And just in time for the political slow season, a major problem for Our Glorious Leader and his friend.
FindLaw's Writ - Dean: Missing Weapons Of Mass Destruction: President George W. Bush has got a very serious problem. Before asking Congress for a Joint Resolution authorizing the use of American military forces in Iraq, he made a number of unequivocal statements about the reason the United States needed to pursue the most radical actions any nation can undertake - acts of war against another nation. Now it is clear that many of his statements appear to be false. In the past, Bush's White House has been very good at sweeping ugly issues like this under the carpet, and out of sight. But it is not clear that they will be able to make the question of what happened to Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) go away - unless, perhaps, they start another war.
The administration is, of course, fighting back, hoping to squelch things before they get too out of hand....
Iraq reports defended; Powell, Rice say prewar estimates of threat not exaggerated: The Bush administration's two top foreign policy advisers said Sunday it was the judgment of the U.S. intelligence community that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons and that the president and others did not exaggerate the threat in the months before going to war. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice described as "revisionist history" recent criticism that senior Bush officials starting with the president may have overstated what was known about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons leading up to the war in March. "The truth of the matter," Rice said on NBC's "Meet the Press," "is that repeated directors of central intelligence, repeated reports by intelligence agencies around the world, repeated reports by United Nations inspectors asking hard questions of Saddam Hussein, and tremendous efforts by this regime to conceal and hide what it was doing, clearly give a picture of a regime that had weapons of mass destruction and was determined to conceal them."
There would seem to be one small problem with this, however. Sensing that they're about to be sacrificed on the altar of political exigency again, the intelligence agencies are mounting their own pre-emptive strike ... against the administration.
Retired State analyst alleges distortion, misstated conjecture in leadup to Iraq: The Bush administration distorted intelligence and presented conjecture as evidence to justify a U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a retired intelligence official who served during the months before the war. "What disturbs me deeply is what I think are the disingenuous statements made from the very top about what the intelligence did say," said Greg Thielmann, who retired last September. "The area of distortion was greatest in the nuclear field." Thielmann was director of the strategic, proliferation and military issues office in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. His office was privy to classified intelligence gathered by the CIA and other agencies about Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear programs.
In Thielmann's view, Iraq could have presented an immediate threat to U.S. security in two areas: Either it was about to make a nuclear weapon, or it was forming close operational ties with al-Qaida terrorists. Evidence was lacking for both, despite claims by President Bush and others, Thielmann said in an interview this week. Suspicions were presented as fact, contrary arguments ignored, he said. [...] Thielmann suggested mistakes may have been made at points all along the chain from when intelligence is gathered, analyzed, presented to the president and then provided to the public. The evidence of a renewed nuclear program in Iraq was far more limited than the administration contended, he said. "When the administration did talk about specific evidence -- it was basically declassified, sensitive information -- it did it in a way that was also not entirely honest," Thielmann said. [...] Thielmann said he had presumed Iraq had supplies of chemical and probably biological weapons. He particularly expected U.S. forces to find caches of mustard agent or other chemical weapons left over from Saddam's old stockpiles. "We appear to have been wrong," he said. "I've been genuinely surprised at that."
The administration will probably seize on to Thielmann's suggestion that mistakes may have been made all through the intelligence gathering process. Absent the discovery of chemical, nuclear and biological weapons, it's pretty much the only reasonable explanation they could possibly have for what otherwise seems to be an outright campaign of deception. (That said, even the discovery of such weapons wouldn't necessarily help now. Since the US has rigorously excluded the UN from most of the search process, it's fairly likely that the rest of the world will believe that anything found was planted there. Even handing over the process to the UN now, were they willing to tackle the job, wouldn't prevent a charge of planted evidence that many would see as credible, under the circumstances.)
Things are not going well for the administration on related fronts, as well. Some intelligence analysts are saying that the mobile labs that the administration thought were intended for biological weapons production may have been intended for other purposes. (NY Times, June 7, 2003, registration required.) Additionally, the search for said weapons is being stepped down:
Weapons hunt slows as teams await new leads, instructions from Pentagon: ..... Ahead of the war, planners were so certain of the intelligence that the weapons teams were designed simply to secure chemical and biological weapons rather than investigate their whereabouts, as U.N. inspectors had done. But without evidence of weapons, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have begun reviewing the accuracy of information they supplied to the administration before the March invasion of Iraq. Government inquiries are being set up in Washington, London and other coalition countries to examine how possibly flawed intelligence might have influenced the decision for war. "The smoking guns just weren't lying out in the open," said David Gai, spokesman for the Iraq Survey Group. "There's a lot more detective work that needs to be done." The group will work more along the model of U.N. weapons inspectors.
Speaking of UN weapons inspectors, Hans Blix is now saying that Iraq was free of chemical, nuclear and biological weapons before the war ... although at the time, while it was clear that was what he believed, he did seem to be hedging his bets. That seemed, in large part, to be based in the clear obstruction that Iraq was placing in the way of the inspections. (And we're now appealing to the Iraqis to help us find said weapons. After we've made a disaster of their country. Oh, my goodness, that should go well, shouldn't it?)
Meanwhile, in Britain, Blair is being "threatened" by his own intelligence services, who feel that they're about to be hung out to dry. He's apparently also about to blow off the MPs conducting an inquiry into who knew what and when, which can only be politically disastrous for him. (Although perhaps not so disastrous as the inquiry itself. That said, he seems to be basing his probable refusal not on any content issues, but on precedent and privilege.)
Frankly, it seems as though there was an impressive concatenation of faulty intelligence combined with political .... overstatement, let's say. And all that said, unless it can be absolutely proven that the administration knowingly and wilfully lied to the public, it probably won't make much difference in the long run. It's unlikely to be proven or disproven, which means that its use as a political issue is limited. If Congress were still Democratic, that would be one thing, but absent outright proof of malfeasance, a Congress of the sitting president's party is unlikely to initiate or allow to be initiated an inquiry of any substance. Frankly, if the economy continues to meander about, and the deficits continue to swell (reports about which the administration seems to have tried to bury -- that said, ignoring economic predictions based on income and outlay seems to be a fine old bipartisan government tradition), that's more likely to be a problem for the administration in the long run. Where Iraq itself is more likely to make a difference is when people realize just what sort of longterm commitment we've signed up for. Even allowing that the administration did not mislead about that, at least, hearing them say, "Well, this may take a few years," is very different from the reality of hearing about the deaths of something like four soldiers per week in what's supposed to be a pacified country.
Posted by iain at June 09, 2003 04:23 PMComments
