Who’s Telling the Truth About Iraq?

Mark Vasina
NFP President

The following article by NFP President Mark Vasina, appeared as an op-ed in the December 5, 2005 Lincoln Journal Star.

Vice-President and Lincoln native Dick Cheney recently charged those who say the administration manipulated pre-Iraq War intelligence with rewriting history in a “dishonest” and “reprehensible” way. Former Senator Bob Graham of Florida, a leader on the Senate Intelligence Committee during the run-up to the war, responded with an op-ed piece (Journal Star, 11/22/05) disclosing that, on the eve of the invasion, the White House had not even asked CIA Director George Tenet for a “National Intelligence Estimate” to evaluate the need for a preemptive strike. At Graham’s insistence the CIA produced a 90-page estimate that raised serious doubts about whether Iraq indeed possessed weapons of mass destruction. Yet, when the administration released its 25-page public summary of the estimate, the doubts in the longer document had completely disappeared.

In any case, however, even the estimate’s allegations of a WMD threat came from sources whose credibility was suspect. Most of the alleged intelligence came from Iraqi exiles or third countries with an interest in Hussein’s removal. Among the principle sources was Ahmad Chalabi, accused of questionable business practices by our own State Department. Under congressional questioning, Tenet himself admitted that no U.S. operative had independently verified the claims.

Much of this “intelligence” was assembled by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans. Now under congressional investigation, this ad hoc group had, according to some CIA and FBI intelligence analysts, produced most of the “information” needed by Secretary Rumsfeld and Cheney to justify the war. Since these two men—along with Undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Department advisor Richard Perle—had sought a war with Iraq since the late ’90s, it is not surprising that the new Office of Special Plans produced what their bosses required.

As a result of this “twisted” intelligence, more than 2,100 U.S. soldiers and 30,000 Iraqis have died. Over 80 percent of the Iraqi public disapproves of our presence there. And President Bush’s sole idea of an exit strategy is to “stay the course.” Some argue that members of Congress who supported the war were duped. How ever, they could have turned to evidence widely available before the 2003 invasion. The charge that Niger sold yellow cake uranium to Iraq was known to be false when it was aired in the 2003 State of the Union address. The other allegations were also suspect. Even an organization as far off the beltway as Nebraskans for Peace could spot the cracks. In an April 1, 2003 open letter to the United Nations published in local papers, we asked that U.S. WMD claims be monitored and suggested that the evidence had been manipulated:

U.S. claims are in dispute. Hans Blix and the U.N. weapons inspectors were not able to verify them…. The majority of the members of the U.N. Security Council did not find them sufficiently credible to vote with us.

The most credible evidence regarding Iraq’s WMD threat came from Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law and his weapons head. Kamel defected to the West, gave the U.S. his information, and then went back to Iraq to his family, where, on his return, his father-in-law killed him. According to Newsweek, he was not giving us disinformation. As we said in 2003:

Kamel’s testimony… was used by the United States to drum up support for the war, [but] only part of his testimony was used. A transcript of his full UNSCOM testimony obtained by Glen Rangala of Cambridge University includes Kamel’s indication that he headed the weapons program but later, during the inspections, ordered all biological, chemical, long-range missile, and nuclear weapons destroyed. He did the same for all anthrax and VX production. Rangala did not obtain this document until February 2003, after war fever was very high, even though UNSCOM had it a year earlier and the U.S. CIA and the British MI6 since 1995 (http://www.fair.org/press-releases/kamel.pdf).

Cheney and Co.’s case for war was clearly the product of a hatchet job on the evidence. The Kamel, Blix and CIA testimony given to Senator Graham had all been manipulated. Nevertheless, prior to the March 19, 2003 invasion, anyone watching the news would have seen Blix calling for more time for inspections, or could have found the Kamel document on the internet. Democrats and Republicans who voted for a war against WMD simply failed to ask the necessary questions.

When Nebraskans for Peace called this war unnecessary and the evidence cooked, many called us unpatriotic.

We were motivated, on the contrary, by patriotic concern about the consequences of this war. We cared about the cost in American lives and money and reputation. We cared about the promotion of real stability in Iraq and the Mideast and throughout the world. And we cared about the truth. Our patriotism was not the patriotism that is, as the great Dr. Samuel Johnson put it, “the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

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