The Politics of Truth_Inside the Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity

by Joseph Wilson

  The first public reference to the uranium charge had been in a British white paper published in September 2002, three months before receipt of Iraq’s weapons declaration. In it, the British asserted that Iraq had sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. I had read the press reports on the white paper, and though I was mildly curious about which country in Africa the British were talking about, I did not inquire. After all, there are four African countries that produce uranium: Niger, where I had started my career; Gabon, where I had served as ambassador; and South Africa, where I had also worked. The fourth was Namibia, where I had not served. I thought it possible that the British were referring to South Africa, though that seemed unlikely, or perhaps Namibia.

  I wouldn’t learn for six months that the country referred to in the British claim was, in fact, Niger. At the State Department, the charge that Iraq had sought uranium there clearly had no credibility. But I would soon discover that ideologues there, and in other parts of the administration, were determined to keep pushing the lie about an Iraq-Niger uranium transaction, no matter how many times it would be refuted.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Road to the Second Gulf War

  FROM OCTOBER 2002, SHORTLY AFTER THE PUBLICATION of my first opinion piece, up to the beginning of the war in March 2003, my own contributions to the debate on Iraq continued, mostly on cable news broadcasts. I appeared three times on Hannity & Colmes, the FOX political talk show that resembles the old Morton Downey, Jr. show more than it does serious debate. Sean Hannity, easily one of the least interesting people I have ever spoken to, takes more interest in pushing an extremist right-wing agenda than in promoting an honest discussion of the issues. He also has no idea what he is talking about, at least on foreign policy, and does a great disservice to his audience. His tactic of making ad hominem attacks on the integrity and patriotism of those whose views he does not share may make for amusing entertainment, but it denigrates the serious discussion we should have before we send our military marching off to war. Fair and balanced it is not.

  I accepted invitations to appear on Hannity & Colmes, and on the equally vapid O’Reilly Factor, because I thought those programs drew audiences that deserved to have the benefit of another point of view on which to base their political judgments. Issues of war and peace are so critical to the future of our country and our national security that they rate more than simply propagandistic treatment. War is not entertainment; it is serious business. So, like other concerned citizens, including former Maine Congressman Tom Andrews, the head of the Win Without War coalition, and Mike Farrell, the longtime Human Rights Watch activist and costar of TV’s M*A*S*H, I laid out my case for tough disarmament on these shows.

  To his credit, Bill O’Reilly was a polite interviewer and at least listened to the airing of all sides of the issue. Hannity, on the other hand, made his guests mere props for his political rants. On my final appearance on Hannity’s show, he began the segment by implying that I was an appeaser and a Bush-hating Democrat, neither of which bore any relationship to my position on the war or to who I am. I responded forcefully, pointing out that his position as host did not allow him to spout lies about his guests. He went ballistic when I wouldn’t let him interrupt me and threatened to cut off my microphone. I decided then that I wouldn’t waste any more time on his program, as he clearly wasn’t interested in providing his audience with any views other than his own.

  For many years, I had known Edward (Ned) Walker, president of the Middle East Institute, a venerable Washington institution dedicated to fostering a deeper understanding of the region. Ned had been ambassador to Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) and to Israel, as well as assistant secretary for Near Eastern Affairs. The institute he runs is refreshingly free of ideology and polemics and serves as a useful forum for views from all sides.

  Walker and I crossed paths at a luncheon cohosted by the institute for a delegation from Jordan, which included many former members of the Jordanian government and advisers to the late King Hussein. They had come to Washington to plead the case for a more even-handed approach to the plight of the Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories. I brashly offered, with all respect, that if the delegation were to succeed, its members needed to understand that the American administration and the American people viewed the Arab-Israeli problem through the prism of terrorism. Given our own shock at the attacks on us, we naturally sided with others who themselves were victims of monstrous violence. The second intifada, Arafat’s horrendous response to the failure to reach agreement in the negotiations brokered by the Clinton administration during its last days, had been a disaster, I said, that fed into the hands of extremists of all sides.

  After lunch, the Middle East Institute’s communications director, Maggie Mitchell, complimented me on the frankness of my comments and suggested that the institute name me an unpaid adjunct scholar and refer news outlets to me for any information or opinion they might require regarding the Middle East—Iraq, in particular. I was pleased to accept her offer.

  The air waves were saturated with spokesmen from the neoconservative faction. They were continually popping up under different titles; one of their strategies had been to create a whole host of pseudo-foundations and nongovernmental organizations to give the public the impression that they enjoyed a groundswell of support far broader than was the case. Their marketing strategy was as good as the policy they were advocating was flawed. They would make assertions devoid of sense with total confidence, and utter known falsehoods as the gospel truth. A classic from their reperteroire: the supposed meeting in Prague of the suicide hijacker Mohammed Atta with an Iraqi intelligence officer, now knocked down by a number of intelligence services, including our own.

