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

by Joseph Wilson

On the international stage, the formulation that “American might makes right” has alarmingly supplanted the rule of law as the operating principle of international relations. In the first flush of battlefield victory, überneocon Richard Perle gloated in an article headlined “Thank God for the Death of the U.N.” in the British newspaper The Guardian on March 21, 2003: “Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror is about to end. He will go quickly, but not alone: in a parting irony, he will take the U.N. down with him. . . . What will die is the fantasy of the U.N. as the foundation of a new world order. As we sift the debris, it will be important to preserve, the better to understand, the intellectual wreckage of the liberal conceit of safety through international law administered by international institutions.”

  The collective security system that emerged from World War II has served America’s ends far more than it has ever impeded our actions. Even while the U.N. is in need of reform—and I agree that it is not appropriately structured to meet the challenges of the post-Cold War era—it is still far superior to the law of the global jungle, under which countries submit to no restraint on their actions. When the U.N. fails to act, it is easy to blame the institution—but in fact the institution reflects the interests of its members. Without it, we would still need to work with other countries who may not share our views. The U.N. provides the forum and the framework within which we can work out differences.

  In the case of Iraq, the U.N., belatedly to be sure, was in fact enforcing the will of the international community as stated in Resolution 1441 at the time we decided to short-circuit the process. It turns out, as David Kay and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace have both stated, the inspection regimes of the 1990s and late 2002 served the world well. Even if we should still find evidence of WMD, they obviously posed no significant threat to us that could not have been managed in a way less destructive than with a military invasion.

  I knew, from three decades of experience with conflicts ranging from Angola to Bosnia, that an American invasion was not the best—or the only—option for dealing with Saddam. War, the bluntest of instruments in our foreign policy arsenal, is costly, and it comes with incalculable and unintended consequences.

  It is undeniable that the international will to disarm Saddam of his WMD needed to be resuscitated. Inspectors had not been inside Iraq since 1998, and nobody believed that Saddam had changed his ways. He would continue to aspire to build up an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction so long as he was in power. In fact, almost any regime in Iraq would strive to attain such armaments, given that the country lay between two strong and historically aggressive neighbors, Iran and Turkey, and close to what Iraqis had long considered their enemy, Israel, which in fact did have such an arsenal.

  No matter who ruled Iraq, we were going to have to monitor the country for a long time, at least until a broader peace emerged in the region—between Iraq and Iran and, farther west, between Israel and its neighbors. The economic sanctions placed on Iraq had proved to be extremely debilitating on the general population but were having virtually no effect on Saddam and the Baathist elite—and international support for them had dissipated. Something had to be done, and the right course of action was indeed to seek international support for the return of a rigorous inspection regime, one backed by a credible threat of force that could and would be implemented if necessary.

  While the twelve years of sanctions on his country had not been so airtight that they had prevented Saddam from building palaces, he had not, however much he wished or strived to, been able to rebuild his military. The no-fly zones had effectively denied him sovereignty over much of his country, and his support was eroding from within. A look at photographs of his cabinet meetings showed old men. Saddam’s regime was sclerotic. 130,000 American soldiers were not required to topple it; it needed only the resurrection of the inspection regime, supported by the threat of force, and some skillful subversion.

  In short, just what was required to ensure the regime’s eventual collapse was already happening before the middle of March 2003. We had infiltrated Saddam’s intelligence services; we had turned several of his senior military commanders. We were locked and loaded, but we did not need to fire. Not at all. A little patience would have achieved everything we wanted, without creating the whirlwind that we are now reaping in our bloody and chaotic occupation of the country.

  Sure, twelve years was a long time for us to put up with the irritation of Saddam. But by way of comparison, the Cold War lasted forty-five years, and Saddam was far less of a threat than several generations of Soviet leaders and the Red Army had been. In fact, the Cold War provided a useful blueprint on how to subvert an oppressive regime and achieve regime change without resorting to brute force.

  The Reagan administration, working with the Pope, had been extraordinarily effective in undermining communist rule in Poland, for instance. It was a case study in the use of all the implements in the foreign policy tool kit to bring about desired change. In Poland in the 1980S, we were perceived to be on the side of the people and supportive of their ambitions to overthrow the yoke of communism, yet we neither bombed their capital or their villages nor invaded their countryside in order to achieve our goals. We did not humiliate the Poles with a foreign occupation, or kill thousands of innocent civilians in order to liberate them. Patience, tenacity, and support for those elements that could mobilize opposition from within were appropriate strategies for us in Poland, as they could have been in Iraq.

  The president was right to seek U.N. Resolution 1441, for by it he successfully forced Saddam to permit inspectors back into the country. Kenneth Pollack had persuasively argued that coercive containment could not be restored; but to President Bush’s credit, it was. Yet, he just would not accept the response of the international community and allow the inspections—which had resumed under Hans Blix—to proceed. The president’s hand was exposed: An offensive was of choice could no longer be masked as self-defense.

