"As White House officials try to control the latest fallout over President Bush's flawed suggestion in the State of the Union address that Iraq was 
buying nuclear bomb materials," says US News' Washington Whispers, "there's growing talk by insiders that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice may take the blame and resign."
Even I find such an eventuality a bit hard to imagine, but it actually jibes well with a lot of what I've been hearing over recent weeks and months. With Steve Hadley taking the latest rap for the Niger-uranium debacle, Rice has for all intents and purposes taken the rap without having herself uttered the words. As I wrote to someone who knows her earlier today, "Everyone's spin aside, the nuke issue was the biggest issue in terms of threat. And this was one of our best pieces of positive --- as opposed to inferential --- evidence. If she really didn't read the memo that was sent to her --- which I agree is possible --- it's inexcusable."
At the end of the day I think it's quite likely we'll find that the true pressure for pushing the uranium story came from the Office of the Vice President, pressure quite possibly exerted through Hadley, who is generally seen as a Cheney-man at NSC.
But if Rice goes it won't just be as a fall-gal for the uranium business. Because this unsightly view into the Bush NSC has only crystallized an increasingly widespread perception that she has simply done a poor job as National Security Advisor.
Mind you, it's no surprise that any National Security Advisor steps on a lot of toes and makes enemies. It's her job to discipline and force consensus -- if only operational consensus -- from the various ideological and organizational factions in the national security establishment. So the job requires slapping all sorts of people around.
But the criticism in most every case is that she's exercised little of that disciplining, consensus-forcing, BS-catching role. That shortcoming doesn't bear directly on the stuff we're seeing now. But it helped set the stage for it in a number of important ways -- a point we'll get to in greater detail in a later post.
The point is that many people from both sides of the administration's pragmatist-hawk dividing line criticize Rice in very similar terms: for not settling these ideological and inter-agency debates with any finality so that the execution of policy is not overwhelmed by continuing in-fighitng over just what it should be. One hears many stories of her presiding over meetings in the professorial manner of a seminar leader, asking interesting questions, and leaving the issue as unresolved at the end of the meeting as it was at the beginning. In essence, you hear many folks on both sides saying: Hey, choose our plan or choose theirs. But, for God's sake, you have to choose!
--Josh Marshall
Department of scorecards worth pulling back out of that desk drawer.
This from The New York Times, March 22nd 2003 ...
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld declared today that the Iraqi government was starting to crumble as he laid out eight broad objectives by which the Bush administration would define victory.
...
Mr. Rumsfeld listed eight sweeping goals that the Bush administration sought to achieve in the war.
...
The first of the eight specific aims, Mr. Rumsfeld said, is to "end the regime of Saddam Hussein by striking with force on a scope and scale that makes clear to Iraqis that he and his regime are finished."
Second, Iraq's arsenal of biological and chemical weapons, and any program to develop nuclear weapons, are also targets, as the American military has been ordered "to identify, isolate and eventually eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, their delivery systems, production capabilities, and distribution networks," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
Troops will then "search for, capture, drive out terrorists who have found safe harbor in Iraq," he added.
Next, he said, the allied forces will "collect such intelligence as we can find related to terrorist networks in Iraq and beyond."
The fifth goal, Mr. Rumsfeld said, is to "collect such intelligence as we can find related to the global network of illicit weapons of mass destruction activity."
The United States also seeks "to end sanctions and to immediately deliver humanitarian relief, food and medicine to the displaced and to the many needy Iraqi citizens," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
Military forces also will "secure Iraq's oil fields and resources, which belong to the Iraqi people, and which they will need to develop their country after decades of neglect by the Iraqi regime," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
Lastly, Mr. Rumsfeld said, the war effort is "to help the Iraqi people create the conditions for a rapid transition to a representative self-government that is not a threat to its neighbors and is committed to ensuring the territorial integrity of that country."
Add your own clever remark here and stir ...
--Josh Marshall
James Baker update! As we noted in the post earlier this evening, the White House wants James A. Baker, Uber-Fixer-Maximus to take over running Iraq.
Now when I originally linked to the story in question at the Washington Post it was datelined just after twelve noon today. It was headlined 
with the news about the probable return of Baker ("White House Wants Baker to Head Iraq Reconstruction")and hinted on various levels that Bremer might be on the way out.
What the story actually said was that Baker would likely be asked to run the economy and the physical infrastructure in Iraq while Bremer would run the political side. Significantly, the story said it was unclear whether Bremer would report to Baker or vice versa.
For those who remember how ole' Jay Garner got the boot, that sort of 'transition' had an awfully familiar ring to it.
Now, just before nine I again checked the story. And it had changed -- a lot.
Now there's no James Baker in the headline ("Bush Considers New Overhaul of Postwar Iraq Administration"). And he's not even mentioned until the 5th graf, where it says ...