  I had one such exchange with Ken Adelman, an acolyte of former U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, in the fall of 2002. He had not been in government for several years, until he was picked to serve on the unpaid but very influential Defense Policy Board, made famous by the presence of Richard Perle, its chairman for a time (he has since resigned from the group entirely). In my exchange with Adelman, he tried to ridicule my position on disarmament by saying that I did not have access to intelligence and therefore could not comment knowledgably on the subject. Given the trip I had taken to Niger February 2002, I could not help but chuckle to myself. However, I continued to push the point that our true national security concern was weapons of mass destruction in the arsenal of a rogue state like Iraq. I insisted that we focus our energies on meeting that threat, not allowing ourselves to be sidetracked by the seductive dream of regime change.

  When I entered into a mini-debate with former Reagan defense official and arch neocon Frank Gaffney some weeks later, on another cable news program, I decided that I was not going to let myself be victimized by the usual neocon tactics. I let Frank have the first word and listened to him carefully. The host of the show asked me what I thought of what Frank had said, and I answered “Hogwash,” then started my rebuttal. Predictably, Frank interrupted, or tried to. I told him he would have his chance after I had said my piece, and kept speaking over him till he shut up. I then filibustered till the end of the segment. As we went to commercial, I looked down at the screen to see Gaffney red-faced and sputtering. I thought to myself that here was somebody who was never likely to be a friend.

  I had never believed that the “due date” for the Iraqi WMD declaration would be the go-to-war date. In fact, I continued to think there was some chance that the administration could achieve its disarmament objective peacefully and that war could be avoided. So did other moderates from both parties. After all, the declaration would serve as a baseline for the resumption of the intrusive inspection regime proposed in the resolution. It would take time to translate the declaration, and the logistics of remounting the inspection program would be daunting. Hiring inspectors, opening offices, obtaining cars and airplanes and helicopters, establishing liaison relationships with the Iraqis and with the members of the s
ecurity council, especially the United States—would all take time and energy. There remained, too, the question of whether we could go to war without at least a second consultation at the U.N.

  Somehow, I was relatively optimistic. I felt that the president, supported by Congress, had done the right thing. Although I was uneasy with the very broad language of the congressional resolution, and with the implication that it gave the president the authority to go to war at his discretion without further congressional action, I wanted to take him at his word when he said that congressional authorization of a military strike “does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable. The resolution will tell the United Nations, and all nations, that America speaks with one voice and is determined to make the demands of the civilized world mean something,” as reported in the Los Angeles Times on October 10.

  There was no need to invade Iraq, at least not then, or in the near future, so long as an intrusive U.N. inspection program was achieving results; and even if we were at some point obliged to back the disarmament demands with force, that force could be directed at achieving the disarmament objective and not require the regime change so fervently lusted after by the neocons. I thought the president had successfully steered the U.S. and the U.N. back to the appropriate course. I pointed out in my appearances that the president had in fact proven the thesis of Kenneth Pollack’s book wrong, that he had been hugely successful at obtaining the international support for coercive containment that Ken had eloquently argued would be impossible. The attacks of September 11, 2001, a forceful president, and a compliant Congress had given us exactly what was needed: the will to deal with the real threat posed by Saddam—WMD in the hands of a rogue state—and not the distracting targets of regime change and spurious links between al Qaeda and Saddam.

  My optimism, however, was dampened as early as December 9 when I participated in a symposium at the Nixon Center in Washington, cochaired by former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger and Ambassador L. Paul (Jerry) Bremer, a retired foreign service officer then best known as an expert on terrorism, and the center’s director, Dimitri Simes. I listened as the other participants waxed eloquent about how we would reshape the Middle East with our invasion of Iraq. Also in attendance was conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer. He offered three reasons to justify the war that most of the participants saw as inevitable and desirable. Weapons of mass destruction was the one presented loudly and frequently to the public, Krauthammer said, but American credibility and the democratization of the Arab world were the other two—if largely understated—reasons. American credibility was at stake, claimed Krauthammer, becauseif for no other reason, having said what the president has said—starting with his “axis of evil” speech, the speech at West Point [in January 2002], and all the way through the year—he had consistently said that this state of affairs will not stand. If he doesn’t follow through, I think there will be a tremendous collapse of everything we had achieved by the war in Afghanistan. That would be a great strategic setback. And it would have negative effects on the region, especially on the war on terrorism.