  I harbored no illusion that my views would prevail when I entered the debate over Iraq, but I hoped that my voice, added to the voices of others, might give pause to members of Congress under bombardment by the neoconservatives, for whom nothing short of occupying Baghdad was acceptable. Many moderates from both parties shared our concerns, but the partisan distortions, lies, and misinformation produced a predictable result: a majority of Americans, wanting to trust in the president and his words, actually came to believe that Saddam had nuclear weapons and was somehow responsible for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The war policy garnered broad support for a time, until the deception, and its massive extent, became apparent to a too-trusting American public.

  In our society, the decision to declare war resides correctly with the Congress, the representatives of the people, after a debate based upon a set of commonly accepted facts. The Bush administration subverted the debate on the use-of-force resolution by introducing as facts selective bits of information that had not been vetted by our intelligence analysts, and by pressuring analysts to cast their conclusions in language that would support political decisions already made.

  Alan Foley, the recently retired director of the Nonproliferation Center at the CIA, told Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff that there was an item in the report on my trip to Niger that had led him to conclude that there may have been something to the assertion that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger. I can only assume that he was referring to the conversation a Nigerien source of mine had had with Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, aka “Baghdad Bob,” on the margins of an Organization of African Unity (OAU) meeting in 1999. Could it be that we went to war over a conversation in which the word “uranium” was not spoken at all? The only meeting detailed in my Niger report between an Iraqi and a Nigerien official in which even a whiff of uranium arose did not actually include any spoken reference to uranium, only the notion later expressed by my Nigerien contact that maybe, just maybe, at some point in the indeterminate future the Iraq
is might, just might, have wanted to raise the subject of uranium. Was that the smoking gun that could supposedly have become a mushroom cloud? And so is it possible that, because of that non-conversation, 549 Americans have already given their lives, countless Iraqis have been killed, and $150 billion of national treasure spent?

  The administration’s deception of the American people was far more nefarious than mere spin, or a matter of simply putting the best case forward. Instead, the administration engaged in active deception of the United States Congress, the international community, and the American people so that they could go to war for reasons that, had they been honestly and openly debated, would never have been approved.

  An example of the administration’s shifting rationales for the war is evident in the varying importance officials placed on the allegation that Iraq had purchased uranium, or tried to. In sharp contrast to the president’s dire warnings in his September 2002 speech to the U.N., in which he stated, “Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year,” and the subsequent charge that Iraq was actively seeking to purchase uranium from Africa, Condoleezza Rice tried to downplay the importance of the Niger allegation after it came out that it was false. “It is ludicrous to suggest that the president of the United States went to war on the question of whether Saddam Hussein sought uranium from Africa,” Dr. Rice said on FOX News Sunday on July 13, 2003. “This was part of a very broad case that the president laid out in the State of the Union and other places.” But the Niger fabrication was the only allegation of an Iraqi attempt to secure uranium that the administration ever put forward to substantiate the president’s charge.

  As it turned out, Rice was actually right—if not for the reason she meant—that the Niger allegation was unimportant, because this war was never really about WMD. Paul Wolfowitz, in an interview with Vanity Fair, acknowledged as much when he said, “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.” (The Pentagon released its own transcript of the interview after they were unhappy with news coverage of the revelations in the published article, but the two versions do not differ on this point).

  This enterprise in Iraq was always about a larger neoconservative agenda of projecting force as the means of imposing solutions. It was about shaking up the Middle East in the hope that democracy might emerge—what I had heard Charles Krauthammer call “the coming ashore in Arabia.” Whatever one may conclude about the desirability of using our military to bring democracy to the Arab world, the fact is that we went to war without first testing the thesis in serious national debate.

  Democratization is a noble goal. I was involved in democratization efforts for most of my diplomatic career. It is a long and hard road that requires institution-building and a significant investment on the part of the local population in a new and different system of governance that is often at odds with tradition. The best description I have heard for the process is that it is like a fine English lawn: you must seed it, you must water it, and if you want it to look really good, you must roll it—for six hundred years. It is not a task that comes naturally to our military, however excellent that institution is.

  In perhaps the most eloquent and scathing critique of the consequence of the administration’s having lied about why it believed it needed to go to war, Zbigniew Brzezinski observed in an October 2003 speech that during the Cuban missile crisis, Secretary of State Dean Acheson offered to show French President Charles de Gaulle satellite photos of Soviet nuclear missile installations in Cuba to support President Kennedy’s request for support in the event we had to go to war. De Gaulle replied that he did not need to see the photographs, as President Kennedy had given his word and his word was good. Who would now ever take an American president at his word, in the way that de Gaulle once did?

  So we find ourselves in a disastrous quagmire in a distant land, with our troops suffering fatal wounds and disabling injuries every week, even as we employ ever greater force to subdue an increasingly disgruntled people. And just when we think the numbers of casualties may finally be starting to subside, with our uniformed commanders assuring us that the corner has been turned, that the number of insurgent attacks is at last decreasing, the very lethality of the attacks may in actuality be increasing.

