December 17, 2005
In
a recent article, "Who
Is Lying About Iraq?" Norman Podhoretz takes the interesting
position that George Bush has been completely upfront in his handling
of the conflict, and that the conventional wisdom that he "lied
us into war" is a complete fabrication by his political enemies.
I
say the position is interesting because there certainly seems
to be some skullduggery afoot. After all, Bush clearly said
in his (now infamous) 2003
State of the Union address that we were giving Saddam one last
chance to give up his stockpiles of WMD (that he currently had
in his possession), or else we (i.e. Bush) would "lead
a coalition to disarm him." Following the invasion, when the
stockpiles failed to turn up day after day, people like Rumsfeld
assured us it was just a matter of time. (Nobody ever said at that
point, "Well, we’re still looking for the WMD, but keep in
mind that it’s entirely possible our intelligence was dead wrong
on this.") Then, after months and months had gone by, pundits
(I’m not sure if the Bush higher-ups themselves ever tried this)
said, "What are you wacky liberals talking about?? Bush never
said Saddam had WMDs, just that he was developing the capacity
to produce them!" Fortunately this lie (which it was) died
out, and finally, at long last, even top people in the Bush Administration
stopped speculating on how Saddam funneled all his WMDs through
Syria on the eve of invasion, and admitted that they had been completely
wrong in their statements about the stockpiles.
So
given the above history of the WMD issue, it is interesting to find
Podhoretz so confidently claiming that "the charge that George
W. Bush misled us into an immoral and/or unnecessary war in Iraq
by telling a series of lies" has been "refuted and discredited
over and over again by evidence and argument alike." Further,
I must confess that Podhoretz makes a very persuasive case; any
Bush sympathizer would undoubtedly come away from the piece feeling
reassured indeed. And yet, as I shall show below, Podhoretz largely
relies on accurate, yet completely irrelevant, points. (At critical
steps in the argument he also throws in a few falsehoods, but largely
I agree with his statements.) Upon reflection (and some investigation),
I cling to the conventional wisdom that George Bush lied us into
war.
Democratic
Critics
Podhoretz
spends much of his article documenting the apparent hypocrisy of
liberal Democrats such as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry.
Even if we stipulate all of this "evidence," it proves
nothing except that US senators will lie in order to gain political
points. Did it take Podhoretz to convince us of this? The point
is obvious, but important, so let me say it plainly: Just because
a particular critic of the Iraq War turns out to be a hypocritical
liar, the war is not necessarily a good thing. If Bill Clinton
should publicly speak out against marital infidelity, that would
not exonerate philanderers.
However,
even on this minor point I think Podhoretz oversteps. After claiming
that all major intelligence agencies agreed with the CIA in the
weeks before the invasion, Podhoretz writes: "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…"
Now
this is quite odd. Certainly the members of Congress (and coalition
allies) who supported Bush were not doing so on the basis of 1998
intelligence reports. Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney, etc. were
not telling people, "As of five years ago, we are quite confident
that Saddam has dangerous stockpiles of WMD."
More
important, knowledgeable
critics of the prewar intelligence were not claiming
that Saddam had never had WMD in the history of his regime. No,
they were claiming (as was Saddam himself) that he had fully complied
with the UN demands to disarm. Now I don’t pretend to be an expert
on these matters, and hence I can’t give a precise timeline, but
it seems that one could consistently claim that in 1998 Saddam posed
a growing threat, but that in response to international pressure
he backed off his programs and was not a threat when Bush,
Cheney, et al. claimed otherwise.
As
a final remark in this section, let me draw attention to Podhoretz’s
treatment of Kerry, who is one of the Democrats "who would
later pretend to have been deceived by the Bush White House."
As evidence of Kerry’s apparent dishonesty, Podhoretz offers the
following quote from Kerry:
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.
Now
to understand the context of this choice of Kerry quotes, you would
need to read Podhoretz’s article (and of course I urge you to do
this to accurately assess the fairness of my critique). Podhoretz
is trying to demonstrate that Bush’s Democratic critics believed
Saddam was dangerous even back when Clinton was in office, and so
they must now be lying when they claim that Bush tricked them. Yet
how does a quote from Kerry in 2002, in which he makes no
allusion to his prior beliefs, bear on this point? If John
Kerry is now saying that he was misled by Bush when he voted to
give the president the option of invasion, how in the world is this
disproven by quoting Kerry’s statement at the time of the vote?
