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.