Revising Policy — And History
WASHINGTON, Feb. 6, 2004
Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush (Photo: CBS/AP)
What's your opinion? Charles Wolfson welcomes comments from readers of Diplomatic Dispatch and can be reached at cwp@cbsnews.com.
(CBS) CBS News Reporter Charles Wolfson is a former Tel Aviv bureau chief for CBS News, who now covers the State Department.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The president's doing it. The vice president is doing it. The secretary of state is doing it. The secretary of defense is doing it. Even the director of Central Intelligence is doing it. And they're doing it so often and so openly anyone who follows the pronouncements of these senior officials can hardly keep up.
What, you may ask, are all these powerful officials doing? They can dress it up all they want, but it boils down to this: there's an ongoing attempt to revise the political and diplomatic record before it becomes the historical record on why the Bush administration went to war in Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein.
If daily journalism is, as it is often said, the first draft of history, then the rewrite desks of Washington's speechwriters are the busiest places in town.
One year ago this week Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the United Nations and laid out the Bush administration's brief against Saddam Hussein. With CIA Director George Tenet sitting behind him in the Security Council, Powell used what he called "facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence" to make Washington's case that Saddam was a clear and present danger.
Fast-forward through the well-known events of the past year — the U.S.-led war in Iraq, the fall of Saddam, the beginning of reconstruction and democratization efforts and the so-far fruitless search for the promised stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction — and you come to this snapshot of a moment where things simply have not turned out as advertised by the Bush administration. Add to the mix the political pressures brought on by this year's presidential election and toss in the interim findings of Dr. David Kay, the onetime arms inspector who, until recently, headed Mr. Bush's investigating team looking for the evidence which Powell and other senior officials said was there.
From the smorgasbord of revisionist "this is what I meant to say" comments, here are a few examples:
David Kay told Congress "we were all wrong, probably" in believing Iraq had stockpiles of WMD.
Powell, asked by the Washington Post if he would have recommended the invasion of Iraq had he known there were no stockpiles, said "I don't know. I don't know because it was the stockpiles that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger and threat to the region and to the world." And Powell added, more pointedly, "The absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus ... the fact of the matter is that we went into this with the understanding that there was a stockpile and there were weapons."
When those comment hit the newsstands officials in the White House hit the roof. According to a senior State Department official, Powell decided after consultation with officials there to amplify his views the following day. Thus, Powell told reporters asking about his comments in the Post, "The bottom line is this: the President made the right decision ... The only thing we're debating is the stockpile ... The right thing was done. And other information that might have been available earlier, don't know if it would have changed the outcome, nor did I say it would have changed the outcome."
Presto, with another sound-bite, the administration's most popular official revised (again) the record and in doing so showed full public support for Mr. Bush's decision to oust Saddam Hussein.
Tenet, whose CIA is taking the biggest hits for the administration's poor intelligence, decided to make an unusual tactical move and speak publicly, defending his agency's analysis.
First, Tenet gave his audience at Georgetown University a little lesson from Intelligence 101. "In the intelligence business," he said, "you are almost never completely wrong or completely right."
True enough, but it's unlikely to get him off the hook. Responding to specific criticisms which have been made, Tenet said his analysts "never said there was an 'imminent' threat" from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Tenet added that, taken together, the information his agency had "provided a solid basis on which to estimate whether Iraq did or did not have weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them," emphasizing the word "estimate." He also admitted the CIA, which relies heavily on satellite photos and electronic eavesdropping, "did not have enough of our own human intelligence" and, further, "We did not ourselves penetrate the inner sanctum — our agents were on the periphery of WMD activities..."
Why would any head of the CIA want to admit that in public, unless he were really feeling the political heat?
Finally, noting the ongoing search for WMD through the work of the Iraq Survey Group, Tenet concludes "We are nowhere near the end of our work in Iraq. We need more time."
And there's the rub. The weapons investigators' timeframe for locating WMD in Iraq is open-ended while the politicians' timeframe for actually finding such weapons stockpiles to prove or disprove the Bush administration's case is quite limited.
Presidential politics is in the air, and more precisely, on the air, day and night. A second term for Mr. Bush or a first term for one of the Democratic candidates may well depend on what is or is not found in a hole in the ground in Iraq between now and Election Day in early November.
By Charles M. Wolfson
©MMIV CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.
cbsnews.com |