Yes, Mr. Podhoretz, John Kerry said in 2002 that "I believe
that a deadly arsenal of weapons" in the hands of Saddam posed
a grave threat, but his current claim is that this very belief
was engineered by Bush’s falsehoods. Again, I’m not trying to
defend Kerry here, I’m just pointing out the irrelevance of this
supposedly damning Kerry quotation.
Framing
a Guilty Man
Beyond
the alleged hypocrisy of liberal critics, Podhoretz’s main point
is that Bush, although mistaken in his claims about Saddam’s WMD,
was honestly mistaken:
[I]t
defies all reason to think that Bush was lying when he asserted
that [WMD existed in Iraq]. 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.
First,
a minor linguistic point: Even if Bush didn’t lie us into
war, he still misled us—by definition. He told the American
people that it was up to Saddam to lay his banned weapons out for
the world to see, and that if he didn’t do so, America would lead
a coalition to disarm him. If that isn’t "misleading"
then I don’t know what is.
Beyond
that, though, Podhoretz is being quite naïve. Even if George
Bush honestly believed Saddam had those stockpiles, why would this
necessarily prevent Bush from using falsehoods to raise public support
for the war? In explaining what happened with the O. J. Simpson
trial, Alan Dershowitz said that the jury believed the police had
framed a guilty man. In other words, the police were sure Simpson
did it, but they were afraid he might walk if they didn’t "help
out" with the evidence. Is it so inconceivable that a US president
might feel the need to exaggerate certain things in order to convince
the fickle and shortsighted public to support his bold mission?
Intelligence
Consensus?
Let
us now get to the gritty details. After the rather strong statement
that "it is as close to certainty as we can get" that
Bush didn’t lie concerning WMD, Podhoretz documents this fact by
citing the endorsement of these claims by "all fifteen agencies
involved in gathering intelligence in the Unites States," and
Podhoretz also argues that the "intelligence agencies of Britain,
Russia, China, Israel, and—yes—France all agreed with this judgment."
In
fairness, let me concede that I conducted a (very brief) AP news
search for the weeks prior to the invasion, and the headlines didn’t
make it appear as if the French, Germans, etc. were saying, "We
totally dispute the US-British claims about WMD, and that’s why
we cannot endorse their proposed invasion." However, the situation
is a bit more nuanced than a simple Agree: Yes / No. As the Bush
apologists now remind us, intelligence operations are a tricky,
uncertain matter. It would have been unnecessarily risky to say,
"We are confident that Saddam has zero WMD." But
in retrospect, whose use of the available intelligence was
the more…well, intelligent? The position of the UN critics—based
of course on their intelligence reports—was that war was not
necessary, that inspections were working, and that Saddam did not
pose an immediate danger to the world. Isn’t it a bit inaccurate,
then, to say that every intelligence agency in the world agreed
with the CIA about Saddam’s stockpiles?
In
any event, we now come to one of the outright falsehoods in Podhoretz’s
article. First, a caveat: Just as Podhoretz claims with Bush, it
is here possible that Podhoretz is not lying; perhaps he
honestly believes what he wrote. Nonetheless, it is demonstrably
false. I refer to the claim concerning nuclear capability that I
have put in bold below:
In
short…"the consensus of the intelligence community,"
as [Powell chief of staff Lawrence] 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.
Now
this is simply not true. As Podhoretz himself admits, the State
Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) never went
along with the nuclear claims. Further, International Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) Director
General Mohamed ElBaradei’s March 7 presentation to the UN Security
Council paints a quite different picture of the allegedly "overwhelming
consensus" concerning Iraq’s efforts to revive its nuclear
program:
Mr.
President, my report to the council today is an update on the
status of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s nuclear verification
activities in Iraq…
The
IAEA has now conducted a total of 218 nuclear inspections at 141
sites, including 21 that have not been inspected before. In addition,
the agency experts have taken part in many joint UNMOVIC [U.N.
Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission]-IAEA inspections.
…
Our vehicle-borne radiation survey team has covered some 2,000
kilometers over the past three weeks. Survey access has been gained
to over 75 facilities, including military garrisons and camps,
weapons factories, truck parks and manufacturing facilities and
residential areas.
…
Mr.
President, in the last few weeks, Iraq has provided a considerable
volume of documentation relevant to the issues I reported earlier
as being of particular concern, including Iraq’s efforts to procure
aluminum tubes, its attempted procurement of magnets and magnets-production
capabilities and its reported attempt to import uranium.
…
Mr.
