Nothing Could Be Farther From The Truth
By: Winston Smith

From the hot spin swirling down the White House steps like the first gusts of a Santa Ana wind, the Bush Administration would have you believe that Liberals, especially Democrat liberals, are either really stupid or virtual fools. Beginning with Steven Hadley’s comments on the 10th, then the President’s Veteran’s Day campaign-style stump speech- repeated almost verbatim on Monday as his plane stopped for gas in the frigid reaches of Alaska- and ending Sunday with Ken Mehlman’s starts and sputters attempt at factoid manipulation on Meet the Press, we on the Left should selectively forget everything else and simply accept as gospel that which the Administration would have you believe.
When Hadley was asked at his press briefing, “… what do you say to the Democrats who opposed the war, who said if we had not rushed into it, we would have had the benefit of better intelligence…,” he was ready. He had gone to his little fax machine that very morning and found Karl Rove Talking Point #1: Blow a little dust in their eyes and maybe they won’t notice what you aren’t going to say. “Those people who have looked at that issue,” of manipulated intelligence, “some committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission have concluded it did not happen.” He wanted so hard to convince everyone that the dust had settled. “So what we are left with is a body of intelligence that was developed over a long period of time, was looked at by the prior administration. They reached the conclusions that they reached.”
We Liberals, of course, are supposed to forget in our chronic lapses of long term memory, that the Silberman-Robb Commission was specifically prohibited from addressing manipulation of intelligence. Its mission was to determine the veracity of the intelligence used- and its results were damning. The same for the committees on the hill- the Intelligence Committees of the House and Senate. Like the Silberman-Robb studies, the Senate Committee Phase One Report said there were problems with the intelligence. Thanks to the temper tantrum Sen. Harry Reid threw on the floor of the Senate a few weeks ago, Phase Two will begin to address the manipulation. So, I guess the dust hadn’t really settled, huh?
“Congress,” he continued, “in 1998, authorized, in fact, the use of force based on that intelligence. And as you know, the Clinton administration took some action.” Rove Talking Point #2: If all else doesn’t make sense, blame it on Clinton. So think for a moment, as Frank Rich did last week, what the intelligence given to Clinton actually said. WMD’s? Hadley is right: everyone in the world in the year 2002 thought with a high degree of certainty that he still had them- everything but nukes. Hans Blix stated as much his January 2002 Policywatch article when he contrasted chemical and biological weapons that “… are much harder to trace,” to nuclear weapons which, “… are the simplest to find, as they leave ‘fingerprints’ in the form of distinct chemical trails.” Additionally, the facilities needed to harvest U-235 from the U-238 “yellowcake” ore are massive, impossible to hide. Mohammed El Baradei also concluded, "after three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq.”
Thus, while Iraq might well have had anthrax, poison gas, plague, and any number of other weapons, if it had nukes, they would have been found. That’s what Clinton was told and, based upon such knowledge, he decided any non-nuclear WMD’s were not a direct threat to the United States. For the record and not to be overlooked, the action taken by the Clinton Administration did not include invading Iraq; he merely kept it contained within its sorrowful borders
As the monologue continues, Hadley notes that, “…we all looked at the same intelligence, and most people, on the intelligence, reached the same conclusion…,” which implies two separate issues. One, that international consensus on Saddam’s WMD arsenal included nukes, and two, that everyone had the same intelligence. The fact is that, while the international community might have initially thought Iraq possessed nuclear weapons, the unity of that opinion was gone once the weapons inspectors returned to Al-Q'aq'a and other nuclear facilities and, by 2002, discovered no active nuclear program and a paucity of evidence one could ever be reconstituted.
“And I would also remind people,” he concluded, “that when we talked about the rationale for going to war, it was more than just weapons of mass destruction.”
“It was,” as the next correspondent noted, “the weapons of mass destruction that was used to justify the urgency, and that, of course, is what,” his question dealt with.
What Hadley failed to mention, what he hoped the dust in your eyes would make you forget, was that Congress did not get to see the intelligence. On October 5, 2001, Bush wrote a memorandum to The Secretaries Of State, Treasury, Defense, the Attorney General, and the Directors of Central Intelligence and FBI, stating that intelligence was only to be provided to Congressional leaders of both parties and houses, and the Intelligence Committee chairs and ranking members of both houses. The White House has not confirmed whether this memorandum has been rescinded, nor is Senator Feinstein’s office aware of its rescission as of this writing.

As an aside, it seems sickeningly ironic that 537 members of Congress, all elected, essentially had their security clearances cancelled based upon suspicions of security breaches, while a pair of unelected political hacks undoubtedly complicit in a much more serious security breach are retained in the White House until they are indicted.

The point is not the hypocrisy of Libby and Rove’s employer, but a restatement of the obvious: Congress, by means of executive fiat, was not allowed to see the same intelligence. All intelligence was spoon fed to eight people; the rest received non-classified briefings. Judith Miller and Matt Cooper got more classified information that Congress

So it is Hadley who first voices the White House’s response: that the Democrats had the same information as the rest of the world. But the rest of the world didn’t declare war on Iraq. We did. The fact that we did begs the question: if the intelligence was the same, why didn’t the rest of the world join us? If it was compelling enough for Congress, why wasn’t it compelling enough for Russia, France, Germany, and Bhutan? We’ll get back to that later- I digress.

