very difficult to take Baghdad. But then the Americans began arresting Baath Party members.” He went on, “The Americans are dealing with people who have come from outside the country and have no political base in Iraq. They cannot be successful in this way.” Sheikhly dismissed Allawi’s overtures to Baath Party members and said that only “collaborators” were dealing with him. “If the Americans coöperate and let the Baath Party back, they can secure their interests in Iraq at a very cheap price,” he said. (Several Baathists I spoke to claimed that, in the last few weeks, there had been tentative talks with American officials.) Sheikhly did not address the Shiites’ and Kurds’ opposition to the Baathists. Like so many Baathists I talked to, he also refused to acknowledge that simply reinstating the Party might be morally or politically unacceptable to Saddam’s victims and to the international community—that a regime that was little more than “Saddam Lite” might not be good enough.

One high-ranking former official of Saddam’s Foreign Ministry told me, “The problem cannot be solved by the reincorporation of a few high-level Baathists. It’s a problem of national reconciliation. The Americans made a big mistake by initiating the de-Baathification process; it was antidemocratic and inhumane, and it did not take into account who the Baathists are. After thirty-five years, the Baath Party had become part of the fabric of Iraqi society, a complex, interrelated pyramid of economic, political, religious, and tribal links, with the President, yes, at the top. . . . But to dismantle the Party, the Army, and other structures of the state was only to replace them with chaos.”

The insurgency has clearly moved beyond the Baathists; the stakes are much higher now. Last week, a large-scale offensive against Falluja seemed imminent, with American troops moving into position. The American special-forces officer told me that he and others were hopeful that, with the election over, the White House would give its full backing for a decisive battle: “By being aggressive, it may be tough, bloody, and unpopular at first, but it will knock the terrorists off balance and create the space for success. The longer we wait, the more difficult, costly, and bloody it will be.”

Last month, I asked Stephen Browning how he viewed the situation in Iraq. He replied, “I spoke to an Iraqi doctor friend last week and I asked him the same question. He said to me, ‘The country is slowly dying.’ He was always an optimist before, so to hear him say this was just so dispiriting to me. My own sense is that I don’t see a good, positive way ahead. There were so many opportunities that were lost in the early days. Now that this insurgency has grown so big, I don’t know what we can do to stop it.”

[ZippyTheChimp]

Insurgent Attacks Spread In Iraq

'Hard Fighting' Expected In Mosul in Coming Days

By Karl Vick and Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 16, 2004; Page A01

BAGHDAD, Nov. 15 -- Insurgent attacks spread Monday to another Sunni Muslim city, Baqubah, and a nearby village, where bands of armed men attacked two police stations simultaneously, the U.S. military said. American forces used airstrikes to blunt the assault, the latest that insurgents have launched in apparent response to the U.S. offensive in Fallujah.

Two 500-pound bombs were dropped on insurgent positions after a two-hour firefight in which guerrilla reinforcements arrived by bus, took positions on a roof and blocked a road, according to the U.S. military.

Meanwhile, fighting continued in Mosul, a city of 1.8 million, where large numbers of insurgents went on the offensive late last week. "I expect the next few days will bring some hard fighting," said Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the senior U.S. commander in the area. "The situation in Mosul is tense but not desperate."

U.S. forces last week stormed into Fallujah, which insurgents had controlled since spring. American policymakers portrayed the operation as a decisive move to clean out a major stronghold of foreign fighters and Iraqis opposed to the country's interim government.

The insurgents have struck back hard in Fallujah and also turned up the heat in many other cities dominated by Sunni Muslims, who were favored over the majority Shiite Muslims by the government of former president Saddam Hussein. Operating in unusually large groups, fighters have attacked in Ramadi, to the west of Fallujah, and Samarra, Baiji, Tall Afar, Hawija and Mosul to the north.

Their strategy was stated Monday in a new recording attributed to Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of a large insurgent group affiliated with al Qaeda. If the U.S. military "finishes Fallujah, it will move in your direction," the voice said to be Zarqawi's warned followers. "Beware and deny it the chance to carry out this plan."