President, in conclusion, I am able to report today that in the
area of nuclear weapons, the most lethal weapons of mass destruction,
inspections in Iraq are moving forward. Since the resumption of
inspection a little over three months ago, and particularly during
the three weeks since my last ordered report to the council, the
IAEA has made important progress in identifying what nuclear-related
capabilities remain in Iraq and in its assessment of whether Iraq
has made any effort to revive its past nuclear program during
the intervening four years since inspections were brought to a
halt. At this stage, the following can be stated:
One,
there is no indication of resumed nuclear activities in
those buildings that were identified through the use of satellite
imagery as being reconstructed or newly erected since 1998, nor
any indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities at any
inspected sites.
Second,
there is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import uranium
since 1990.
[Third],
there is no indication that Iraq has attempted to import aluminum
tubes for use in centrifuge enrichment. Moreover, even had
Iraq pursued such a plan, it would have encountered practical
difficulties in manufacturing centrifuge out of the aluminum tubes
in question.
Fourth,
although we are still reviewing issues related to magnets and
magnet-production, there is no indication to date that Iraq
imported magnets for use in centrifuge enrichment program.
As
I stated above, the IAEA will naturally continue further to scrutinize
and investigate all of the above issues. After three months
of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or
plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapon program
in Iraq. We intend to continue our inspection activities,
making use of all additional rights granted to us by Resolution
1441 and all additional tools that might be available to us, including
reconnaissance platforms and all relevant technologies.
Now
of course, just as we can’t take the public statements of Bush,
Blair, Kerry, or Saddam for that matter at face value, neither should
we conclude that ElBaradei believed in what he stated to the UN.
In other words, just because he uttered the above on March 7, 2003,
doesn’t necessarily prove that Podhoretz is wrong in asserting
a consensus regarding Iraq; ElBaradei could’ve believed Saddam was
reviving his nuclear program and lied about it (for some reason)
to the UN. But judging from the quite specific details (which could
have been easily contradicted), and their correspondence with what
in hindsight is obviously the truth, I think the more reasonable
conclusion is that Podhoretz is dead wrong on this point.
The
Infamous Niger Documents
In
his State of the Union, Bush notoriously said, "The British
government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant
quantities of uranium from Africa." The typical understanding
(which Podhoretz takes pains to refute) is that forged documents
were the basis for this claim, and hence Bush (and Blair) lied us
into war.
First,
an aside: Podhoretz spends most of his time here attacking Joseph
Wilson. As with the liberal senators, I concede the point; as far
as I can tell, Wilson has been caught fudging certain facts in order
to make himself a sleuthing Cassandra. But again, that is completely
irrelevant to whether Bush and his subordinates acted dishonestly
with regard to the State of the Union claim.
In
order to defend Bush’s statement, Podhoretz tries a Clintonesque
parsing of language: "[E]very single one of the sixteen words
was true. That is, British intelligence had assured
the CIA that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy enriched uranium from
the African country of Niger."
As
I say, this move reminds me of Clinton hiding behind the definition
of sexual relations. And, as with Clinton, not only does
the legalistic defense miss the big picture, it’s not even correct.
If you say that someone else has learned something, then
you are endorsing its truth. (In contrast, if Bush had said
that the British government believed or that the British
government informed him of such-and-such then Podhoretz’s
defense would be much stronger.)
This
is a crucial point (for proving Bush’s dishonesty), so forgive me
for the following analogy: If memory serves, the villain in a certain
Columbo episode tried to establish an alibi by having someone
purposely get caught on a traffic surveillance camera while holding
up a cardboard replica of the killer. (The point was to make the
police believe the murderer was on the road—going above the speed
limit—during the time of the murder.) Now when Columbo interviewed
this man, suppose he said, "Lieutenant, please! The officers
who reviewed the traffic tapes learned that I was on the road at
the time Jerry was killed." Would this statement be merely
misleading, or would you consider it a downright lie? I for
one would classify it as a lie, because the killer knows
that the officers’ beliefs are false, and hence he knows that they
haven’t really "learned" any such thing. In the same way—as
I shall document in a moment—Bush had to have known that
the documents on which the British claim was based were forgeries,
and hence he was lying when he made his notorious statement.
Okay,
why do I say that Bush had to have known? For the simple reason
that the forgeries were ridiculously bad ones, and it is inconceivable
that they would have long hoodwinked all of Bush’s top advisors.
As I pointed
out on July 19, 2003:
[L]et’s
be sure we realize just how bad the forged documents were. It’s
not as if it took painstaking analysis with an electron microscope
to discover that they weren’t legit. No, the reason the documents
have been referred to as "crude forgeries" is that,
for example, experts say the signature of the President of Niger
is obviously not his own. There’s also the problem that the President
of Niger refers to powers under a constitution that did not exist
at the time of alleged writing. Additionally, a letter dated October
10, 2000, describing the "protocol of understanding"
for the uranium export to Iraq, is signed by a foreign minister
of Niger who had been deposed a decade earlier. What is even more
ludicrous, this particular
letter was stamped with a date of receipt in September 2000.
