Forget the Truth
The Bush White House was never really preoccupied with the question of whether or not Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It wasn’t until “late 2002,” virtually on the eve of the U.S. invasion, that the administration ordered the CIA to shift priority on WMD intelligence collection to Iraq from North Korea and Iran, according to an internal CIA report.
The administration’s belated concern appears to have been driven by two contemporary events. The White House at the time was narrowly focused on rallying public support for war by invoking the specter of mushroom clouds, and any supportive “intelligence” would be useful. That would also serve as backup ammunition to discredit inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, reintroduced into Iraq after a four-year hiatus, if they were to conclude there was nothing there.
The decision to invade had been made months earlier. There would be no show-stoppers. No matter that the belated emphasis on discovering Iraq’s alleged banned weapons produced nothing, or that the IAEA also came up with blanks.
Now, four years after our troops cakewalked (as wars go) into Baghdad, the White House still has not admitted that the decision to invade and occupy Iraq was one of the most monumental blunders in American history. Nor has it admitted that all this pre-war talk of Iraq’s doomsday weapons was nothing but a crass, yet very effective, sales pitch.
On the other hand, top CIA officials who oversaw the production of the disastrous intelligence conclusions have publicly conceded that the agency blundered badly. In his new book, “At the Center of the Storm,” George Tenet, who devotes half of the book to Iraq, offers modest personal mea culpas. He had been too preoccupied, he says, with chasing al Qaeda and “didn’t pay enough attention to another gathering storm”—Iraq. And when he briefed the White House, where officials were grossly amplifying CIA’s reporting on Iraq’s alleged weapons, Tenet admits he should have done “a better job of making sure they knew where we differed and why.” His deputy at the time, John McLaughlin, has not written a book and has been more reluctant to accept personal responsibility. But he has, on several occasions, admitted that “mistakes” were made.
At the same time, there has been not a peep from the man most directly responsible for the monumental intelligence failure—Alan Foley. Foley was the consummate CIA insider who managed the hundreds of WMD analysts at the agency’s Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control, charged with tracking illicit weapons activity around the world.
It was WINPAC that overruled the Energy Department and incredulous IAEA inspectors on the issue of Iraqi purchases of aluminum tubes for rocket casings. WINPAC said the casings were going to be reengineered somehow into centrifuges for enriching uranium. And it was WINPAC that suspended reason for more than a year by insisting that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium from Niger—until the IAEA told the world just before the invasion that the claim was based on badly forged documents. Outside of WINPAC, intelligence analysts were generally dismissive of the uranium intelligence, which they believed made absolutely no sense: Iraq already had a stockpile of uranium left over from the pre-Desert Storm days, and didn’t have the industrial capability to process it.
In our book, The Italian Letter, we tell the tale of those Italian-origin forgeries, and devote a chapter and more to WINPAC and Foley’s preeminent role in the intelligence disaster. Tenet, a nice guy who can’t bring himself to say bad things about the agency he once ran or of his former colleagues, mentions Foley uncritically, only twice in his book. WINPAC is mentioned a mere three times, also in passing.
Foley, for example, played a key role in generating the notorious “sixteen words,” the reference in George Bush’s Jan. 28, 2003 State of the Union address to Iraq’s alleged attempts to purchase uranium from Africa. Foley told National Security Council staffer Robert Joseph that it was perfectly OK: Just pin the intelligence on the Brits. Several months earlier the CIA had, only with great difficulty, convinced intransigent White House officials to delete a passage about the alleged uranium deal from a speech Bush delivered in Cincinnati.
It is unclear what Foley really believed. He and Joseph later told Senate Intelligence Committee staffers that they had no discussion about the credibility of the Niger claim, only of the sourcing. Foley and WINPAC analysts told the Senate investigators, who were preparing a report on the Iraq intelligence failures, that they actually “believed that Iraq was probably seeking uranium from Africa…until the IAEA reported that the documents were forgeries.”
