No need for Perfect Storms

For well over a week, Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler, one of my favorite sites, has been taking many of Bush's critics to task for hyping the Yellowcake story. I agree with many of his criticisms. The Yellowcake story is not the ultimate smoking gun proof of the Bush administration's dishonesty that it is often made out to be. It is just one of many SOTU assertions that can be questioned. We don't know about the British intelligence. But, while some of the Yellowcake reporting is inaccurate, sloppy, and indicative of the herd mentality of our press, I think it really is important. It's important because the Bush Whitehouse is flailing for the first time, and making enormous mistakes.

For one thing, the administration is losing control with the press corps (I think having Scott McLellan as the new Ari isn't helping). With Hadley and Tenet both taking responsibility for the 16 words, the White House looks sloppy. And, it seems to me, chief among its mistakes, someone in the White House burned Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, outing her as a CIA agent. In what appears to be an act of vengeance against the Ambassador for writing in the NYTimes about his Niger trip, the White House has:
-committed a federal crime
-ruined a CIA agent's career and endangered her safety
-weakened our WMD intelligence.
That was unwise of them.

I believe that Bush and Friends have crossed a certain threshold, and I think the Sepember 11th honeymoon is over. Obviously, the Yellowcake issue didn't happen in a vacuum. For example, our ongoing war in Iraq is, well, ongoing. Our soldiers in Iraq are still being killed at a rate of more than one a day. Our political development job is not going to well. It's costing us a lot of money- about $1 billion a week- to occupy. Our economy is still doing very poorly. Unemployment is still high. The stock market is starting to uptick a bit. I mean, the Dow's over 9000! Hooray! Oh yeah, we're running some of the biggest deficits ever. Near $450 billion this year (that would be the biggest ever in dollar terms). A very large chunk of that seems to come from those tax cuts that aren't having the same effect they were supposed to.

Because of all these issues and others, Bush is no longer untouchable.

Like Somerby, I think there are plenty of issues more scandalous than those 16 words. But I think those 16 words do figure in significantly, just not necessarily the way they have, by and large, been interpreted. For one thing, Bush said that the Brits said that Iraq was looking to score some uranium. Actually, he said he learned that from the Brits. So he was going with British intelligence over the prevailing consensus of the US intelligence community- cherry picking data. In addition, Bush tells us that Saddam was pursuing yellowcake from Africa. Not enriched uranium, yellowcake. The consensus is that Iraq already had more than 500 tons of the stuff. And it would take a lot of time, effort, and industrial facilities to enrich the uranium- it would be almost impossible to accomplish with UNMOVIC and the international community in Saddam's face. And Iraq was pursuing the uranium. Yet Condoleezza Rice said that the smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud. Bush was misleading America. as he had so many times in the past, he said something that sounded scary (you say the word uranium and people think World War 3) but really didn't mean too much.

So much of the Iraq war was built upon this kind of fearmongering dishonesty. The intelligence that suggested Saddam's enormous stores of chemical weapons was from 1998, right before Clinton, tired of Iraq's treatment of UNSCOM inspection teams, bombed dozens of suspected chem and bioweapons sites. That is, not only was the intel old, but it predated just the kind of event that would have radically altered the volume of Chem and Bioweapons.

We also got the balsa wood planes of mass destruction, and, after the war, the tractor trailers of mass destruction. Not to mention the aluminum tubes that could have been used to process uranium if they were a different gauge and massively altered and in fact were much better suited for conventional missile construction. That was in the SOTU also, wasn't it. And, pretty much the grandaddy of misleading hype, Bush's constant association of terrorism, Al Qaeda, and 9/11. No credible connection was ever made between Saddam and 9/11, the connection with Al Qaeda is unproven and weak, and Iraq's support of terrorist organizations is significantly less than, say, its neighbor Iran, and perhaps less than Syria. According to a recent PIPA (out of U of MD) poll, 7 of 10 believe Bush implied Saddam was involved in 9/11. At the very least, Bush is the type of serial exagerrator he made Gore out to be. At worst, he is a liar who uses fear to persuade, a deceiver whose policies have endangered our economic and national security.

Oh, and to those who justify the raging violence in Iraq with your flypaper theory- that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I won't go into the many reasons I feel that way- I think JM Marshall and others have done a good enough job- but didn't it occur to you that it sounds like the logic of an eight year old?