Did President Bush Mislead the Country ... Does It Matter?
Clarke's line of reasoning raises the question of the arguments underlying the president's decision to go to war to depose Saddam Hussein. According to Bush's former Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neil, the president was intent on confronting Iraq from the beginning of his administration. And according to Clarke, who was in charge of counterterrorism for the National Security Council in the Bush (and before that the Clinton) administration, immediately after the 9-11 attacks President Bush charged him with finding "any shred" of evidence of possible Iraq's involvement, even though Clarke had assured him that the FBI and CIA had not found any evidence of it. Given these revelations, it might be useful to review the arguments made by President Bush and his administration for going to war with Iraq.
Possible justifications for war with Iraq ranged from the idealistic goal of bringing democracy to Iraqis, to the humanitarian desire to rid them of a tyrant, to geostrategic concerns about the future of the Middle East. That Saddam was a vicious tyrant who tortured his political enemies, gassed his own people, and invaded other countries was known long before the Bush administration decided to go to war to depose him. But the most compelling arguments to the American people were the arguments that Saddam was implicated in the terrorism of 9-11 and that the national security of the United States was at risk from his weapons of mass destruction.
Two days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a Time/CNN poll found that 78 percent of respondents thought that Saddam Hussein was involved with the attacks on the twin trade towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington. In a major address to the nation on October 7 the president closely connected the need to attack Iraq with the 9-11 attacks: "Some citizens wonder, 'after eleven years of living with this [Saddam Hussein] problem, why do we need to confront it now?' And there's a reason. We have experienced the horror of September the 11th." Thus, according to the president, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were a major reason for attacking Iraq.
The problem was that evidence for a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda was never very solid. Investigations by the FBI and CIA concluded that there was no convincing evidence of such a connection. Despite the lack of solid evidence, president Bush continued to connect the war in Iraq with al Qaeda and 9-11. In his victory speech on May 1, 2003 on an aircraft carrier off the coast of California he continued his implied association of 9-11 with Iraq.
But on September 18, 2003 President Bush conceded: "No, we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th." The careful phrasing of administration statements implying a link between Saddam and 9-11 suggests that they knew there was no compelling evidence. If there were, they would have made an outright claim for the link, and the argument for war would have been much easier to make.
In 2002 president Bush and his administration made a number of claims about Saddam Hussein's potential nuclear capacity, allegations that culminated in a statement in the president's State of the Union speech on January 29, 2003. The claim that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program and was potentially "less than a year" away from possessing nuclear weapons was a powerful argument that deposing Saddam Hussein was important for U.S. national security. Even those who thought that Saddam could be deterred from using chemical and biological weapons (as he had been in 1991) might be persuaded that an attack was necessary if they were convinced that Saddam was closing in on a nuclear weapons capability. Thus the claim of Saddam's nuclear capacity was one of the strongest arguments that President Bush could make for war with Iraq.
In his speech in Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, President Bush said: "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. . . . .he could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. . . .Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." Then in his State of the Union Address on January 28, 2003, President Bush said the sixteen words that would become the center of controversy: "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
The problem with this series of statements was that the evidence upon which the president's claims was based turned out to be questionable. Two claims of evidence for Saddam's nuclear capacity that the administration relied upon were of dubious authenticity: the claim that Iraq sought uranium oxide, "yellowcake," from Niger and that aluminum tubes shipped to Iraq were intended to be used as centrifuges to create the fissile material necessary for a nuclear bomb.
The CIA was doubtful about the Niger claim because after the reports arose, the vice president's office requested that the CIA investigate the claim. The CIA sent former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate and concluded from his report that the initial claims about Niger had no evidentiary basis. Later, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director, General Mohamed ElBaradei disclosed that the documents relied upon were forgeries.
In addition to the Niger yellowcake claim, the administration also adduced as evidence for Iraq's reconstituting its nuclear program reports of large numbers of aluminum tubes purchased by Iraq. The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, however, dissented from the intelligence assessment, saying: "INR accepts the judgment of technical experts at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) who have concluded that the tubes Iraq seeks to acquire are poorly suited for use in gas centrifuges to be used for uranium enrichment. . . ." The physical characteristics of the tubes matched closely the dimensions of aluminum tubes used in Medusa Rockets, but did not match the dimensions commonly used for centrifuge rotors. There is no doubt that Iraq sought nuclear weapons in the 1970s and 1980s. After the 1991 Gulf War, however, U.N. inspectors destroyed Iraq's physical capacity to construct nuclear bombs.
That Iraq had chemical and biological weapons in the 1980s is certain, in part because some of the materials came from the United States and because Saddam used chemical weapons against Iran and against the Kurds in northern Iraq. Thus it was surprising that little evidence of these programs was found by U.S. troops in the aftermath of the war, especially since the United States devoted considerable manpower and expertise to the effort to discover them.
The administration's inference that Saddam Hussein was continuing his previous weapons programs was not an unreasonable conclusion, one that was shared by intelligence agencies in other countries. The problem was that there was little evidence to support their conclusion, and they used claims of dubious validity to make their case to the American people. What can we conclude from this record about President Bush's arguments for war with Iraq?
1) His series of statements connecting Saddam to the atrocities of 9-11 created a false impression that the administration had evidence of a connection between Saddam and the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
2) His pattern of statements about Saddam Hussein's nuclear capacity were also systematically misleading.
3) His claims about Iraq's chemical and biological capacity were shared by many, including allied intelligence agencies, U.N. inspectors, and the Clinton administration. Bush cannot be fairly blamed for using such widely accepted claims, even though little evidence of such weapons were found in Iraq after the war.
Should the president be held responsible for what he said during the course of his argument that war with Iraq was necessary? It is true that much of what the president said about nuclear weapons was supported by the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002. But it is also true that there were serious caveats in the NIE that called into question the certainty of the conclusions the president expressed. Although it is too soon to come to firm historical judgments, the publicly available evidence so far seems to support the conclusion that President Bush, despite the lack of compelling evidence, did encourage the general public belief that Saddam was connected to the attacks of 9/11 and that Saddam was close to having a nuclear capacity. Whether his misleading statements were due to poor staff work or to the president's ignoring conflicting evidence is uncertain.
The issue here not whether the war with Iraq was wise; whether it was a wise war will become clear only with the passage of years. At issue here is a matter of democratic leadership. Citizens must trust the president because they do not have all of the information that he has. If the president misrepresents the nature of crucial information, he undermines the democratic bonds between citizens and president upon which this polity is based. Insofar as President Bush misled the congress and the citizenry, either from deliberate misstatements or through creating an atmosphere in which he was not well informed by his advisors, he undermined the crucial trust upon which the nation depends.