The cult that's running the country

I resisted going public for several months, however, in the futile hope that after it became apparent there was no truth to the Niger uranium claim, and once serious questions were raised in the media, somebody in the administration would come forward and take responsibility for the falsehood. I had no interest in attaching my name and face publicly to any such revelation; I had seen the harm done to bearers of bad tidings in Washington. Even after Condoleezza Rice falsely asserted on "Meet the Press" that "maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the Agency" that the evidence cited in the State of the Union address was suspect, I still hesitated to set the record straight publicly, although I was becoming more determined that the lies be corrected somehow.

A few days after Rice's interview, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees announced that they were going to look into the prewar intelligence, including the uranium claim. I called the staffs of both committees and volunteered to brief them about my trip and findings. I ended up briefing them separately within a few days of each other in mid-June, disclosing what I knew to the appropriate oversight bodies.

A week after those briefings, I learned from a journalist that my name was soon to be made public. I finally decided to write the story myself, and called back David Shipley at the New York Times to accept his offer of space on their op-ed page.

I knew that my credibility would be challenged the moment I went public, and I made preparations to defend it. I was not going to let the rabid ankle-biters of the right deny me a voice in the debate or impugn my integrity. I had earned the right to be heard, the same right enjoyed by other responsible citizens. I spoke out confident in the belief that our democracy remains strong precisely because we have a long and proud tradition of citizens challenging our government when it lies to the people.

However, for all the insults I knew I would suffer, I never expected the White House itself to do anything like what it did: come after my wife.

The disclosure of her identity was unprecedented, and the Grand Jury will decide if it was a criminal act. Whether convictions are obtained or not, it was unquestionably beneath the standards of conduct that we have every right to demand from our public servants. But in their attacks on us, the administration was firing at the wrong targets. I had not put the sixteen words in the president's mouth; somebody on his staff had, and that is where he should have been taking aim; Valerie had not done anything wrong. And when somebody leaked the fact she was undercover, thereby putting a national security asset out of commission at a time of war, the president should have demanded swift action to remove the offender from his post. Yet, as in the case of the sixteen words, the president once again demonstrated more loyalty to his staff than they had shown to him. To this day, no one at the White House has apologized for the unwarranted attacks on Valerie and me. And to this day, the person who leaked her name evidently remains in a position where he enjoys the trust of President Bush.

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.

Next Page: Bush could change the entire course of his administration by firing 15 people -- but he'd first have to want to

• View blog reactions