16 words
Bush's defenders have long since admitted that the 16 words in the 2003 State of the Union were mistaken--not supported by reliable evidence. "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The Bush people admitted that the words shouldn't have been uttered, and they persuaded George Tenet to take the fall for their inclusion, on behalf of the CIA.
Now, having made someone take the blame for the words being incorrect, they are apparently going to try to take the credit for the words being correct. Now that is a neat trick.
The Butler report in Britain apparently sticks to the story that there was some sort of inquiry by people working for Saddam about acquiring uranium in Africa. The Brits refuse to reveal the documents supporting this claim, however. After what we have seen, it is difficult to believe this is anything more than another bit of Chalabi's crap, but who knows?
Josh Marshall has taken a lot of ridicule because he went out on a limb and suggested that whereas Bush generally cannot be trusted, Joe Wilson generally can. It is now pretty clear that Wilson has tended to make categorical statements that his wife was not involved in his selection for the job of going to Africa, whereas in fact she did what she could to get him that job.
The murkier part of the Wilson story is whether his actual report, when he first got back from Africa, supported the "Iraq might be acquiring uranium" view or not. Some months after the SOTU, and more than a year after his trip, he indignantly claimed that Bush completely mistated his--Wilson's--report. The truth seems to be that there was controversy even as to how to interpret Wilson's report. The State Department tended to discount any recent attempt by Saddam to acquire uranium. The CIA was skeptical--but that was partly because they thought he had plenty of uranium. No one to speak of seems to have realized just how few weapons Saddam had. This might mean he was unlikely to try to acquire uranium, since there was actually nothing he could do with it with all of his nuclear weapons facilities dismantled; but again, who knows?
I think Marshall does a good job here on some of the main points of the story. The Senate Committee, while basically postponing the question whether the administration twisted evidence in order to go to war, says the CIA report warning about Iraq--and even including some warnings about Saddam seeking uranium in Africa--was reasonable "at the time it was written"--September 2002. The documents that were generally used to support the Africa stories, including those that had been circulated through Italy, were later proved to be forgeries, although not necessarily in time for the SOTU. The CIA was inclined to doubt the Africa story--including its British version--at the time of the SOTU, and the Bush people were advised of this fact. It wasn't until spring and summer of 2003, however, that definitive statements by intelligence agencies were made to the effect that documents indicating Saddam attempted to acquire uranium in Africa were forgeries, and there was no reliable evidence that such an attempt was made.
Bush went beyond, or contrary to, the prevailing view of American intelligence experts in the SOTU. That prevailing view turned even more strongly against the belief that Saddam had tried to get uranium in Africa in following months.
Here's David Corn in the Nation: "After coming back from Niger, Wilson's view--which he did not express publicly for nearly a year and a half--was different from that held by CIA analysts. Yet his conclusion--that the Niger allegation was probably bunk--was in line with the thinking of the State Department's lead analyst on this matter. And Wilson's reasoning came to prevail and to be shared by the intelligence community."
UPDATE: Fred Kaplan draws a nice analogy in Slate. If Eisenhower had made speeches in the late 50s and early 60s to the effect that there was a missile gap--and the Soviet Union was in the lead--he could truthfully have said there was some support for this proposition from official CIA reports. Unfortunately, the CIA had grossly over-estimated the alleged stockpile of Soviet missiles at one point, and even though reliable evidence such as aerial photos pointed to the presence of very few missiles, the CIA was very slow to ratchet their estimate downward. No doubt they were trying to save face, or avoid admitting that at least one high-profile document (the 1957 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)--the same kind of document Bush relied on in the fall of 2002) had been completely wrong--had over-estimated an enemy's strength by many times.
Fortunately, Eisenhower was always skeptical of the high estimates, and he took the newer and more solid evidence very seriously. (One detail on which an analogy to 2003 might break down is that Eisenhower had Krushchev's word that there were very few missiles; Eisenhower gave some weight to this claim--again, especially when the photos seemed to confirm it.)
At the bureaucratic level, the dispute continued to 1960--the year JFK was elected, partly on the issue of "the missile gap." The Air Force, which considered missiles its highest-profile program, was sticking with very high estimates of Soviet missiles; the Army and Navy, partly for obvious competitive reasons, expressed open skepticism for the first time; and the CIA was willing to go as low as 50 Soviet missiles, as opposed to 1000 within a year or two.
How many Soviet missiles were there in 1960? Four (4).
To some extent Eisenhower had to stand up to a lot of bureaucrats who, for various reasons, some of them good, kept saying "1000 Soviet missiles! Missile gap!" He could easily have made speeches repeating this nonsense for demagogic purposes of his own--and when the estimates were revised sharply downward, he could have made the head of the CIA eat shit. Eisenhower was simply too wise, and too good a leader to do any of this.
The contrast to Bush's behaviour is striking. Bush and his people consistently wanted to pick and choose the most scary possibilities in reams of intelligence reports, and use these fragments even when they were specifically warned that they had little credibility. They would edit a statement that had once been true so that even intelligent readers would believe the truth to be much more frightening that it was. All of this made them and their journalistic defenders suckers for Chalabi--but even beyond that, they may simply have made up their minds to invade Iraq, no matter what, years ago.
The timing of the 2002 NIE was dictated by the White House--and it was a rush job. There are lots of indications that the White House had made up its mind, and the NIE was simply going to be mined for supporting material. The NIE often does not point to one clear course of action--it is meant to contribute to an intelligent debate. The ensuing debate is obviously more intelligent in some cases than in others.
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