INTELLIGENCE AND IRAQ

More than five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the Senate Intelligence Committee has – after lengthy review and plenty of stonewalling – found that the White House knowingly exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. The committee’s report doesn’t change the difficult position the United States faces in Iraq, but it does reiterate the value of skepticism as the country considers – through two presidential candidates with very different foreign policy strategies – its future role in Iraq as well as how to deal with other countries.

The committee began its investigation, at the behest of Democrat Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, in March 2003. It was supposed to be completed a year later, but then-chairman Pat Roberts, a Republican from Kansas, succeeded in delaying the report until well after the 2004 presidential election. Partisan divides continue to plague the committee, with five Republicans voting against the report and issuing their own.

The committee’s vice chairman, Republican Kit Bond of Missouri, points out that the report does not examine the statements made by Democratic leaders in the time before the Iraq war. This overlooks the fact that Democrats, then in the minority, were heavily reliant on the Bush administration for information about Iraq’s weapons capability. Ironically, Sen. Bond accuses the Democrats on the committee of writing the report without Republican input and of cherry picking information. Those were the same strategies used by Republicans when they were in the majority in the Senate to first downplay the need for this review and then to stall it.

Republican Sens. Olympia Snowe and Chuck Hagel were the only Republicans to support the committee’s report. “We firmly believe that process should be as transparent as possible to empower the public to arrive at their own conclusions,” the senators said when the report was released last week. “We expect future administrations to learn from this comprehensive review and avoid making similar mistakes.”

The mistakes detailed in the Intelligence Committee report include statements by the president, vice president and secretary of state that Iraq had provided training and weapons to al-Qaida, that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups and that Sept. 11 hijacker Muhammad Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in 2001. These statements were either directly contradicted by available intelligence or not substantiated by intelligence reports. Emphatic statements about Iraq’s weapons capabilities also did not reflect uncertainties in the intelligence.

The administration either knew or should have known these claims were not true, the report concludes.

“Before taking the country to war, this administration owed it to the American people to give them a 100 percent accurate picture of the threat we faced,” Sen. Rockefeller said last week.

Congress also owed it to the American people to ask more questions and to try to get better information from the White House and intelligence agencies.

As the administration continues to put a positive spin on the situation in Iraq and as the public faces a choice between John McCain’s stay-the-course strategy in Iraq or Barack Obama’s promise of a quick troop withdrawal, that mistake of complacency can’t be repeated.