This article by Seymor Hersh puts light on why the Bush administration got Iraq's wmd threat wrong, (which until we're shown otherwise I'll continue to believe). Mechanisms in the CIA that were intended to verify and filter intelligence data were put aside. (Via Col Lounsbury.)

The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic?and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book "The Threatening Storm" generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was ?dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.

"They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information," Pollack continued. "They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn't have the time or the energy to go after the bad information."

This is not the whole story - we won't have that for years - but it gives an indication of how bad information may have been prematurely presented to top officials and influenced their decisions, (or at least their justifications). In May I made a list of various scenarios about the information Bush used to justify the war: that he thought he told the truth, that he lied, or that he exaggerated sketchy evidence. This would indicate the first, but that doesn't vindicate him. If there were mechanisms in place to prevent this from happening, why were they removed?

Hersh blames pre-9/11 decisions, but it seems plausible to me that 9/11 would have increased the effect. CIA failed to predict and prevent the attack partly because it didn't connect all its dots, and perhaps one way the CIA leadership - the people who were held responsible for the failure - responded to that was by insisting on more information to be sent upwards more quickly. But that's also a risky way to respond to organizational weaknesses, more of a panic solution than a real one. The problem with bad information isn't shortage of it.

None of this changes my view that the Iraq war was right. It's hard to understand how anyone can read about the things that are happening there now - the introduction of freedom of thought and expression, and the hope if not the certainty of stability, wealth and democracy - and say that it would have been better for everyone if the clock could be turned back, if we could revive Hussein's hell of torture, fear and propaganda. We have the alternatives before us, Iraq of October 2002, and Iraq of October 2003. Who but a sadist would prefer the first?

It's also hard to see why the certainty of a nuclear threat from Iraq would be required to justify a war, which is the implication of the criticism against Bush. Bush seems to have exaggerated the threat, that's true, but it existed. Even a small probability of a large threat should weigh heavily for taking action, and we can be pretty sure that if Bush had tried to confront Hussein about wmd's and then backed down, the threat would have increased. I don't believe for a second that Hussein, if left alone and led to believe there was noone around with the guts to confront him, wouldn't have restarted his nuclear weapons program. What, play nice, and let Iran become the Gulf region's only nuclear power?

So there may have been faults with the evidence Bush presented, and Americans will want to remember that when they consider him for reelection, but this only cuts of the legs of the case for war if you believe that, say, a 25% chance of Hussein acquiring nuclear weapons would have been acceptable, and that there were no other important benefits to removing him. (That's if you think it all through, of course, which is a bit straining, and totally unnecessary as long as you remember that it was the Americans who did this, and that President Bush is a Republican. That's all any concerned citizen needs to know to form their opinions.)

The most disturbing part of the Hersh article
is this.

Quote:

Another explanation was provided by a former senior
C.I.A. officer. He had begun talking to me about the
Niger papers in March, when I first wrote about the
forgery, and said, "Somebody deliberately let something
false get in there." He became more forthcoming in
subsequent months, eventually saying that a small group
of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators
had banded together in the late summer of last year
and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.

"The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney," the former
officer said. "They said, ?O.K, we?re going to put the
bite on these guys.?" My source said that he was first
told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the
many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past
and present C.I.A. officials. "Everyone was bragging
about it -- ?Here?s what we did. It was cool, cool,
cool.? "

People also need to know that Joseph Wilson lied
to the american people in his New York Times
op-ed.

Several days after Wilson wrote that op-ed, the
director of the CIA, George Tenet, issued this
statement:

"In an effort to inquire about certain reports
involving Niger, CIA's counter-proliferation experts,
on their own initiative, asked an individual with
ties to the region to make a visit to see what he
could learn. He reported back to us that one of the
former Nigerien officials he met stated that he was
unaware of any contract being signed between Niger
and rogue states for the sale of uranium during his
tenure in office. The same former official also said
that in June 1999 a businessman approached him and
insisted that the former official meet with an Iraqi
delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations"
between Iraq and Niger. The former official interpreted
the overture as an attempt to discuss uranium sales."

The "individual with ties to the region" is
Joseph Wilson.

Wilson has since confirmed that statement by Tenet
although he has sought to play down its significance.

It's also worth pondering that Seymour Hersh also left
this information out of his account although it belongs
right at the heart of the story he tells.

If as the Hersh source asserts, some significant part of
the CIA was aware of, and vicariously participated in,
a conspiracy to deceive the government of the United States
in order to make look the only legitimate authority, the
only elected representative of the people, in the executive
branch look bad, then frankly I believe the White House was
right to cut the CIA out of the decision making loop, and
in fact they did rather well on the limited human resources
that they could trust.

