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January 12, 2004

Warbaby says:

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has published the definitive report on Iraq's WMD.  There wasn't any and our justification for invading was false.  Yet the Bush administration is sticking to their guns despite a stunning refutation of their claims.

It's "game over" for the Bush administration's case for invading Iraq.  In a highly detailed 111-page report, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace shredded the distorted intelligence on Iraq's WMD situation and demolished the claims that Saddam Hussein's Baathist dictatorship shared strategic weapons with terrorists or other states.

The release of this report signals a new phase in the inter-elite conflict over the so-called "War On Terror" similar to the shift in opinion among policymakers after the Tet Offensive in Vietnam.  The preemptive war doctrine spelled out in the National Security Strategy is systematically dissected as utterly contrary to the national interest.  This report will be making waves for months.

But don't take my word for it.  Go read it.

The lengthy report contains three main sections:  an examination of Iraq's WMD capabilities comparing the Bush administration's claims against the known and provable facts, a series of closely argued findings and recommendations, and five appendices reproducing the administration's case for going to war.

The first section on Iraq's WMD capabilities examines the shifting U.S. intelligence estimates made before 9/11 and during the run-up to invasion.  These are contrasted with the findings of UNSCOM and what has been discovered in the aftermath of the invasion.  The most interesting conclusion is the evidence for political interference with the intelligence process that produced the now-discredited National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002.

The final part of the first section examines the allegations that Iraq was prepared to transfer chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to terrorists or neighboring states.  The report makes a very strong case for dismissing these fantasies as absurd and unsupportable by any available evidence.

The findings and recommendations lay out a program for preventing intelligence disasters in the future.  The most sweeping recommendation is to "professionalize" the directorate of the Central Intelligence Agency by removing the president's power to appoint the directorate.  The recommendations call for a searching examination and debate of the present policy of lumping together the threat of "evil states and terrorism."  They also call for an end to unilateralist policies on confronting WMD threats and proliferations by increasing international cooperation and bringing the United Nations into a partnership with the U.S.

The appendicies are particularly interesting because they contain the key sections of the October 2002 NIE and the now notorious 2003 State of the Union Address and the full text of Bush's October 7, 2002 speech, Secretary of State Colin Powell's address to the United Nations and Bush's address to the nation at the time of the invasion.  Together, these form the basis of the administration's claims about Iraq and WMD.  They are treated as testable hypotheses in the report.  There is no wiggle room for downplaying the extent to which facts were distorted and unsupported assumptions were presented as proven truths.

The administration's response to the report has been extremely interesting.  The links in the right-hand column show how Cheney, Rice and Powell have reacted -- it's not a pretty sight.  Cheney says he hasn't read the report and thus can't respond directly to it, but then careens on to repeat the bogus assertions exposed in the report.  Powell just denies everything and Rice falls back on suggesting there is more investigation needed into Iraq's possible transfer of WMD to Syria and perhaps through them to terrorist groups.

It is clear that the Bush administration did not anticipate the release of this report (a further failure of intelligence) and their initial positions have been to grasp at straws already demolished by the report's findings.  As of this writing, the administration looks like it has been caught flat-footed and is just flailing around for a response.

So far, there has been no reaction from members of the Senate.  The report clearly lays out several important issues that fall within the Senate's responsibility.  What happens next will be extremely interesting.