Spinning Iraq Intelligence: The Reasons Matter

Today, both Robert Brooks in the New York Times and the lead editorial in the Wall Street Journal take the Democrats, and Harry Reid in particular, to task for claiming that the Bush Administration "manufactured and manipulated intelligence in order to sell the war in Iraq." Brooks' piece is much the more amusing of the two, portraying Harry Reid as a demented conspiracy theorist "sit[ting] alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m., writing important notes in crayon on the outside of envelopes." But Brooks' basic point is that most of the claims made by the Bushies in the run-up to the war had been made before -- by Democrats in the Clinton Administration:

• "[In 1998] Clinton argued, 'Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions ... and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons.' "
• "In 1997 Clinton's defense secretary, William Cohen, went on national television and informed the American people that if Saddam has 'as much VX in storage as the U.N. suspects' he would 'be able to kill every human being on the face of the planet.' "
• "Secretary of State Madeleine Albright compared Saddam to Hitler and warned that he could 'use his weapons of mass destruction' or 'become the salesman for weapons of mass destruction.' "
• "Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, warned that 'Saddam's history of aggression, and his recent record of deception and defiance, leave no doubt that he would resume his drive for regional domination if he had the chance. Year after year, in conflict after conflict, Saddam has proven that he seeks weapons, including weapons of mass destruction, in order to use them.' "
• "[I]n 2002 Al Gore declared that Saddam Hussein 'has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.'
• "In 2001, a Clinton assistant secretary of state, Robert Einhorn, said at a Congressional hearing, 'Today, or at most within a few months, Iraq could launch missile attacks with chemical or biological weapons against its neighbors.' "
• "Clinton National Security Council staffer Kenneth Pollack has written, 'The U.S. Intelligence Community's belief toward the end of the Clinton administration [was] that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program and was close to acquiring nuclear weapons.' "

The Wall Street Journal editorial takes on the "manipulation" claims more prosaically and more directly:

In July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan 500-page report that found numerous failures of intelligence gathering and analysis. As for the Bush Administration's role, "The Committee 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," (our emphasis).

The Butler Report, published by the British in July 2004, similarly found no evidence of "deliberate distortion," although it too found much to criticize in the quality of prewar intelligence.

The March 2005 Robb-Silberman report on WMD intelligence was equally categorical, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . .analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments. We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments."

* * * *

In short, everyone who has looked into the question of whether the Bush Administration lied about intelligence, distorted intelligence, or pressured intelligence agencies to produce assessments that would support a supposedly pre-baked decision to invade Iraq has come up with the same answer: No, no, no and no.

Everyone, that is, except Joseph Wilson IV.

And, as, Max Boot pointed out in yesterday's LA Times, Wilson was at least as guilty of "manipulating" the facts as anyone else:

The problem here is that the one undisputed liar in this whole sordid affair doesn't work for the administration. In his attempts to turn his wife into an antiwar martyr, Joseph C. Wilson IV has retailed more whoppers than Burger King.

The least consequential of these fibs was his denial that it was his wife who got him sent to Niger in February 2002 to check out claims that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium. . . . Much more egregious were the ways in which Wilson misrepresented his findings. In his famous New York Times Op-Ed article (July 6, 2003), Wilson gave the impression that his eight-day jaunt proved that Iraq was not trying to acquire uranium in Africa. Therefore, when administration officials nevertheless cited concerns about Hussein's nuclear ambitions, Wilson claimed that they had "twisted" evidence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." The Senate Intelligence Committee was not kind to this claim either.

The panel's report found that, far from discrediting the Iraq-Niger uranium link, Wilson actually provided fresh details about a 1999 meeting between Niger's prime minister and an Iraqi delegation. Beyond that, he had not supplied new information. According to the panel, intelligence analysts "did not think" that his findings "clarified the story on the reported Iraq-Niger uranium deal." In other words, Wilson had hardly exposed as fraudulent the "16 words" included in the 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." In fact, the British government, in its own post-invasion review of intelligence, found that this claim was "well founded."

OK. OK. Surprise, surprise. No one is pure. The intelligence was spotty and ambiguous, and politicians and op-ed writers on both sides of the political spectrum emphsized the parts that advanced their underlying agendas and de-emphsized or ignored the rest. What else is new?

Still, it seems to me there is a difference. It lies not in the fact of the "spin" but in the reasons for it. The goal of the Clinton administration was to keep the United Nations from abandoning the inspection process and the sanctions imposed on Iraq after the Gulf War. The goal of the Bush Administration was to take us to war. That difference is important. It is one thing to ignore ambiguity when the proposed reponse is diplomatic and economic pressure and another thing entirely when the proposed response is war.

It is not the "manipulation" of intelligence that is the real problem here. It is the willingness of this administration -- any administration -- to go to war in the face of very ambiguous intelligence about the degree to which US security is actually treatened.

Even more, I think, it is about trust. I can remember reading Colin Powell's address to the UN and thinkng, "Is that all?? Man, that's thin!" Yet I, like so many others, bouyed in part by the apparent success of the invasion of Afghanistan, decided to trust them. It is the fact that this trust was so obvioulsy misplaced that generates the real bitterness and anger.

On most issues, people expect politicians and editorialists to "spin" the facts and are therefore suitably skeptical of arguments made for and against a given proposal. Not so with wars, though. The decision to take the Country to war is the single most important decision any government can make. People expect that, on this decision at least, their leaders, regardless of political party or ideology, will not take the Country to war without a very, very good reason for doing so. People also recognize that the publicly available facts may be only a small part of the story. As a consequence, on questions of war, people are much more willing to trust the President and his advisors than they are on virtually any other issue. When it turns out, as it so often has in the last several decades, that this trust has been misplaced, that an Administration's reasons for going to war had more to do with ideology than security, people get angry and, in the end, lose a bit of their capacity to trust even on questions of war. That is a very dangerous thing, becuase there someday might actually be a real good reason to go to war, yet the people may be unwilling to believe. One can only cry wolf so many times.