Who Is Lying About Iraq?
December 2005
By Norman Podhoretz
Among the many distortions, misrepresentations, and outright
falsifications 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 lies that have now been definitively exposed.
What makes this charge so special is the amazing success it has
enjoyed in getting itself established as a self-evident truth even
though it has been refuted and discredited over and over again by
evidence and argument 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
that 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
Saddam Hussein possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, or
WMD as they have invariably come to be called. From this followed the
subsidiary “lie” that Iraq under Saddam’s regime posed a two-edged
mortal threat. On the one hand, we were informed, there was a distinct
(or even “imminent”) possibility that Saddam himself would use these
weapons against us and/or our allies; and on the other hand, there was
the still more dangerous possibility that he would supply them to
terrorists like those who 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
life by the indictment in late October of I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby,
then chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby stands
accused of making 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 administration had “outed” Valerie Plame, a
CIA agent married to the retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, IV. The
supposed purpose of leaking this classified information to the press
was to retaliate against Wilson for having “debunked” (in his words)
“the lies that led to war.”
Now, as it happens, Libby was not charged with having outed Plame but
only with having lied about when and from whom he first learned that
she worked for the CIA. Moreover, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special
prosecutor who brought the indictment against him, made a point of
emphasizing that
[t]his indictment is not about the war. This indictment is not about
the propriety of the war. And people who believe fervently in the war
effort, people who oppose it, people who have mixed feelings about it
should not look to this indictment for any resolution of how they feel
or any vindication of how they feel.
This is simply an indictment that says, in a national-security
investigation about the compromise of a CIA officer’s identity that
may have taken place in the context of a very heated debate over the
war, whether some person—a person, Mr. Libby—lied or not.
No matter. Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, spoke for
a host of other opponents of the war in insisting that
[t]his case is bigger than the leak of classified information. It is
about how the Bush White House manufactured and manipulated
intelligence in order to bolster its case for the war in Iraq and to
discredit anyone who dared to challenge the President.
Yet even stipulating—which I do only for the sake of argument—that no
weapons 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 asserted that they did. To lie means to say something one
knows to be false. But it is as close to certainty as we can get that
Bush believed in the truth of what he was saying about WMD in Iraq.
How indeed could it have been otherwise? George Tenet, his own CIA
director, 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 the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) of 2002,
where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions
offered with “high confidence” 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—yes—France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix—who
headed the UN team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam
had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid
of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the
past—lent 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. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the
rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time
when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be
the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does
not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of
chemical rockets that are unaccounted 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 Powell’s reading
of the satellite photos he presented to the UN in the period leading
up to the invasion. Powell himself and his chief of staff, Lawrence
Wilkerson, now 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 President, the Vice President, and the Secretary of
Defense for getting us into Iraq) is forced to acknowledge that the
Bush administration did not lack for company in interpreting the
available evidence as it did:
I can’t 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 UN on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can’t. I’ve wrestled
with it. [But] when you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of
the chemical-weapons ASP—Ammunition Supply Point—with chemical
weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should
show a chemical ASP, and they’re there, you have to conclude that it’s
a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph
which shows the UN inspectors wheeling in their white vehicles with
black markings on them to that same ASP, and everything is changed,
everything is clean. . . . But George [Tenet] was convinced, John
McLaughlin [Tenet’s deputy] was convinced, that what we were presented
[for Powell’s UN speech] was accurate.
Going on to shoot down a widespread impression, Wilkerson informs us
that even the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research
(INR) was convinced:
People say, well, INR dissented. That’s a bunch of bull. INR dissented
that the nuclear program was up and running. That’s all INR dissented
on. They were right there with the chems and the bios.
In explaining its dissent on Iraq’s nuclear program, the INR had, as
stated in the NIE of 2002, expressed doubt about
Iraq’s efforts to acquire aluminum tubes [which are] central to the
argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program. .
. . INR is not persuaded that the tubes in question are intended for
use as centrifuge rotors . . . in Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program.