Yet days after Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech, Foley told an acquaintance that he didn’t think Iraq had been rearming with banned weapons. Retired CIA analyst Melvin Goodman asked Foley what weapons of mass destruction he thought would be found in Iraq after the invasion. “Not much, if anything,” Foley replied.
There was another episode suggesting that Foley had little trouble bending with the wind. Goodman told us that Foley in December 2002 gathered his production managers in his office and told them, “If the President wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.” Though not quite a directive to cook the books, it clearly suggested that cherry-picking and slanting would be tolerated, and perhaps rewarded.
Those passages got the attention of several bloggers, including Jonathan Schwarz, Kevin Drum and McJoan, who suggested that Foley should be invited to testify before a congressional panel, perhaps Rep. Henry Waxman’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has been investigating the saga of the Niger forgeries. To date, however, only Tenet and Condoleezza Rice have been asked to testify at a hearing scheduled for June 19.
--Knut Royce
Oh come on. It was a pack of lies. Is it so hard to simply come right out and say that?
June 11, 2007 7:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, the decision to invade was made YEARS earlier. It was a fundamental principle of PNAC to launch a war with Saddam. Rumsfeld and Cheney signed PNAC documents promoting it back in 1998. Bush boasted of his intention to invade during the 2000 campaign. I recall reading a George Packer article in the The New Yorker back in the fall of 2002, in which he quoted a high State Dept. official, a person who met with Condi Rice weekly. In April of 2002, this official started mentioning potential policy alternatives to an invasion. A "friend" of his in the White House told him, "Don't bother. It's a done deal." That was April, 2002.
While it's nice to get this bit of supporting evidence, it's always been obvious that Bush was going to launch this invasion, no matter how flimsy the pretexts. It took the ultimate enabler, Powell, to jawbone Bush into getting a UN resolution, and then lie his ass off at the UN to convince the credulous that, gee, if Powell says so, maybe Saddam really does have mobile weapons labs.
It's often forgotten, but Bush himself had no intention of getting a new resolution from the UN, nor did he feel compelled to form a coalition to launch the invasion. Powell talked him into the UN resolution, and it's too bad he did (like virtually everything Powell has ever done, it was a mistake), because it gave Bush a fig leaf of an excuse to launch this stupid war.
June 11, 2007 7:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
For what it's worth, here's my theory.
In mid-2002, from the Downing St memo, Bush and Blair agreed to use Saddam's WMD capability to justify war. In typical arrogance, they assumed WMD existed and thus evidence of non-compliance with UN resolutions would be ample.
By the end of 2002, they had begun to realize the intelligence archives were in fact pretty slim. Blair's dossiers, for example, impressed no-one. But Bush and Blair were set on presenting a case to the UN, so they sent the CIA (and other WMD intelligence agencies) on a final fool's errand to find something.
They found nothing; at least that's what Bob Woodward reported in "State of Denial". And the subsequent flops at the UN - Powell's blow-out and the failure to get a second resolution - tended to confirm this fact and also ensured few objective watchers would be persuaded about the necessity (and thus legality) of the war.
But we went in anyway, because, as you say, the WH was never really preoccupied with the WMD. The great con they pulled was having many Americans believe that they were.
June 11, 2007 8:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
Iraq was always about oil (see Cheney's 2001 energy conference), establishing a footprint with military bases in Iraq (since our base in Saudi Arabia was one the main things that caused Bin-laden to launch 9/11), and finding somebody for "tough guy" Georgie to push around so he could strut as Commander-in-Chief because he is such an incompetent boob that he could never earn our respect as President. For this probably over 900,000 people have died.
Tom
June 11, 2007 8:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
This seems to be the case with Iran's "nuclear weapons program" too - doesn't matter that there is no evidence of such a program, doesn't matter than Iran has repeatedly made offers of compromise that would address any genuine proliferation concerns but which were ignored or dismissed by the Bush administration, doesn't matter that the US supported and encouraged Iran's nuclear program in the first place - we need a pretext to attack and the nuclear program provides a good one, and that's all.
