June 9, 2003, 1:00 P.M.
Bush administration supporters are turning to two tactics to deflect attention from its overstatement of Iraqi WMD capabilities prior to the invasion. The first is revisionist history. The second is to attack anyone who questions the government on this or any other question as unpatriotic and not supportive of “the troops.” Recent articles appearing on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and by the New York Times’ William Safire turn the obvious question of the missing weapons of mass destruction into the problem of anyone who dares wonder where they might be.
High level administration officials such as Paul Wolfowitz are now “refining” their thoughts and “focusing” their pre-war rhetoric on issues other than the lack of intelligence that Iraq possessed the 5000 gallons of anthrax, several tons of VX nerve agent, 100 to 500 tons of other toxins, including botulinin, mustard gas, ricin and sarin, 15 to 20 Scud missiles, drones fitted with poison sprays and mobile chemical laboratories, that President Bush and Colin Powell told us and the world that the Iraqis had. The Pentagon’s transcript of Wolfowitz’s May 9, 2003 interview with Vanity Fair’s Sam Tannenhaus records the following statement by Wolfowitz:
“…And most of these were things that people warned were absolutely certain to happen if we went to war [oilfields destroyed, attacks on Israel, fortress in Baghdad, civil war in northern Iraq, etc.]. I think a few of them I thought were exaggerated. The one that has always worried me the most was the use of weapons of mass destruction. We still don’t know why they weren’t used. That’s something maybe we’ll know more about one of these days, I don’t know.”
The CIA is apparently prepared to report its raw intelligence data to Congress for review and analysis. All reports from Washington suggest that, while an October 2002 national intelligence estimate supported the premise that Iraq had WMDs, recently released backup data contained a lot of qualifiers like “probably” and “the evidence strongly suggests.”
Faced with the fact that Iraq’s capability to harm U.S. citizens or proliferate chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to the extent once claimed, White House hawks are circling the wagons, trying to “refocus” the historical record on other reasons for going to war. The argument offered by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al. seems to say that just removing Saddam and “freeing” the Iraqi people is now reason enough to justify the war. This emphasis on “other reasons” is simply an attempt to deflect attention from the fact that the intelligence was spun and manipulated to provide justification that the American people could support.
The Pentagon’s top policy advisor, Donald Feith, has been operating what appears to be a sort of intelligence chop shop, cutting out unfavorable information and pasting in evidence supporting the administration’s claims of a WMD program in Iraq. At a June 4, 2003 briefing Feith admitted that he created an intelligence unit within the Defense Department just after September 11 to look for world-wide terrorist links, including Iraq, that may have been overlooked by the CIA. This unit scanned intelligence gathered by other agencies for information supporting the administration’s position, harvesting intelligence to illustrate Iraq’s terror connections. Seymour Hersh reports in the New Yorker that the Pentagon’s intelligence unit relied on information supplied by Ahmad Chalabi's intelligence network inside Iraq, and that this information tended to be mistrusted by the CIA. Tension has been growing recently between the Pentagon and the CIA over the issue of Iraqi intelligence, and some CIA analysts have complained of pressure from Pentagon and White House officials to produce recommendations that support administration views. Condoleezza Rice confirmed on Sunday that Vice President Dick Cheney made several trips to the CIA during the period when intelligence relating to Iraqi WMD programs was being developed, but denied that he pressured anyone at the agency.
The strange thing about all of this is that so much effort was put into creating a compelling reason to go to war that the public could understand and support. Paul Wolfowitz, in the same Vanity Fair interview, now suggests that neutralizing Iraq to facilitate the removal of U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia was a “major reason” for going to war. The presence of U.S. troops on Saudi soil has been a sore spot in Arab-U.S. relations and is a major motivator behind the al Qaeda network’s attacks on the U.S. and our interests. If this was a major reason, we should have been told – we could have understood it. Wolfowitz went on to explain that:
“The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason...”
The White House is revising the history of the war in Iraq to avoid discussing the fact that either its intelligence was bad or it was manipulated. Neither scenario is very flattering. What’s worse, however, is the new attack on the patriotism of anyone who questions or challenges the government on this issue, or the manipulation of the media in the aircraft carrier speech, or the Jessica Lynch story is not “supportive of the troops.” On the world stage, America is further losing credibility. At home, some of us are losing confidence in our government’s ability to recognize that the truth matters.
Speaking of truth, I choose to believe – I want to believe – Sammy Sosa. The use of a corked bat to give fans a show with big hits in practice is a plausible explanation. The fact that 81 other bats (76 game bats and 5 in the Hall of Fame) came up clean is heartening. Sammy needs to take his punishment and move on. His fans, including me, will love him for it.