The speaker said that U.S. forces were overextended and would be unable to respond everywhere. "Shower them with rockets and mortars and cut all the supply routes," he said.

A senior Iraqi official said Monday that about half of Mosul's police officers have returned to duty, reinforced by an armored U.S. battalion and truckloads of Iraqi troops and police commandos. But sporadic fighting continued in the city, and insurgents set on fire an oil storage facility outside the city.

Interior Minister Falah Naqib grew emotional during a news conference in Baghdad while describing the killing of a Mosul police officer. "Yesterday in Mosul, they abducted a wounded member of the police from the hospital," Naqib said. "They dismembered him.

"He was wounded," he repeated. "They dismembered him, and then his remains were hanged in a public square until his fellow policemen were able to secure his body.

Close to 1,000 members of the interim government's security forces have died in the insurgency. Intimidation of those who remain is a prime goal of the guerrillas. Naqib said that threats are directed not at recruits but at their family members. Kidnappings of recruits are also on the rise.

Meanwhile, the office of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi confirmed reports that two female relatives of Allawi's had been released by kidnappers but that Allawi's elderly male cousin remains captive.

The badly mutilated body of a Western woman, assumed to be another kidnapping victim, remained unidentified after being found on a Fallujah street.

To the east, new fighting in Baqubah, long a flash point for attacks on U.S. forces, began about 7 a.m. with simultaneous attacks on two police stations, one in the city, the other in the nearby village of Buhriz.

Protected by dirt-filled fences to guard against car bombs, the stations were targeted by rocket-propelled grenades, rifle fire and, at one station, fire from a heavy machine gun, according to Army Capt. Bill Coppernoll, a spokesman for the 1st Infantry Division.

Elements of the division responded and reported taking fire from multiple spots, including a mosque. A search of the area around the mosque produced three rocket-propelled grenade launchers, 29 grenades, two mortar tubes, 10 mortar rounds and hundreds of rounds of ammunition for AK-47s assault rifles, the military said in a statement.

Four American soldiers were wounded in the fighting. The military reported that more than 20 insurgents were killed, and news services said seven civilians and five police officers, including the police chief of Buhriz, also died.

In a separate attack in Baghdad, seven civilians were killed and seven wounded when a mortar round landed in the Dora neighborhood. At least five suicide car bombers wounded at least nine U.S. troops elsewhere in Iraq, the Associated Press reported.


© 2004 The Washington Post Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

November 29, 2004

TROOPS

Shadow of Vietnam Falls Over Iraq River Raids

By JOHN F. BURNS

CHARD DUWAISH, Iraq, Nov. 28 - As marines aboard fast patrol boats roared up the Euphrates on a dawn raid on Sunday, images pressed in of another American war where troops moved up wide rivers on camouflaged boats, with machine-gunners nervously scanning riverbanks for the hidden enemy.

That war is rarely mentioned among the American troops in Iraq, many of whom were not yet born when the last American combat units withdrew from Vietnam more than 30 years ago. A war that America did not win is considered a bad talisman among those men and women, who privately admit to fears that this war could be lost.

But as an orange moon sank below the bulrushes on Sunday morning, thoughts of Vietnam were hard to avoid.

Marines waded ashore through soft silted mud that caused some to sink to their waists, M-16 rifles held skyward as others on solid land held out their rifle barrels as lifelines.

Ashore, sodden and with boots squelching mud, the troops began a five-hour tramp through dense palm groves and across paddies crisscrossed by deep irrigation canals.

There were snatches of dialogue from "Apocalypse Now," and a black joke from one marine about the landscape resembling "a Vietnam theme park."

But behind the joshing lay something more serious: the sense expressed by many of the Americans as they scoured the area that in this war, too, the insurgents might have advantages that could make them a match for highly trained troops, technological gadgetry and multibillion-dollar war budgets.

The 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit conducted the river raid as part of a weeklong offensive billed as a sequel to the battle for Falluja, less than 20 miles upriver from the village where the marines landed Sunday.