(In other words, this particular piece of evidence was somehow
penned after it was mailed.)
Ah
but wait, Podhoretz has an ingenious reply to my argument:
The
documents did indeed turn out to be forgeries; but, according
to the [British] 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]."
If
this were true, then Podhoretz’s indignation over the media treatment
of this issue would be quite justified. However, it is simply
not true that British and US intelligence did not have the documents
in the weeks prior to Bush’s State of the Union. (I am relying on
this ABC
News timeline for the following, but I have cross-checked it
with several places and they all agree on the general details of
the Niger story.) On October 9, 2002, Elisabetta Burba, who worked
for an Italian magazine, contacted the US embassy in Rome about
the documents in her possession. On October 15 (over two months
prior to Bush’s speech) the embassy faxed them to the US State
Department’s Bureau of Nonproliferation, which in turn faxed
them to INR. On January 13, 2003 (fifteen days before Bush’s speech)
an INR analyst emailed his colleagues claiming the alleged purchase
agreement "probably is a hoax." Because of this email,
the CIA’s Iraq nuclear analyst asked for copies of the documents,
which he was given on January 16 (twelve days before the speech).
As for the British, they had mentioned the yellowcake claim publicly
in the fall of 2002 (possibly not relying at all on the forged documents),
and thus speechwriters for Bush decided to play it safe by "sourcing"
his claim to the British.
Now
at this point, Podhoretz could claim, "So what? We all know
how inefficient government bureaucracies are. Just because the documents
were in the hands of particular members of the British and US intelligence
communities before the speech, doesn’t prove that they were the
basis of the assessments."
That
is certainly true, insofar as it goes. But in response to requests
for verification of the Iraq-Niger connection, on February 4, 2003
the US sent copies of the documents to the IAEA. (As ElBaradei’s
report [linked above] to the UN shows, the IAEA investigation centered
on the documents [which the IAEA of course said were forgeries],
so they apparently got the impression that the US/British
case rested on the documents.) Thus, over three and a half months
passed from the initial US receipt of the documents, and its turning
them over to the IAEA as evidence in its claims regarding Iraq-Niger.
As I’ve already pointed out, it is simply inconceivable that anyone
at all competent in international affairs would have believed in
the legitimacy of these documents after even the most cursory inspection.
So is it more plausible to say that (a) this was just a quirky outcome
of a bad system where complete honesty resulted in a major goof
or (b) the Bush people knew full well that part of their "evidence"
was bogus but thought they could use it and later claim to have
been innocently misled?
Conclusion:
Politicians Lie!
Wrapping
up, let’s step back from the minutiae and remind ourselves of a
few things. First, politicians are professional liars. That’s the
very nature of their jobs. In his book Secrets, Daniel Ellsberg
(of Pentagon Papers fame) tells of being asked by his boss (who
I believe in turn worked for Robert McNamara), right before a press
conference, to quickly brainstorm and come up with a list of possible
lies to deal with a certain uncomfortable fact regarding Vietnam.
That is simply the nature of politics; our rulers are placed in
the position of having to lie to get anything done. (Go watch a
few episodes of the fantastic series 24 and count how many
times "the good guys" lie; they don’t even think twice
about it.) Second, besides Vietnam, US presidents have clearly lied
even when it comes to something as important as war. For example,
even defenders of FDR now claim that he nobly lied prior to our
entry into WWII, because of the foolish isolationism of the nation.
Third, the Bush Administration has clearly lied regarding other
matters of the so-called War on Terror. For example, the initial
stories concerning Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman were complete propaganda.
In
conclusion, I still maintain that George Bush and his subordinates
knowingly lied us into
war. Let me offer one last bit of armchair logic: If Bush really
thought Saddam (a) had stockpiles of WMD and (b) was too crazy to
respond rationally to threats of reprisal, then why would Bush send
in American troops? Can you imagine the public outcry if, say, 850
US troops were killed in a single day by chemical weapons? Wouldn’t
it make a lot more sense to invade Iraq if the president knew Saddam
would love to acquire (but didn’t quite yet have) those nasty weapons?
December 17, 2005
Bob
Murphy [send him mail]
has a PhD in economics from New York University, and is the author
of Minerva.
See his personal website at BobMurphy.net.
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