The stakes are too high to gloss over what got us to this point. Bush created the expectation that large stores of chemical and biological weapons would be found in Iraq and that Saddam had an active nuclear program. Nothing of consequence has yet been uncovered–suggesting either a colossal intelligence failure or the selective use and manipulation of the data that was available to suit the administration’s political aims.
These are serious charges that go to both the administration’s candor and its competence. The only predicate to a policy of preemption is good intelligence, so you know what you’re preempting. If you don’t have that, the new Bush foreign policy has no merit. Democrats have so little credibility with the American public on national-security matters that the most outspoken critic of Bush is a Republican, former Nixon turncoat John Dean, who says that if it is proven that Bush misused the CIA to take the country to war, that would be worse than Watergate. The White House finds that comparison ludicrous. “That kind of language I love because it’s so over the top,” scoffs a White House aide.
It’s not fair to jump to Watergate, but the administration is in a vulnerable position. There is so much uncontrolled information swirling around that the control freaks at the Bush White House are sucking air. At particular issue is an allegation that the Iraqis were trying to import uranium from Africa. When this piece of intelligence first surfaced, CIA director George Tenet dispatched a trusted former top official to Niger to investigate. He reported that the documents alleging the sale were forged. It wasn’t even hard to spot. The Niger government officials cited were no longer in office. Yet months later this phony evidence showed up in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address as part of the administration’s case for war.
What comes next is straight out of a Tom Clancy novel. In a front-page report in Thursday’s Washington Post headlined CIA DID NOT SHARE DOUBT ON IRAQ DATA, the White House asserts that the CIA did not pass along the information about the forged Niger documents, and therefore Bush was unaware they had been falsified. If true, that means that George Tenet, head of the CIA, knowingly placed a verifiably false piece of information in the president’s hands that Bush used as a key element in the road to war when he spoke to Congress and the country. If Bush truly believes his CIA director set him up like that, he should fire Tenet.
Phoning around Capitol Hill for reaction to the Post story, I found a high degree of skepticism about the White House version of events. The SOTU is the most vetted speech a president gives. It’s not credible to believe Bush and all the bigwigs around him were duped. A more likely explanation is that the administration needed to bolster the nuclear leg of its case. The hard-liners running foreign policy didn’t have enough to claim Iraq was an imminent threat with chemical and biological weapons. Most experts don’t regard them as real WMD; they’re terror weapons, and absent a convincing connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, which the administration couldn’t make, they did not pose an imminent threat to the United States.
A congressional source says Powell knew what the administration’s pro-war wing was doing, and that Tenet was trying to put up resistance while also serving his clients, a jujitsu act that sets him up as the fall guy in the unfolding WMD scandal. “He’s a good politician in the worst possible sense of the word,” says a Senate foreign-policy aide. “He plays both sides of the street.”
Tenet is not a Bush loyalist; he was CIA director in the Clinton administration before Bush asked him to stay on the job. Getting hung out to dry on the front page of the Post is Tenet’s reward. He’s where the giant finger of blame is pointed. “We know what we were told,” says a White House official, ridiculing the claim made by unnamed CIA officials that they felt pressured because Vice President Dick Cheney made numerous trips to the agency. “Does an accountant tell you he feels pressure to get this guy a deduction? They know where the president is, but they’re professionals. They made a judgment, and they might still be right. [Bush’s] dad was director of the CIA. He knows how this works. If they felt pressure, they should have resigned.”
The quality of the CIA’s intelligence, and whether it was cooked to accommodate the administration’s political needs, is at the heart of the controversy. The late and widely admired Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said after the cold war ended: “The CIA could tell you every conceivable detail about the Soviet Union except that it was falling apart.” If Bush needs a villain, the CIA will do nicely. But that will not close the chapter on the politicization of intelligence. Tenet won’t go quietly, and in classic Washington fashion, the story of what Bush knew and when he knew it will leak out a little at a time, with a drip-drip that damages American credibility abroad even if Bush escapes political damage here at home.