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 instruments?
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 Saddam definitely had an arsenal of chemical and biological
weapons, and that he was also in all probability well on the way to
rebuilding the nuclear capability that the Israelis had damaged by
bombing the Osirak reactor in 1981.
Additional confirmation of this latter point comes from Kenneth
Pollack, who
served in the National Security Council under Clinton. “In the late
spring
of 2002,” Pollack has written:
I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present
included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations
Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee
the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a
question to the group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was
currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three
people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret
calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).
No wonder, then, that another conclusion the NIE of 2002 reached with
“high confidence” was that
Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires
sufficient weapons-grade fissile material.
But the consensus on which Bush relied was not born in his own
administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton
administration. Here is Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:
If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is
clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s
weapons-of-mass-destruction program.
Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in
1998:
Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a
great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will
use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies
is the greatest security threat we face.
Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton’s National Security Adviser, who chimed
in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:
He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten
times since 1983.
Finally, Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, was so sure
Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained “absolutely convinced”
of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion
in March 2003.
Nor did leading Democrats in Congress entertain any doubts on this
score. A few months after Clinton and his people made the statements I
have just quoted, a group of Democratic Senators, including such
liberals as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urged the
President
to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile
strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat
posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction
programs.
Nancy Pelosi, the future leader of the Democrats in the House, and
then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, added her voice to
the chorus:
Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of
weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries
in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection
process.
This Democratic drumbeat continued and even intensified when Bush
succeeded Clinton in 2001, and it featured many who would later
pretend to have been deceived by the Bush White House. In a letter to
the new President, a number of Senators led by Bob Graham declared:
There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his
weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and
nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf war
status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and
is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop
longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our
allies.
Senator Carl Levin also reaffirmed for Bush’s benefit what he had told
Clinton some years earlier:
Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of
the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, and is
building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed, speaking in October 2002:
In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show
that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and
biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his
nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to
terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.
Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, agreed as well:
There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working
aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear
weapons within the next five years. . . . We also should remember we
have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development
of weapons of mass destruction.
Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush’s opponents in his two
campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:
We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and
chemical weapons throughout his country.
And here is Gore again, in that same year:
Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to
deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as
Saddam is in power.
Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:
I will be voting to give the President of the United States the
authority to use force—if necessary—to disarm Saddam Hussein because I
believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his
hands is a real and grave threat to our security.
Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would
later employ against Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements
made by Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:
Kennedy: We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking
and developing weapons of mass destruction.
Byrd: The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We
are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical
and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash
course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities.
Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons.
Liberal politicians like these were seconded by the mainstream media,
in whose columns a very different tune would later be sung. For
example, throughout the last two years of the Clinton administration,
editorials in the New York Times repeatedly insisted that
without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild
weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks
may be required to diminish the arsenal again.
The Times was also skeptical of negotiations, pointing out that it was
hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his
commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as
his country’s salvation.
So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George
W. Bush in January 2001 with the admonition that
[o]f all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration,
none is more dangerous—or more urgent—than the situation in Iraq. Over
the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with,
or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade’s
efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from
rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush
to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where]
intelligence photos . . . show the reconstruction of factories long
suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons.
All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even
unreasonable doubt that Bush was telling what he believed to be the
truth about Saddam’s stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the
fallback charge that Bush lied by exaggerating or hyping the
intelligence presented to him. Why on earth would he have done so when
the intelligence itself was so compelling that it convinced everyone
who had direct access to it, and when hardly anyone in the world
believed that Saddam had, as he claimed, complied with the sixteen
resolutions of the Security Council demanding that he get rid of his
weapons of mass destruction?
Another fallback charge is that Bush, operating mainly through Cheney,
somehow forced the CIA into telling him what he wanted to hear. Yet in
its report of 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee,
while criticizing the CIA for relying on what in hindsight looked like
weak or faulty intelligence, stated that it
did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to
coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments
related to Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.
