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Norman Podhoretz Among the many distortions, misrepresentations, and outright falsificatio ns that have emerged from the debate over Iraq, one in particular stands out above all others. This is the charge that George W Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq by telling a series of li es that have now been definitively exposed. What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has enjoyed i n getting itself established as a self-evident truth even though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by evidence and argumen t alike. In this it resembles nothing so much as those animated cartoon characters who, after being flattened, blown up, or pushed over a cliff, always spring back to life with their bodies perfectly intact. Perhaps, like those cartoon characters, this allegation simply cannot be killed off, no matter what. Nevertheless, I want to take one more shot at exposing it for the lie tha t it itself really is. Although doing so will require going over ground that I and many others have covered before, I hope that revisiting this well-trodden terrain may also serve to refresh memories that have grown dim, to clarify thoughts that have grown confused, and to revive outrage that has grown commensurately dulled. The main lie that George W Bush is accused of telling us is that Sadda m Hussein possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, or WMD as they have invariably come to be called. From this followed the subsidia ry lie that Iraq under Saddams regime posed a two-edged mortal threat . On the one hand, we were informed, there was a distinct (or even immi nent) possibility that Saddam himself would use these weapons against u s and/or our allies; and on the other hand, there was the still more dan gerous possibility that he would supply them to terrorists like those wh o had already attacked us on 9/11 and to whom he was linked. This entire scenario of purported deceit has been given a new lease on li fe by the indictment in late October of I Lewis (Scooter) Libby, then c hief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby stands accused of mak ing false statements to the FBI and of committing perjury in testifying before a grand jury that had been convened to find out who in the Bush a dministration had outed Valerie Plame, a CIA agent married to the reti red ambassador Joseph C Wilson, IV. The supposed purpose of leaking thi s classified information to the press was to retaliate against Wilson fo r having debunked (in his words) the lies that led to war. Now, as it happens, Libby was not charged with having outed Plame but onl y with having lied about when and from whom he first learned that she wo rked for the CIA.
And people who believe fervently in the war effo rt, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it shoul d not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel or an y vindication of how they feel. This is simply an indictment that says, in a national-security investiga tion about the compromise of a CIA officers identity that may have tak en place in the context of a very heated debate over the war, whether s ome persona person, Mr Libbylied or not.
his case is bigger than the leak of classified information. It is abo ut how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated intelligence i n order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to discredit anyone who dared to challenge the President. Yet even stipulatingwhich I do only for the sake of argumentthat no wea pons of mass destruction existed in Iraq in the period leading up to the invasion, it defies all reason to think that Bush was lying when he ass erted that they did. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that Bush believed in th e truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq. George Tenet, his own CIA direct or, assured him that the case was a slam dunk. This phrase would later become notorious, but in using it, Tenet had the backing of all fifteen agencies involved in gathering intelligence for the United States. In t he National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of 2002, where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with high confide nce was that Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological , nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions. The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel, and yesFrance all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blixwho headed the UN team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had compli ed with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapo ns of mass destruction he was known to have had in the pastlent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion: The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. Th is was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have bee n moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not hav e had such munitions. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather poin ts to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unacc ounted for. Blix now claims that he was only being cautious here, but if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration misled itself in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand. So, once again, did the British, the French, and the Germans, all of whom signed on in advance to Secretary of State Colin Powells reading of th e satellite photos he presented to the UN in the period leading up to th e invasion. Powell himself and his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, n ow feel that this speech was the low point of his tenure as Secretary of State. But Wilkerson (in the process of a vicious attack on the Preside nt, the Vice President, and the Secretary of Defense for getting us into Iraq) is forced to acknowledge that the Bush administration did not lac k for company in interpreting the available evidence as it did: I cant tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits, and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U N on 5 February 2003 was the truth.
when you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical -weapons ASPAmmunition Supply Pointwith chemical weapons, and you mat ch all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and theyre there, you have to conclude that its a chemical ASP, espe cially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the UN in spectors wheeling in their white vehicles with black markings on them t o that same ASP, and everything is changed, everything is clean.
Going on to shoot down a widespread impression, Wilkerson informs us that even the State Departments Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) w as convinced: People say, well, INR dissented. INR dissented t hat the nuclear program was up and running.
central to the argu ment that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for use as centrifuge rotors . But, according to Wilkerson, The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said , we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by God, we did it to this RPM, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite inst ruments? In short, and whether or not it included the secret heart of Hans Blix, the consensus of the intelligence community, as Wilkerson puts it, was overwhelming in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq that Sad dam definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and th at he was also in all probability well on the way to rebuilding the nucl ear capability that the Israelis had damaged by bombing the Osirak react or in 1981. Additional confirmation of this latter point comes from Kenneth Pollack, who served in the National Security Council under Clinton. In the late s...
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