HISTORY LESSON
The belief Saddam had WMD might have been an honest mistake; nevertheless, it was dead wrong.
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
PRESIDENT Bush used the occasion of Veterans Day to accuse his critics of irresponsibly rewriting the history of how the war in Iraq began. The final history of our entanglement has not been written, much less rewritten, but the president is right if he suggests that partisan charges and countercharges are obscuring the facts:
•The administration's belief that Iraq's Saddam Hussein had piles of weapons of mass destruction lying around might have been an honest mistake. Nevertheless, it is an undisputed fact that the administration's prewar claims about WMD were wrong. So was all the intelligence on WMD fed to Bush by the nation's intelligence agencies. So were the bold assertions then-Secretary of State Colin Powell laid out in a speech to the United Nations. Bush rewarded this massive error by awarding the man largely responsible for it, former CIA Director George Tenet, with the Medal of Freedom, inappropriately suggesting that the error was understandable and that no one needed to be held accountable.
•Another source of false information, disgraced Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, deputy prime minister in Iraq's interim government, was warmly received by senior administration officials in Washington last week. Chalabi met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and others, despite being the target of an FBI investigation to determine whether Chalabi gave Iran information on U.S. code-breaking.
In a speech to a private policy forum, Chalabi said the charge that he deliberately misled the United States about Saddam's threat was "an urban myth." Borrowing from Mark Twain, if Chalabi is not one of the world's biggest liars, he has missed it only by the skin of his teeth.
•By keeping Karl Rove as White House deputy chief of staff and praising indicted Cheney aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the president needlessly casts doubt on his — and his administration's — commitment to the truth. Both Rove and Libby misled the president and the American people concerning their role in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, but Bush seems not to mind.
•The president is correct that many Democrats, believing Saddam possessed WMD, voted to authorize Bush to use force against Iraq. But one reason for authorizing force given at the time was to put Saddam on notice that he must cooperate with U.N. inspectors. Inspections, combined with economic sanctions, had kept Saddam from developing new weapons of mass destruction or replacing his former conventional military capability.
•Bush is also correct that the intelligence agencies of the free world shared the inaccurate belief that Saddam had WMD and was developing more. But in the so-called Downing Street memo, a senior British intelligence official advised Prime Minister Tony Blair that Bush would invade Iraq no matter what the intelligence indicated.
•If the Senate Intelligence Committee had not delayed its investigation into whether the administration misused or exaggerated intelligence, definitive answers to that question might be at hand. The long delay fans suspicions that key senators fear the answer could be yes.
Whatever the answer, the American people deserve to know the truth, unmolested by partisan spin.Link:
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/3458317