As part of an effort to beef up the reconstruction, the White House is considering asking several major figures, including former secretary of state James A. Baker III, to help with specific tasks like seeking funds from other countries or helping restructure Iraq's debt.
The new article is larded with lines about how everyone loves the job Bremer is doing (which, by and large, I think I agree with, given the constraints he seems to be operating under). And the second mention of Baker's name -- down in graf #8 -- says ...
An aide said Baker is on vacation, and he did not immediately return messages left at his law firm, Baker Botts LLP in Houston. Several administration officials predicted that Baker would not become involved, but said the White House might still seek "a Baker-like figure" to share duties with Bremer.
Here's CBS's pick-up of the original Post story -- though who knows how long it'll remain?
Now, I've gotta ask: what happened here?
Between noon and 7 PM we went from the likely sending out of Baker as viceroy to the possible appointment of "a Baker-like figure" to help out Bremer.
Something's fishy here. Did the authors -- Mike Allen and Glenn Kessler, two real pros -- get spun by some bad tips? That's hard to figure. Or did they get walloped by a tsunami of Bush spinmeisters furiously walking back the story? Or did the Baker boomlet at the White House really only last for half an afternoon? Is there a tug of war? And where's Bremer fit in in all this? And, while we're asking questions, how many neos with offices at OSD or at the corner of 17th and M Street suffered nervous breakdowns when they heard James A. Baker might be put in charge of Iraq?
Something worth knowing happened here.
Special Note to Post sources (you know who you are!): Your own TPM mug for whoever can send me a copy of the original piece. And even more TPM prizes for whomever can fill me in on the backstory.
Late Update: Another blog, "Uggabugga" (no, I have no idea how he came up with that name), has both versions of the article lined up side by side on his site.
Even Later Update: Is that your final answer? As of 12:50 AM, we have yet another version of the story ("Changes in Iraq Effort Debated"). Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. This one sheds a little light on the tug-of-war that likely led to the differences between versions one and two.
--Josh Marshall
Can someone wake me up when we figure out whether this is comedy, tragedy, parody or farce? Now James Baker's going to take over running Iraq.
Yeah, that James Baker.
--Josh Marshall
Some time over this weekend I want to get time to address in detail the defenses coming from administration advocates regarding the war.
For the moment, let me try briefly to address two of the more commonly-heard ones.
First is that captured in Charles Krauthammer's column this morning. Responding to the many charges of exaggerated or manipulated intelligence, the plea is essentially nolo contendere, no contest. Whether the intelligence was cooked or not, they say, we and the region are better off for having invaded when we did.
I think that for anyone seriously following events in the region, that judgment is still very much in suspense. The truth is that it's too soon to know with any certainty what the long-term results of all this are. But, however that may be, this strips down to an ends justify the means argument. Simple as that.
The means the White House used to get the country into Iraq are quite capable of being analyzed independently from the results of the invasion. Anyone who argues otherwise is really cynical in the extreme.
The other argument is that advanced by Dick Cheney yesterday in his speech at AEI. That was, essentially, this: knowing what we knew then we had no choice but to act.
I agree.
In fact, I said so many, many times in magazine articles and in these virtual pages. But Cheney's is only an attempt to retrospectively distort the debate to such an extent that the choice was one between doing nothing and launching the war with only one significant ally in March 2003. (And, no, don't even try to tell me about Poland and Spain.) Cheney is simply trying to pitch the ludicrous notion that everyone who doesn't drink the neocon Kool-Aid spends their spare moments teary-eyed over the rough shake Saddam got growing up on the mean streets of Tikrit.
I certainly hope no one will 
let him get away with this laughable dodge. To act, in this case, was not synonymous with going to war in March 2003. The key questions were a) timing, b) how we did it, and c) what inspectors were finding once in country -- because as I've said many times before, the initial reconnaissance by the IAEA gave good reason to believe that the Iraqi nuclear program was at best not very far advanced. And nukes were the central issue, as far as any imminent threat.
The challenges we're facing now stem from the fact that we dealt with the situation on the double-quick. And the fact that we dealt with it that way is inextricably linked to the issue of hyping and manipulating the intel.
The question is not whether there was any reason to believe there was a threat. There was. The questions were whether that threat was imminent and whether we dealt with it in the best possible way or the stupidest possible way.
Coming next, criticism aside, what's the best policy to pursue in Iraq today ...
--Josh Marshall
In the previous post I noted the section of Steve Hadley's White House Q&A in which he said that Condi Rice had received the memo calling the Niger-uranium story into question . Then I contrasted it with her earlier statements on Meet the Press.
Some readers noted that in that appearance Rice said only that those "in [her] circles" didn't know that the documents in question were forgeries. She didn't address the broader issue of whether there were concerns that the intel itself was simply false.
Now, for my money, this is slicing it rather thin, or a matter of violating that part about telling not just the truth, but the whole truth. If what Rice meant was that they didn't know the documents were forgeries only that the charges themselves were likely bogus, I think you could say she didn't quite level with us.
