Iraq: One Year Later

One year ago today, after months of saber-rattling and drum-beating, the United States invaded Iraq in what was called a "preventive war." (While other countries were involved, the vast majority of troops, not to mention the driving forces behind the invasion, were American. For all intents and purposes, this was and is an American war.)

We were told that Iraq posed an imminent threat to American security. We were told that Saddam Hussein possessed vast arsenals of chemical and biological weapons, and was working on building nuclear weapons. We were told that Iraq could pass such weapons to terrorists. We were told that Saddam was in league with al Qaeda. We were told that we could not wait for another 9/11, and indeed it was implied through endless repetition that Iraq was involved in 9/11.

And none of it was true.

No weapons of mass destruction have been found anywhere in the country. Supposed WMD finds have all been deflated as false alarms. No Baghdad-al Qaeda connection has been discovered. Iraq was in no way connected with 9/11.

(Speaking of 9/11, it now seems that invading Iraq was never a reaction to the terrorist attacks, as the Administration has always publicly claimed. In Ron Suskind's recent book, The Price of Loyalty, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill revealed that at his first National Security Council meeting less than two weeks after taking office in January 2001, Bush ordered his staff to "go find me a way" to attack Iraq.)

Revelations as to how the White House manipulated and distorted pre-war intelligence reports pour out almost daily. CIA analysts say the Administration pressured them to deliver the "right" intelligence, that is, intelligence supporting an invasion. When they could not do so, the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon analysis group reporting solely to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, went over the raw intelligence data, picked out only the most damaging tidbits regardless of their actual relevance or even reality, and discarded the rest. (The New Yorker last year published a penetrating article about the OSP.)

The National Intelligence Estimate, which was released in October 2002 and played such a major role in convincing Congress to give President Bush blank-check authorization for war, actually had two versions. The unclassified version, the one released to Congress and the public, clearly and frighteningly said Iraq had WMD, and lots of it. But a classified version was far more equivocal in its assessments, saying Iraq might have WMD but it could not be proved. This version was solely for senior Administration figures, although parts of it were declassified and released only after the invasion.

The White House has shown no enthusiasm for any real inquiry as to how, in the words of former chief U.S. weapons-hunter David Kay, "we were almost all wrong." (Kay, who quit in January after reporting that no WMD were found and concluding that there were none to find, has since gone on record urging Bush to "come clean" about the pre-war rationales and that his refusal to do so is "going to hurt American credibility.") It was only after severe pressure that the Administration agreed to create a commission to examine the pre-war intelligence, but deliberately excluded from its mandate any examination of how that intelligence was used by the White House. This is not terribly surprising, given where the intelligence came from.

The primary (and in many cases, only) source of recent pre-war intelligence from inside Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, has been shown to be less than reliable. Even before the war, CIA and State Department analysts were deeply suspicious of the INC, warning the White House that they were a bunch of craven opportunists who cared only about seizing power for themselves, and that nothing they said could be trusted. But the INC had what CIA and State lacked: a willing audience in the White House and the Pentagon, and they told the Administration exactly what they wanted to hear.

Long after virtually every piece of intelligence passed by the INC to the Administration has proven to be wildly exaggerated or outright false, you and I, through our tax dollars, are giving the INC $3-4 million a year in under-the-table payments. And surprise, surprise: Newsday reported on February 15 that "U.S. authorities in Iraq have awarded more than $400 million in contracts to a start-up company that has extensive family and, according to court documents, business ties with Ahmed Chalabi, the Pentagon favorite on the Iraqi Governing Council."

Chalabi makes no attempt to dispel the perception that his INC deliberately lied to get what they wanted. In fact, he bragged in a recent interview with the London Daily Telegraph, "As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important."

Um...yes, it is. Hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis were killed in the war and its aftermath. Such a loss of life demands an honest public accounting of how we got here, no matter where it may lead.