Weapons of mass deception

The Bush administration goes into full spin mode and Tony Blair battles to save his political life, as charges mount that they lied their way into war.

By Jake Tapper

Jun 6, 2003 | At the Senate Republicans' weekly policy lunch on Tuesday, Vice President Dick Cheney reassured the assembled lawmakers that the administration had credible evidence, in the months leading up to the war, to assert that Iraq did indeed harbor weapons of mass destruction.

Before the war, Cheney asserted, the administration was positive that the weapons were there and that Saddam Hussein was refusing to acknowledge that. It wouldn't make any sense otherwise, he said; why would Saddam refuse to cooperate with arms inspectors if he didn't have anything to hide? Why would he lead his country into war?

Cheney was received warmly, and it was pointed out in the meeting that new inspectors were heading over to Iraq. Maybe WMD would be found soon, after all.

That the supremely confident vice president even felt the need, in a room full of loyal Republican officials, to reassert that the administration wasn't lying is an acknowledgment that the as yet undiscovered WMD is emerging as a major problem, even if polls indicate that a majority of Americans still don't seem to care. And Cheney's attempt to allay any fears -- in what is, by all accounts, an extremely admiring coterie of senators -- is but one recent example of the administration's slow but steady realization that the failure to find any WMD could pose a real problem for the Bush administration and the United States in general. From the Pentagon to the British House of Commons to President Bush's appearance Thursday in Qatar, the American and British governments are responding, sometimes reeling, in the face of some harsh accusations.

It already looked like it was heading toward an investigation. On Sunday, the Republican chairmen of the Senate Armed Services and Senate Intelligence committees -- Sen. John Warner, R-Va., and Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan. -- seemed to be gearing up for a joint investigation into the pre-war intelligence on Iraqi WMD, but both appeared to back off such a call on Tuesday, particularly after Warner had a private meeting with Cheney. Warner and Roberts then argued that the committees should privately read the materials the CIA was about to present to them for private review before launching an investigation. But on Wednesday afternoon, the Democratic vice chair of the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.V., took issue with that plan. "I strongly disagree with the notion that we should wait to decide on a formal investigation until we complete a review of CIA documents regarding WMD and Iraq," Rockefeller said. "This limited approach clearly falls short of the important oversight responsibilities entrusted to the members of this committee."

A source familiar with the situation tells Salon that Cheney and Warner "are old friends; no one's pressuring anyone." That doesn't mean, of course, that Warner isn't inclined to help Cheney. As of Thursday, Senate sources told Salon that it was still undetermined how the Senate would handle the matter and that at least a few weeks would pass before the two committees decided what -- if anything -- would happen.

Across the pond, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has had a harder time fishing for allies. At the House of Commons on Wednesday, Blair was essentially called a liar, and accused of telling intelligence agencies to add less-than-credible information to a September dossier stating that Saddam could launch a WMD attack within 45 minutes. "These allegations are not going to go away," Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith railed. While Conservative and Liberal Democrat Party forces are demanding an investigation into pre-war intelligence about Iraqi WMD, they are joined by several members of Parliament from Blair's own Labor Party. Blair faces two inquiries into the pre-war intelligence on the Iraqi WMD -- and there are no doubts that these investigations will actually occur.

Some of the charges against the two governments are unfair -- as with a Wednesday account in the British newspaper the Guardian that twisted the words of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Sometimes the charges are tenuous, as with a pending Vanity Fair story that conservatives charge misquoted Wolfowitz and took his quotes out of context.

But in leading their nations to war, Bush and Blair presented compelling cases to many as to why Iraq needed to be disarmed immediately -- "We don't have a lot of time," Wolfowitz said to the Council on Foreign Relations in January, "time is running out." But the cases don't seem to be holding up. And experts, prominent Republicans among them, are willing to point out the problem with that. The WMD "is the real reason the U.S. went to war," says Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and national security studies director for the Council on Foreign Relations. If it turns out that no WMD are found amid accusations that the Bush administration and Blair governments misused intelligence information, "that will have long-term ramifications with our allies," Korb says.

Referring to a Pew poll released this week indicating that international public support for the United States has significantly slipped -- with majorities in 13 of 20 foreign nations surveyed holding an unfavorable view of the United States, and majorities in seven out of eight Muslim countries expressing the fear that the U.S. might threaten them -- Korb says the affair "feeds into the problem we already had with the rest of the world. People think we're making up the rules as we go along, and that we think that might makes right." This could have far-reaching implications on the future of American foreign policy, including our ability to wage the "war on terror."

What would Korb advise the administration? "Come clean," he says. "I'd tell them to admit what they knew, what they didn't know, and to stop playing games with us."

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