As it happens, the question is moot. One of my well-placed and cherished spies alerts me to Rice's comment on ABC's This Week on June 8th ...
STEPHANOPOULOS: That claim was later discredited by the International Atomic Energy Agency, found that to be based on forged documents. So how did it make it into the State of the Union address?RICE: At the time that the State of the Union address was prepared, there were also other sources that said that they were, the Iraqis were seeking yellow cake, uranium oxide from Africa. And that was taken out of a British report. Clearly, that particular report, we learned subsequently, subsequently, was not credible. But it was also a very small part, George, of a larger picture of a program aimed at developing nuclear weapons.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me stop you right there, because many in the United States government knew before then that this, this ...
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: George, somebody, somebody down may have known. But I will tell you that when this issue was raised, uh, with the intelligence community, because, uh, we actually do go through the process of asking, uh, the intelligence community, can you say this? Can you say that? Can you say this? The intelligence community did not know at that time or at levels that got to us that this, that there was serious questions about this report.
Either Rice didn't read the memo (possible, but improbable) or she didn't level with George.
--Josh Marshall
A couple days ago I linked to a UPI story that said the just released 9/11 report had concluded not only that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 but that there were no ties whatsoever between Iraq and al Qaida. They've now retracted the story.
--Josh Marshall
Why the pass for Condi? This from Hadley's White House Q & A ...
Hadley: The memorandum describes some weakness in the evidence, the fact that the effort was not particularly significant to Iraq's nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already had a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory. The memorandum also stated that the CIA had been telling Congress that the Africa story was one of two issues where we differed with the British intelligence. This memorandum was received by the Situation Room here in the White House, and it was sent to both Dr. Rice and myself....
Question: So within the White House, the first time that the CIA concerns about the quality of the British intelligence went up to the level above your level, up to Dr. Rice, would have been with memo number two?
Hadley: I'm hesitating because, again, given you don't know what you don't, given what we put together at this point in time, that's the evidence we had. That's old --
Question: But as of memo number two, certainly Dr. Rice was aware of the concerns, the CIA --
Hadley: What we know is, again, a copy of the memo comes to the Situation Room, it's sent to Dr. Rice, it's sent -- and that's it. You know, I can't tell you she read it. I can't even tell you she received it. But in some sense, it doesn't matter. Memo sent, we're on notice.
Steve Hadley
White House Q&A
July 22nd, 2003
We did not know at the time--no one knew at the time, in our circles--maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the Agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery.Condi Rice
Meet the Press
June 8th, 2003
Speaks for itself doesn't it?
--Josh Marshall
Chatterbox takes the field! Slate's Tim Noah, AKA 'Chatterbox', has a very good run-down of Dick Cheney's speech today at AEI and the larger, shall we say, context of this counter-offensive.
By the way, was that Ahmed Chalabi sitting there in the front row next to Lynne Cheney?
Remember, in this administration, all roads lead to Cheney, especially the ones paved with good intentions and the ones leading to ... well, you know where.
--Josh Marshall
The headline from this article in today's Washington Post is that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz conceded that a number of the administration's assumptions about the occupation of Iraq turned out to be unduly optimistic.
Wolfowitz summed up his implicit defense thus: "There's been a lot of talk that there was no plan. There was a plan, but as any military officer can tell you, no plan survives first contact with reality."
I credit Wolfowitz for his candor. But here's why this explanation doesn't really add up.
Under any set of circumstances this was an extremely ambitious undertaking. There would inevitably have been setbacks and course corrections once hypotheses gave way to realities.
The issue though is not that there are reverses and course corrections, but the extent of them and, even more than that, which way they trend.
Let me explain what I mean in this context by "trend."
In the lead-up to the war there was a broad battle between Pentagon civilian appointees and folks at State, CIA, in the uniformed military, and even career folks at DOD -- those who hadn't already been shipped off to the Hill or NDU -- over what the occupation would look like and what would be required to make it a success.
(I discussed this issue with regards to the CIA in my column this week in The Hill.)
The big issues were how many troops would be needed to secure the country, how much low-level armed resistance would continue after the war, how quickly and under what auspices a new government would come into being, the optimal degree of internationalization, among many others.
Give the Post article a good read, because it contains a lot of good information and a solid overview. But if you read it and other similar articles I think it's hard not to come to one conclusion: that on almost every one one of these key issues the predictions and preferred policies of the career/State/ CIA/uniformed military faction turned out to be far closer to the mark than the thinking that was coming out of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) -- the people who ended up in charge of shaping the actual policy.
Some neo-cons and advocates of the Pentagon civilians will argue that an almost equally significant problem was that the NSA, Condi Rice, never forced everyone to get on one page and agree on one policy. So what you had was different parts of the national security bureaucracy devising and pushing contrary policies right up till the last minute, and generally fighting wars with each other while they were supposed to be getting ready to fight a war against Iraq. And there's some measure of truth in this criticism.
