Fear of Clowns

A great essay (registration required) explaining the entire Iraq/Niger yellow-cake mess - clearly and succinctly.

• From loud -- and erroneous -- claims that a link finally had been established between Niger and Iraq, you'd think the entire case for invading Iraq had finally been validated. That's hogwash.

  ... The whole Niger discussion is being used to obscure a larger truth: that the entire central case for going to war -- the threat from Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction -- has proven baseless. Saddam had no program for building nuclear weapons, though he perhaps wanted his internal and external enemies to believe he did.

  In fact, the British Butler report, issued last week, pretty much says that. Its general conclusion was that the case for war was "seriously flawed," but that Prime Minister Tony Blair had not "intentionally" misled his country into the conflict. Blair at least accepted that judgment, acknowledged that the case for Iraq's WMD programs was grossly overstated and said, "I accept full personal responsibility for the way the issue was presented and therefore for any errors made." The prime minister has run into a buzz saw of criticism and would be out of a job except for the ineptitude of the Tory opposition.

  Meanwhile, rather than focusing on the larger intelligence failure, Americans have been led by Republican spin artists to ponder the mind-numbing bureaucratic intricacies of the supposed Iraq-Niger link. Finding that such a link existed requires circular logic, and that is abundantly in evidence, particularly in the Butler report. Bush's defenders have seized on a passage in it which said, "We conclude that the statement in President Bush's State of the Union address of 28 January 2003 that 'The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa' were well-founded."

  Leaving aside the oddity of a politicized British report seeking to exonerate not only Blair but also a U.S. president, Bush's statement was anything but well-founded. The British had three sources for the Niger intelligence. One was equivocal, one appeared strong, and one, the last to come into British and American hands, was made up, everyone has now agreed, of obviously falsified documents. The Butler report hinges on the one apparently "strong" report. But a close reading of previous British reports on this indicate that the "strong" report was actually an Italian summary drawn from the forged documents, which had yet to reach British or U.S. hands.

// posted by Erik @ 7/21/2004 01:05:00 AM
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