I think by now most Americans fall into one of two camps: Those who have already concluded that the Bush administration was either lying or duped in its pre-war assertion that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that were an imminent threat to the U.S.; and those who don’t care, either because they supported the war on purely humanitarian grounds (a defensible and noble position) or because they are among the hordes of Americans who fell for the FUD about the Saddam-Al Qaida connection (a preposterous position).
For anyone else who is still patiently waiting to see what might turn up in the WMD hunt, the news today was not good. Someone leaked to the New York Times information about a draft of the report (now dubbed an “interim” report) by David Kay, the former U.N. weapons inspector whom the U.S. commissioned to lead the weapons search. The Times story suggests that after four months the findings are still meager: no weapons at all. None. Some “precursors and dual-use equipment that could have been used to manufacture chemical and biological weapons.” And “one Iraqi security officer who said he had worked in such a chemical and biological weapons program until shortly before the American invasion in March.”
With reports like this, no wonder the Bush administration is frantically back-pedaling on the significance of Kay’s work. As Josh Marshall points out, only a couple weeks ago Secretary of State Colin Powell was telling us, “I am confident when people see what David Kay puts forward they will see that there was no question that such weapons exist, existed, and so did the programs to develop one.” But here’s Condoleeza Rice on Monday: “David Kay is not going to be done with this for quite some time. And I would not count on reports.”
It seems pretty clear now that, even if down the line Kay does stumble upon a canister or two of poison gas, the line the Bush administration fed the American people before the war — that Saddam had tons of this stuff, that it was what he lived for, and that if the U.S. didn’t strike now he would threaten the American homeland with it — was at best a mistake and at worst a lie.
If it was a lie, Bush should be impeached yesterday — but it’s next to impossible that anyone will ever be able to prove it was a lie. So let’s give Bush and company the benefit of the doubt: Let’s say it was a mistake. Maybe Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi told his American contacts that Saddam was sitting on mountains of bioweapons, or that he was this close to building nukes. That doesn’t exactly make one feel better about the future pursuit of the war on terror: It means that, far from achieving a new level of alertness and smarts in the post-9/11 age, Bush and his advisers remain stuck in the same fog of bad information and bad intelligence leading to bad decisions that was their pre-9/11 norm.
There’s another report circling the runway that might illuminate what went wrong with our intelligence back then and what we should be doing now — the big 9/11 investigation headed up by Tom Kean. Yesterday the Times reported that the commission seemed likely to suggest a major overhaul of the structure of American intelligence — something Bush has resolutely opposed. Is it any wonder that his administration has done everything it could to delay, dodge or downplay that report, too? Just as it has done everything in its power to block release of a previous Congressional study of what went wrong on 9/11?
A cynic might even wonder whether the Republican strategy is to keep kicking all these issues down the field — keep withholding information from Kean’s committee, keep labeling Kay’s work “interim,” and so on — until Bush is safely past Election Day. And maybe the only thing scarier than a first-term George W. Bush fighting for his political life by endangering our national security is a second-term George W. Bush who doesn’t have to think at all about winning over moderates, and is free to let his Inner Autocrat run wild. You can bet that, if Bush wins in Nov. 2004, we won’t see many more reports of this kind. After all, as Bush has said, “I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.” It’s good he understands so well the way power and information should flow in a democracy.
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