And so whenever they've shown any flexibility, we've increased our demands (they agreed to the indefinite extention of the Non-Proliferation Treaty - we backed out of our promise to take "13 steps to disarmament" whilst demanding that they give their prefectly legal Russian-made reactor at Bushehr. They voluntarily suspended enrichment in 2004 in return for recognition of their nuclear rights - we increased our demands that they give it totally)
We've made ridiculous demands on them knowing full well that they can't or won't give in - demanding for example that they first abandon enrichment before we're willing to negotiation their abandonment of enrichment. Everytime they've made attempts to reach out to us, we've ignored them. Everytime they've shown any flexibility, we've maximized our demands hoping to get a refusal.
Why? Because we're looking for a pretext for a war, that's why. And no doubt they have reached the same conclusion too.
Ridiculous, and transparent.
June 11, 2007 8:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for doing this. I think your book is excellent. I've got two questions. On p. 216 you mention a NIC memo authored by the NIO for Africa, Robert Houdek, that went to the Pentagon and said the Niger story "looks like crap." You date the Pentagon's reception of it to April 2003. This is obviously closely related to the NIC memo by Houdek first reported on in the Washington Post by Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer, but crucially, they reported (in April 2006) that the NIC memo calling the Niger story baseless was produced in January 2003 and sent to the White House before the 2003 State of the Union. Are you now reporting that that is flatly incorrect? Or is it possible that the memo was produced in January, went to the White House (perhaps among other places), and then was either resent or modified or its substance reproduced in the April 2003 memo? And if it's the former, since one of your is a Washington Post reporter, doesn't the paper have an obligation to issue a correction? If it's the latter, that woul be important to know.
Second, one of the significant revelations in Tenet's new book is that in September 2002, in preparation for some important Rose Garden comments President Bush was going to make, none other than Condoleezza Rice herself tussled with CIA folks, in particular Jami Miscik, over the inclusion of the uranium claim in Bush's remarks. Tenet appears to indicate that, apparently in the face of CIA skepticism, Rice herself suggested just taking the claim out - and in fact it did not appear in Bush's remarks that day in late September. This would be extraordinary new evidence that Rice herself knew exactly what was going on with regard to the uranium claim, making it all the more implausible that she would not know the uranium claim was funky and should not be used when it appeared again in the SOTU a mere few months later. Do you have any confirmation of this story, or anything about it?
For what it's worth, I think Waxman should add Miscik to his list of people to hear from along with Foley.
June 11, 2007 8:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Strange days these... you'd think the automatic assumption would be that Rice, as National Security Advisor, ought to have had good knowledge of the uranium intel. The fact she has plausibly plead ignorance over this matter to date proves she was either a really terrible NSA, or a remarkably capable dissembler.
Very interesting post though, removed any doubt as to whether I should read this book.
June 11, 2007 9:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
Why haven't the mainstream media made more (anything?) about Tenet's revelations in his book about earlier efforts with Rice to get the Niger stuff taken out of Presidential speeches.
Why isn't this news...in the "newspapers"?
June 11, 2007 9:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
Wake up my fellow Americans from your coma. There is a ruling class, and you are grist for their mill. Why did we go to war? To enrich the ruling class, seize control of valuable natural resources, and establish a military foothold. Who benefited? Look at the profits for the energy industry, and the military industrial complex. It tells a big story. What does it matter what political fairytale is told to the know nothings that populate this land--the deal is a fait accompli. And they will do it again. And again. And again. Why? Because Americans are ignorant, and not very bright. They not only robbed the bank--they robbed all the deposits that will be made to that bank for the next 40 years.
"If you talk about it, even the simplest thing becomes complex and incomprehensible." -Herman Hesse
June 11, 2007 9:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
Does anyone see the similarities between this and Lurita Doan's statement to her staff about helping "their" candidates?
Dems still just don't get it.