  Though peremptorily denied by the administration, our all-volunteer military is suffering long-term damage, as tours of duty are extended with stop-loss orders and as National Guardsmen and Reservists put their civilian lives on hold for longer stretches than they, their families, or their work colleagues ever imagined. Our prestige in the world is sustaining similar damage, notwithstanding the president’s claims to the contrary.

  The election campaign of 2004 offers the American people an opportunity to engage in a meaningful debate on the merits of this war, and we should so engage. It is long overdue and appropriate, as even the president agreed during his February 8, 2004, interview on Meet the Press. It is his judgment, his vision, his policies that are under scrutiny, and that is how it should be in a democracy. Those who attempt to deflect attention from the president’s decisions by blaming the quality of the intelligence provided to the administration miss the essential point that it is the president, not the director of Central Intelligence, who made the decision to go to war, and his is the record that must be judged.

  The intelligence community provides its estimate of the facts on the ground, but it does not offer policy recommendations or make war decisions. The president and his national security team do. For all the reforms that might be warranted for the intelligence community, we do our spies and analysts incalculable harm when we try to blame them for the bad decisions taken by our political leaders. Unwarranted attacks and finger-pointing debilitate morale and create an adversarial relationship, at precisely the time when we should be working together to effect necessary change in the way we collect and analyze information.

  The exposure of a clandestine operative is a reprehensible breach of a trust between our political leadedrship and those who risk their lives to keep America safe. It is a profound betrayal of our country and it has repercussions across the globe. Foreign agents will hesitate before stealing secrets on our behalf for fear that exposure of their American handler may compromise them. American spies will always worry about whether they can trust their own government. Programs will be more difficult to launch and maintain in such a climate. Those who expose an operative must be labeled as what President Bush’s father said they are: “the most insidious of traitors.”

  But even as we debate the merits of what we have wrought, we must not lose sight of how we can best extricate ourselves from this quandary.

  The myth that we would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi population has been definitively dispelled. With the insurrection increasingly requiring heavy-handed military ripostes in which property is destroyed and Iraqi civilians killed or injured, it is unlikely that Middle Eastern history will ever view our invasion as the beneficent mission that President Bush promised it would be: an effort to free Iraqis from the chains of their tyrant. On the contrary, if there is a civil war that results in the violent breakup of the Iraqi state, in the eyes of the Muslim world we will be responsible for having caused it.

  We are therefore compelled to see it through, until some semblance of representative government has been installed in Iraq. To cut and run at this chaotic point would guarantee greater instability in the region for the foreseeable future, as various factions vie for power. Yet cutting and running is just exactly what is happening, as the Bush administration has imposed a June 30, 2004, target deadline on itself to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqi people—a timetable geared more to the U.S. election calendar than it is to democratization in Iraq.

  Even if that date is moved back, as well it should be, the signal the administration has sent to the Iraqi factions is that we see
k an early departure. A precipitous departure before proper institutions have been built; before parameters for acceptable political behavior have been established and accepted; and before a resilient sense of optimism about the future has been fostered within Iraqi society, may well presage a complete breakdown of relations among the many factions that already have armed militias at their disposal. The ill-advised decision of the Coalition Provisional Authority to disband the Iraqi military, one of the country’s few unifying national institutions, ensures that there will remain a huge void in the center of Iraqi national life when we leave, unless permanent viable institutions are somehow established and widely accepted by the people of Iraq first. A civil war would fuel independence ambitions among the Kurds, ignite the simmering hostility between the Shia and Sunni, and leave this already-broken country subject to even greater ruin.

  And our troops run the substantial risk of being in the middle of it all, trying to defend themselves, and noncombatant Iraqis, who will despair over our continuing inability to provide security and a quality of life better than what they are promised from their indigenous leaders. Lacking a better alternative, they will see no option but to seek protection from within their traditional family and clan structure. We are fighting two wars in Iraq right now, the war against the insurgency and the war to restore public safety and services. If we cannot win the latter, then the ranks of the former will continue to swell daily with bitter citizens.

  Wars of liberation are terribly expensive in terms of political capital. One needs only look at the debacle in Somalia, when an American Blackhawk helicopter was shot down in the streets of Mogadishu in 1993. Fewer than twenty deaths resulted from that one urban battle—and the American political will to intervene in African conflicts was stifled for years, as was epitomized by our failure to respond to the genocide in Rwanda that ultimately cost 800,000 Africans their lives in less than four months. No Republican and few Democrats were prepared to argue, during that crisis, that we should intervene militarily. It was only when the number of deaths became too large to ignore that we were shamed into reacting. By then it was too late. We ended up spending $500 million—then roughly 60 percent of our annual development assistance budget for all of Africa—to do little more than bury the dead and purify water for the survivors. We should have done better, but the political will was wanting. It had all been expended in the tragedy of Blackhawk Down.