President Bush's apparently false argument for invading Iraq -- that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction -- continues to remain as indelible as a spaghetti sauce stain on the administration's relationship with the American people.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair's stout defense of the same position also continues to cost him dearly in internal United Kingdom political terms.
The latest round in the Bush administration's attempt to wriggle away from this issue occurred last week while Mr. Bush was traveling in Africa. Seeking to focus attention exclusively on the unsubstantiated claim in Mr. Bush's Jan. 28 State of the Union message that Iraq had been trying to buy the ingredients for nuclear weapons from the African nation of Niger, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice passed the hot potato to Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, who confessed to not having paid close enough personal attention as the presidential speech was being put together.
Mr. Tenet also indicated that the CIA had in fact knocked the unsubstantiated Iraq-Niger point out of an earlier presidential speech in October, thus acknowledging the weakness or falsity of the so-called intelligence in question. Mr. Bush then quickly came to the defense of Mr. Tenet, who had in an act of loyalty fallen on his sword, assuring the world that Mr. Tenet still had his confidence.
One problem with this approach in terms of credibility is that that makes three big mistakes for Mr. Tenet. The CIA and other U.S. national security agencies missed the preparatory activities leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks. The CIA also completely misread the type of reception that American forces would meet in the Iraqi population. Instead of welcoming U.S. forces as liberators, the Iraqis are now becoming even more violent in their resistance to the American presence.
The third mistake -- to the degree that it is Mr. Tenet's -- is in letting the president include a piece of bum intelligence in what is the most important speech that any American president makes in a year to the American people and Congress. Any one of these mistakes might well have brought about a change in leadership at the CIA. The fact that the third strike did not mean that Mr. Tenet was out might mean that he had put himself forward to take the fall for the rest of those who were involved in putting forward the now apparently false "WMD" argument.
In any case, to try to cause the American population to focus on the Iraq-Niger letter as "the issue" is the equivalent of a plea bargain. The defendant, in this case, the Bush administration, pleads guilty to having bought and marketed one piece of bad intelligence, whereas, in fact, what it did was to deliberately mislead the American population on a fundamental point -- the possession by Saddam Hussein's Iraq of weapons of mass destruction -- and then take the United States to war on the basis of that piece of deception.
That issue remains to be dealt with. We still don't know who in the Bush administration wanted to take America to war with Iraq, regardless of relevant intelligence, or why. A curve ball in the form of exaggeration of the importance of a phony letter does not answer the still critical questions.
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