After the French Revolution, it was said that of the old aristocracy that they had forgotten nothing and learned nothing. After the disastrous second Iraqi war, it may be said of the Wall Street Journal that it had learned nothing and forgotten everything. The latest entropy effusion from the WSJ Memory Hole is Judith Miller’s “The Iraq War and Stubborn Myths,” which features a large color photo of Dame Judith, looking resolute and unafraid, circa 2005.
Well, unless you’re Justin Bieber, and I’m not, you’d like to be 10 years younger too. Sportingly, Judith does have a confession to make, of sorts:
There was no shortage of mistakes about Iraq, and I made my share of them. The newsworthy claims of some of my prewar WMD stories were wrong. But so is the enduring, pernicious accusation that the Bush administration fabricated WMD intelligence to take the country to war. Before the 2003 invasion, President Bush and other senior officials cited the intelligence community’s incorrect conclusions about Saddam’s WMD capabilities and, on occasion, went beyond them. But relying on the mistakes of others and errors of judgment are not the same as lying.”
No senior official spoon-fed me a line about WMD. That would have been so much easier than uncovering classified information that officials can be jailed for disclosing. My sources were the same counterterrorism, arms-control and Middle East analysts on whom I had relied for my stories about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda’s growing threat to America—a series published eight months before 9/11 for which the Times staff, including me, won a Pulitzer.
In 1996, those same sources helped me to write a book about the dangers of militant Islam long before suicide bombers made the topic fashionable. Their expertise informed articles and another book I co-wrote in 2003 with Times colleagues about the danger of biological terrorism, published right before the deadly anthrax letter attacks.
OK, let’s start picking and unpacking. First of all, Judy’s book on biological terrorism came out in 2001, not 2003, as it would have had to have done to precede the anthrax attacks of September 2001. (Apparently, even the WSJ can’t afford proofreaders any more.) Perhaps more to the point, the anthrax used in the attacks (the “Ames strain”) came from U.S. labs rather than Saddam Hussein’s. Right disease, wrong country.
Before the 2003 invasion, President Bush and other senior officials cited the intelligence community’s incorrect conclusions about Saddam’s WMD capabilities and, on occasion, went beyond them. But relying on the mistakes of others and errors of judgment are not the same as lying.
That’s one way of looking at it. Kenneth Pollack, formerly with the National Security Council, not at all a fan of Saddam and author of several books on the Middle East, had a different take, as reported in Seymour Hersh’s Oct. 27, 2003 article for the New Yorker, “The Stovepipe”. Pollack told Hersh that the Bush Administration “dismantle[d] the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.”
“They always had information to back up their public claims, but it was often very bad information. They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn’t have the time or the energy to go after the bad information.”
Judith also tells us “No senior official spoon-fed me a line about WMD.” Uh-huh. On Sunday, Sept. 8, 2002, the New York Times published an article by Michael Gordon and Judith bearing the snappy headline “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts,” which began with the following:
More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.
The “worldwide hunt” consisted entirely of Iraqi attempts to buy those fabled aluminum tubes that, as it turned out, were not intended for use in the construction of centrifuges in the nonexistent Iraqi nuclear weapons program. A couple of paragraphs down we have the following:
“The jewel in the crown is nuclear,” a senior administration official said. “The closer he gets to a nuclear capability, the more credible is his threat to use chemical or biological weapons. Nuclear weapons are his hole card.”
“The question is not, why now?” the official added, referring to a potential military campaign to oust Mr. Hussein. “The question is why waiting is better. The closer Saddam Hussein gets to a nuclear weapon, the harder he will be to deal with.”
Hard-liners are alarmed that American intelligence underestimated the pace and scale of Iraq’s nuclear program before Baghdad’s defeat in the gulf war. Conscious of this lapse in the past, they argue that Washington dare not wait until analysts have found hard evidence that Mr. Hussein has acquired a nuclear weapon. The first sign of a “smoking gun,” they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.
Did Judy work out a deal with Mike that he would do all the talking with “senior administration officials”? And as for the hilarious “smoking gun”/mushroom cloud combo, was it just a coincidence that then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said, on a Sept. 8 Sunday morning talk show “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud?” Who was feeding whom?
That Sept. 8 article was truly a gift that kept on giving. After the “mushroom cloud” line, Gordon and Miller engage in a couple of “on the other hand” paragraphs, letting unnamed “administration critics” have their say before unloading the following paragraph:
Still, Mr. Hussein’s dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq’s push to improve and expand Baghdad’s chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war.
Note that Gordon and Miller state, on their own authority, that Hussein is showing “dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions,” a conclusion based entirely on hearsay evidence about aluminum tubes. They also state on their own authority that this “dogged insistence” has brought “Iraq and the United States to the brink of war.” They interlard these two unqualified statements with the odd assertion, based not on their own authority but that of unnamed “defectors”, that Hussein is also seeking to “improve and expand” his chemical and biological arsenals, even though their assertion that Hussein is pursuing “nuclear ambitions” at all, doggedly or not, rests entirely on what has been “described” to them in interviews as well. As for the claim that it was Hussein’s misbehavior that had “brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war,” that’s nonsense pure and simple. The Republican right wing had been demanding “regime change” in Iraq for years. After the dust of 9/11 had settled, it was clear that the Bush Administration was determined to invade Iraq as an end in itself. Iraq was at the brink of war because the U.S. had pushed it there.
