By now, the mere mention of Bush’s “16 words” brings to mind Niger-gate and Bush’s since-debunked claim that Saddam Hussein sought uranium for a nuclear weapons program from Africa.
What has generated far less attention was the paragraph those 16 words were part of, and the point Bush was trying to get across by explaining this threat.
Just for the sake of review, here’s the paragraph in question from the State of the Union in January: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production. Saddam Hussein has not credibly explained these activities. He clearly has much to hide.”
For my money, this was the most important point of Bush’s case against Iraq before the war. If Hussein had a reconstituted nuclear weapons program, then Iraq was a legitimate threat. A reasonable case can be made that a war to prevent Iraq from having nuclear weapons is justifiable.
Bush was laying his cards on the table, wanted to convince the world of Hussein’s nuclear capabilities, and to bolster his argument, offered two pieces of evidence — the uranium and the aluminum tubes.
We now know the uranium story was bogus. The administration had ample evidence to show that Iraq had not sought uranium from Africa, but the president made the claim anyway.
Which brings us to the other part of the argument — the aluminum tubes. We’ve known for a while that this claim was dubious, but I’m bringing it up again because Mother Jones ran a really good story about this in its current issue.
The truth is Hussein did try to buy some highly-refined aluminum tubes, but as Mother Jones explains, “they were not, as alleged by the Bush administration, to be used in a uranium-enriching centrifuge; rather they were intended to be used in the production of conventional rockets — at least according to the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency, the closest thing to an impartial authority in this case.”
Just as importantly, while the administration knew the Niger claim was false before it was inserted into the State of the Union, the administration also had received word about the suspect evidence on the aluminum tubes line.
“[T]wo weeks before the State of the Union, the IAEA said that the tubes ‘were not directly suitable’ for uranium enrichment. Months earlier, the Department of Energy had reached the same conclusion — as had intelligence experts at the State Department.”
So why did the President allege a nuclear use for the tubes? According to Greg Thielmann, who directed the office of Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Affairs in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research until September 2002, “This administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude. It’s top-down use of intelligence; ‘We know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those answers.'”
To be sure, as Colin Powell said in February, Iraq’s use of the aluminum tubes for conventional rockets was also prohibited under U.N. sanctions. But that’s not really the point. Bush led us to believe that we had reason to fear Iraq’s nuclear weapons program and used this “evidence” to scare the hell out of us. Now we see that this claim is just as bogus as the Niger story.
Iraqi nuclear scientist Mahdi Obeidi, who gave the U.S. a hand in June by showing us some nuclear plans buried under a rose bush 12 years ago, recently told the government the same thing — that the aluminum tubes were for rockets, not nuclear bombs.
This is no small matter. If Bush made two claims about Iraq’s nuclear threat and both were false, then the whole argument tumbles like a house of cards.
Arguing that nuclear weapons are just one of the Big 3 that constitute “weapons of mass destruction” — along with chemical and biological weapons — doesn’t cut it. There’s always been a hierarchy to these threats and nuclear has been on top by a large margin.
As Gregg Easterbrook explained last fall, “[T]heir lethal potential is emphatically not equivalent. Chemical weapons are dangerous, to be sure, but not “weapons of mass destruction” in any meaningful sense…. Similarly, biological weapons are widely viewed with dread, though in actual use they have rarely done great harm…. Then there are atomic and nuclear devices — utterly, unmistakably ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ Pound for pound, these are the most awful constructions of human enterprise, thousands or millions of times more dangerous than any chemical or biological arms. The phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ then, obscures more than it clarifies. It lumps together a category of truly terrible weapons (atomic bombs) with two other categories that are either less dangerous than conventional weapons (chemical arms) or largely an unknown quantity (biological agents).”
In other words, Bush tried to convince us that Hussein nearly had the one weapon that we couldn’t allow him to have. Bush’s proof, however, is now considered worthless. Just like his credibility.