A rchive Date
[ 10-10-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnists/Toronto/Lorrie_Goldstein/2004/10/10/663189.html
Bush has a new line on Iraq
By Lorrie Goldstein -- For the Toronto
Sun, October 10, 2004
As the U.S. presidential race enters its final weeks, George Bush is making a pretty good argument about why he had to invade Iraq 18 months ago. The problem is, it's a different argument from the one he made at the time he actually launched the war.
Today, Bush argues that as the American president in a post-9/11 world, he couldn't afford to wait for conclusive proof that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and the will to hand them over to terrorists. That there was, in any event, plenty of circumstantial evidence pointing to Saddam's evil intentions.
This included his past pursuit, development and use of WMD, his support for terrorism aimed at Israel and the West, and his years of defiance of UN Security Council resolutions calling for him to disarm, and to prove it. Given all that, Bush now argues, he couldn't wait for a so-called ''smoking gun'' proving Saddam's guilt beyond any doubt, because by then it would have been too late.
It would have meant acting only after another terrorist attack on the U.S., this time by terrorists armed with WMD. While one can disagree with that argument, it's a valid one. Unfortunately, it's not the argument Bush made in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq 18 months ago.
Back then, we were assured repeatedly by the Bush administration (Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council, to cite just one example) that Saddam already had WMD that he could easily hand over to terrorists. With the failure to find any WMD post-invasion (noted again last week by Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraqi Survey Group), Bush has understandably shifted his argument to what Saddam might have done, given enough time and a chance to rebuild Iraq's WMD programs.
Problem is, that's not the justification Bush gave for the war when he launched it.
As Democratic Sen. Carl Levin rightly observed last week in the wake of the latest report confirming Iraq had no WMD: "We did not to go to war because Saddam Hussein had future intentions to obtain weapons of mass destruction." Precisely. Bush went to war because, he said at the time, Saddam already had WMD.
The irony is that with the benefit of hindsight, the argument Bush is making now -- that there was plenty of circumstantial evidence against Saddam and that it was better to be safe than sorry -- is more credible than the one he made before the invasion: that Saddam had WMD and had to be stopped.
Serious doubts
Indeed, if Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack about Bush's preparations for the war is accurate, then Bush himself had serious doubts about American intelligence regarding Iraq's WMD just months before the March 2003 invasion. Woodward describes a Dec. 21, 2002 meeting in the Oval Office in which then-CIA director George Tenet and deputy director John McLaughlin, outlined the CIA's case against Iraq -- much of which would later appear as part of Powell's Feb. 5, 2003 presentation to the Security Council.
As Woodward reports it, after hearing the CIA briefing, made by McLaughlin, Bush was skeptical, telling the two top CIA officials: "I've been told all this intelligence about (Iraq) having WMD and this is the best we've got?"
Far from finding the case convincing, Bush described it as a "nice try ... (but) not something that Joe Public would understand or would gain a lot of confidence from."
'Slam dunk'
At that point, Woodward writes, Tenet twice made his now-famous claim that the case against Iraq with regard to WMD was a "slam dunk."
Woodward adds that Bush "later recalled that McLaughlin's presentation 'wouldn't have stood the test of time'" but that Tenet's reassurance "was very important."
All of which raises the question of why, if the CIA had a "slam dunk" case against Iraq, it couldn't compile the evidence into a convincing brief just three months prior to the invasion. And why Bush took such apparent comfort from Tenet's assurance, when he wasn't at all convinced by the intelligence on which it was based.
I'd love to hear from you.
Phone: (416) 947-2212
Fax: (416) 947-3228
he can be reached by e-mail at: lorrie.goldstein@tor.sunpub.com Letters to the editor should be sent to: editor@tor.sunpub.com
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