Steve Benen's reporting of Fouad Ajami's assertion that Scooter Libby was a soldier is softened to the comparison of Libby just being a convicted felon. WRONG!
While Scooter may have been convicted of lying and obstruction, those charges are just a flesh wound in this WAR.
The factions in the Republican party have militarized politics- to them the past thirty years have been as serious as a shooting war, and they have been willing to make the calculations of "the Butcher's Bill" from the start to win a permanent Republican rule of this country. Dems just toss this off by saying the GOP wounded have been "thrown under the bus". My view is different from that- I believe there was a considered decision that some would break the law in furtherance of the strategy, and that would be ok- if caught and convicted, just another casualty of war. Libby rates the all of letters to the judge begging for leniency because he's the only one that's been left on the battlefield, while Feith, Wolfowitz, et all, have been evacuated.
With every new revelation that administration officials have abandoned their oath to defend the Constitution, and instead, use their offices to promote and defend what their conventional wisdom assumes Bush wants, the breadth and depth of this "bloodless" coup is laid at our feet.
Alphonse ( Al ) Kada
Iranians are fighting the Americans in Iraq so they don't have to fight them on the streets of Tehran
June 11, 2007 9:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
Americans are as bright as anyone else. They're just not taught critical thinking skills in many of their institutions for the reasons you state above.
Tom
June 11, 2007 10:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
Condi knows her time is coming, in backchannels she's promised leniency if she works Baker-Hamilton and gets Iran to take over the ground situation in Iraq so we can withdraw to air bases or redeploy.
Cheney's fighting it tooth and nail, getting Lieberman to talk bellicose and even sending aid to SUnni groups likely to become resistance in Iraq ,Syria, and Lebanon.
June 11, 2007 10:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
Eisner & Royce:
Is there any sense that if more "witnesses" are called there would be some movement towards charges? From the responses I've read here, and when the topic is discussed elswhere here or anywhere, it seems clar that many already believe that the deceit and hype that lead us to war was intentional and well planned. However, there has been little appetite or movement towards charging anyone with a crime directly related tot he topic.
Does this additional information change anything?
/c
In the blogosphere every one is an expert, so no one is an expert.
June 11, 2007 11:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's Called Terrorism
When a regime issues a "bomb threat" to the American People by falsely screaming "Mushroom Clouds Over Our Cities!!," they are committing an Act of Terrorism.
This is not hyperbole. This is what happened.
It's called terrorism. Use the word -- Terrorism.
Otherwise you really do "Forget the Truth."
--
June 11, 2007 11:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think (parishilton) that Americans (tonysoprano) admire (georgebush) people ... (staysinvegas) they aren't (liberalpress) so stupid (fairandbalanced)...
... um (williamjefferson,tonysoprano,oceansthirteen, cutandrun) ...
... never mind (macdonaldsrocks,iwantaiphone).
I forgot what I was going to say, maybe something about some stupid document about habeas something or other.
I think Sanjay should have won American Idol.
MW
June 11, 2007 11:38 AM | Reply | Permalink
The "state department official whom Packer is quoting is Richard Haas. And it was Condi
who told him"Don't bother".
Of course Packer himself supported the invasion,
it might be interesting if at some point he himself were to come clean on the extent to which
he knew in Feb/March 2003 that the War was being sold on flimsy pretexts.
Not for the first time of course.
Remember "Remember the Maine".
Or The Great War.
The British cabinet-a coalition- had initially directed the PM to delay declaring war until the German's actually crossed the border. But for various reasons the Government decided they had to act and sent a note to the German Ambassador declaring war based on the ever popular flimsy pretext. Then a cable came in saying a german machine gun had fired across the Belgian border . At that point the British Foreign Minister dispatched Harold Nicholson with instructions to somehow retrieve the first note and replace it with a new one saying that Britain had no alternative but to declare war because of this hostile action against its ally Belgium.
