In his New York Times column on Thursday, November 3, David Brooks trots out what will surely be the White House line about pre-war intelligence on WMD as the Libby scandal and Congressional hearings unfold: the whole world believed Saddam had WMD including Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Sam Berger and Madeleine Albright -- not to speak of Jacques Chirac, Vladimir Putin and probably Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and all the janitors at the United Nations.
But that was not the issue. What the Cheney cabal's forward-leaning spin was selling was "imminent danger" of WMD use, not their past or potential existence. Many, including UN arms inspectors, believed Saddam still had the capacity to reinvigorate WMD programs shut down after the first Gulf War and would do so if given the chance. Indeed, Iraqi scientist Mahdi Obeidi has since confirmed to me and others that he had hidden a prototype centrifuge for uranium enrichment in his back yard so the nuclear effort could later be revived. However, after more than a decade of inspections and sanctions, Saddam had been effectively defanged and contained as a threat beyond his borders.
No one in the Clinton administration or the UN Security Council outside Britain (or the likes of Brent Scowcroft) believed Saddam was a threat sufficient to meet the 2002 US National Security Strategy test that called for preemption "against forces that present imminent danger of attack." Thus, the only hope for war was to manufacture a compelling case of imminent danger.
In Congressional hearings, Cheney will surely revert to blaming the CIA, pointing to the National Intelligence Estimate that checked the "high probability" box on its assessment that "if he got fissile material," Saddam could put together a weapon quickly. Thus, the absolutely critical importance of promoting as credible the report of Niger yellowcake. The case was so shaky that pulling out this one thread would unravel it all.
Another likely line of White House defense will mimic the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in which Clinton said, in so many words, "it depends what you mean" by sex.
Here is an excerpt from an exchange I had on the subject last year with Condi Rice published in the German daily Die Welt, Italy's Corriere della Sera and Japan's Yomiuiri Shimbun under the heading: "It Depends on What You Mean By Imminent Danger."
"Gardels:...did the Iraq threat meet the test of imminent danger set out in the National Security Strategy?
"Rice: The biggest problem we have had Since Sept. 11 -- given the shadowy nature of terrorist networks, proliferation and the links between the two -- is that you never know when something is imminent. You have to begin to change your notion of 'imminence.' Now, what the President said in his State of the Union speech was that 'we could not afford to wait' until the Iraqi threat became imminent. After 12 years of trying to get Iraq to live up to its promises to comply with United Nations resolutions, a final resolution, 1441, said it had one last chance to comply. Only then did we take action to enforce.
"Did that meet the criteria of preemptive action? The world had been more than patient with Saddam Hussein.
"Gardels: The test, then, is 'that we can't wait for imminence.', not 'imminent danger,' as the strategy document says?
"Rice: What I said is that it is hard to know how to define 'imminent danger' in a world in which you can't see what is coming at you. Did we know Sept. 11 was imminent? We didn't know it on Sept. 10. We didn't know it at 7a.m. on Sept. 11.
"What you can't afford is to let threats gather because you don't know when they will become imminent."
As the debate reopens about the lead up to the Iraqi war, it would be a big mistake to let the White House and its allies frame the issue as "faulty intelligence" in which the whole world believed -- the "we were all wrong" argument that relieves anyone of responsibility for this whole calamity.
The issue must remain focused on the campaign, including media manipulation, to convince public opinion that Saddam was not just a really bad guy who killed, torutured and oppressed his own people, but that he was about to pounce out of his box and get you too. Without creating a sense of imminent threat, the Cheney cabal knew there could be no war.