The neos also make the argument that if it had been left to the career/State/ CIA/uniformed military faction we probably never would have invaded Iraq in the first place -- though that's not quite the argument ender it was a few months ago.
At the end of the day, though, it just doesn't cut it to say that no plan is perfect and that you never know quite what you'll find until you're actually in country. Because a lot of people did have a fairly good idea of what we'd find in the country, or at least a much better idea than the folks at OSD.
Unfortunately, those folks at OSD spent the last two years pummeling those other dudes into the ground.
--Josh Marshall
According to a story just hitting the wires by UPI's Shaun Waterman, the report from the joint congressional 9/11 inquiry, which will be released tomorrow, concludes not only that Iraq had no connection with the 9/11 attacks but that there was no evidence for any Iraq-al-Qaida connection.
Some interesting tidbits ...
Former Democratic Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, who was a member of the joint congressional committee that produced the report, confirmed the official's statement.Asked whether he believed the report will reveal that there was no connection between al-Qaida and Iraq, Cleland replied: "I do ... There's no connection, and that's been confirmed by some of (al-Qaida leader Osama) bin Laden's terrorist followers."
...
"The administration sold the connection (between Iraq and al-Qaida) to scare the pants off the American people and justify the war," said Cleland. "What you've seen here is the manipulation of intelligence for political ends."
...
Although the committee completed its work at the end of last year, publication of the report has been delayed by interminable wrangles between the committees and the administration over which parts of it could be declassified.
Cleland accused the administration of deliberately delaying the report's release to avoid having its case for war undercut.
"The reason this report was delayed for so long -- deliberately opposed at first, then slow-walked after it was created -- is that the administration wanted to get the war in Iraq in and over ... before (it) came out," he said.
"Had this report come out in January like it should have done, we would have known these things before the war in Iraq, which would not have suited the administration."
...
[A government official who's read the report] went on to suggest that the conclusions drawn from the information about [a key piece of alleged evidence for a Iraq-al Qaida connection] was indicative of a wider-ranging problem with the administration's attitude to intelligence on the alleged Iraq al-Qaida link.
"They take a fact that you could draw several different conclusions from, and in every case they draw the conclusion that supports the policy, without any particular evidence that would meet the normal bar that analytic tradecraft would require for you to make that conclusion," he concluded.
Administration backers will reasonably note that former Senator Cleland might be said to have a bit of a bone to pick with the White House. After all, they spearheaded a campaign against him that charged that he, a Vietnam vet and triple amputee, was soft on national defense. So maybe some will say that Cleland's credibility is suspect. But, then, everyone's credibility is stretched a bit thin these days, ain't it ...
--Josh Marshall
Interesting insider info on the CIA-NSC war from today's Nelson Report ...
CIA TORPEDOES THE NSC9. Until or unless the President steps in to provide leadership, the long-awaited showdown between the "neoconservatives" and the "pragmatists" will soon reach crisis proportions…this, due to CIA director George Tenet's extraordinary decision to name the President's staffers responsible for misleading, or false, pre-Iraq war intel, Administration sources confirm today.
-- and the war has just begun, intelligence community sources warn. The Iraq/Niger debacle is but one of "a whole series of stories which are ready to break", a source told us today, adding, "I've never seen such hostility and disdain as now being expressed between the White House and the CIA. Never…"
10. As we reported on July 17, Tenet's lengthy, closed Capitol Hill testimony "outed" not just NSC non-proliferation staffer Bob Joseph, but also Deputy National Security Advisor Steve Hadley, and, by implication, Condi Rice, and Vice President Cheney, if not Bush himself.
-- yesterday, Hadley performed a virtual repeat of Tenet's highly qualified "taking responsibility" pose by making it clear that if he has to take a fall, then Ms. Rice needs to explain why she didn't read the memos he gave her.
11. As one Administration source put it, privately, today: "Between Tenet and Hadley, Condi now has the choice of saying she's a fool, or a liar…if not both. Bottom line is she failed to protect the President…look at all this lame stuff about him not being a 'fact checker'. It's just incredible."
-- even before last week, a source close to the White House told us, "the President now sees that he's exposed on the intel problems. And he now sees who's been manipulating him, and he's not happy about it. No president likes to be embarrassed, but this stuff goes to the heart of all the reservations, pre-9/11, about his intelligence, his attention span, and his interest in foreign affairs."
12. Three weeks ago, this source speculated that it would be "difficult" for Bush to fire the senior officials responsible, for obvious reasons, since they would include Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Rice, at a minimum, and that Tenet seemingly had so ingratiated himself at the personal level, he could escape punishment.
-- today, while no one wanted to speculate about Rummy and Cheney, in the absence of new disclosures, disparate Administration sources confirm that it is "generally accepted" that Tenet will be fired from the CIA, if only because of what he started last week.
