White House must admit its role in intelligence error
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PRESIDENT Bush has offered a spirited defense of the administration's decision to go to war against Iraq. Judging by his near-defiant position, the president seems to be in denial over the Senate Intelligence Committee report that called the reasons for invading Iraq deeply flawed.
"We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them," Bush said.
Seeing as a few nations other than Iraq fit the criteria Bush posited for international troublemakers, the United States would have its hands full with pre-emptive missions were the president's conditions followed to the letter.
But it was Baghdad and apparently Baghdad only -- despite more concrete evidence of banned weapons in countries like North Korea and Iran -- that Washington trained its bull's eye on last year. And, as the Senate panel unanimously concluded in its 511-page report, a negligent, organizationally unsound CIA mischaracterized intelligence on Iraq, leading the White House and Congress down the path of an unjustified war.
The Senate committee found that the CIA and other intelligence agencies engaged in "group think" concerning Iraq's purported nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, with few, if any, voices ever heard to challenge the prevailing beliefs on Iraq's banned weapons that turned out to be untrue. Worse still, the panel determined that U.S. intelligence often relied upon unconfirmed, contradictory or false sources for information.
The misleading intelligence notwithstanding, what the Senate report called an "assumption train" about Iraq's illicit weapons would have had a hard time leaving the station were the White House not eager to conduct it. And, considering the rhetoric emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, one would have had to be tone-deaf to miss the administration's bellicose intentions toward the regime of Saddam Hussein.
<font color=red>The public won't find out how the administration used unsubstantiated, almost amateurish intelligence to justify the war on Iraq this page was wary of from the get-go. That's because the Senate unfortunately opted to postpone its almost certainly politically charged findings until after the election.
<font color=black>Perhaps the upcoming congressional report on the 9/11 attacks will shed some light on how the White House handled intelligence on Iraq. Further information on alleged links between Iraq and al-Qaida -- one of the main legs along with WMD the administration stood on to invade Iraq -- will be particularly welcome.
As a warm-up, the Senate report found no basis for any "established formal relationship" between Saddam and al-Qaida. Furthermore, the report said there was no evidence Baghdad had ever pressed al-Qaida into service against the West or that Saddam ever had a hand in any Osama bin Laden-directed attack.
The White House must be more straightforward about the truth concerning the Iraq war. <font color=red>In that respect, the administration could take a cue from British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who candidly admitted last week that WMD may never be found in Iraq. <font color=black>Blair's admission preceded a British government report released Wednesday that concluded U.K. intelligence officials shouldn't have claimed that Iraq possessed ready-to-use weapons of mass destruction.
Clearly, the U.S. intelligence community let down the administration and Congress over what former CIA Director George Tenet called a "slam dunk" on the case for going to war against Iraq. <font color=red>But it is incumbent upon the president to assume ultimate responsibility for actions that happened under his watch.
The White House must accept its role for the failures in Iraq brought on by a unilateralist foreign policy as well as incompetent intelligence. Otherwise, any future threat based on palpable evidence will unnecessarily become a tougher sell to the public. |