Nicholson arrived at the door . The Butler , who knew him since Nicholson was on social terms with the Ambassador , told him that the A was upstairs.
Nicholson knocked on the door to the A's room .He could faintly hear the sounds of bells ringing and jubiliant cheering as London foolishly celebrated the declaration of War.
The A asked Nicholson what he wanted. He said he
brought a note from the Foreign Minister. The A said :"I thought I'd had the last communication I would ever receive from Lord Grey- but you may enter."
He did, the A was lying face down on
his bed .From some combination of Anglophilia , pacificism or regret at a professional failure (the Kaiser had hoped his cousin ,the King , would keep Britain neutral) he lay,sobbing,with the original note unopened on his bureau. Nicholson removed it , left the new note , and Britain went to a justified war based on this hostile German action.
June 11, 2007 12:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Does this additional information change anything?"
No, because most Democrats are too wimpy to impeach Bush or vote to cut off funds for Georgie's Iraq disaster.
Tom
June 11, 2007 3:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
"... 'bloodless' coup...
Unlike the bloody coup against JFK. Read David Talbot's Brothers.
Tom
June 11, 2007 3:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
... because the MSM is controlled by Bush's corporate lackeys who either agree with George or are afraid of the little dictator.
Tom
June 11, 2007 3:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jeff L:
We were aware of the Washington Post account whem we wrote
the passage on p. 216 and double-checked with a senior intelligence official whether Houdek's memo was indeed post-invasion. He said the Post had been wrong and that the memo was drafted and circulated in April 2003.
June 11, 2007 5:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
jconorflynn:
Our responsibility as journalists is not to advocate criminial
prosecution. It is to shed light where the flashlight has been dim. And since Foley has been all but invisible in virtually all accounts of what led to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, we think it was important to focus on his role, a significant one, if only to make the history of the disaster a bit more complete. And compelling key players to testify under oath can provide voters, if not politicians, with valuable lessons learned. One can hope.
June 11, 2007 5:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
jconorflynn:
Our responsibility as journalists is not to advocate criminial
prosecution. It is to shed light where the flashlight has been dim. And since Foley has been all but invisible in virtually all accounts of what led to the invasion and occupation of Iraq, we think it was important to focus on his role, a significant one, if only to make the history of the disaster a bit more complete. And compelling key players to testify under oath can provide voters, if not politicians, with valuable lessons learned. One can hope.
June 11, 2007 5:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for the reply. I was assuming you knew about the Post report and were deliberately providing a different story. I guess my question is: how confident are you that, for example, there wasn't some document produced by the Africa NIO in January 2003 which was then in some form recycled for the April 2003 memo? I could imagine your senior intelligence official could parse what he says very carefully. On the other hand, I could imagine that person could be very close to author and you could be very confident that the post was just flat wrong.
And if you're as confident as you sound, given that one of you is a reporter for the very paper that reported the original story - which, by the way, got a good deal of play both in the regular media (including, I believe, 60 Minutes) and in the blogosphere - should the Post sort it out and publish a correction? It's sort of important.
Anything on Miscik-Rice on the uranium claim in September 2002?
June 11, 2007 6:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
deleted
June 11, 2007 7:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for your comment, but I have to say that I searched for this article online at the The New Yorker and couldn't find it, at least not by Packer. Maybe I just had the date wrong. He didn't seem to have anything written for them before 2003. Anyhoo...I do remember reading it and I don't have time to research it further right now.
June 12, 2007 3:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
In the 3/31/03 New Yorker Nicholas Lemann quotes Hass that Condi told him in the first week of July 2002 that the decision had already been
made to go to war with Iraq.
June 12, 2007 4:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
There is little doubt now what both Bush and Blair did to start to war on Iraq. Similarly, anyone who has read about PNAC and the preparations that Bush was making in 2000 to learn foreign policy prior to taking office as President knows that the fix was already in. We were going to invade Iraq ASAP, and we were going to build the anti-missile defense system.