13. Where this gets really interesting is the apparent response of neoconservatives: just prior to Hadley's self-destruction yesterday, a source reported talk of trying to replace Tenet with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; replacing Wolfowitz with Hadley; and moving Bob Blackwill immediately up to Deputy NSC advisor…even though Blackwill is not a neo-con.
-- parenthetically, sources explain that for neo-cons, Blackwill enjoys the considerable virtue of loathing, and being loathed by, the "leaders" of the pragmatists, Secretary of State Powell, and Deputy Secretary Armitage. State sources say Blackwill was "fired" as Ambassador to India, due to his management of the Embassy, and how he worked with Armitage in various India/Pakistan crises.
More soon ...
--Josh Marshall
So now we have Stephen Hadley, Condi Rice's number two, stepping forward to take the blame for not keeping the uranium line out of the State of the Union speech. This buck may eventually stop at the president's desk, but it's amazing how many stops it makes along the way, isn't it?
An Acela Express it ain't!
Presumably this renders 'inoperative' the earlier White House claim that the CIA didn't warn them about their doubts on the uranium sale.
It would seem that Hadley's 'mea maxima culpa' was triggered by leaks out of the CIA that they had even more evidence to prove that they sent the word to the White House plenty of times. It may also not have been entirely coincidental that the news came out on a day when the administration was celebrating a very real victory in having tracked down Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay.
For what it's worth I think the chain here leads not so much to President Bush as to Vice President Cheney.
--Josh Marshall
Again and again we hear the refrain that this single instance of mentioning discredited intelligence about Iraqi uranium purchases pales in comparison to the much broader set of reasons why the United States invaded Iraq.
In one sense this is certainly false. The possibility that such a hostile and threatening regime could acquire nuclear weapons is sui generis. You simply can't compare it to this or that many liters of VX nerve gas or botulinum toxin. Seemingly strong evidence that Iraq was well on its way to producing nuclear weapons isn't just one "data point" as Condi Rice put it recently.
In another sense, though, it is just one small question or small issue. And if it were taken in isolation or without a broader context, it would hardly be generating the intensity of criticism and scrutiny that it is. The reason it is generating this level of scrutiny is that this one instance of bad faith is of a piece with so much of what went on in the build up to war.
It would be one thing if the administration had pursued this war because of weapons of mass destruction and, in so doing, pumped up the evidence to strengthen the case. Perhaps, one might hypothesize, they knew there was a lot of chemical and biological weapons production underway and the beginnings of a major push for nuclear weapons and, to seal the deal, said the nuclear program was further along than it was.
But this greatly understates the scope of the problem. Not only was the WMD issue (and the allied issue of Iraq's connection to al Qaida) systematically exaggerated, the entire WMD issue -- and the nexus to non-state terrorist groups like al Qaida -- wasn't even the main reason for the war itself. So the case for war amounted to one dishonesty wrapped inside another -- not quite Churchill's "riddle, wrapped in mystery, inside an enigma" but not that far off it either.
Now some people on the left are saying, well, the real reason was the possession of Iraqi oil. Or, the real reason was to seal the 2002 election or the 2004 election. Various other real reasons have been and are being proffered. But these are at best secondary or tertiary reasons. Karl Rove certainly exploited the Iraq debate and the war on terror to the hilt in 2002 -- and to great effect. But he was only taking advantage of a situation that had come about for reasons entirely different from his own narrow political ones.
Now, the series of neoconservative rationales for invading Iraq well predate 9/11. And as I've written before I think the desire to achieve this goal -- overthrowing Saddam Hussein -- became such a guiding star for many regime-change advocates that the desire become the parent of the rationale. This was one of the reasons why there was, in the end, such a curious multiplicity of rationales for doing it.
But over time after 9/11 one overriding theory of the war did take shape: it was to get America irrevocably on the ground in the center of the Middle East (thus fundamentally reordering the strategic balance in the region), bring to a head the country's simmering conflict with its enemies in the region, and kick off a democratic transformation of the region which would over time dissipate the root causes of anti-American terrorism and violence: autocracy, poverty and fanaticism.
That is why we are in Iraq today. That is the theory of this war. I have little doubt that many in the administration and in certain think-tanks in DC who really don't like much of what they've been reading on this website recently will have little to disagree with in that description.
It's important to note that this theory of the war actually does have a lot to do with stopping terrorism and the generalized instability of region -- but in a way that is almost infinitely more complex than the Saddam-WMD-hand -off-to-al-Qaida idea that the administration pushed in the build-up to the war.
