Rewriting history

During a promotional tour for his new book, the former head of CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA), General Michael Hayden, has stated that the intelligence agencies are to blame for being wrong about Iraq’s WMDs and not the White House. General Hayden’s ruminations come at an opportune moment. If we’re meant to believe his words, it would shift blame for and unjust invasion from a political party to the shoulders of retired spies during election season. The Republican Party has not been able to put forward a viable presidential candidate since George W Bush tarnished the brand by pushing for the Iraq invasion. Their current preferred crop of nominees still refuse to concede the mistakes of their past and are summarily being crushed by Donald Trump, a party outsider. Hayden’s open offer to fall on the grenade provides an opening for other nominees to admit Iraq actions were unfounded without taking any blame.

In an interview with NPR, Hayden said that their intelligence estimates were incorrect and added “It was a clean swing and a miss. It was our fault.” The baseball analogy has many Americans cringing because it’s oversimplifying a situation which led to insurmountable death, destruction and cost trillions of dollars.

Despite Hayden’s efforts to separate faulty intelligence and the White House’s decision to go to war, the facts state otherwise. In September 2002, a classified report titled “Status of Iraq’s WMD Programs” appeared on the desk of Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld. The report was an account of what US intelligence didn’t know about Iraq’s WMD programme. The report, now declassified, concluded that “our knowledge of the Iraqi (nuclear) weapons program is based largely — perhaps 90% — on analysis of imprecise intelligence.”

Rumsfeld withheld the report with key members of the administration such as Colin Powell, since he was concerned about the report’s potential to undermine the case for war. Had the public known the uncertainty that was locked up rather than the certainty proffered in front of cameras, support for the invasion of Iraq would have been nonexistent. Between 2002 and 2003, top officials from the Bush administration continued to spin tales about Saddam Hussein and his links to al Qaeda despite the CIA’s unwillingness to support claims that he had been involved in the 9/11 attacks. Former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell has since accused Vice-President, Dick Cheney of pressuring the agency to find Iraq’s ties to al Qaeda that simply didn’t exist. Similarly, the documents used to suggest that Saddam Hussein was buying yellow uranium cake from Niger were proven to be fake by the IAEA before the Iraq invasion.

Former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, who was tasked with finding Iraqi WMDs, declared that the US government was obviously searching for evidence to support a foregone conclusion. He added that “there were about 700 inspections, and in no case did we find weapons of mass destruction.” The inspections were cut short by the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003.

Hayden’s attempt to rewrite history should only find traction in the very laziest of minds and weakest of memory. The White House was not only aware of shoddy intelligence, but even went as far as to hide it while promoting untruths. It is also clear that during the lead up to the war, Iraq willingly cooperated with UN inspections and even provided names of over a hundred scientists to interview. Nevertheless, Bush rushed into war, hundreds of thousands of lives were lost, and now we have IS to deal with.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 9^th, 2016.

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