According to Miller, it’s simply a mysterious coincidence that the “counterterrorism, arms-control and Middle East analysts” that she had relied on the past to win a Pulitzer all got it wrong. Political direction from above? No way! She cites with approval the “Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction,” a bipartisan group set up by (one guesses) a reluctant President Bush to investigate just why U.S. intelligence capabilities proved so incapable, which concluded that, yes, U.S. intelligence on Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction” had been completely wrong, but it was all the fault of the little people, not the big ones. Political pressure from above? No way!
I’ve already noted that Kenneth Pollack didn’t see it that way. In early 2004, Michael Massing wrote a long article for the New York Review of Books, “Now they tell us”, identifying more “little people” who insisted that the big guys were getting it wrong. Massing interviewed both Michael Gordon and Miller for the article and pursues in particular the case of the aluminum tubes. After the Sept. 8 article appeared, Massing says, David Albright, “physicist and former weapons inspector who directed the Institute for Science and International Security,” contacted Miller, with whom he had worked in the past, and told her that many scientists doubted that the nefarious tubes were in fact intended for use in a nuclear program. Gordon and Miller produced a follow-up article on Sept. 13, “White House Lists Iraq Steps To Build Banned Weapons” that provided Albright with little comfort:
Senior officials acknowledged yesterday that there have been debates among intelligence experts about Iraq’s intentions in trying to buy such tubes, but added that the dominant view in the administration was that the tubes were intended for use in gas centrifuges to enrich uranium.
George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, has been adamant that tubes recently intercepted en route to Iraq were intended for use in a nuclear program, officials said. They also said it was the intelligence agencies’ unanimous view that the type of tubes that Iraq has been seeking are used to make such centrifuges.
The Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency support the C.I.A. view, the officials said.
Although the C.I.A. position appears to be the dominant view, officials said some experts had questioned whether Iraq might not be seeking the tubes for other purposes, specifically, to build multiple-launch rocket systems.
Specifically, Washington officials said, some experts in the State Department and the Energy Department were said to have raised that question. But other, more senior, officials insisted last night that this was a minority view among intelligence experts and that the C.I.A. had wide support, particularly among the government’s top technical experts and nuclear scientists.
“'This is a footnote, not a split,” a senior administration official said.
It’s “interesting” that, despite Miller’s supposed affinity for the “little people,” it’s the big shots once more who get to do all the talking in this article. Also “interesting” is that CIA Director Tenet chose to let himself be identified in the New York Times as being “adamant” on the issue. No pressure, guys. The director’s just telling you how he feels.
I feel I’ve given Judith a pretty fair hearing, and I’d like to conclude by refuting a few myths myself:
Myth No. 1: That “weapons of mass destruction are weapons of mass destruction”. They aren’t. That is to say, chemical and biological weapons, though hideous and morally repulsive, are not in the same league as nuclear weapons. The many “worst case scenarios” circulated by Miller and others were in fact “no case scenarios.” Hussein used chemical weapons fairly freely, both against Iran and against his own people, where they proved no more terrible, and no less terrible, than conventional weapons. It is by nuclear weapons, and nuclear weapons alone, that enormous casualties can be generated by a single device. And the only country ever to use nuclear weapons is the United States.
Myth No. 2: That Saddam Hussein was a “direct and growing threat to the United States”. This was an ever bigger fraud than myth no. 1. Hussein had no ties to al Qaeda, and this was something the Bush Administration, principally Dick Cheney, did lie about, with some frequency. Through a variety of clearly and deliberately disingenuous statements—Bush’s assertion that Hussein was a “madman,” Rice’s “mushroom cloud”—the Bush Administration sought to convince the American people that Hussein would inevitably deliver massive terrorist attacks on the United States, using all the “weapons of mass destruction” at his disposal, unless he were removed from power. In fact, Hussein had not the slightest intention of attacking the U.S., either directly or indirectly. He had used chemical weapons, but only against his fellow Muslims, never against Americans or Israelis, either directly or indirectly. He refrained from using chemical weapons against the U.S. even when we attacked him in the first Gulf war. And he never used biological weapons, of any sort, against anyone.
Myth No. 3: That Saddam Hussein was a “madman,” Hussein was bad, of course, but hardly mad. For a long time the U.S. found it easy to do business with him. Miller of course fails to note that the U.S. assisted Hussein when he used chemical weapons against Iran, providing him with intelligence that allowed him to pinpoint the presence of Iranian troops. After Hussein used chemical weapons on Iraqi citizens, April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, assured Hussein that the U.S. desired a “deeper, broader” relationship with him and also told him that it was okay with the U.S. if he took a portion of Kuwait but not to take the whole thing. It was only after Hussein did take the whole thing that George H.W. Bush decided that Hussein was “the worst since Hitler” but also decided as a matter of deliberate policy to keep the worst since Hitler in power, standing aside after the war was over as Hussein slaughtered the dissidents whom the Bush Administration had encouraged to rise in revolt. Who’s got the clean hands here?
Afterwords
The report by the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction is here. Other past critiques of the WMD fraud include Bob Drogin and Maggie Farley, “Hard Claims but Only Soft Proof So Far in Iraq”; Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus, “Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence,”; Russ Baker, “‘Scoops’ and Truth at the Times”; and Jack Shafer, “The Scoops that Melted”. In addition, in 2005 the Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee produced a report on intelligence, and other, failures of the Bush Administration, available here, which is not so forgiving as the committee established by President Bush. It’s a little hard to navigate, but it rattles a few skeletons more aggressively than ace reporter Judith Miller was ever able to do.