It's much more complicated, much more complex, and vastly more difficult to achieve. It's not that the main war-hawks didn't believe there were WMD or that rooting them out wouldn't have been a great coup for US national security. But it is almost as if administration war-hawks told the public a vastly simplified, fairy-tale version of the Iraq war's connection to stopping terrorism and justified this benign deception because the story contained a deeper truth, almost in the way we tell children similar stories because their minds aren't advanced enough to grasp or process all the factual details connected to the lessons or messages we're trying to convey. Got all that? Good.
Of course, one might also say that the public might have intuited that fighting this sort of war was too risky, improbable and costly than anything it wanted to get involved in.
(I made this argument in an article I wrote in early March and which appeared in the Washington Monthly during the first week of the war. I'd certainly change some things about that piece were I to write it again. But not many.)
As I wrote then, and in several earlier articles, I think this theory of the war contained several penetrating insights into America's position in the Middle East and the long-term losing game we may be playing by identifying ourselves with corrupt autocracies which are in many ways themselves failed states which simply have yet to collapse.
But an insight or even a broad strategy is not a plan -- a fact which we're now seeing played out before our eyes. The fact that the administration never leveled with the public -- or in some ways even itself -- about this shielded it from the kind of scrutiny which would have revealed just how little the administration had thought through the sheer complexity of what it was trying to accomplish. This created the need to goose up secondary issues like WMD to gain a public rationale for the war. If you're wondering why so little planning seems to have gone into what on earth we were going to do once we took the place over it's because so little of the debate leading up to the war had anything to do with these questions or for that matter what we were actually trying to achieve by invading the country.
Now, a few points about the dishonesty at the center of all this. It's bad just on principle not to fundamentally level with the public about why you're getting into a war and just what sort of war you're getting into. Quite apart from that, however, doing so gets you into some practical difficulties. If you don't level with the public that you're getting into a very long-term, extremely costly enterprise you may find that your tough talk about having the staying power to finish the job isn't matched by public sentiment, or that you face a backlash over getting the country into far more than you led voters to believe. You may find that the public really isn't on board for what you're trying to accomplish. And that's a big problem if the public doesn't have the staying power and you have to leave the task half-finished, because this is one of those things that is better not to have tried at all than leave half-done.
So, why is this little matter of the uranium statements such a big deal? Because it is a concrete, demonstrable example of the administration's bad faith in how it led the country to war. To date that bad-faith has been all too apparent on many fronts. But the administration has cowed much of the press into remaining silent or simply not scrutinizing various of the administration's arguments for the war. And success makes up for many sins. No doubt it's painful for the president's partisans to see this stuff dug into. And it produces glee for Democrats who think -- rightly or wrongly -- that it gives them a potent issue to use against the president in the 2004 elections. But quite apart from partisan considerations on either side, we're never going to figure out what we're doing in Iraq, do it well, or accomplish anything good for the future security of the United States unless and until we start talking straight about why we're there, what we need to accomplish, and how we're going to do it.
--Josh Marshall
A few thoughts on under-celebrated reporting of the WMD manipulation story. First, some of the more interesting, not-following-the-pack pieces I've seen have been by Knut Royce in Newsday. (Do I know him? No, never even heard his name before a week or so ago.) And, of course, let's keep in mind that Tom Gjelten of NPR had pretty much the entire story -- the administration's knowledge of the problems with Niger claims, the last minute back-and-forth with the CIA, and even the decision to use the Brits to get around the CIA's objections -- more than a month ago, back on June 19th. Talk about beating everyone else to the story!
--Josh Marshall
What will we find?
When Iraqi scientists are permitted to talk to inspectors and journalists without fear of having their tongues later cut out and their families slaughtered by Saddam, the truth will out in vivid detail about the decadelong deception of the U.N. With "Dr. Germs" singing to save her life at future war crimes trials, today's American straddlers will at last be confronted with conclusive evidence they now profess to doubt ... When the postwar books are written, a former Iraqi spymaster with knowledge of the suicide attacker Mohamed Atta's perhaps unwitting connection to Saddam will eagerly come forth to spill all he knows to save his neck or sell his memoirs. Suspected followers of Osama bin Laden like Musaab Zarqawi and Mullah Krekar, if alive, will further link Al Qaeda to Saddam's mukhabarat police.
Some Bush critic setting the bar ridiculously high? No, Bill Safire, from January 30th.
More to come soon on the phantom 'al Qaida connection.'
--Josh Marshall
It's nice to see some war-hawks are waking up to what George Tenet actually wrote in his July 11th plank-walking press release, the 'mea culpa' that had an extremely sharp barb hidden amidst all the abject language.
Over the last week people who've been following this case have slowly woken up to a realization of how dexterous a game Tenet has been playing. I wrote back on the 12th that if you "read Tenet's 'mea culpa' (self-criticism session?) closely ... you'll see it points right back at Condi Rice's NSC."
But I didn't grasp quite the degree of Tenet's bureaucratic savvy. Nor do I think did the White House. Actually, scratch that: I'm sure they didn't.
