To call “Bush Lied, People Died” a “slander,” one has to make the argument that the Bush Administration coolly analyzed the intelligence concerning the Iraqi threat and let the facts as presented – not their ideological or strategic predilections – drive its decisions. One has to argue that the Administration did not “sex up” intelligence that fit its ends or downplay, or suppress, intelligence that contradicted or undermined its assertions.
News reports at the time suggested the administration was looking more for reasons to go to war than looking for facts. And when Hans Blix presented the case that these WMDs you’re talking about – they’re not there, the Administration’s response was “Then they’re somewhere else!”
And the assumption that the people involved in the decision making would do so in a fair and balanced manner was always a stretch given that many of them had a track record of prevarication.
As members of Ford Administration, Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney worked hard to undermine arms reduction efforts with the Soviets. They believed the Soviet threat was greater than the CIA believed (when, in hindsight it was actually considerably weaker than the CIA portrayed). They didn’t have any stellar insight leading them to think the Soviet menace was greater than advertised. It was just a “gut” thing, the same sort of “thinking” that would guide them three decades later.
Anyway, tacking right to appeal to the conservative base, Ford made Rumsfeld (previously his chief of staff) his secretary of defense and made Cheney (Rumsfeld’s No. 2) chief of staff.
From Richard Rhodes’ Arsenal of Folly (p. 119):
“Rumsfeld and Cheney were the right wing of the Ford Administration,” writes the journalist Sidney Blumenthal, “opposed to the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, and they operated by stealthy internal maneuver.” Once Rumsfeld became secretary of defense, he attempted to sabotage Kissinger’s SALT II negotiations. An important reason for [CIA director William] Colby’s replacement with the more pliable George H.W. Bush, Blumenthal says, was the CIA’s unwillingness to cooperate with the Rumsfeld-Cheney effort. “Instead of producing intelligence reports simply showing an urgent Soviet military buildup, the CIA issued complex analyses that were filled with qualifications. Its National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet threat contained numerous caveats, dissents and contradictory opinions. From the conservative point of view the CIA was guilty of groupthink, unwilling to challenge its own premises and hostile to conservative ideas.
The pliant George H.W. Bush, under orders from the right-tacking Ford, would subsequently create an outside team to look at the NIE on Soviet Strategic Objectives. Why? Because the assessment wasn’t panicked enough. The so-called Team B included two neocons just making their bones, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Pipes.
Again from Rhodes:
Writing a decade before Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and their associates in the administration of George W. Bush pushed the CIA to inflate the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, a Nitze (Paul Nitze, another hawk who was on Team B) biographer, David Callahan, identified a similar modus operandi in the Team B episode.
To critics in Congress, the Team B episode was a blatant attempt to undermine the objectivity of intelligence and twist CIA estimates to fit an ideological agenda. Nor did the timing of [George H. W.] Bush’s undertaking – during the last months of the Ford Administration – seem coincidental. Democrats suspected that Team B was aimed at saddling any incoming administration with a preordained, anti-Soviet pessimism. Three congressional committees began investigations into the affair. Summing up the sentiments of many who looked into the matter, Senator Gary Hart would write that “’competitive analysis’ and use of selected outside experts was little more than a camouflage for a political effort to force the National Intelligence Estimate to take a more bleak view of the Soviet Threat.”
From a Lawrence Korb piece on the topic.
Although the Team B report contained little factual data, it was enthusiastically received by conservative groups such as the Committee on the Present Danger, whose members included Ronald Reagan, and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. But the report turned out to be grossly inaccurate. For example, it said that the Soviets would have 500 intercontinental Backfire bombers capable of striking the United States by 1984. In reality, only 235 were deployed. Team B also claimed that the Soviets were working on an anti-acoustic submarine, though they failed to find any evidence of one. The hawks explained away this lack of evidence by stating that "the submarine may have already been deployed because it appeared to have evaded detection."[3]
Maybe the sub was deployed in Syria
A similar situation arose with the CIA analysis of the role of the KGB in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981. The CIA analysis showed that the attack had been carried out by Turkish fascist extremists and that there was reliable documentation that proved that neither the Soviet Union nor Bulgaria was involved in the plot. Nonetheless, Casey produced a study to the contrary, which reached President Reagan and other senior members of the administration.
In the first Bush administration, the CIA claimed that Soviet spending on weapons started declining in 1988 and that the number of Soviet strategic launchers was staying the same or declining. Then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney argued publicly that the Soviet Union's efforts to modernize its strategic nuclear weapons were "robust and continuous." [7] Moreover, Cheney asserted that there was "absolutely no evidence" that Gorbachev's ascension had altered Soviet strategic planning. [8]
Saying the bumper-sticker charge “Bush Lied, people died” suggests that the people who led our country to war were above twisting evidence to their own ends (which may have been driven by motives pure as the driven snow). But there’s nothing in the backgrounds of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to suggest they’re that kind. And, in the buildup to Iraq, the U.S. public was the victim of a con that had been played many times before.
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