The 40-foot river craft they used are called Surcs, for Small Unit Riverine Craft, a high-tech update on the Swift boats used in Vietnam. The craft were flown into Iraq aboard giant C-5 transport aircraft and were first deployed with five-man crews during the battle for Falluja this month, patrolling the stretch of the Euphrates that runs along the city's western edge to prevent attempts by insurgents to escape that way after American troops had thrown a cordon around the city.

Those patrols were judged a success by American commanders. Now they are eager to exploit the potential the patrol boats give them for mounting fast, unexpected attacks along the Tigris and the Euphrates. The rivers run through many of the cities and towns that are rebel strongholds, and the long stretches of verdant riverbank provide ideal hiding places for insurgents and their weapons caches.

The raid, backed by air cover from attack helicopters and pilotless drones, gave the Americans a chance to exploit another new dimension of their strategy for winning the war: twinning American combat units with newly trained Iraqi troops.

After failures earlier this year, when many Iraqi units deserted or refused to fight, the American command wrote a new blueprint for training tens of thousands of Iraqi fighters and used Falluja as the first, critical testing ground. Considered a qualified success there, the best Iraqi units have been an integral part of every major raid in the follow-up offensive here.

In many raids, they have heavily outnumbered American troops, as they did in the operation on Sunday, which included 40 marines and 80 members of a special Iraqi commando unit assigned to the country's powerful Interior Ministry.

As much as they wanted to test their new river boats, American commanders wanted to see how the commandos - many drawn from elite units of Saddam Hussein's special forces - would respond to an arduous and potentially risky mission.

This day, long before the three-mile sweep through the palm groves and citrus orchards and paddies was ended, the mood among the marines had soured as the Iraqis adopted a mostly dilatory attitude toward the tedious business of spreading out in long lines and moving methodically across the terrain, poking haystacks, running metal detectors over piles of palm fronds, peering into thick clusters of bulrushes, and digging in places of freshly turned earth.

"They've just about given up," said Lt. Jerman Duarte, 34, of Houston, his voice edged with exasperation.

Lieutenant Duarte, a native of Guatemala, led the raid in his capacity as commander of a reconnaissance and surveillance platoon that has honed its skills in many of the marines' toughest raids and stakeouts during their five months in Iraq. Among his men, he is known as "El Guapo," the handsome one, for his fine features and his bristling mustache. But his sense of urgency and do-it-by-the-book briskness appeared lost on the Iraqi fighters, who used their rest breaks in the morning sunshine to trade quips about the Americans, not all of them friendly.

As in so much else about the American venture in Iraq, cultural differences played their part. At one point, Lieutenant Duarte bridled when some of the Iraqis resisted his repeated urging that they spread out along the line, preferring to cluster together, ineffectively, at one end. A Marine sergeant told him that the Iraqis were officers and did not feel that they should be asked to work side by side with common soldiers.

One of the Iraqi officers, asked if he spoke English, replied snappily, "English no good. Arabic good. Iraq good." The message seemed clear.

Although recruits in the new Iraqi units undergo strict vetting, American officers say rebel sympathizers have infiltrated some of the new units - some of the soldiers have been caught tipping off rebel groups. If there were sympathies for Hussein loyalists among these raiders, though, the area chosen for the sweep would likely have stirred them. One American officer described the stretch of the Euphrates that runs southeast from Falluja as "Saddam's Hamptons" for the clusters of luxurious villas set along the riverbank, mostly built by favored stalwarts of Mr. Hussein. The territory controlled by the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, across the southernmost reaches of Iraq's Sunni heartland, served as an arsenal for Mr. Hussein, with dozens of weapons research facilities, munitions factories, and vast weapons storage sites, including the one at Al Qaqaa, which made headlines last month when the Americans discovered that more than 350 tons of high explosives were missing.

Recent American sweeps in the area have uncovered some of the largest weapons caches found in post-Hussein Iraq. And the raid here on Sunday, about five miles from Al Qaqaa, followed a tip that more large caches might be found there.