Having covered himself with a dignity-dashing mess of sorries and self-criticism (which sounded vaguely like something out of Russia in the mid-late 1930s), he set out an explanation that pointed right back to the White House, or specifically to the NSC.
He upped the ante dramatically when he and his aides gave more information in the recent closed-door hearing on Capitol Hill. Tenet and company are slowly reeling out piece after incriminating piece of information. It's hard to attack him since he's already 'taken responsibility' for the goof (still the only one as far as I can see.) But the real reason it's hard to attack him or, for that matter, fire him, is that the White House realizes that it is far better to have a dishing Tenet on the inside than on the outside. Amazingly, Tenet has managed to make himself nearly untouchable -- at least for the moment.
In any case, back to war-hawks realizing this.
In Bill Kristol's new column, he writes ...
On January 28, the president said in his State of the Union address that "the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Perhaps he should have said "the British government believes" rather than "has learned." But this statement was unremarkable at the time, and remains unremarkable today. And, contrary to the implications of George Tenet's disingenuous press release of July 11, the president said nothing that the Central Intelligence Agency had retracted or controverted in the months between the distribution of their October estimate and the State of the Union address.It now turns out the CIA had its doubts--though they were less than definitive. It also turns out the British are sticking by their claim. And it remains the case, most important, that the African uranium business, whatever the truth of it, was never more than a single piece of the otherwise voluminous evidence driving allied concern over Saddam and weapons of mass destruction. How important were those "significant quantities of uranium from Africa"? The White House now acknowledges, in retrospect, that the matter didn't merit mention in the State of the Union.
There are three points I'd like to note about these two grafs. But let me start with the point about Tenet. The "president said nothing that the Central Intelligence Agency had retracted or controverted in the months between the distribution of their October estimate and the State of the Union address"? Is that really your final answer, Bill? If it is, which part of the public record are you disputing? As nearly as I can tell we have at least two instances where the CIA did just that -- we can leave aside for the moment the instances that haven't been reported yet.
George Tenet personally -- and it seems, repeatedly -- interceded with Hadley to keep the Niger uranium story out of the president's October 7th speech. Isn't that right? And then Alan Foley tried to keep the statement out of the State of the Union speech, but eventually gave way over the 'Brits-said-it compromise.' The White House first agreed that Foley had done this and now they seem to have un-agreed.
But does anyone really buy the line from the "senior administration official" on Friday that the White House came up with the 'British caveat' on their own to make the claim seem more credible? It seems like there are at least two instances where Tenet or one of his subordinates tried to warn the White House off those claims, on the reasoning that they were not credible enough for public dissemination. The sentence that reads "the CIA had its doubts" probably ought to read "the CIA had its doubts and communicated them to the White House on at least two occasions after the NIE was completed."
Second point. Kristol asks "how important were those 'significant quantities of uranium from Africa'? The White House now acknowledges, in retrospect, that the matter didn't merit mention in the State of the Union." This comes after he argues that the uranium claim was just a minor part of the case against Iraq.
If I didn't know better I'd think this was an attempt at a rhetorical sleight of hand. Kristol seems to be saying that the uranium claim didn't merit mention because it was a matter of such negligible significance.
Let's try that again.
If they didn't merit mentioning it was because the allegations weren't particularly credible. It's almost as if Kristol wants to have it both ways -- to grab the uranium claims out of the speech but to do so for reasons that have nothing to do with their credibility. Does anyone really believe that evidence of Iraqi purchases of tons of uranium ore from Africa -- if credible -- wouldn't "merit mention in the State of the Union"?
I didn't think so.
The only possible reason not for including those claims when building the case for the magnitude of Saddam's WMD program would be their lack of credibility.
And finally to the Brits and the claim they're "sticking by." Based on my own snooping I think I know what the Brits' other evidence is. I can't say I'm certain of it yet. But I have to figure that the White House -- having rather better sources of information than I do -- is hearing the same thing. The "other evidence" is not insignificant. If I were the DCI I'd probably have someone look into it. Hell, I might even send Joe Wilson over to Africa to check it out. But if it's not insignificant, it's pretty close. I think I know why the Brits are keeping it mum. They have their own domestic political reasons for sticking by their other evidence -- even if it's little more than a placeholder -- and the president's defenders know it. But partisans of the White House probably don't want to press too hard, lest everyone actually find out what that 'other evidence' really is.
--Josh Marshall
William Safire has now joined the camp of those who argue that anyone who questions the White House's use of trumped-up or flimsy intelligence is actually playing into the hands of Saddam and aiding his quest to return to power. Saddam, says Safire ...
presumes that British and American journalists, after the obligatory mention that the world is better off with Saddam gone, would — by their investigative and oppositionist nature — sustain the credibility firestorm. By insisting that Bush deliberately lied about his reasons for pre-emption, and gave no thought to the cost of occupation, critics would erode his poll support and encourage political opponents — eager to portray victory as defeat —to put forward a leave-Iraq-to-the-Iraqis candidate.
