Tangled Web Snares Bush

Tangled web snares Bush administration by Sarah Littman

published February 21st, 2006

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!” So wrote Scottish poet Sir Walter Scott in 1808. It looks like current Administration starting to get caught in a tangled web of its own making. President Bush must be reaching for his Grecian Formula these days, what with the flood of bad news and scandal engulfing the White House.

Former CIA national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, Paul R. Pillar, who until last year was responsible for coordinating US intelligence on the Middle East, wrote in Foreign Affairs that the Bush administration was guilty of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify the decision it had already made to go to war. Pillar’s assertion that the administration’s decision to go to war was pre-determined is credible in light of the recently exposed memo containing minutes of a January 31^st 2003 White House meeting between President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair at which the president made clear that he intended to invade Iraq whether or not there was a second UN resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of a banned Iraqi weapons program. "The diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning” the memo quotes the president telling Mr. Blair. He went on to that the US was so worried about the failure to find hard evidence against Saddam that it thought of "flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colors,” adding "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of UN resolutions]".

Pillar says that pre-war intelligence community assessments "anticipated that a foreign occupying force would itself be the target of resentment and attacks -- including guerrilla warfare -- unless it established security and put Iraq on the road to prosperity in the first few weeks or months after the fall of Saddam."

Prior to the invasion, the intelligencassessments that indicated a postwar Iraq "would not provide fertile ground for democracy" and would need "a Marshall Plan-type effort" to restore its economy, oil revenue notwithstanding. The assessments also warned of the possibility of conflict between the Sunni and Shiite communities.

“It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [White House] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.

Perhaps the most astonishing of Pillar’s revelations is that the first request he received from a Bush administration policymaker for an assessment of post-invasion Iraq wasn’t “until a year into the war.”

That the administration didn’t take heed of such assessments prior to the invasion is a travesty, when there have been 2,272 American soldiers killed and 16, 653 wounded since March 2003.

Perhaps the most damaging scandal of all as far as the Bush White House is concerned, bigger than Abramoffgate, Shootergate, and Katrinagate combined, is the testimony of former vice-presidential chief-of-staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby that Cheney and “other senior Bush administration officials” encouraged and authorized him to share classified information with journalists to build public support for going to war, and later to defend the administration’s abovementioned manipulation of pre-war intelligence in making the case for war.

What’s more senior officials at the State Department, the National Security Council and the CIA have revealed that Cheney and former deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley led the campaign to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson for his attack on the veracity of the famous “16 words” about Saddam Hussein buying yellowcake from Niger in the January 2003 State of the Union address and his vocal opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Cheney apparently was upset by Wilson’s comments about the real reasons for the Bush administration’s push for war with Iraq in a March 2^rd 2003 CNN interview: “The…objective, as I see it… is less and less disarmament, and it… has little to do with terrorism, because everybody knows that a war to invade and conquer and occupy Iraq is going to spawn a new generation of terrorists…Is it really America's military's responsibility to go in and occupy a country for 10 years, in the hopes that you're going to create a democracy, which probably will not be any more pro-American than what you've got in the region?”

If only the White House had listened to Joe Wilson instead of plotting to discredit him…

Sarah Littman, who lives in Greenwich, is author of "Confessions of a Closet Catholic," published by Dutton Children's Books and winner of the 2006 Sydney Taylor Book Award for Older Readers.