I just watched Dick Cheney deliver remarks to the American Enterprise Institute defending Bush’s decision to launch a war of aggression against Iraq. In summary, Cheney based the entire decision to invade on the October National Intelligence Estimate. He quoted four fragments from the NIE, each assertively warning that Saddam’s Iraq was bristling with WMDs, expanded programs to develop them, and a reconstituted nuclear weapons program.
Cheney had two cute rhetorical questions for those who are critical of the decision to begin a war of aggression against Iraq:
1) How could a responsible leader ignore the evidence in the NIE and not take action against Iraq?
Where to begin? Cheney is using documents that have proven to be manifestly wrong to defend the decision to cause the deaths of thousands of innocent people. Not only that, he is using old documents, from October of 2002, as though the decision to invade Iraq was made several months before the White House claims it was.
From October of 2002 to March of this year when the war of aggression was launched, there certainly was not an information vacuum with respect to Saddam’s WMDs. The CIA was in a mortal struggle with the neo-con chickenhawks in the NSC and OSD to keep government pronouncements about the Iraqi threat from containing absurd exaggerations. For Cheney to suggest that the October 2002 NIE was the last word on the Iraq threat is nonsense.
This is to say nothing of Cheney’s multiple unprecedented visits to the CIA in the time that the NIE was being developed. Ray McGovern, an ex-CIA spook, wrote of Cheney’s CIA visits in the Hartford Courant.
In sum, the evidence presented in last September's intelligence estimate fell far short of what was required to support Cheney's claim that Iraq was on the road to a nuclear weapon. Something scarier had to be produced, and quickly, if Congress was to be persuaded to authorize war. And so the decision was made to dust off the uranium-from-Niger canard.
Indeed. An earlier NIE had contained none of the alarmist language about Iraq that somehow found its way into the October 2002 document after Cheney’s repeated pressure on, er, visits to the intelligence analysts who developed it.
But the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. In response to Cheney’s rhetorical question about acting on the basis of the NIE, filled as it is with errors, exaggerations, mistakes, and outright lies, I would ask him, “So, where are they?” Where are all the scary things the NIE hysterically warned us about? Colon Powell showed us satellite photos of chemical and nuclear weapons complexes in his speech before the general assembly of the United Nations on February 5, enumerating the specific justifications for invading Iraq. Yet no weapons have been found. No weapons programs have been found. No Iraqi who worked in any such program or knew the location of any WMD has been found. The administration can struggle to explain away the remarkable absence of WMDs by claiming they were buried or otherwise hidden, but how can they explain not finding the weapons complexes displayed in Powell’s slide show? Did clever Iraqis bury entire buildings? Did they move entire industrial complexes to Syria? Since any explanation would surely be absurd, the Bush administration has not offered one regarding Powell’s missing WMD factories and warehouses.
How could a responsible leader ignore the evidence in the NIE and not take action against Iraq? No, the question becomes, how could a responsible leader pressure intelligence analysts to produce a phony NIE and then use it as a trumped up justification for a war of aggression?
Dick’s second rhetorical question employs an excuse now popular among the ethically challenged republicans, the ends justify the means:
2) What would Iraq look like today had we not acted?
It would look like it did right before your invasion, Dick. It would look like no threat to America, and very little threat to its neighbors. There would be inspectors combing the countryside looking for your fictional WMDs. Nearly 7,000 innocent people killed in your trumped up war of aggression would be alive.
Saddam would be barking his empty threats to America, but so what? Sure, he and his sons would still be running a brutal regime that harbored hatred for America, so it would look exactly like Pakistan. It would look like Saudi Arabia. Exactly like Egypt. And Indonesia.
The fact is, Dick, that Saddam could easily have been contained, just as the old Soviet Union was. Your war was a phony, trumped up slaughter of thousands, in furtherance of your pitiful imperial ambitions. That is already apparent to all non-American people in the world, and is becoming known here.
So your question now becomes this, Dick: How does the United States look after launching a war of aggression against Iraq based on phony pretexts? Not very good, Dick. We look a lot like a rogue state, and you and Bush look like men of spectacular evil.
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