But either the tipoff was flawed or the raid missed the target. Altogether, Lieutenant Duarte's men discovered only an old shotgun and three Kalashnikov rifles, two of them in plastic bags that were clumsily buried in a paddy field. They also found two sets of identity documents belonging to a high-ranking member of Mr. Hussein's Baath Party. After a marine stumbled across a yellow plastic bag lying in an irrigation panel with what he identified as a severed human head and intestines, Lieutenant Duarte radioed to headquarters and was told to leave it for investigation by the Iraqi police.

In the end, the day's main yield came not from the raid, but from the brutal chance that comes with every foray into the Iraqi hinterland. On the road back to the Marine base at Camp Kalsu, 40 miles from the raiding site, the unit's convoy of armored trucks and Humvees was attacked near the town of Latifiya with a huge roadside bomb.

Unlike a similar device that killed two marines in a nearby incident later in the day, the bomb caused no injuries or damage. But two Humvees broke away from the convoy and pursued two fleeing men with Kalashnikovs into a house about a mile back from the highway, shooting one dead and capturing the other. The men were said to have been found with a cellphone that could have been used to set off the bomb.


Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

December 2, 2004

MILITARY

U.S. to Increase Its Force in Iraq by Nearly 12,000

By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 - The American military presence in Iraq will grow by nearly 12,000 troops by next month, to 150,000, the highest level since the invasion last year, to provide security for the Iraqi elections in January and to quell insurgent attacks around the country, the Pentagon announced Wednesday.

The Pentagon is doing this mainly by ordering about 10,400 soldiers and marines in Iraq to extend their tours - in some cases for the second time - for up to two months, even as their replacement units begin to arrive. The Pentagon is also sending 1,500 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division in the next two weeks for a four-month tour.

By extending the tours of some 8,000 soldiers from two brigades, the Army is risking problems with morale and retention by breaking its pledge to keep troops on the ground in Iraq for no more than 12 months, some commanders and military experts said.

Commanders had signaled for weeks that there was a likelihood that additional troops would be needed to provide security for elections scheduled for Jan. 30, and the Pentagon took a first step in October by ordering 6,500 troops to extend their tours. But the force levels announced Wednesday are larger than many officers had expected and reflect the insurgents' deadly resiliency and the poor performance by many newly trained Iraqi security forces in the face of rebel assaults, military officers said.

Senior officers in Iraq and Washington said that after the Falluja offensive, they did not want to lose the momentum in pressing insurgents in other restive parts of Iraq, like Mosul and Babil Province. At the same time, commanders say they need to keep a sizable force in Falluja to stabilize the city as reconstruction efforts get under way there.

But those requirements demand more troops, especially combat-hardened forces whose experience is seen as essential in attacking the insurgents and providing support to Iraqi security forces. Putting even a squad of Americans inside police stations will stiffen the resolve of local forces and prevent routs like that in Mosul, where newly minted Iraqi police forces fled last month when attacked by small numbers of rebels, American officers said Wednesday.

"It's mainly to provide security for the elections, but it's also to keep up the pressure on the insurgency after the Falluja operation," Brig. Gen. David Rodriguez, a military spokesman, told reporters at the Pentagon.

Under the military's plan, about 3,500 members of the Second Brigade of the First Cavalry Division, based at Fort Hood, Tex., were ordered to stay an additional 45 days, until early March, for a total of about 14 months. The unit had originally been scheduled to leave in mid-November, but that departure was delayed until Jan. 12, General Rodriguez said. The First Cavalry Division is responsible for security in Baghdad, but it also provided soldiers for the cordon around Falluja.

About 4,400 troops from the Second Brigade of the 25th Infantry Division, a Hawaii-based unit now operating as part of the First Infantry Division north of Baghdad, had its departure date in early January delayed 60 days, bringing its total deployment to about 14 months, General Rodriguez said. The tours of 160 soldiers from the 66th Transportation Company, based in Germany, were also extended by two months, he said.

In addition, the departure date of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, with 2,300 marines from Okinawa, Hawaii and California, will be extended to mid-March, he said.

The two 82nd Airborne battalions will be sent to conduct security missions in Baghdad's International Zone, where top American and Iraqi government officials work, General Rodriguez said. This will free up more experienced troops from the First Cavalry Division to carry out missions elsewhere in Iraq, he said.

