US and the World

Bush in the clear? Like hell!

The New York Times > Opinion > The Senate Report

Glad to see the NYT this morning putting it to the president and not letting him use the Senate intelligence report as a way to sidestep responsibility for his failures regarding Iraq. Unfortunately, in too many places this report is already being used to exhonerate the administration. Wish more of the media would do their homework before they reported. Here are some key passages from today's NYT editorial:

The panel's investigation into how President Bush handled the intelligence has been postponed until after the election. But the bottom line already seems pretty clear. No one had to pressure analysts to change their findings because the findings were determined before the work started.

By late 2002, you'd have had to have been vacationing on Mars not to know what answer Mr. Bush wanted. The planning for war had begun. The C.I.A. was under enormous pressure over getting it wrong before 9/11. And the hawkish defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, wanted to set up his own intelligence agency to get the goods on Iraq that the wishy-washy C.I.A. couldn't seem to deliver.

Both political parties see all this as an election issue, and the international community will see the committee report as another reason to decry Mr. Bush's go-it-alone foreign policy. But the report also speaks to a critical long-term security threat. We cannot afford to have the public become too cynical about the government's assessment of danger.

There may well come a time when Mr. Bush, or another president, will have to ask the nation and its allies to back a pre-emptive military strike against terrorists, or a country that poses a real threat. And he's probably going to have to rely on intelligence that is hardly the "slam dunk" that George Tenet reportedly called these shoddy reports on Iraq. The public will have to believe that the president is acting against a real threat, not one manufactured to justify a political agenda.

This administration has not made it easier for people to have that confidence. Its continuing insistence on linking Iraq and Al Qaeda is not aimed at helping the public understand the situation in the Middle East, but at providing political cover for an increasingly unpopular invasion.

Then there are the news conferences that administration officials hold periodically to warn us that we're about to be attacked. Everyone is aware of the danger out there, but there is no reason to go on television and repeat vague warnings that seem to be intended to frighten everyone, but are more likely to lull people into complacency by their familiarity and repetition. When Tom Ridge, the secretary of homeland defense, holds a news conference to warn the nation of dire peril and it winds up as fodder for comedy shows, there's something very wrong somewhere.

And I keep remembering what Time magazine reported just before Bush launched his war - the report references and event a year earlier - in March 2002.

"F___ Saddam. We're taking him out." Those were the words of President George W. Bush, who had poked his head into the office of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. It was March 2002, and Rice was meeting with three U.S. Senators, discussing how to deal with Iraq through the United Nations, or perhaps in a coalition with America's Middle East allies. Bush wasn't interested. He waved his hand dismissively, recalls a participant, and neatly summed up his Iraq policy in that short phrase. The Senators laughed uncomfortably; Rice flashed a knowing smile. The President left the room.

THAT was the atmosphere in which the CIA functioned - that, and as the NYT reported, Rummy trying to establish his own intelligence agency to tell him what he wanted to hear.