Foul-ups--Not Felonies
Were the American people taken into war on false pretenses? That is the mushroom cloud of a question conjured up by the Senate Democrats' imposition of the rare closed-session discussion they held last week. Party leader Harry Reid accuses the Republicans of manipulating intelligence to justify the invasion, a serious charge that excites the media and disturbs a war-weary public. The central question is whether anyone in the executive branch had good reason prior to the war to believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Let's look at the record. The single most important document that reflects the conclusion of all 15 intelligence agencies of our government was the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq of October 2002. This report stated that "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons, as well as missiles with ranges in excess of U.N. restrictions, and, if left unchecked will probably have a nuclear weapon this decade." No equivocation there. The report justified this conclusion by observing that since the U.N. inspectors left in 1998, "Iraq has maintained its chemical weapons, energized its missile program, and invested more heavily in biological weapons," and "under the cover of civil production, Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons' program." The 15-agency conclusion was one of "high confidence." CIA Director George Tenet, according to the book by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, dramatized this judgment by telling the president that the case on Iraq's possession and pursuit of banned weapons was a "slam dunk."
Unanimous. But this was not only the assessment of our intelligence agencies. Virtually every western intelligence service reached the very same conclusion. So did all the major media between 1998 and 2001--including the Washington Post , the New York Times, and U.S. News. So did the most senior officials of the Clinton administration. In a conversation I had with President Clinton, just before the Iraq invasion, his concern was not whether or not Saddam had WMD but that a war seeking regime change would provide the pretext for him to use them. Add to this the fact that Saddam had sacrificed over $120 billion in oil revenues to U.N. sanctions, presumably to protect his secret weapons programs.
So, what happened? Last year's bipartisan report by the Senate Intelligence Committee stated the panel "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgment related to Iraq's WMD." Earlier this year, the Robb-Silverman report was equally clear, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community's prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons programs" and no political pressure "to skew or alter any . . . analytical judgments." Rather, the report said, "it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate prewar intelligence assessments."
Then there is the odd case of yellowcake uranium and the report that eventually led to the resignation of Lewis "Scooter" Libby. The former ambassador who claimed he had debunked the administration's assertion that Iraq tried to buy yellowcake in Niger was himself challenged by several GOP members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who concluded that much of what he said was either distorted or untrue, calling his report on the matter "inaccurate and unsubstantiated."
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