If he only implied it, he sure implied the hell out of it. Bush said over and over that Iraq was a threat to the United States. This latest game of “find the word ‘imminent’” is just silly. It’s tantamount to “I didn’t say ‘Simon says’”. I don’t think Bush and the CIA were on the same page at all. The CIA was cautioning him about the unreliability of the intelligence, but Bush just took the ball and ran all the way to the wrong endzone.
It burns my gut that this “blame the intelligence” balloon is getting such prominent play. It’s even more galling to consider that it might actually stick.
I’ve seen interviews and commentary from image analysts and document experts and others from inside the Farm who say they knew the administration’s case was BS the moment Secretary Powell shoveled it onto the daïs at the UN. The things Powell described were not what we were looking at, according to those who would know. But then, Powell isn’t supposed to be the expert, right? He’s just the messenger, so how is it his fault if his message was wrong?
The intelligence community is caught in an exquisite trap here. If they publicly repudiate the administration’s assertions, they know they’ll be accused of being disloyal, they know they’ll cause political chaos, and they know they’ll be endangering their job security. But if they keep their mouths shut like the good apparatchiks they are, they’ll take the blame for the failure. There won’t be any actual consequences, as job security will be the reward for playing the scapegoat, with the possible exception of a few folks at the top (though I don’t hear anybody calling for Tenet’s head, from either side). However, the emotional and psychological consequences could be grave, as the folks in the trenches, the people you really need to be on top of their game in the vastly more complex and dangerous geopolitical arena of the 21st century, will know that their leaders will not hesitate to hang them out to dry to save their own skins.
I think Bush & Co are playing a dangerous game here. He already tried to pin the yellowcake blunder on Tenet, and Tenet basically said, “Okay, I’m willing to eat this to this extent, but no more.” Government functionaries know their jobs get politicized to some extent with every change of power (as London_Calling describes at length in another thread), so they’re used to bending with the prevailing wind, but the current administration is subjecting them to a hurricane. I really wonder how far the intelligence establishment will be willing to give on this before something snaps back.
He and his entire administration both implied it and allowed the word to be used knowingly, and assented to the use of the word:
To anyone who says the Bush administration wasn’t deliberately allowing the meme “imminent threat” to fester to their advantage, here’s Josh Marshal’s “best imminent threat quote contest”
It’s fundamentally dishonest of any Bush apologist to claim that the Bush administration didn’t use and foster the perception of an imminent threat from Iraq to justify the invasion. Thus, Kay’s spin: okay, there wasn’t an imminent threat, but everyone thought there was! France, Germany, Canada…"
The difference being that those countries didn’t invade.
My two cents on the issue…
Kay cannot deny that there was not a credible WMD threat from Iraq. Period. The evidence simply doesn’t support it, and despite how many times Dick Cheney mutters vague nothings about trailers in the desert, at this point in time the only people who will still claim Iraq had WMDs and posed a war-worthy threat are either idiots or conservative apologists.
However, Kay doesn’t want to burn his bridges. Out of either a sense or loyalty to the Bush Administration, or a misguided sense of honor(*), he will not turn around and say “All this bullshit about WMDs came from the Bush White House and the guys who were massaging data to fit their pre-determined outcomes.” Since he can’t argue the facts, he’s resorted to finger-pointing, such as blaming the intelligence community and saying they owe George an apology. :rolleyes: It’s a shaky gamble, since the CIA or FBI can easily debunk that charge by pulling out a few memos, but it’s still safer for Kay than to admit his bosses fucked up.
All the rest is spin.
(* = Under the Japanese warriors’ code of bushido, a warrior who continues to serve his lord even when his lord proves to be dishonorable or corrupt is held in high regard for his loyalty. I don’t agree with this position, but it does suggest where Kay is coming from.)
First of all, I hope you are not saying that I am a Bush apologist. To be perfectly clear, I cannot stand the guy, I had to turn off the SOTU because his voice grates on me, I think he has caused very serious damage to the reputation of the United States, and needlessly sent five hundred-plus Americans to their deaths and spent $120 billion on a foolish endeavor. However, I believe it is factually incorrect for folks to keep saying that Bush spoke of an imminent threat when he never used those words – that term is other’s interpretation of what he and his advisors were saying.
For the life of me, I cannot understand why folks get so riled up about the term “imminent threat” and hardly say boo about the term “grave and growing threat,” a term that was actually and repeatedly used by the Administration. So Saddam, who was kept busy writing novels in the final days of his regime, was a grave threat? That is something to get worked up about.
I looked through that contest. That is really, really shaky stuff. So a press secretary answered a question that had the word “imminent” in it with an affirmative response. Is that really the smoking gun evidence? For all the explicit and clear statements quoted above by others about how the White House didn’t want Saddam to become an imminent threat, the best evidence of a rebuttal is an affirmative response by a press secretary to a complex question? That’s shakier than the NIE from October 2002.
I have no doubt whatsoever that the Bush Administration used its rhetoric to argue that something had to be done about Iraq right now. There were probably hundreds upon hundreds of statements to the effect that the United States cannot wait. But that does not mean that Iraq was an imminent threat; it just means that a lot of folks aren’t following the Administration’s logic. To be perfectly clear, let me diagram:
Here’s my view on the use of force:
1 - The armed forces should only be used against an immediate and severe (ie, imminent) threat.
2 - Iraq was not an immediate and severe (imminent) threat because there was no evidence that they were on the verge of attacking the United States
– Therefore, force was not justified
And the Administration’s view:
1 - The US cannot wait until a threat becomes immediate and severe (because we do not have perfect intelligence, we may not be able to detect an imminent threat)
2 - Iraq did not seem to be planning an attack, but their WMD capabilities and links to terrorism made them a “grave and growing” threat that could, someday, some year, be used to attack the US
– Therefore, we had to use force
Now the concept of “imminent threat” doesn’t even enter into the calculations of the Administration in this case. We opponents of the war should be attacking the logic of the “doctrine of preemption,” not fuming about whether Iraq was an imminent threat or not – because everyone (in Dr. Kay’s sense of the word) agrees that Iraq was not an imminent threat!!!
The press secretary is the president’s mouthpiece, by definition an administration figure without a personal agenda. No administration staffer is more carefully scrutinized, coached, and evaluated minute to minute as the press secretary is. If he assents to the use of the word imminent, then it’s as good as Bush doing so.
The essence of Bush’s wrongdoing is not the doctrine of pre-emption, which is arguably a good principle, under the right circumstances (imagine if the French had surged across the Maginot Line into the Ruhr after Austria had been annexed); it’s the weaseling way in which the Bush Administration parlayed half-truths and innuendo into a shaky foundation for the application of the doctrine of pre-emption. Perhaps that’s an argument against such a doctrine in and of itself–that it’s simply impossible to avoid the abuse of it.
It’s terribly important now that Bush be punished in the next election for doing so, to roll back the precedent that has been set: namely, that the president can get away with an unjustified foreign adventure if he’s just cagey enough in how he presents it.