  The democratization of the Arab world—Krauthammer’s “third reason for the war in Iraq”—was, he said,what I would call “coming ashore.” Our attitude to the Arab world has always been that we could be the “offshore balancer” of last resort. We would pacify the regime by buying off the corrupt governments in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. We would police and we would patrol offshore. This hands-off, offshore policy, I think, is over. Iraq will be the first act in the play of an America coming ashore in Arabia, trying to do what it did in Germany and Japan. I know the analogy is obviously a strained one but I think, historically, this is what the mission is. It’s not just about weapons of mass destruction or American credibility. It’s about reforming the Arab world. I think we don’t know the answer to the question of whether the Arab-Islamic world is inherently allergic to democracy. The assumption is that it is—but I don’t know if anyone can answer that question today. We haven’t attempted it so far. The attempt will begin with Iraq. Afterwards, we are going to have empirical evidence; history will tell us whether this assumption was correct or not.

  I was stunned by the unabashed ambition of this imperial project, by the willingness to countenance a major military engagement and lengthy occupation in order to “attempt” to reform the Arab world, to remake it to our liking. What hubris, to put American lives and treasure at stake in order to gain empirical evidence to test an assumption. Krauthammer concluded his remarks with a chilling comment that we needed to go to war soon, before the antiwar movement coalesced—in other words, before Americans woke up to the fact that this war was not at all about combating the publicly proclaimed grave and gathering danger posed by Saddam.

  I could not restrain myself. When I spoke, I drew the analogy that the neoconservatives were to the president as were Napoleon’s generals to the emperor as they sat around the table and listened to his plans on the eve of the march on Moscow. Schlesinger commented that he preferred to think of it as the night before the Battle of Austerlitz—which, Simes reminded us, led to that failed Russian campaign. I replied that since Schlesinger had always seemed to be something of an imperial figure, perhaps I should begin to refer to him as Mr. Bonaparte. The thin smile on the face of the former secretary of defense indicated that he was not amused. Neither was I.

  Krauthammer remarked that he viewed the prospective war with Iraq as the night before D-day, the eve in June 1944 of the liberation of France and the defeat of Germany. If the advocates of the coming-ashore vision in the symposium had their way, we really were going to try to bring Jeffersonian democracy to the Arab world on the coattails of an American military conquest. We were going to be waging an imperial war, pure and simple.

  I was not prepared to concede the necessity of the neoconservatives’ war so long as there were alternatives. Retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, who had been urging caution for months, wrote me in December 2002 with disgust that the debate was over and the decisions already made to launch an invasion. Despite the general’s sobering analysis, I continued to speak out, along with an ever-shrinking number of others, including Tom Andrews, Mike Farrell, and Katrina van den Heuvel and David Corn from The Nation magazine. But we were a dwindling breed.

  Over the 2002 Christmas holidays and most of January 2003, Congress was out of town, so there was no real focal point for those calling for the consideration of alternatives to the drive to war. The antiwar coalition, while well intentioned, was doomed to fail. It had organized itself too late and left itself too open to the ill-considered charges of appeasement from the ruthless right-wing war camp.

  On January 28, 2003, President Bush spoke to the nation in the State of the Union address. It was arguably the most important speech he had yet made in his presidency. The country and the world listened—a world growing increasingly nervous that the United States, fresh from a quick military victory in Afghanistan, was about to go to war again. Quite apart from the now infamous sixteen words—“The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”—the speech was replete with other assertions that, to put it charitably, were questionable.

  In perhaps the most striking moment of the evening, which regrettably received less attention from pundits and the press than the notorious sixteen words, the president stated that “throughout the twentieth century, small groups of men seized control of great nations, built armies and arsenals, and set out to dominate the weak and intimidate the world.” What irony: this was a president who had come to power in a hotly disputed election in which he won fewer popular votes than his opponent. Now he was advocating an aggressive foreign policy born of a small band of zealots—a policy the precise opposite of the one he had championed as a candidate—who had callously seized the opportunity presented by the tragedy of a terrorist attack on our country to foist its dangerous ideas on the nation and the world.

 
; But the sixteen words certainly piqued my curiosity. The following day, I called a colleague at the State Department and suggested to him that if the president had been speaking of Niger in his reference to Africa, then my report, along with the report of our ambassador on the scene, and that of the Marine Corps four-star general, had all been wrong. Or had the president misspoken? In that case, the record needed to be corrected.

  My colleague replied simply that perhaps the president had been speaking about an African country other than Niger. I had no reason to doubt my informant—his access and knowledge were more current than mine—so I didn’t pursue the matter. It was my business only if the president was referring to Niger. I later learned from Walter Kansteiner, assistant secretary for Africa at State, that he had not even seen the State of the Union speech to read it before it was given, and that Colin Powell himself had been given only a few hours to review it for accuracy.

  Another statement from the State of the Union address gave me serious concern. For the previous few months, with the exception of a few ill-chosen remarks by Bush at political rallies during the midterm election campaign about how “Saddam tried to kill my dad,” the president had adhered to his talking point that “Saddam will either disarm or we will disarm him.” When asked whether that position represented a change from the regime-change rhetoric thrown about so freely the previous year, senior officials, including Colin Powell and the president himself, argued that disarmament effectively was regime change, even if Saddam remained in power.