Arms Expert Says Bush, Not Experts Got It Wrong

The Democrats are holding hearings on why the case for war in Iraq went so wrong. The Republicans, of course, refuse to investigate. Joseph Cirincione is the Senior Vice President for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress. He's a well-known arms expert who has written several books on the subject. He has a guest post on Think Progress; here's an excerpt (the original post has several useful links):

The Senate Democratic Policy Committee hearing yesterday was the first time a congressional committee held a public hearing on the pre-Iraq War intelligence failure, and the first time any testimony had been taken on postwar intelligence failings. We still do not know for certain why officials were wrong in every one of their claims that Iraq posed such an immediate threat. But the available evidence strongly points towards a systematic campaign by senior officials to manipulate the intelligence....

(snip)

Here are three ways that administration officials systematically misled the American people about the nature of the Iraqi threat:

1. Administration officials repeatedly suggested that Hussein would transfer WMD to terrorist groups such as al Qaeda. There were no intelligence findings to support this claim.

2. Administration officials routinely dropped caveats and uncertainty present in intelligence assessments. E.g. Cheney said he knew with “absolute certainty” Iraq was developing its nuclear program. Powell said there was “no doubt” that Iraq had biological weapons.

3. Administration officials misrepresented the findings made by UN inspectors. Bush said prior to the war that U.N. inspectors concluded that Iraq had likely produced two to four times anthrax that had been found, but inspectors never said they actually had produced such materials.

The only quibble I have is that Cirincione ends the article talking about the intelligence 'failure' but of course as he says in his article we're talking about politicians manipulating the intelligence. I also have used the word 'failure' when talking about intelligence (and the Bush presidency in general) but we know by now that there was a considerable amount of outright fraud in the case for war. Since the decision for war in Iraq was made back in the spring of 2002 (or perhaps earlier), everything else the Bush Administration said in relation to Iraq was mostly window dressing; how much we still don't know because we still don't know why the Bush inner circle wanted war (recently, some have suggested multiple conflicting reasons and that seems consistent with the horrendous incompetence we've seen in the actual execution of the war; however, though our reconstruction efforts in Iraq appear to have been grossly incompetent, it is appears more and more that the real issue may be the huge amount of fraud and corruption involved in the awarding of contracts to administration cronies and friends).

I confess an itch in wanting to understand the Bush meltdown. I've never seen anything like it and I hope our country never sees anything like it again. In the meantime, Bush has more than two years left and the number of Americans who trust him is shrinking every day.