Normalizing Evil

When we let officials lie, reality becomes relative

Lesley Stahl’s deferential 60 Minutes interview with demagogue Marjorie Taylor Greene wasn’t the only softball interview last week. You may have been as disappointed as I was by the tepid, superficial discussions of the 20th anniversary of the Iraq war.

For example, this PBS NewsHour interview allowed Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz to deflect the conversation from whether he had lied about the need to go to war to a distraction over whether we were better off that Saddam Hussein is not in power. Charles Dulfer, who headed the official Iraq Survey Group, was allowed to avoid his finding that there was not one ounce of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons in Iraq and talk instead of the vague claim that Saddam might have been able to restart the programs if we had not invaded.

Or this disappointing panel at the Council on Foreign Relations that dodged the hard questions and devolved into portraying the George W. Bush administration as a Shakespearian drama struggling over intelligence that Saddam Hussein was hosting hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters and, thus, had to rush to war.

Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

Twenty years later, there’s actually little debate on the hard facts. We know for certain that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. We know that the intelligence was manipulated. We know that this war was a costly blunder. We also know that no one responsible for the catastrophe has been held to account.

Not one of the dozens of claims the Bush administration made about Iraq’s alleged stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, missiles, drones, or, most importantly, Iraq’s nuclear weapons and ties to Al Qaeda, were true. Not one. Yet no one in the administration was held accountable for the hundreds of false statements or—if you believe they made the statements in good faith—for their faulty judgments and incompetence.

The most that Duelfer was able to tell Congress in October 2004 at the conclusion of his official investigation was that Saddam might have had the “intention” to restart these programs at some point. That is because the weapons did not exist. Saddam did not destroy them shortly before the war, nor did he secretly move them to Syria, as some claim. As Duelfer reported in 2004, the weapons and facilities had been destroyed by the United Nations inspectors, U.S. bombing strikes and Saddam himself in the 1990s. He found no evidence of “concerted efforts to restart the program.”

I spent years tracking weapons of mass destruction and tried as best I could before the war to refute claims that Saddam poised an imminent threat. I was then director of the Non-Proliferation Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, working with a great team that included Jon Wolfsthal, Miriam Rajkumar, Jane Vaynman, Dipali Mukhopadhyay and Alexis Orton. I disagreed strongly at the time with the public presentation that persuaded many people to support invasion - Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations Security Council in February 2003.

I knew Secretary Powell and have great respect for him. He himself deeply regretted his testimony years later. I regretted it at the time, writing:

Secretary Powell's case was powerful, but partial and incomplete…Security Council members need little convincing that Saddam is a liar or that Iraq is not in full compliance with UN resolutions. What they need, however, is proof that Iraq actually has chemical or biological weapons. The evidence seems to point to further material breaches of UN resolution 1441. However, the Secretary did not, or could not, provide hard evidence that Iraq still had chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

I warned of what was to come:

Few support or trust Saddam, but most believe that he is successful caged and his programs throttled. Most nations fear that the invasion and occupation of Iraq entails far more political, economic and military risks to the region and to the world than continued inspections. They believe the inspections have barely begun and must be given time to work.

One year after the invasion (and before Dulfer’s findings), I wrote with Carneige Endowment President Jessica Mathews, Vice-President George Perkovich and Research Assistant Alexis Orton one of the reports I am most proud of in my career. The comprehensive WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications (2004). It remains the best summary of what was claimed, how the intelligence was manipulated, what we knew at the time and what we learned after the invasion.

We concluded:

Drawing useful lessons from experience begins with an accurate record of what happened. It is not too soon to begin this inquiry into the Iraq experience, because public confusion is widespread and revisionism has already begun. Some pundits now claim that the war was never about WMD but was undertaken to bring democracy to Iraq or the entire Middle East. Others say it was a response to 9/11 or was the necessary answer to a composite threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s domestic evils, past aggressions, defiance of the United Nations, and desire for WMD.

The administration has adjusted its public expectation of what Iraq will be found to have had from actual weapons and massive stockpiles of agent, to weapon programs, to “capabilities,” and even to the “capability that Iraq sought” for weapons of mass destruction. U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz has called WMD merely “the one reason everyone could agree on,” chosen for “bureaucratic reasons.”

We found, after rigorous research, that:

Administration officials systematically misrepresented the threat from Iraq’s WMD and ballistic missile programs, beyond the intelligence failures noted above, by:

• Treating nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as a single “WMD threat.” The conflation of three distinct threats, very different in the danger they pose, distorted the cost/benefit analysis of the war. (p. 52)

• Insisting without evidence—yet treating as a given truth—that Saddam Hussein would give whatever WMD he possessed to terrorists. (p. 52)

• Routinely dropping caveats, probabilities, and expressions of uncertainty present in intelligence assessments from public statements. (p. 53)

• Misrepresenting inspectors’ findings in ways that turned threats from minor to dire. (p. 53)

The failure of journalists to stay with core truths when questioning officials means that the lessons of the Iraq War may be lost, as was the central truth of the Vietnam War. As Lawrence O’Donnell told me in this interview on the day the US left Afghanistan (below), the central lesson was “Don’t do that again.” I said in reply. “That’s exactly right. And for twenty years [after that war], we did not. What is now referred to as ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ was when we listened to those lessons, when we understood that this was a war we never should have started.”

I discussed with O’Donnell and fellow guest David Rothkopf that for the thirty years after the end of the Vietnam, many conservatives and neoconservatives dedicated themselves to refuting that lesson, to claim that we didn’t lose the war. Rather, cowardly politicians in Washington had cut off funding for the war, stabbing us in the back. This helped mobilize public support for going to war with Iraq.

Similarly, because we never held to account those who manipulated the pre-war intelligence, officials in the Trump administration felt they had free rein to spin their own reality. The lesson they took from the false narrative created to justify an invasion that was that they, too, could do it - but on steroids. Not just on foreign policy, but on everything, everywhere, all at once.

The circus of lies we are witnessing this week as Donald Trump is indicted has its roots in the lies created twenty years ago and never fully corrected. This is the price we pay when we avoid the tough calls, when we treat liars as if they are just representing one side of an issue.