Fawaz Turk

WASHINGTON, 5 February 2004 — The drama of being president of the United States, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in human history, is anchored in how you balance your multiple roles as commander in chief, steward of the country’s political and economic destiny, arbiter of the complex interplay between Congress and government agencies and, above all, as master salesman of American conduct around the world.

And salesmanship in this case is successful only when a president, pursuing a broad consensus for a difficult policy decision, such as going to war, levels with the people who had elected him to office.

With revelations made last week by former weapons inspector David Kay, that Saddam Hussein had no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction when sundry officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN, were claiming emphatically that he had, President Bush finds himself on the defensive.

This was followed shortly afterwards by the news that the House and Senate intelligence committees, which had worked separately for the past seven months, have unearthed a series of failures in prewar intelligence on Iraq, leading members to question either the competence, credibility or motive of CIA operatives.

Why did these operatives fail to detect, as we now know, that the Iraqi chain of command for developing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons had fallen apart long before the US invasion took place? Was the failure derived from the CIA’s heavy reliance on outdated circumstantial evidence and a misinterpretation of communication intercepts? Or, to put a sinister spin on it, as many commentators have openly done, was it because intelligence analysts slanted their data to conform to perceived or actual political pressure from the White House?

Lest we forget, President Bush’s neocon crowd have, from the get go, made clear their ideological agenda, which included the overthrow of Saddam’s regime. Iraq, they insisted, possessed weapons of mass destruction and it thus posed “an imminent threat” not only to its neighbors but to the US as well. In high-profile speeches in the months preceding the war, they dominated the public debate with a frenzied torrent of apocalyptic pronouncements that carried all before it. It was like a runaway train, as it were, which, once it left the station, kept going faster and faster on its destination — to Baghdad.

Some intelligence analysts may have gone along to get along, others may have been influenced, consciously or not, by the need to reinforce the biases of the administration, and others may have had political motives to doctor their reports. Which is which is yet to be determined.

Meanwhile, we now learn that it is more than likely that Iraqi scientists engaged in their own campaign to deceive their leader, telling him they had weapons that did not exist, and equally likely that Saddam Hussein, an insecure man at heart, wanted to project the macho image, in the Arab world and beyond, of a tough guy, in possession of lethal weapons, whom no one could mess with. One thing we do know, however, is that, as the curtain parted on the approaching tsunami of shock and awe, the man remained oblivious, preoccupying himself with writing novels, pulp fiction about a damsel in distress (Iraq) saved from being violated by a gallant prince (himself), and leaving it to his notorious windbag and fantasist of an information minister to tell Iraqis what was going on.

For now, President Bush has a lot to answer for. In senate testimony last Wednesday, Kay said that his six months of searching in Iraq (backed by a staff of 1,200) had convinced him that Saddam had not possessed illicit weapons. Period.

All of which, not surprisingly, ignited the current brouhaha over whether the administration was duplicitous in twisting the intelligence to suit its war agenda.

Whichever way you look at it, there was a big screw up there. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called the prewar estimate of Iraq’s weapons capabilities “a world intelligence failure.”

That it is, And that is why in the coming weeks, President Bush will have a challenging job of salesmanship.