CIA need fumigation. Tenet should have been out by 9/30/01.

Wilson is a shill for the Saudis. This ties into the Plame/Wilson nonsense. Either his wife was outed in 1994 by traitor Adrich Ames or the CIA or Wilson inadvertently outed her, I can't remember which. It was Wilson's wife, Plame, who suggested him for the job. He stayed at the hotel, drinking tea by the pool and phoned in his report. His contacts came to him, he did no legwork.

Some American bloggers have already dissected this column, I just can't remember who.

I was in favor of the war, too, but I think it's important to keep in mind the elements of the argument.

There are few who would argue that Saddam had no intention of acquiring nuclear weapons (the only real weapons of mass destruction). If he could have gotten them he would, and he would probably have used them.

But one key factor was whether he could be persuaded to disarm via weapons inspections, diplomatic pressure, etc. I think the evidence that Saddam only understood force, or the threat of it. And it's pretty clear to me that waiting until someone has nuclear weapons (Iran, North Korea) is pretty stupid, too. As much as people despise a doctrine of pre-emption, the alternative is much worse.

The other factor was one of timing. Waging war in Iraq is practical only between say January and May. The coalition was running out of time to start a war - April was cutting it close, as it was. But the question was what they would have won by waiting, if it was true that Saddam's nuclear threat wasn't as imminent as Bush led us to believe. Presumably, more of the international community would have aligned behind military action; there would have been better preparation for the war, and more "limited" military strikes; etc.

The bigger political issue is this: if the Bush administration deliberately misled the public - and Congress - about the basis for going to war, it really doesn't matter if the outcome was good or not. The president of the U.S. simply doesn't have the authority to start a war without the informed consent of Congress, and (imho) doing so amounts to what surely must be the kind of high crimes and misdemeanors the framers had in mind.

I don't buy the argument that a better Iraq is a good enough reason for the U.S. to have launched the invasion. I'm obviously hopeful that things will go spectacularly well in Iraq, but I don't think the U.S. is willing to live with the precedent that any totalitarian regime can be toppled at the whim of the U.S. There's a long line of countries that need invading and despots that need deposing/killing if that were the case.

--if it was true that Saddam's nuclear threat wasn't as imminent as Bush led us to believe.--

Bush NEVER led ANYONE to believe the threat was imminent. You were spun. And it's not being used as much in America.

That lie has been busted by the American blogosphere.

For the best roundup, Andrew Sullivan.

Why else was there such a hurry? Yes, W. gave a number of reasons why invading Iraq was a good idea, but some were decisive and others weren't. The WMD argument was clearly what mattered, and if I'm not mistaken the term was "clear and present" which in my mind translates nicely to "imminent."

I'm not convinced by the arguments that the invasion and administration failed; neither that Blix and AlBaradei represented a reasonable alternative; and certainly not France, Germany, et al are more peace-loving than Americans. But neither am I convinced by the Bush administration's retrofitting of their arguments to fit the facts once they're actually known.

Either Bush was misled into believing there was a clear and present danger to the U.S. posed by Iraq, or he lied about what he knew. I'm more inclined to believe the former, but he's got to answer one way or the other.

After the comments Hersh gave to ChicagoMag.com last May, I take his reporting on these issues with a grain of salt.

Choice comments:
Hersh on President Bush and his top advisors: "We didn't win the war in Afghanistan; I don't care what George Bush says. I don't care that George Bush doesn't know much, but the people around him should know more who don't seem to know more."
Hersh on John Ashcroft: "We have an attorney general that is, I don't know, how would you describe him, demented?"
Hersh on Donald Rumsfeld: "We've got a secretary of defense who thinks he's Woody Allen."
Hersh on invading Iraq: "We have a possibility of some sort of horrible Armageddon."

Please keep these in mind the next time you read one of Hersh's pieces.

A fairy tale for you:

Once upon a time, there was a town whose children liked to play in a vacant lot on the edge of the town. Nearby, there was a big nest of snakes, some of them venomous, some not. One day, some of the snakes slithered into the vacant lot where the children were playing and bit some of them. A couple of the children died. The town elders decided to take action and kill off all of the snakes, but were thwarted by PETA and the Council on Serpent-American Relations, who said that the town elders could only kill the snakes that were actually involved in the attacks on the children. "They were bitten by a rattlesnake!" a herpetologist screamed. "Why are you attacking those poor cottonmouths and coral snakes? They didn't do anything to you! Stop the speciesist attacks on serpents!"

