It’s time to play “connect the story” — the game where we show the relationship between seemingly disconnected news stories — again, as we recently did regarding the California energy and budget crises.
There isn’t much more to say about the flap over President Bush’s State of the Union use of fraudulent evidence regarding Iraq’s nuclear program. We know that an administration desperate to make a case for war seized upon material that it had been repeatedly warned was suspect or (as is actually the case) outright forged and presented it to the American public. That impeachment hearings aren’t already being held is just another sign of the deep dysfunctionality of our political system — in which partisan operatives in Congress can drum up an impeachment vote when a president lies about his sex life, but when a president lies about the gravest matters of war and peace, it’s not even considered worth an investigation.
What is interesting here is that this story is playing out at precisely the same time the nation may be slowly coming to the belated realization that things really aren’t going so well in the president’s open-ended, no-clearly-defined-goals “war on terrorism.” Our principal foe, Osama bin Laden, remains on the loose, and his organization continues to operate in a region sandwiched between one nation that we conquered and one that is nominally our ally. His principal ally, Mullah Omar, is also on the loose. The leader of the other nation we’ve recently invaded, Saddam Hussein, is also on the loose. Is there a pattern here? Why can’t we find these guys?
This is, of course, an intelligence failure — and that’s where these two stories intersect. At the very same time that the Bush administration was corrupting our intelligence agencies by demanding that they produce the evidence for an already decided-upon war, it needed to rely upon them to locate its foes. I’m not an intelligence insider and I don’t know whether U.S. intelligence’s failure to locate Osama et al. is a function of incompetence, demoralization, structural weakness (reliance on technical means rather than people who speak the language, for example) or other factors.
But it’s obvious that the bogus Iraq/Niger nuclear connection story is a sign of just how derailed, corrupted and ineffectual the U.S.intelligence effort has become. If you’re busy squabbling over whether to offer fabricated evidence for a trumped-up war, you have that much less time to do your real job.