Let's translate this: What's the defense against charges of manipulation or deception? We don't have one. But don't mention it or you'll be helping Saddam return to power. Or perhaps you could put it another way: the mess we've made is too big for us to afford the luxury of asking why we made such a big mess.
I'll be honest with you. I struggled for some time trying to think up a way to discuss Safire's Monday morning column. But the whole thing was such a cynical mix of half-truths, untruths and twisted logic that it ended up besting me.
Here are a few examples ...
Saddamist guerrillas, aided by terrorist allies in Syria and Iran, would hold out the fearsome possibility of the return to power of Saddam or his sons. A series of murders of "collaborators" would continue to intimidate Iraqi scientists and officers who know about W.M.D. and links to Al Qaeda and its related Ansar al-Islam.
Here Safire slips in an assumption ("continue to intimidate") that virtually no one believes: that we haven't gotten WMD-related testimony because the scientists and officers fear retribution.
Or this ...
How best to deny Saddam's putative return from his Elba, and to put this summer of discontent behind us? Drop the premature conclusion that if we can't yet find proof of the destructive weapons, they never existed. That's like saying because we haven't found Osama or Saddam, those killers never existed.
Is it really like saying that? Am I missing something? Because this analogy sounds like one of the stupidest things I've ever heard in my life.
Let's be honest. Homefront disputes over war aims, justifications and policy are seldom helpful to the conduct of a war, at least in an immediate operational sense. But accountability and responsibility are so alien to these people that the responsibility for their manipulations, reckless enthusiasm and lack of planning rests not with them, but on the shoulders of those who now choose to call them on it.
--Josh Marshall
There's a bigger point that's easy to miss in this larger brouhaha over the Niger documents -- one which the attention to the Niger documents themselves may even help obscure.
A few days ago I mentioned an October 20th column by Jim Hoagland, one in which he celebrated the way the Bush administration had muscled the intelligence community (and particularly the CIA) into giving up its "long-standing and deeply flawed analysis of Iraq." The White House was triggering, he went on to say, a battle between "officials whose careers and reputations were built on the old analysis of the Iraqis as a feckless, inert and inward-looking bunch of thugs against those willing to take a fresh, untilted look at all the evidence."
The idea was clear. The CIA didn't understand Saddam, his motives, the extent of his WMD programs or the depth of its ties to al Qaida. (The CIA, Hoagland lamented, still couldn't bring itself to agree about Iraq's alleged deep ties with al Qaida.) The politicals did -- and they were going to make sure the folks at the Agency did too.
The results, Hoagland continued, had been promising. It was only because the administration had forced the CIA to get religion on Iraq that they had generated a National Intelligence Estimate that allowed the president to fill his speech with details of Iraq-al-Qaida connections and chemical and biological-spewing unmanned aerial vehicles. As Hoagland aptly put it on July 16th, the "political leadership of the administration declared war on the careerists at the CIA soon after Bush's election."
Now, sometimes bureaucracies really do need to be taken on, to be shaken up. But we have intelligence agencies for a reason: to gather and analyze intelligence. Going to war with your primary intelligence agency is a risky proposition, especially while you're fighting a war against international terrorist groups.
Until we got into Iraq we really couldn't say for certain what we'd find. Perhaps the politicals were right and the Agency's more cautious estimations of the Iraqi threat would be exposed as hopelessly naive.
But now we're there. And from what we've found so far, the Bush administration's revisionist view of Iraq seems far more deeply flawed than what Hoagland called the Agency's "long-standing and deeply flawed analysis of Iraq."
Now we're also seeing a lot of administration defenders carting out the standard lines that intelligence is an art, not a science, that it's a mosaic, and so forth.
That's all true of course. But it doesn't cut it to say, "This is just an intelligence failure. The White House just went with what they were being told." Why? Because you can't separate our failure to find a lot of what we thought we'd find in Iraq from the "war" the administration has been fighting with the intelligence community for the last two years. If the administration spent the previous two years "at war" with the CIA, pushing them harder and harder into a set of assumptions (and in many cases conclusions) that turned out to be wildly off-the-mark, shouldn't there be some political accountability for what turned out to be at best a very poor call?
Let's say a CEO took over a Fortune 500 company. Let's further say that his first act was to walk down to the advertising division and tell them they had no idea what they were doing and had to change the way they did business. He also told them he was going to bring in some outside consultants to comment on (read: second guess) their work. Now, the CEO and his new crew didn't have a huge amount of experience with ad work. But he talked a good game. So people thought he might have something up his sleeve. Then the new results come in at the end of the year and the company's revenues fell off the cliff.
Now, needless to say, the boss's cronies and sycophants would say that it was just an example of how bad the ad division was doing in the first place, or come up with some other such excuse. But how long do you think that CEO would hold on to his job?
--Josh Marshall