The March 2005 report of the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman
commission, which investigated intelligence failures on Iraq, reached
the same conclusion, finding
no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence
community’s pre-war assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs. . . .
[A]nalysts universally asserted that in no instance did political
pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical
judgments.
Still, even many who believed that Saddam did possess WMD, and was
ruthless enough to use them, accused Bush of telling a different sort
of lie by characterizing the risk as “imminent.” But this, too, is
false: Bush consistently rejectedimminence as a justification for war.
Thus, in the State of the Union address he delivered only three months
after 9/11, Bush declared that he would “not wait on events while
dangers gather” and that he would “not stand by, as peril draws closer
and closer.” Then, in a speech at West Point six months later, he
reiterated the same point: “If we wait for threats to materialize, we
will have waited too long.” And as if that were not clear enough, he
went out of his way in his State of the Union address in 2003 (that
is, three months before the invasion), to bring up the word “imminent”
itself precisely in order to repudiate it:
Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since
when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely
putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted
to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all
recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and
restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an
option.
What of the related charge that it was still another “lie” to suggest,
as Bush and his people did, that a connection could be traced between
Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us on
9/11? This charge was also rejected by the Senate Intelligence
Committee. Contrary to how its findings were summarized in the
mainstream media, the committee’s report explicitly concluded that al
Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative, if informal, relationship with
Iraqi agents working under Saddam. The report of the bipartisan 9/11
commission came to the same conclusion, as did a comparably
independent British investigation conducted by Lord Butler, which
pointed to “meetings . . . between senior Iraqi representatives and
senior al-Qaeda operatives.”
Which brings us to Joseph C. Wilson, IV and what to my mind wins the
palm for the most disgraceful instance of all.
The story begins with the notorious sixteen words inserted—after, be
it noted, much vetting by the CIA and the State Department—into Bush’s
2003 State of the Union address:
The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought
significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
This is the “lie” Wilson bragged of having “debunked” after being sent
by the CIA to Niger in 2002 to check out the intelligence it had
received to that effect. Wilson would later angrily deny that his wife
had recommended him for this mission, and would do his best to spread
the impression that choosing him had been the Vice President’s idea.
But Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, through whom Wilson first
planted this impression, was eventually forced to admit that “Cheney
apparently didn’t know that Wilson had been dispatched.” (By the time
Kristof grudgingly issued this retraction, Wilson himself, in
characteristically shameless fashion, was denying that he had ever
“said the Vice President sent me or ordered me sent.”) And as for his
wife’s supposed non-role in his mission, here is what Valerie Plame
Wilson wrote in a memo to her boss at the CIA:
My husband has good relations with the PM [the prime minister of
Niger] and the former minister of mines . . . both of whom could
possibly shed light on this sort of activity.
More than a year after his return, with the help of Kristof, and also
Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, and then through an op-ed piece
in the Timesunder his own name, Wilson succeeded, probably beyond his
wildest dreams, in setting off a political firestorm.
In response, the White House, no doubt hoping to prevent his
allegation about the sixteen words from becoming a proxy for the
charge that (in Wilson’s latest iteration of it) “lies and
disinformation [were] used to justify the invasion of Iraq,”
eventually acknowledged that the President’s statement “did not rise
to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address.” As might
have been expected, however, this panicky response served to make
things worse rather than better. And yet it was totally
unnecessary—for the maddeningly simple reason that every single one of
the sixteen words at issue was true.
That is, British intelligence hadassured the CIA that Saddam Hussein
had tried to buy enriched uranium from the African country of Niger.
Furthermore—and notwithstanding the endlessly repeated assertion that
this assurance has now been discredited—Britain’s independent Butler
commission concluded that it was “well-founded.” The relevant passage
is worth quoting at length:
a. It is accepted by all parties that Iraqi officials visited Niger in
1999.
b. The British government had intelligence from several different
sources indicating that this visit was for the purpose of acquiring
uranium. Since uranium constitutes almost three-quarters of Niger’s
exports, the intelligence was credible.
c. The evidence was not conclusive that Iraq actually purchased, as
opposed to having sought, uranium, and the British government did not
claim this.