How ironic that Dick Cheney, the man who “had better things to do” when it came his time to serve, should stand in the President’s stead at the Tomb of the Unknown. The fact that the President, AWOL at a domestic service honoring those who paid the price for his presidency with their lives, chose to engage in politics on Veterans Day should come as no surprise. Just as it was in 1972, politics is always a higher priority for him than service to his country. How duplicitous, then, that the White House web page should title the transcript of his Tobyhanna Army Depot political diatribe against those who dissent from his twisted logic “President Commemorates Veterans Day, Discusses War on Terror,” for in trying to do both, he did neither.

Much of the rhetoric in this speech is the same as every other speech he has made this year: Islamic Radicals are like communists and freedom on the march throughout the Middle East. Using Orwellian Doublespeak he claims- against overwhelming evidence- that, “…our presence in that country” has not “somehow caused or triggered the rage of the radicals,” or that extremism has not been strengthened by our presence in Iraq. Like Hadley throwing dust in our eyes, the President obscures the obvious in what he says: “The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was and issue,” and what he doesn’t say: that terrorism within, and radiating from, Iraq was not an international issue before our enforced presence there. And, once again, he attempts to connect with gossamer logic September 11th and Iraq by noting “we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001” while forgetting that Saddam wasn’t metaphorically in New York that day, either. But again, this is old stuff- been there, heard that.

What is new to Tobyhanna is the literal and figurative rewriting of history by the President combined with the Orwellian/Rovian, attachment of this trait to his opposition. Ultimately however, I suppose, I would have to agree with Bush: it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how this war began, and we all know from Katrina how deeply he feels about accepting responsibility. For example, “Congress,” he says, approved his decision to remove Saddam “with strong bipartisan support,” which is not what history has written so far as I am aware. Look at the resolution passed by Congress. Congress approved a resolution to negotiate through the United Nations for the inspections to resume. Congress approved that the President would return to the United Nations before engaging in war. Congress approved a resolution that declared war would be a last resort. What Congress approved was the elimination of WMD’s, including nukes, from Iraq; that it might be done without displacing Saddam was of no concern to Congress. The decision to remove Saddam from power was not Congresses, it was the President’s.

Using Hadley’s cues from the previous day, the dust storm blowing through Pennsylvania continued. Quoting a snippet from the Democratic nominee he defeated last year as some sort of justification, he forgot the context of the rest of Kerry’s caveat to joining the President’s call for war, in which Kerry declared, “I will support a multilateral effort to disarm him by force, if we ever exhaust those other options, as the President has promised, but I will not support a unilateral U.S. war against Iraq unless that threat is imminent and the multilateral effort has not proven possible.” Disarm him, not displace him. Multilateral, meaning something involving a unified United Nations action. Exhaust other options before the use of force. Imminent threat. Perhaps most damning: as the President has promised.

Anthrax and nerve gas stored in a bunker on the outskirts of Baghdad are not imminent, at least not to the United States. Israel, maybe, but Israel is certainly capable of defending itself against the tattered remains of the vanquished Iraqi army. Mushroom clouds? That’s imminent, but the ability of Saddam to acquire such weapons was not.

Which brings me back to the question: why didn’t the rest of the world join us in removing Saddam from power? If the intelligence was so overwhelming, so frightening, that Cheney, Rice, and Bush felt emboldened to use images of mushroom clouds in their description of the threat, why was the Coalition joining us so, well, mediocre? There was the United States, Britain, and a ragtag assembly of a few dozen other nations. A few like Spain, Poland, and Ukraine offered boots on the ground, but most didn’t. There was no Germany, no France, no Russia. There was Costa Rica and the Seychelles.

The answer lies in a little gem lost in the chaff, to mix a metaphor. The DSM’s - The Downing Street Minutes. They are a Rosetta Stone for this political charade, the reference to which we on the Left turn when the answers from the Right are, as they have been, an admixture of vapid, overheated, rhetorical ills wind obfuscating the obvious.

So, when Ken Mehlman categorically declares that “… the majority of the Democrats in the Senate, 80 Democrats in the House, looked at the exact same evidence the president looked at…,” we know he’s lying through his teeth. We know this because the DSM’s tell us in the official language of the British Government that the policy leading up to war had already been created, and for which evidence would be assembled to justify that policy. When he tells America that it was bad intelligence, the DSM’s contradict him by making it clear that the intelligence was great. It’s how the WHIG- White House Iraq Group- used the intelligence that was bad. Proof of forged documents was dismissed or discarded; information discarded by other intelligence agencies in France or Germany was embraced. Testimony deemed completely unreliable was incorporated into the framework of deception and presented to Congress like a glass of wine from Lucrecia Borgia.

To paraphrase the misphrasing of our President: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. We on the Left have a more appropriate prologue to the future: we won’t get fooled again.

Very nice, Winston.

I've made some substantial revisions...