Bush Vindicated
By Ryan Walsh (07/29/04)
The ultimate hypothetical: If the “BUSH LIED!” crowd were rational, recent developments would suggest they would change their tune.
In the 2003 State of the Union speech, Bush uttered the now notorious “16 words” of death: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
Soon after, former diplomat Joseph Wilson penned a column for "The New York Times" cutely entitled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” In it, he said that he had been sent to Niger—the particular African country in question—to investigate the supposed illegal uranium trade with Iraq. He discovered the claim was bogus.
Joseph Wilson and last summer’s “Uraniumgate” expose provided the desired material for the “BUSH LIED!” gang to unleash all fury.
But, in the past weeks, Joe Wilson’s credibility has been reduced to nothing. This means two things: one, his new book’s title, "The Politics of Truth," is so inexplicably ironic that it’s gut-wrenching hilarious, and two, if you own a copy and now worry that you have wasted a good 20 bucks, don’t fret. Its usefulness as prime fire-starting material hasn’t decreased in accordance with its intellectual worth.
The much anticipated bipartisan Senate Intel report rebukes Wilson’s claims. For starters, the report shoots down Wilson’s claim that the fact that his wife worked for the CIA had nothing to do with his comfy assignment as a “diplomat.” In fact, the committee learned his wife had formally recommended him for the job. In another dishonest declaration, Wilson said that documents that had supposedly proved an Iraqi-Niger uranium trade were forgeries since details such as names and dates were wrong. Nice, but the committee says Wilson never saw or even had access to such documents, which means his intimate knowledge of names and dates is unlikely.
Britain’s Financial Times has also thoroughly contributed to the Wilson discrediting. Thus far, the paper has reported that new European intelligence shows that five particular nations had sought uranium from Niger. The article concludes, “One of the customers discussed by the traders was Iraq."
A more “reasonable” Bush critic will tell you, “Well, okay, maybe Bush didn’t just come out and lie, but he exaggerated and distorted intelligence in order to build his case for war.” But the Senate report and the British Parliament’s own Butler report demur.
Here’s some important Senate report text: “The committee found no evidence that the [intelligence community's] mischaracterization or exaggeration of weapons of mass destruction capabilities was the result of political pressure.”
Reinforcing important findings in the U.S. and Europe, the Butler report concluded “… the statement in President Bush's State of the Union Address of 28 January…was well-founded.”
We are told that Bush had a tough decision to make on Iraq. But, in the post-9/11 setting, he really had no choice at all. Saddam Hussein had ignored and obstructed international law and UN resolutions for 17 years. Former CIA Director George Tenet was so convinced of the existence of WMD stockpiles that he told the commander in chief the intelligence was a “slam dunk.” This in conjunction with Saddam’s strong ties to terrorist groups (a topic of future column) produced a transparent threat to the U.S. in particular and the West in general.
As Bill Safire observed in a recent column, our pre-war intel before the first Gulf War was wrong, too: we had no idea that Saddam’s nuclear program was as fully developed as it was. Clearly, this is the more perilous sort of intelligence “errors.” Would Bush’s son make the same mistake and wait until the threat rose to imminence?
Bush addressed this question at a rally in Duluth—which I attended. He said that, given that choice, he will “defend America every time.”
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