As if that were not enough to settle the matter, Wilson himself, far
from challenging the British report when he was “debriefed” on his
return from Niger (although challenging it is what he now never stops
doing), actually strengthened the CIA’s belief in its accuracy. From
the Senate Intelligence Committee report:
He [the CIA reports officer] said he judged that the most important
fact in the report [by Wilson] was that Niger officials admitted that
the Iraqi delegation had traveled there in 1999, and that the Niger
prime minister believed the Iraqis were interested in purchasing
uranium.
And again:
The report on [Wilson’s] trip to Niger . . . did not change any
analysts’ assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most
analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the
original CIA reports on the uranium deal.
This passage goes on to note that the State Department’s Bureau of
Intelligence and Research—which (as we have already seen) did not
believe that Saddam Hussein was trying to develop nuclear
weapons—found support in Wilson’s report for its “assessment that
Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq.” But
if so, this, as the Butler report quoted above points out, would not
mean that Iraq had not triedto buy it—which was the only claim made by
British intelligence and then by Bush in the famous sixteen words.
The liar here, then, was not Bush but Wilson. And Wilson also lied
when he told the Washington Postthat he had unmasked as forgeries
certain documents given to American intelligence (by whom it is not
yet clear) that supposedly contained additional evidence of Saddam’s
efforts to buy uranium from Niger. The documents did indeed turn out
to be forgeries; but, according to the Butler report,
[t]he forged documents were not available to the British government at
the time its assessment was made, and so the fact of the forgery does
not undermine [that assessment].
More damning yet to Wilson, the Senate Intelligence Committee
discovered that he had never laid eyes on the documents in question:
[Wilson] also told committee staff that he was the source of a
Washington Postarticle . . . which said, “among the envoy’s
conclusions was that the documents may have been forged because ‘the
dates were wrong and the names were wrong.’” Committee staff asked how
the former ambassador could have come to the conclusion that the
“dates were wrong and the names were wrong” when he had never seen the
CIA reports and had no knowledge of what names and dates were in the
reports.
To top all this off, just as Cheney had nothing to do with the choice
of Wilson for the mission to Niger, neither was it true that, as
Wilson “confirmed” for a credulous New Republicreporter, “the CIA
circulated [his] report to the Vice President’s office,” thereby
supposedly proving that Cheney and his staff “knew the Niger story was
a flatout lie.” Yet—the mind reels—if Cheney had actually been briefed
on Wilson’s oral report to the CIA (which he was not), he would, like
the CIA itself, have been moreinclined to believe that Saddam had
tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.
So much for the author of the best-selling and much acclaimed book
whose title alone— The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to
War and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity—has set a new record for
chutzpah.
But there is worse. In his press conference on the indictment against
Libby, Patrick Fitzgerald insisted that lying to federal investigators
is a serious crime both because it is itself against the law and
because, by sending them on endless wild-goose chases, it constitutes
the even more serious crime of obstruction of justice. By those
standards, Wilson—who has repeatedly made false statements about every
aspect of his mission to Niger, including whose idea it was to send
him and what he told the CIA upon his return; who was then shown up by
the Senate Intelligence Committee as having lied about the forged
documents; and whose mendacity has sent the whole country into a
wild-goose chase after allegations that, the more they are refuted,
the more they keep being repeated—is himself an excellent candidate
for criminal prosecution.
And so long as we are hunting for liars in this area, let me suggest
that we begin with the Democrats now proclaiming that they were duped,
and that we then broaden out to all those who in their desperation to
delegitimize the larger policy being tested in Iraq—the policy of
making the Middle East safe for America by making it safe for
democracy—have consistently used distortion, misrepresentation, and
selective perception to vilify as immoral a bold and noble enterprise
and to brand as an ignominious defeat what is proving itself more and
more every day to be a victory of American arms and a vindication of
American ideals.