Politics
in Washington works in strange ways. A case in point
is the Senate Intelligence Committee's decision to divide
its investigation of the US invasion of Iraq into two
parts. The first part dealt with the reasons for
intelligence failure, or false intelligence, governing that
decision. That congressional report, issued on Friday, damned the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in asserting that the
invasion was carried out on false intelligence.
However, conclusive statements on
the second part - regarding the culpability of the
administration of President George W Bush, whether it
went to war for the wrong reasons, by creating
disinformation about the weapons of mass destruction-related capabilities
of Saddam Hussein and his intentions
toward the United States - will come out after the November
presidential elections. Yet that is the most important part of
the investigation.
The essence of democracy is
that elected officials must be judged on the basis of
their performance. No attempt should be made to cover up
any wrong-headed decisions, for all such endeavors are
nothing but an unadulterated sabotage of democracy. The
American people have the right to know whether their
country was dragged into war on the basis of
disinformation, false premises and scary scenarios that were
reportedly created by highly partisan officials of the current
government. Politics in a democracy not only remains an
art of possibles but, alas, at times it is also about
circumventing - or even outright manufacturing - the
truth to gain undeservedly the trust of a majority of
the people.
Let us be clear about one thing.
The CIA has indeed made mistakes in
providing faulty intelligence; however, in a
democracy, intelligence agencies don't make the high-stake decisions
related to war and peace. Elected officials and
their appointed subordinates do. In this sense, the
real responsibility about the decision to invade Iraq resides
at the doorsteps of President Bush, Vice President
Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and a whole slew of
second- and third-string functionaries who worked directly
for Cheney's office, the Office of the Secretary of
Defense (the civilian side of the Pentagon), and some
members of the Defense Policy Advisory Group, a counseling
arm of the Pentagon. Secretary of State Colin Powell was
a latecomer to the decision to invade Iraq, but even he
cannot escape blame. Those people at the top were
driving policy, not the CIA.
One of the oldest
dictums governing the role of intelligence in national-security
decision-making in Washington - to which everyone
pays lip service but is fully cognizant that, more
often than not, it is not part of the reality - is that
intelligence should not be politicized. Yet intelligence
is frequently politicized. One can write books
just on how many times intelligence was used for
political purposes in various presidencies. The only caveat
is that, under some circumstances, it is less or more
politicized, depending on the stakes involved, and is
also based on who is involved at the top in his/her
attempt to use it to back up certain decisions that are
intended, or have already been made.
In the
case of the Bush administration, the decision to invade
Iraq was never in question. In fact, it was made within
10 days after Bush entered the White House. All
published sources and background information coming out of
Washington on that issue consistently support that fact.
One can explain it either in terms of personal
preference of the sitting president - by stating that
Bush hated Saddam with a passion and entered office with
a steely determination to topple him, no matter what -
or couch it in more grandiose terms - by arguing that
Bush genuinely felt that Saddam's regime posed a serious
threat to the vital interests, indeed, the very security
of the US. Harping on personality-based explanations
risks trivializing the matter. However, by selecting
grandiose explanations, one has to look for evidence
supporting the premise that Iraq under Saddam was a
major threat to the security of the United States and the United
Kingdom, thereby justifying a preemptive war - a more
telling phrase describing that war is "the war of
choice".
That is where one is back to Square 1.
The important questions become whether the evidence provided
by the CIA was indeed out there, and it supported
Bush's description related to Iraq, or whether the intelligence
officials were browbeaten into creating such evidence.
The Senate Intelligence Committee decided to put
the blame on the CIA for providing false evidence, but
not to disclose the most crucial - and explosive -
issue: clarifying whether the Bush administration put
pressure on the CIA in that regard.
Senator Jay
Rockefeller, the ranking Democratic member of that
committee, was quite blunt in stating, "We went into
Iraq based on false claims. The fact is that the
administration at all levels ... used bad information to
bolster its case for war, and we in Congress would not
have authorized that war ... if we knew what we know
now." Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of
that committee, lamely insisted that the invasion of
Iraq was justified on humanitarian grounds, "to liberate
the people of Iraq".
