The emphasis on the Senate Intelligence report over the weekend dealt with the “flawed” intelligence Bush relied on regarding Iraq and the CIA’s responsibility for the debacle. Yet we also are reminded — again — that everything the president said when outlining his casus belli turned out to be false. It creates an awkward conundrum for the White House in dealing with the new report, to say the least.
The White House apparently “took comfort” in the report because it pointed fingers at the CIA and away from the president. Likewise, Dems (including me) initially cried foul because the Senate report sidestepped, for the time being, the role the administration played in ignoring inconvenient intelligence and pressuring the intelligence community to get the information it wanted.
But putting aside for a moment all the pertinent information that should be in the report but isn’t, let’s consider that this document is the latest of many sources to tell us that a) Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction; b) Iraq had “no established formal relationship” with al Queda; and c) Iraq’s military was basically a joke and hardly a threat to anyone, least of all us.
The Senate’s report on prewar intelligence about Iraq, which asserts that warnings about its illicit weapons were largely unfounded and that its ties to Al Qaeda were tenuous, also undermines another justification for the war: that Saddam Hussein’s military posed a threat to regional stability and American interests.
Newsweek summed this up nicely.
Taken together, the facts in the report show that virtually every major claim President George W. Bush used to justify the invasion of Iraq — from Saddam’s growing nuclear program to his close ties with Al Qaeda — was either wrong or exaggerated.
Bush aides, ever the optimists, were ready to spin this in Bush’s favor.
Seizing on that conclusion, White House aides tried to make the best of the damaging report, saying it proved that the president had been given bad information.
The fascinating thing about this spin is just how hollow and self-defeating it is.
To be sure, John Kerry relied on a vaguely similar spin last year. When anti-war Dem primary voters expressed disappointment with Kerry’s 2002 vote on the war resolution, the candidate said he relied on available intelligence. Kerry’s critics, like Christopher Hitchens, howled.
So, the junior senator from Massachusetts has finally come up with a winning line. “Vote for me,” says John Kerry. “I’m easily fooled.” This appears to be the implication of his claim to have been “misled” by the Bush administration in the matter of WMD.
And yet, Bush’s tack is now identical. Everything the president said to the nation and the world turned out to be false, but the president should be forgiven, the argument goes, because he was duped by less-than-reliable intelligence, which he was all-too-eager to believe. Bush was, in Hitchens’ language, “easily fooled” and launched an unneccessary war under false pretenses.
This would ultimately be an unpersuasive argument, but keep in mind, the White House isn’t even offering this weak response. In fact, it seems the White House is paralyzed in trying to come up with any kind of coherent reaction at all.
Bush can’t fully embrace the report, because it says he was wrong about everything. If the president endorses the Senate panel’s findings, he necessarily admits he made a dreadful mistake of historic proportions. Then again, he can’t reject the report, either. It’s the closest thing to a life preserver his Senate allies could throw him — an opportunity to place the blame away from the White House.
The president, more than ever before, is between Iraq and a hard place. (Sorry; had to.)
He can accept the life preserver and admit he was wrong, or reject it and deny reality. At this point, Bush can’t seem to decide.
“I appreciate the Senate’s work. And I’ll tell you why. Because one of the key ingredients to winning the war on terror is to make sure that our intelligence agencies provide the best and possible intelligence to the chief executive — to the executive branch, as well as to the legislative branch. And so the idea that the Senate has taken a hard look to find out where the intelligence-gathering services went short is good and positive. And I commend the chairman of the committee for doing that.”
What does this tell us? Nothing. That’s the point.
So here’s the question(s) I’d love some enterprising young White House press corps member to ask Scott McClellan: The president commends the Senate panel for its work, but does he agree with its conclusions? And if so, is he now prepared to admit what is painfully obvious, that he was wrong about every detail regarding the Iraqi “threat”?