In advance of the elections in Afghanistan in October, the military sent about 600 troops from the 82nd Airborne to provide security there.

Military officials said Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top American commander in Iraq, had decided to extend the tours of more experienced troops, and to take advantage of their knowledge of the insurgents and region, rather than accelerate the arrival of fresh troops from units like the Third Infantry Division, which will be arriving in January.

In particular, a senior military officer in Iraq said, American and Iraqi forces have forced insurgent and terrorist leaders to flee their former safe haven in Falluja, and additional troops would ensure that they remained on the run and could not settle in another Iraqi city.

At the Pentagon, civilian officials and military officers said they had been concerned that the order to increase troops would be heard by the American and Iraqi public and by insurgents as an acknowledgement that the mission was in trouble.

"But what we're really saying today is that we are committed to the mission, and that we are going to do everything we can to achieve security before the elections," a senior officer said.

American commanders said they learned an important lesson when insurgents responded to the offensive against Falluja by mounting their own counteroffensive, attacking police stations and a range of Iraqi security forces in other cities.

In Mosul, for example, a number of Iraqi policemen simply surrendered their neighborhood stations and headquarters when they came under insurgent attack, even though the guerrillas were vastly outnumbered.

But one Army commander in Iraq said that in those Mosul police stations where American troops were operating, even in small numbers, the new Iraqi security forces had shown resolve and held their ground.

The additional American troops will allow commanders to salt more Iraqi police stations with small, squad-size units of American forces to train the police, advise emerging Iraqi commanders and help steel the wills of Iraqi forces to stand up to the insurgents, this officer said.

More troops will also allow commanders to ease, even if slightly, the grueling days and long nights of missions now assigned throughout the American military in Iraq.

But military personnel specialists warned that the temporary force increases, which are scheduled to last from January to mid-March, might last longer than officials expect.

"The department is managing the force as frugally and carefully as possible, but we may not fall much below the 150,000 level for more than a year," said Richard I. Stark, a retired colonel who is a troop specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies here.

The Army has previously extended deployments for soldiers in Iraq twice, causing complaints from some soldiers and some families.



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[ZippyTheChimp]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Search for Banned Arms In Iraq Ended Last Month

Critical September Report to Be Final Word

By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, January 12, 2005; 1:00 PM

The hunt for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in Iraq has come to an end nearly two years after President Bush ordered U.S. troops to disarm Saddam Hussein. The top CIA weapons hunter is home, and analysts are back at Langley.

In interviews, officials who served with the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) said the violence in Iraq, coupled with a lack of new information, led them to fold up the effort shortly before Christmas.

Four months after Charles A. Duelfer, who led the weapons hunt in 2004, submitted an interim report to Congress that contradicted nearly every prewar assertion about Iraq made by top Bush administration officials, a senior intelligence official said the findings will stand as the ISG's final conclusions and will be published this spring.

Asked if the ISG had stopped actively searching for WMD, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said today: "That's my understanding." He added, "A lot of their mission is focused elsewhere now."

Duelfer "is continuing to wrap things up at this point on an addendum to the report which will be issued sometime next month," McClellan said. "That's not going to fundamentally alter the findings of his earlier report."

President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other top administration officials asserted before the U.S. invasion in March 2003 that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and biological weapons, and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it might give such weapons to use against the United States.

Bush has expressed disappointment that no weapons or weapons programs were found, but the White House had been reluctant to call off the hunt, holding out the possibility that weapons were moved out of Iraq before the war or are well hidden somewhere inside the country. But the intelligence official said that possibility is very small.

Duelfer is back in Washington, finishing some addenda to his September report before it is reprinted.

"There's no particular news in them, just some odds and ends," the intelligence official said. The Government Printing Office will publish it in book form, the official said.

The CIA declined to authorize any official involved in the weapons search to speak on the record for this story. The intelligence official offered an authoritative account of the status of the hunt on the condition of anonymity. The agency did confirm that Duelfer is wrapping up his work an