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06/01/2003 Archived Entry: "Add Newsweek to the chorus..."
Add Newsweek to the chorus...
...of top-line US news outlets asking where the WMDs went - if they were even there in the first place.
ON FEB. 5, Secretary of State Colin Powell was scheduled to go to the United Nations and make the case that Saddam possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. But the evidence was thin—sketchy and speculative, or uncorroborated, or just not credible. Finally, according to a government official who was there, Tenet leaned back in his chair and said, “Everyone thinks we’re Tom Cruise. We’re not. We can’t look into every bedroom and listen to every conversation. Hell, we can’t even listen to the new cell phones some of the terrorists are using.”Tenet was being truthful. Spying can help win wars (think of the Allies’ cracking the Axis codes in World War II), but intelligence is more often an incomplete puzzle (think of Pearl Harbor). Honest spies appreciate their own limitations. Their political masters, however, often prefer the Hollywood version. They want certainty and omniscience, not hedges and ambiguity. Bush administration officials wanted to be able to say, for certain, that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of chem-bio weapons; that he could make a nuclear bomb inside a year; that he was conspiring with Al Qaeda to attack America.
And that is, by and large, what they did say. On close examination, some of the statements about Saddam and his WMD made by President George W. Bush and his top lieutenants in the months leading up to the Iraq war included qualifiers or nuances. But the effect—and the intent—was to convince most Americans that Saddam presented a clear and present danger and had to be removed by going to war.
No wonder, then, that many people are perplexed (or vexed) that U.S. forces in Iraq have been unable to find any WMD. Administration officials insist that eventually they will be able to prove that Saddam was working on a dangerous weapons program. They say that two trailers found in northern Iraq are in fact mobile bioweapon labs, capable of brewing up enough anthrax in a weekend to snuff out a city. But some of Bush’s top men are beginning to sound a little defensive or unsure, and congressional critics are starting to circle. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz caused a flap by telling Vanity Fair magazine that removing Saddam’s WMD was a “bureaucratic” justification for going to war (Wolfowitz says that he was quoted out of context). A recently retired State Department intelligence analyst directly involved in assessing the Iraqi threat, Greg Thielmann, flatly told NEWSWEEK that inside the government, “there is a lot of sorrow and anger at the way intelligence was misused. You get a strong impression that the administration didn’t think the public would be enthusiastic about the idea of war if you attached all those qualifiers.”
Replies: somebody speaks up.
Gee, is it any wonder we haven't found WMD after the Bush Administration gave us "50 Ways to Invade Iraq"?
Posted by Political Pulpit @ 06/02/2003 11:14 PM NY