I do not see any consensus regarding why the decision to invade Iraq was made, nor by who.
All of the alleged reasons given to the press and the people to justify the war were lies. There were no significant exceptions. Unfortunately, there is no consensus regarding the real reasons for invading Iraq, although if someone wants to suggest that the basic reason was that Dick Cheney is an evil man and Bush is a fool and a puppet, I sure won't argue. Unfortunately, that's not very explanatory.
So what was the real justification for invading Iraq? Did the Bushies really think that we could invade the very weak nation of Iraq, take control of it, and use it as a land-locked troop base and aircraft carrier aimed at Iran? And if so, was this also Blair's justification?
Or was Dick Cheney simply so paranoid that he had to start a war, and his paranoia was infectious? [Sort of like the TB lawyer.]
As I understand it, the preparation of the Niger forgeries started before Bush took office. They were just one of the earliest lies used to justify the invasion of Iraq. It appears to have taken a real effort to get them into the Intelligence circles to the extent that they could be used by Cheney, Bush and Blair to justify invading Iraq. They were grabbed onto by Condi Rice and the White House Iraq Group to justify the invasion, but the key point to remember is that the decision to invade Iraq had been made earlier.
What is the story behind that initial decision to invade Iraq? We still seem focused on the selling of that decision. That's PR. Where did the decision itself come from, and how did it cross the Atlantic and involve the governments of Great Britain, Italy, and possibly Spain as well as the U.S.?
June 12, 2007 8:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
Greg Palast, of BBC, argues in his book "Armed Madhouse" that the confusion follows the fact that two different constituencies had designs on Iraq. The PNAC guys had their dreams, but Big Oil had very clear reasons. They wanted a simple coup replacing Saddam with another strongman, and with the result that they could ink new deals and control supply to maintain price.
Although the PNAC crowd did not, of course, realize their dreams of cheap oil and overflowing democracy, Big Oil has in fact benefitted from the troubles keeping oil off the world market. It is the seesawing between these two camps, with State in Oil's corner and the Pentagon with the neocons, that has made a total hash of the armed robbery that is the Iraq operation.
Of course a third factor is Bush's personal ambition, but he could not be public about simply wanting to invade to expunge the Bush=loser aura after the Gulf I aftermath. (Failed uprisings, Saddam's annoying persistence.) This simple man had no way to parse the subtleties of power maneuvering around him. Little wonder Cheney was the driver for most foreign policy.
June 12, 2007 8:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Fair point, and thank you for staying with the board and answering my question. I appreciate the journalistic diligence, sadly a rare commodity in the media saturated age.
I think I am just suffering Bush-fatigue.
I think it does matter that you cover these angles, if not for a criminal resolution, then for history's sake.
Regards.
/c
In the blogosphere every one is an expert, so no one is an expert.
June 12, 2007 9:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Jeff L:
Our source who told us Houdek's memo was delivered in April 2003 is a career CIA analyst who at the time served in anadministrative capacity at the agency. Sorry I can't be more specific, but I have to follow the ground rules established at the time. The source had reviewed the Post story of April 9, 2006, knew Houdek personally andaccessed the paper trail on the matter. Here are the relevant parts of the April 14, 2006, interview: "That (Houdek) memo, it arrived in early April (2003). We were not prescient. It came after the IAEA already come out and said what it said (that the Niger claim was based on forgeries). It was from the NIO for Africa. But it wasn't completed till early April. The requesthad come in from DoD to look into (the Niger claim) in early March and the publication was in early April. Houdek's a great guy, a straight shooter, and in a very clear, blunt manner he said, 'This looks like crap.'"
The official described the Post's sources as"revisionists, who act like, 'oh, yea, we always thought there was something wrong with this (Niger intelligence).'" I don't know if our source knew who the Post's sources were or whether he was speculating on their motive.
-- Knut Royce
June 12, 2007 9:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
OK, Burford converted me by giving me a 1. The MSM is brilliant, microanalyzing all the BS Bush deals out:)
Tom
June 12, 2007 10:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
Interesting.