Here in the southeastern United States, we have an interesting case of mimicry. There is a snake called the coral snake that has red, yellow and black stripes, and is very poisonous. There is also a non-poisonous snake called the kingsnake, which also has red, yellow and black stripes, but in a different arrangement. Animals that prey on snakes leave the kingsnake alone because it LOOKS like a dangerous coral snake.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, some would have us believe that Saddam was a kingsnake, totally harmless, no WMDs here, move along. However, in a post-9/11 world, it's very dangerous to even LOOK like like you're a coral snake. If you look like a coral snake, you're going to get treated like a coral snake, because we don't want to get bitten again that way.

--Why else was there such a hurry? Yes, W. gave a number of reasons why invading Iraq was a good idea, but some were decisive and others weren't. The WMD argument was clearly what mattered, and if I'm not mistaken the term was "clear and present" which in my mind translates nicely to "imminent."--

Hurry???

12 years is hurry?

Even after 9/11 it took a year and a half.

That's hurry???

You infered something that wasn't there.

It's been "clear and present" that we've been under attack for oh, 20++ years now. Does that mean all attacks were imminent?

Via 11/11/02 Sully:

Boston, Mass: Why did Martin Smith at least twice say while conducting an interview in the program that "Americans were sold this war as an imminent threat..." That is a bold face lie, an untruth from beginning to end. In President Bush's state of the union speech, he specifically countered that argument by in essence saying we cannot afford to wait until the threat from Iraq is imminent. For a program with Truth in it's title, that's a big slip up and I heard Mr. Smith say it at least twice.

Martin Smith: I'm glad you asked this question. I believe I may have used the term "imminent threat" more than twice. If you go back to the records you will see that while the president does not use the exact phrase, he talks about a "grave and gathering danger." He talks about Saddam's ability to launch chemical or biological weapons in 45 minutes.

No one that I spoke to in the administration who supported the war quibbled with the use of the term "imminent threat." It's simply not a quotation - it's a summary of the president's assessment.
Good for you, Mr Boston. What we see here is that Smith has interpreted what the administration said before the war to be an "imminent threat." But the only time I know of that the exact phrase was used was in president Bush's critical State of the Union address before the war. And in that speech, this is what Bush said:
"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."
Yes, that is a "grave and gathering danger." But it is not "imminent." In fact, it specifically makes a distinction that Smith's propaganda elides. Think I'm as biased as Smith? Here's how the leading anti-war Democrat - yes, Howard Dean - described Bush's position on September 29, 2002: "The president has never said that Saddam has the capability of striking the United States with atomic or biological weapons any time in the immediate future." I would say that "any time in the immediate future" is as good a definition as any of the word "imminent." So was even Howard Dean spinning for Bush? Of course not. He was summing up the simple truth. Smith is distorting the historical record to make a fake case against the administration. Perhaps it was intentional; perhaps he was just so blinded by liberal bias he even believed his own untruths. But this time, he's been caught.
(CORRECTION: In my original version, I included a final line from the caller from Boston. There was no final line. I mistranscribed commentary from an email about the inter-change and confused it with the transcript. Apologies.)

Sandy - I follow the news way more than the average guy, and I was even convinced that going to war in Iraq was the right thing. Heck, I might even have been convinced by the Wolfowitz/Perle perspective that invading Iraq was necessary to destabilize the many terrorist-supporting regimes in the Middle East.

But Bush didn't just make the case why it was necessary to invade Iraq at all - he also made the case why it was necessary to do it *now* - in spite of the fact that more time would have bought the coalition a better tactical situation (more bombs, better intelligence, etc.) a stronger international base (because Blix and AlBaradei would have failed to get much cooperation from Saddam), etc. The only possible reason for going to war at that particular time was that there was a clear and present danger.

I totally agree that the international community had waited too long, accepted too much BS, and generally been irresponsible about Iraq. But that shouldn't force urgent and extreme action.

I think we have to expect from a president that he makes a clear, compelling, and irrefutable case for taking his country to war. In hindsight, Bush made a muddled, controversial, and questionable case for it. What's worse, it turns out to be that way *after* the fact, and that should bother everyone - even those who still think invading was a good idea.

Another point is that the U.S. does have vast but still scarce resources in the war against terrorism. Even if we accept your argument that an invasion of Iraq was entirely justified, why did we not use those scarce resources to shut down Hizballah in southern Lebanon, go after terrorist cells in Latin America, or even invade Saudi Arabia?

U.S. has launched a war against terrorism, not against proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Lief writes -

"[Dubya] also made the case why it was necessary to do it *now* - in spite of the fact that more time would have bought the coalition a better tactical situation..."

It was NOT possible to maintain Coalition Forces past spring at battle ready strength and at attack range.

Demobilization would have been required and withdrawal of forces until late 2003 or 2004 (U.S. election year).

