FIXING THE FACTS

Anyone still paying attention to the war in Iraq—any one whose interest goes beyond Washington’s insistence that we’re winning and things are getting better—might have noticed two astonishing developments reported recently.

In late April, the plug was pulled on those insisting that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, which was the chief reason for the United States’ attack. Charles Duelfer, the Washington-appointed chief weapons inspector, issued his final report which virtually eliminated any chance that the weapons were in existence.

Duelfer’s initial report last fall concluded the weapons didn’t exist within the country. His addendum this month erased the possibility suggested by some die-hard war supporters that weapons were moved to Syria.

The irony behind Duelfer’s report is that it matches those produced by the United Nations’ inspectors before the war—reports thoroughly discredited by war supporters. It almost seems that war was on the agenda no matter what the intelligence said.

Hold it right there, buster. Questioning White House motives in that way is nothing short of unpatriotic hogwash, many of you might say.

But former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill confirmed the charge, noting that taking out Saddam Hussein was on top of the President’s to do list at the first National Security Council meeting shortly after George W. Bush took office in 2002.

Of course hard-liners discredited O’Neill, but now they have another source to contend with. In the days before Britain’s Tony Blair was reelected last week, a classified intelligence document was leaked to the press from a July 2002 meeting—about eight months before the bombing began, and when the administration still claimed that no decision had been made.

Richard Dearlove, then head of Britain’s equivalent to our CIA, summarized a visit to Washington by writing: “Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD.” The memo stated that the case was thin, and added that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

Plan a war, then fix the facts to justify the action. With Duelfer’s report, we can now conclude that none of the “facts” were justified.

Duelfer’s conclusion arrived almost to the day of the 30-year observance of the end of the war in Vietnam. That conflict, also, was launched on deception. One generation later, we’ve already forgotten.