So where did Jerry Bremer come from? He had a clear agenda which involved turning Iraq into a small government free market nation. It does not appear to me that big oil was a major part of his agenda. Iraq might have been kept more stable if it had been, since big oil knows not to leave national stability to public desire.
OK. Armed Madhouse just jumped up higher on my reading priority list. Thanks.
June 12, 2007 12:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks a lot! Great information.
I will note that, as you know, there were people who knew beforehand that there was something wrong with the Niger intelligence, so it's not inconceivable that someone at the NIC could have too. Also, the SSCI report and Silberman-Robb did take note of requests from the Pentagon right in January 2003 for information on why analysts thought Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program (beyond the alumiuminum tubes). And OSD also asked, though apparently they asked or anyway got a reply from DIA, in that same time period. All of which just makes it at least plausible that the NIC might have looked into it.
It's also pretty amazing that the Post could get no less than four (4!) US government officials to claim that the White House did receive a memo casting serious doubt on the Niger intelligence before the SOTU in January 2003.
June 12, 2007 1:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're kidding right? Small government/
free market/privatize everything was exactly the sort of Agenda big oil wanted.
The Iraq's would have revolted if the sole agenda had simply been to hand the oil fields over to big oil, and frankly, it would have pretty much looked to everyone as if the war really had been about oil.
So they simply applied the big oil agenda to everything: Flat tax rate on everything, no foreign investment controls at all, foreigners could own 100%, foreigners could withdraw 100% of their profits, all state assets and all state businesses to be privatized. Even state functions like health care and education were to be ideologically privatized in the same manner as the U.S.
And who would be the beneficiaries? The Iraqi's themselves were destitute and capital starved. Thus foreigners, particularly Americans, would be in a position to go in and buy the entire country at fire sale prices. The result would be different than eastern europe, where gangster capitalists took over. Here the beneficiaries would be New York commercial elites. The massive investment in reconstruction, and no bid contracts, further primed the pump for the sell off/buy up of Iraq and huge profits to be made.
The Iraqi's would benefit, at least temporarily in the short term, from the influx of capital as their assets were sold off. New foreign owners would then invest in their new properties, further priming the economy. In the long term, the Iraqi's would be slaves, but in the short and medium term, Bremer expected a boom.
The logic was that as the process was getting underway, Iraq would be flooded with foreign investment and its economy would boom, and so the calls to extend the same nostrums to the oil fields and oil industry (which would be allowed to strangle on the vine) would be privatized.
Bremer and others talked a good game about Iraq's oil being a national trust. But behind closed doors they were all about selling it off cheap and fast.
As Bremer failed, the Iraqi economy continued to plummet and reconstruction went into the toilet a new 'sell the oil' scheme was piloted. This time the trojan horse would be 'balance' or 'progress' or 'national reconciliation.'
This is why in the middle of a civil war and bottoming economy, the Bush administration puts such emphasis on an Oil Law that even its proponents admit will have no effect on the countries direct problems.
June 12, 2007 3:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm repeating the Palast argument. Garner was the Oil guy, Bremer the neocon guy.
Apparently the first Oil plan was for a three-day incursion and a sponsored coup, returning everything to status quo ante. The Pentagon was of course in charge of the details and replaced that plan with its own.
Garner was put forward by State, and had no intention of delaying elections until the privatization was complete. He told Palast he had simply ignored the Pentagon's timetable. But Rumsfeld wouldn't have it, and fired him.
Bremer took over, and the neocon Plan B was in force. Oil wasn't happy, and sent Shell's CEO, Philip Carroll, to Baghdad.He dictated terms to Bremer that excluded Iraq's oil industry from privatization and de-Baathification.
Except that after Carroll departed, Bremer dumped Carroll's oil man, Mohammed al-Jiburi, and Chalabi replaced him.
