War under false pretense.(The Last Word)

Bush administration officials were recently forced to admit that the president never should have spoken the following 16 words in his January 28th State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." That charge, we now know, was based on forged documents and fragmentary intelligence. Yet, according to the administration and its defenders, the contested statement was cleared by the CIA, was technically correct, comprised only one small part of a large body of evidence justifying going to war, and should be put "behind us."

The issue, President Bush is finding out, is not "behind us." It is becoming increasingly clear that the whole house of cards that made the case for the war is falling down, from the alleged nuclear purchases, to the elusive chemical and biological weapons stockpiles, to the supposed ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda terrorists. By itself, the uranium issue could have been dismissed as an unfortunate mistake. But the Bush administration engaged in a pattern of downplaying--or even ignoring--intelligence disproving its alarmist claims.

President Bush was able to play up the uranium issue only by ignoring his own intelligence agencies. According to CIA Director George Tenet, the CIA did warn the Bush administration that the evidence supporting the claim that Iraq had tried to buy uranium from Africa was unreliable. Tenet's July 11th mea culpa, parts of which the media quoted heavily, also contained the following account: "[CIA] officials who were reviewing the draft remarks [in the State of the Union speech] on uranium raised several concerns about the fragmentary nature of the intelligence with National Security Council colleagues. Some of the language was changed. From what we know now, Agency officials in the end concurred that the text in the speech was factually correct--i.e. that the British government report said that Iraq sought uranium from Africa." That is, the administration resorted to relating what the British report said because it knew that the evidence supporting the allegation was fragmentary.

Even the much-touted huge stockpiles of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons have not been proven to exist. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer warned on September 6th of last year there "is already a mountain of evidence that Saddam Hussein is gathering weapons for the purpose of using them. And adding additional information is like adding a foot to Mount Everest." But the White House's mountain of evidence hasn't amounted to a molehill. President Bush said the Iraqi regime possessed "thousands of tons of chemical agents" in an ...