As any seasoned observer of U.S. politics knows, the U.S. political system cannot deal with the stress of major foreign policy initiatives during a presidential election year, UNLESS a potential foreign threat has moved past the "grave and gathering" stage, beyond even the "imminent danger" zone, but only if we are plunged directly into the irradiated "dead-zone."

That's our own quaint "cultural exception" in the realm of politics, if you will.

Hence any delay past April meant a two-year free walk for the perp, Sahddim, and his collaborator, Chiraq.

Chiraq/Sahddim were of course transparently gaming this farce.

Very well, no problemo.

You see, when it comes to the security of my homeland, this level of gaming by Chiraq/Sahddim constitutes a full-blown casus belli justifying the removal of the Butcher of Baghdad.

My security will not be made hostage to any Eurabian gaming, thag you berry buch, all the sabe.

Sahddim's job was to show all his cards, face up -- dig up the parts for the nuclear device that were buried in the garden of one his scientists, hand over to Blix the range-exceeding missiles, deliver up the al-Qaeda affiliates training near the Kurd-Iran-Iraq border -- and THAT might have been a fair trade for US/UK demobilization and a de facto committment to let Sahddim run wild & free for another two years.

But no show of any good faith or conciliation was forthcoming.

Sahddim had ample time.

But not enough to bluff and game a two year time-out.

Interesting, though, that Lief should pin the blame on the U.S. for engineering a false casus belli.

Lief writes further -

"Even if we accept your argument that an invasion of Iraq was entirely justified, why did we not use those scarce resources to shut down Hizballah in southern Lebanon, go after terrorist cells in Latin America, or even invade Saudi Arabia?"

One reason is that none of these entities were reasonably suspected of having plans in the works (including plans temporarily on hold) to develop WMDs.

Many other reasons exist; but why bother listing them all?

Sandy - first of all, get the spelling of my name right.

And please don't project opinions on me that I don't have and have never expressed. I did not say that Bush fabricated a casus belli, though others may have said so.

In fact, you are the one who is accusing Bush of timing the war to not get in the way of his presidential election (or re-appointment) campaign. I realize this is a hypothetical (but then again, a WMD threat from Iraq also turned out to be hypothetical), but don't you think that if Bush had the choice between renewing his presidential term or saving American lives - he should choose saving American lives?

I don't believe that the troop deployment was at the point of no return.

Oh, and please stop going off on "here in the U.S. and *my* national security, etc." I live in the U.S., too.

Dear L,

"Sandy - first of all, get the spelling of my name right."

I'll consent to spelling your name right if you'll desist from calling me "Sandy." Sweet name though "Sandy" may be, Og suits me just fine, thank you very much.

"And please don't project opinions on me that I don't have and have never expressed. I did not say that Bush fabricated a casus belli, though others may have said so.

"In fact, you are the one who is accusing Bush of timing the war to not get in the way of his presidential election (or re-appointment) campaign.

Exactly NOT so.

The point is that W, but not only him -- but rather our entire national political system -- is paralyzed during the fourth year of the election cycle.

W (or rather Cheney/Rummy) quite obviously "timed" the invasion, but not as you suggest.

Negotiated solutions were available to Chiraq/Sahddim right up until the last minute, up until the point when the great, slow moving tortoise known as America was about to turn over on its back and be immoblized for no less than 20 months -- starting with the onset of a blazing mesopotamian summer followed by a year long presidential campaign.

Please don't mischaracterize what I wrote. Your disagreement is welcome. I may be totally full of it; if can you point me in the right direction, I'd much appreciate it. But twisting my words and mischaracterizating my meaning doesn't advance OUR cause -- yours AND mine. :)

"I realize this is a hypothetical (but then again, a WMD threat from Iraq also turned out to be hypothetical)..."

Not so.

Jury's still out on WMD. Or WMD program may possibly have been put on temporary hold. But a temporary hold poised to restart at a moment's notice while Uncle Tortoise is flipped over on his back for two years, is not a mere "hypothetical" in my book. "Grave and gathering" is more apt, to my mind.

"... but don't you think that if Bush had the choice between renewing his presidential term or saving American lives - he should choose saving American lives?"

See above.

"I don't believe that the troop deployment was at the point of no return."

That's an important question. Maybe someone else has time to address it.

"Oh, and please stop going off on "here in the U.S. and *my* national security, etc." I live in the U.S., too."

Our gain, Norway's loss, Leif.

Best,

Og

Don't worry - in 20 years, The US will be blamed for incompetance, laziness, generalized non-europeaness, and inhumanity when buried chemical biological and radiological weapons will be discovered as environmental pollutants in Iraq and Syria...

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