After a visit to Iraq by the former Conoco exec and then Halliburton exec Rob McKee, Oil formed a plan.
The Oil plan was called Options for a Sustainable Iraqi Oil Industry, which Palast obtained in July 2004. It suggests seven versions of a state-owned oil company, not the privatization recommended from the Pentagon.
June 12, 2007 6:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Paul Bremer is one of the biggest dopes in this fiasco. So, why don't we award him a medal. Ooops, Georgie already did.
Tom
June 12, 2007 6:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
So you're saying that one amoral looting thug out to rob the place had a slightly different way of implementing the agenda than another amoral looting thug out to rob the place?
Good enough for me.
Let's not mistake any of them for a good guy.
They all deserve to swing from ropes.
June 12, 2007 10:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
BTW, Kevin Drum supported the decision to invade initially...
June 13, 2007 12:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
The IAEA site showed only on plant in the entire region operating at 25% capacity.
That was in Nigeria.
There was not enough refinement ability in the continent to add the amounts claimed, as on its best year Niger could put maybe 300tons on the month and the forgery claimed 500 tons.
The mines in Niger as well, according to Ingersoll Rand subcontractors from both France and Germany, if you looked at their sites and the listed busienss they did, were well below average output.
One mine was closed the other was flooded. Most of the mining equipment in the region was going to the Sierra Leone region for gold mines, which was the underlying motivation for an ethnic cleaning campaign in the are most thought to have mine value.
June 13, 2007 12:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
*in the area
June 13, 2007 12:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is a fair point, and a good argument for dropping the debate on WMD intelligence.
On the other hand, showing that the WMD story was a ruse (albeit one that perhaps the Bushies doggedly believed) does help shift the discussion to the underlying reasons for the invasion. It also might shed light on certain high crimes...
As Tom has commented, "Armed Madhouse" is a great read which illustrates that there were competing "oil" strategies, and Bush apparently oscillated between the AEI strategy (which was fundamentally about breaking the OPEC cartel) and the Big Oil preference to control and constrain supply.
Atrios made the point recently that pretty much everyone in the administration had their own reasons for going to war - Rove + Bush for political capital, Cheney for oil, Rummy to prove his new military theory, the Neocons to give effect to PNAC, etc etc - and to the extent he is correct, I think this shows both the weakness of George Bush and the reason the occupation has turned out this disastrously. For me, a good leader would have gotten the principals to agree on a comprehensive post-Saddam strategy; Bush made no apparent effort to do this... witness the complete breakdown in co-ordination between Pentagon and State.
But whilst I think it is important to understand why things have unfolded so disastrously, I think the underlying reasons for the invasion were basically threefold:
(1) Oil - or euphemistically, "energy security". The strategic importance of the Middle East hinges fundamentally on what lies beneath the sands.
(2) Loosening our dependence on the House of Saud. Even before 9/11, there were reasonable concerns that we were overly dependent on Saudi goodwill, and the hope was we could instal an Iraqi regime that we could better trust and would welcome a military presence.
(3) The Bushies thought it would be an easy win, a simple means of establishing a bigger footprint in the Middle East.
None of the above, of course, could provide legitimacy for the invasion. WMD possession, however, could. And that's why it was foisted on us. As I said, the con the Bushies pulled was making so many people believe that they were concerned about Saddam's WMD. They presented certainty where it did not exist. And they advanced worst case scenarios based on the flimsiest evidence.
Or rather, flimsiest or forged? I guess we'll have to read "The Italian Letter" to find out.
June 13, 2007 3:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Sure enough, Lebanon and Iraq erupt with Sunni terror groups acting out hits...
mission accomplished.
June 13, 2007 2:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
We use many euphemisms for Terrorism in our society. "Shock and Awe" campaigns are a form of terrorism as well.
June 14, 2007 10:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes. Torture is terrorism, on a one-on-one basis. It belies the "they hate our freedoms" defense when we adopt their principles.
June 15, 2007 5:14 PM | Reply | Permalink