Grant President Bush one thing: There is a whiff of hypocrisy about Democratic senators and representatives who favored the Iraq War complaining that the president distorted intelligence findings to sell the war to the public. That the biggest and most important of Bush's deceptions -- that Saddam Hussein was likely to give a nuclear bomb or other mass-casualty device to al-Qaeda -- was a deception was well-understood among those who cared to inform themselves about the matter beforehand. The administration's more subtle manipulation of the WMD intelligence was less obvious at the time, but an inquisitive member of Congress could have gotten a fairly clear picture of things were he or she interested in doing so.
A staple of Bush's pre-war rhetoric was simply to exploit the ambiguity inherent in the term "weapons of mass destruction." Speeches would glide from intelligence regarding Saddam's chemical weapons programs to the threat of nuclear weapons, with "WMD" serving as a convenient but essentially meaningless bridge. Much was made of the notion that if Saddam could acquire highly enriched uranium he could build a bomb within a year, while little attention was paid to the fact that such uranium is extraordinarily difficult to make or acquire. As late as January 2002, the CIA's public reporting on the Iraqi nuclear threat was thin, vague, and non-alarmist, stating only that "we believe that Iraq has probably continued at least low-level theoretical R&D associated with its nuclear program." When, six to twelve months later, the assessment suddenly became more dire, a discerning observer should have wondered whether something fishy was going on.
Above and beyond that, many members of Congress have security clearances that would have allowed them to see information that the White House, through its control of the classification process, hid from public view -- documents such as the caveats in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that were conveniently removed from the public release and the dissenting opinion from the State Department's intelligence agency regarding Iraq's aluminum tubes.
Many Democrats did, of course, see that something was up and tried to resist the drive to war. But many did not. Nowadays, all express outrage about distortions and manipulation, but if the opponents of war among them had been better at doing their jobs in 2002 we might not be having this conversation in 2005.
Grant Bush that much.
Bush is also correct when he observes that "it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war," and I'm glad to hear it from his mouth. Previously, we've heard that those who criticize his decision are simply opposed to fighting terrorism, and that those who criticize his conduct of the war are failing to support our troops in the field. That said, he's on thin ground -- preposterously thin ground -- when he accuses his adversaries of a "deeply irresponsible" effort to "rewrite the history of how that war began."
The history is not especially complicated. The Bush administration contains several members who were agitating for more aggressive action to depose Saddam Hussein as far back as the late 1990s. At that time, it was widely understood that America wouldn't launch a major war on behalf of that cause, so advocates tried to dream up schemes involving air support and armed exile groups, schemes that attracted little enthusiasm outside of a relatively small circle. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, Donald Rumsfeld argued that Hussein should be the target of an American response, a view that was slapped down by his colleagues and the president. But soon enough the Taliban had fallen and the drive to Baghdad began in earnest.
The first and most important part of that drive was to convince Congress and the public. That meant assembling a case that Saddam was a threat to the United States, a very serious threat -- more serious than the others. And so the administration went about assembling it, construing every data point and crafting every word in a manner designed to produce the most threatening portrait possible.
There's nothing mysterious or even especially unusual about this sort of behavior. It's how lawyers argue cases. It's also how politicians normally talk about tax policy or environmental regulations or the latest poll numbers or the fact that one of their top aides has been indicted for perjury. It's called "spin," and it's recognized to be an inherently manipulative and deceptive endeavor.
But national security is -- or is supposed to be -- different.
When we debate most issues, we debate based on information that's available to all. Both sides assemble the best case they can muster and then have it out. National security, however, necessarily involves information that to some extent must be closely guarded. Presidents can't fully explain why, exactly, they think they know what they think they know. They refer instead to "intelligence" and to "sources" that say this or that, and the public -- and Congress -- either trusts them or doesn't. Before we went to Iraq, most people trusted the president. They assumed that he wouldn't insist so firmly that "the danger is clear: using chemical, biological, or, one day, nuclear weapons obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of people in our country, or any other" unless the danger was, in fact, reasonably clear. Most senators and representatives either assumed likewise, or else were swept up in the political pressure generated by the fact that most of the public believed the president.
Either way, the decisive fact is that most Americans put their trust in an administration that, for public consumption, portrayed the matter as an open-and-shut case. That trust, as we now can see, was horribly misguided.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
