To follow up on yesterday’s NYT item on a one-page summary of prewar intelligence in Iraq prepared for Bush — which the White House is refusing to share with the Senate Intelligence Committee — Slate’s Fred Kaplan had a great take on why the document is so important.
To be sure, the document would, at a minimum, shed some light on what exactly Bush thought about the alleged Iraqi threat. The White House has already admitted that the president did not actually read the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate before launching the invasion. As a result, this single-page summary was the primary rationale, encapsulating the intelligence that led Bush to feel the war was necessary.
Kaplan raised two good questions in response to the NYT article.
The first question: The “President’s Summary” was one page? This CIA estimate was a 93-page document, filled with caveats, qualifiers, and footnotes of interagency dissent on several key points. It would take a dedicated master of pith to whittle the NIE’s findings and equivocations to a single page. (By the Times’ account, the summarizer didn’t bother with the equivocations.)
Maybe the font was really small. Maybe Bush gets restless and easily distracted if asked to review a document longer than a few paragraphs. In either case, it’s worth knowing what exactly that one page told him.
Which leads to the second question: Who wrote this summary? And what position had he or she taken on the estimate’s controversies?
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What did the president know about Iraqi WMD — or, more to the point, what did he think (or what was he led to think) his intelligence agencies knew?
We won’t know unless the White House agrees to cooperate with requests for the document, but as Kaplan explained, it could answer a whole lot of questions.
If all George W. Bush knew about the Iraqi threat was gleaned from a one-page summary that stated the case for WMD — and that did not even acknowledge the existence of a case for skepticism — that’s important to know. It’s important for citizens who want some insight on why we went to war. And it’s important for the president, who may decide to read a longer document the next time there’s trouble.
And it’s important for a president who is predisposed to secrecy to hide facts that could be embarrassing in an election year.
Would Bush have acted any differently if he’d known that the State Department’s intelligence branch thought Iraq had imported aluminum tubes for purposes other than building centrifuges? Or that Air Force Intelligence thought Iraq’s drones were unsuitable for spraying chemical or biological weapons? Or that several agencies were far less sure than others that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program? Maybe not. But a president at least should be told of such things. And citizens should know whether he was told—or wanted to be told — of such things.
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“Everybody” assumed Iraq possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons; some also believed Saddam Hussein was trying to rebuild his nuclear program. The CIA, which shared this assumption, kept coming up short on supporting evidence and even found some evidence to dispute it. Footnotes of dissent and ambiguity crept into the NIE. But this time, the president did not side with the dissenters. The question is: Did he know there were dissenters? And: Did he care?