Bush bullied CIA in order to dupe us

Jay Bookman
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
2/5/04
 
The latest line from Secretary of State Colin Powell and others 
is that the Iraq war was such a just cause that we would have 
invaded even if we had known beforehand that no weapons of 
mass destruction existed. 

To some, that might sound like a feeble effort to downplay a 
massive intelligence failure. I think it's more than that. I think 
it's the truth.
 
In effect, the Bush administration is now admitting that WMD 
were never the reason for the war. They chose to invade Iraq 
not to protect us from anthrax or nuclear attack, but because 
they hoped that an invasion would inspire new respect for U.S. 
power and would allow us to use Iraq as a base from which to 
transform the entire Arab world.

In the fall of 2002, however, administration officials recognized 
that honesty was not the best policy. Americans would never 
support an unprovoked war based on some grandiose ambition 
and dubious strategic benefit. If Bush officials wanted war, 
they needed to terrorize the American public into supporting it, 
and they seized upon the CIA's assessment of Iraqi WMD as 
the perfect tool for achieving that goal.

But first, the intelligence agencies had to be whipped into 
playing along.
 
While the CIA believed that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD, 
it had also concluded that his stockpiles posed little danger to 
us or the rest of the world. That widely held view was captured 
perfectly in remarks by Powell on Feb. 24, 2001:  "Frankly, 
[sanctions] have worked," Powell told an Egyptian press 
conference. "[Saddam] has not developed any significant 
capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is 
unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."

To get its war, the administration had to transform what it 
knew to be a minor, contained annoyance into a threat big 
enough to scare the American people. The solution it hit upon 
was ingenious: They fabricated a link between Saddam and 
Osama bin Laden.

Once again, though, the "realists" at the CIA posed a problem. 
They knew that no such link existed, and they naively thought 
their job was to be honest about what they knew. So, CIA 
Director George Tenet told Congress that it was highly unlikely 
that Saddam would ever give WMD to terrorists, and CIA 
analysts confirmed that Saddam and bin Laden were far from 
allies and, in fact, hated and distrusted each other.

That was true, but back then, the administration was more 
interested in fear than truth. It began a campaign to force the 
CIA to toe the company line, a campaign focused in the 
Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office. Pressure was 
exerted in private, including visits by Cheney to cross-examine 
analysts at CIA headquarters. It took place in public, as well, 
as mouthpieces in the conservative press attacked the CIA as 
Saddam-loving apologists. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld 
even created a whole new intelligence office to reinterpret 
evidence "overlooked" by the fools at CIA.

Inevitably, the agency gave in, with surrender coming in the 
form of a letter from Tenet that grudgingly allowed for the 
possibility of a bin Laden-Saddam link. That was all the 
administration needed. "Imagine those 19 hijackers with other 
weapons and other plans -- this time armed by Saddam," 
President Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address. "It 
would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this 
country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known."

A similar sequence of events can be traced involving Iraq's 
nuclear program. The CIA's honest assessment was that "Iraq 
has probably continued at least low-level theoretical R&D 
associated with its nuclear program," but little more.
 
Again, postwar analysis has confirmed the accuracy of that 
claim, but again, the administration didn't want accuracy. It 
wanted scary. It cowed the CIA and other agencies into 
silence, allowing Cheney, Bush and others to warn that Iraq 
had reconstituted its nuclear program, had sought to buy 
uranium, had tried to acquire ways to enrich that uranium. 
None of that was true, but it served its purpose.

Looking back, then, the real scandal is not what the CIA got 
wrong. The real outrage is how much it got right, but was 
muzzled from telling us.
 
Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor. His column 
appears Thursdays and Mondays.