With all the many problems and controversies swirling around the White House these days, we shouldn’t loose sight of the fact that the Bush administration still has a major problem on its hands regarding the non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Sunday, we learned that the Republicans and Democrats on House Intelligence Committee, who has been reviewing administration intelligence data for months, now believe that the information on Iraq’s WMD and alleged ties to al Queda was outdated, “circumstantial,” and “fragmentary.”
The Washington Post reported, “Top members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which spent four months combing through 19 volumes of classified material used by the Bush administration to make its case for the war on Iraq, found ‘significant deficiencies’ in the community’s ability to collect fresh intelligence on Iraq, and said it had to rely on ‘past assessments’ dating to when U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998 and on ‘some new ‘piecemeal’ intelligence,’ both of which ‘were not challenged as a routine matter.'”
“The absence of proof that chemical and biological weapons and their related development programs had been destroyed was considered proof that they continued to exist,” the committee leaders said in a letter to CIA Director George Tenet.
The findings have been endorsed by the committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), as well as the committee chairman, Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), who also happens to be a former CIA agent.
So to review, the main reason the United States had to launch a bloody and costly invasion of Iraq was the threat posed by the country’s WMD arsenal. For months, experts have been insisting that the administration hyped and exaggerated the threat and misused unreliable intelligence. Now the House Intelligence Committee has reached the same conclusion in a bi-partisan fashion.
Yet the administration insists the threat was real, the WMD were there, and the war was fully justified.
I don’t agree with George Will often, but even he wrote today that the administration is looking silly by failing to admit there were intelligence failures regarding Iraq before our invasion.
“Mature Americans understand that to govern is to choose, always on the basis of imperfect information,” Will wrote. “So why is it so difficult for the Bush administration to candidly acknowledge and discuss what Americans are not unnerved to learn — that much prewar intelligence about weapons of mass destruction was wrong?”
Will’s right about this, but he’s naïve about this White House. Bush can’t admit that the intelligence was wrong now. He has too much invested in the mistake.
Iraq, the White House said, was a terrorist threat. Saddam Hussein, they said, had WMD. Allies, NATO, the United Nations, they said, were largely irrelevant.
If Bush were to announce now, after hundreds of troops have died, alliances frayed, and hundreds of billions spent that this entire enterprise was based on faulty information, it would cripple his administration.
So instead, the president has to continue to argue what is transparently false, making himself look ridiculous in the eyes of the world, in a bizarre (and ironic) attempt to save face.