The most surprising
aspect of the whole brouhaha about the role of the CIA is
why there is no outcry in Congress to investigate the
role Cheney, his aides - Lewis "Scooter" Libby and David
Wurmser - Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and their chief cohort,
Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith. From accounts
that are presented in at least five books - Richard
Clarke's Against All Enemies; Bob Woodword's
Plan of Attack; Paul O'Neill's account presented
in Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty; James
Mann's The Rise of the Vulcans; and James
Bamford's A Pretext for War - it is quite
clear that Cheney was the strongest of the "true
believers" regarding the urgency and necessity of
toppling Saddam. But Bamford presents the most damning
discussion of manipulation of intelligence in the Bush
administration. He quotes retired Air Force
Lieutenant-Colonel Karen
Kwiatkowski
, who worked in Feith's intelligence unit in
the Pentagon's Near East South Asia division, stating,
"It was not intelligence, it was propaganda. They take a
little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it
sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of
context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of
information that don't belong together" (p 290).
The Senate Intelligence Committee's report also
cited changes made in the National Intelligence
Estimates (NIE), prepared by the CIA. It noted, "The
classified version presented intelligence findings as
assessments - usually beginning with the words 'we
assess that' - whereas the white paper [the unclassified
version] omitted those words and stated assessments as
facts." For instance, regarding Iraq's chemical weapons,
the classified NIE reads, "Although we have little
specific information of Iraq's CW [chemical weapons]
stockpile, Saddam Hussein probably has stocked at least
100 metric tons of such poisons." In the unclassified
version of the report, on the contrary, the phrase
"although we have little specific information" was
deleted. The unclassified version more categorically
reported "Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred
metric tons of CW agents".
Bamford writes, "From
the very first moment, the Bush foreign policy would
focus on three key objectives: Get rid of Saddam
Hussein, end America's involvement in the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and rearrange the
dominos in the Middle East. A key to the policy shift
would be the concept of 'preemption'" (p 261). The
authors of that Bush blueprint, notes Bamford, were
Richard Perle, Feith, and Wurmser. "Ironically, the plan
was originally intended not for Bush but for ... [former
Israeli] prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu." The partial
purpose underlying their "grand strategy" was to gain
control of Iraq. "Whoever inherits Iraq," they wrote,
"dominates the entire Levant strategically." Another
objective of that strategy was conquest of Syria. One
should recall that the Bush officials made a lot of
accusatory noises, immediately after the toppling of
Saddam, about the purported role of Syria in supplying
weapons to Iraq during military hostilities. There was
also speculation that Syria became the burial ground for
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
Netanyahu rejected the plan of Perle, Feith and Wurmser.
However, when Bush was elected, its authors "dusted off
their preemptive-war strategy and began getting ready to put
it to use". Bamford cites the remarkable National
Security Council meeting of January 30, 2001, which the
newly elected president chaired. In that meeting, Bush
observed, "We are going to correct the imbalances of the
previous administration on the Middle East conflict. We
are going to tilt it back toward Israel ..." (p
265).
Bamford also notes that Bush's
chief of staff Andy Card, Deputy National Security
Adviser Steven Hadley, and Libby were part of creating, in
August 2002, another secret entity, the White House
Iraq Group (WHIG). WHIG's "job was to sell the war to
the general public, largely through televised addresses
and by selectively leading the intelligence to the
media". Karl Rove, another top adviser of Bush, "revealed
a White House political plan", writes Bamford, "to use
the war as a way to 'maintain a positive issue
environment'. But the real pro-war media blitz was scheduled for
the fall and the start of the election season.
Card's explanation for this rationale: ... because from a marketing point
of view, you don't introduce new products in August" (p
318).
The overarching temptation is to dismiss the
preceding as baseless babbling of Bush-bashers. That is
precisely why the Senate Intelligence Committee must forthrightly
and imminently reveal its own findings on the
subject. If the Bush administration is being wrongly accused,
its name and record should be cleared. However, if
it indeed dragged the country into a "war of choice", based
on fictitious descriptions of a threat to the United
States and on make-belief evidence, and by browbeating
the intelligence community to buttress its version of dangers
related to Iraq, then those aspects should be brought to
the full attention of the American people before November
4. Anything short of this will only lead to the
ultimate crime against US democracy: using deception,
mendacity and falsehood to sabotage the will of the
people.
Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an
Alexandria, Virginia, US-based independent strategic
analyst.
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