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POLITICS-U.S.: Bush's Case for War Crumbles
Analysis - By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Oct 6, 2004 (IPS) - Is there anything at all left of the Bush
administration's case for going to war in Iraq or, for that matter, the way
it has been fought?
The answer seems increasingly doubtful given what appears to be an
accelerating cascade of news, leaks and admissions by senior administration
officials over the past several weeks.
Consider what has been disclosed in just the last few days.
On Monday, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign
Relations in New York that he had never seen any ''strong, hard evidence
that links'' ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein with the al-Qaeda
terrorist network, which was one of the administration's two major
justifications for the war.
One day later, the 'New York Times' confirmed reports by Knight Ridder
newspapers about the existence of a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) study
on the Iraq-based Jordanian "arch-jihadi", Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which had
found no concrete evidence to support the administration's pre-war
insistence that Hussein's government had given him safe haven or that he
coordinates his actions in any way with al-Qaeda.
On Wednesday, Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq,
pounded the final nail in the coffin of the second most commonly cited
justification for the March 2003 invasion.
His final report concluded not only that Hussein had no weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) at the time of the invasion, but that he made no effort
to reconstitute them after United Nations weapons inspectors left the
country in 1998.
Indeed, the report, which was based on on-site inspections, interviews with
Iraqi scientists and tonnes of Iraqi documents, concluded that while
Hussein was hoping to rebuild a WMD programme - particularly one of
nuclear weapons - his ability to do so had actually deteriorated over the
previous five years, in stark contrast to the administration's warnings and
Bush's current campaign rhetoric that Hussein posed ''a gathering threat''
to the United States and its allies.
As Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin put it, the latest findings mean
that the administration had ''created a worst-case scenario on virtually no
evidence''.
If that were not enough to throw the administration on the defensive,
consider what else has come out over the last week or so, as well as the
sources of the information.
On Monday, the former U.S. viceroy in Baghdad, Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA) chief Paul Bremer was quoted as telling an insurance group
the administration ''never had enough troops on the ground'' in Iraq, both
during the invasion, to prevent looting, and over the months that followed.
This has been precisely the critique of quite a number of retired military
officers, many Democrats - most especially, of course, presidential
candidate Senator John Kerry - and a number of prominent Republican
senators, who themselves have become increasingly vocal about the
administration's performance in Iraq.
And while White House officials tried hard to persuade reporters that
Bremer had never requested more troops, two ''senior officials'' contacted
by the 'New York Times' on Tuesday admitted that the CPA chief, who has
been prominently mentioned as a possible secretary of state in a second
Bush term, had indeed pressed for more forces, even before he went to
Baghdad in June 2003.
The Bremer story broke just one day after the Times ran an unusually long
investigative report on how another specific and highly questionable
pre-war administration allegation - that 60,000 aluminium tubes Baghdad
tried to buy in early 2001 was firm evidence Hussein was trying to build a
nuclear weapon.
Based primarily on interviews with officials throughout the U.S.
intelligence community, the report found that nuclear engineering experts
at the Energy Department had shot down the notion - which originated with
a junior CIA analyst who, according to the Times, ''got his facts wrong,
even about the size of the tubes'' - within 24 hours of its being raised
in 2001, and did so in four detailed reports that followed.
Aside from the now-discredited report that Iraq tried to buy uranium
''yellowcake'' from Niger, as well as the testimony of a self-proclaimed
Iraqi nuclear scientist handled by the exiled Iraqi National Congress
(INC), the tubes were the only evidence for any nuclear programme at all,
according to the Times report.
While doubts within the intelligence agencies persisted, the
administration, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney and National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, raised the spectre of a ''mushroom
cloud'' as the only proof, and worked to keep both the public and the
Congress in the dark about the dissenting views in the Energy and State
departments.
These latest revelations come against a background as well of what has
become an escalating battle between the White House and CIA career
officers, who apparently are seriously concerned about the agency being
blamed for mistaken estimates in the lead-up to the war, especially in the
super-heated environment of a presidential campaign and amid considerable
politicking over a pending reorganisation of the entire U.S. intelligence
community.
Thus, while Bush and Cheney last month were fending off charges by Kerry
and the Democrats that the situation in Iraq was increasingly chaotic as a
result of administration incompetence, CIA officials leaked details of a
classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) delivered to the White
House in August that concluded the best-case scenario in Iraq over the next
16 months was more of the instability and violence that has prevailed since
April.
As likely, according to the leaked assessment, was that Iraq could dissolve
into civil war.
A second document drafted two months before the invasion by the National
Intelligence Council, which is chaired by the CIA, predicted a number of
the challenges - including a strong anti-American insurgency and a surge
in anti-American sentiment throughout the Muslim world - Washington would
face as a result of war.
The two leaks provoked an outraged response entitled 'The CIA's
Insurgency', by editorial writers at the 'The Wall Street Journal', which
was one of the leading voices for war, as well as from other
neo-conservative voices.
James Pavitt, a career CIA officer who retired as head of the agency's
clandestine service in July, told the Times he had never in his 31-year
career seen such ''viciousness and vindictiveness'' in the fight between
the CIA and its political masters, but could not resist a kicker of his own.
''There was nothing in the intelligence (produced by the CIA) that was a
'causus belli''' that would justify war with Iraq, he said, echoing Kerry.
(END)
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