The lies and mistakes that led us into Iraq, and their long arc
Author makes clear dangers of ideology-driven “facts” and why Americans were so deluded
WASHINGTON — After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a blue-ribbon commission and congressional committees uniformly blamed the U.S. national security apparatus for failing to “connect the dots” of evidence that might have exposed Osama bin Laden’s plot.
Less than two years later, President George W. Bush launched a ruinous war in Iraq based on a far greater intelligence failure, one that saw the CIA, Pentagon and other agencies effectively make up the evidence that the White House sought to justify invading a country that had not attacked — or even threatened to attack — the United States.
The serial mistruths, mistakes and misperceptions about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged support for al-Qaida are laid out in devastating detail in Robert Draper’s authoritative new book, “To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq.”
This is well-trod history, but Draper mines newly declassified documents and tracks down previously unavailable CIA and Defense officials to flesh out the sordid story of the run-up to the March 2003 invasion, the start of a grinding conflict that would last eight years and kill nearly 4,500 Americans.
Why now? Two decades on, there are no new headlines to be pulled from the toxic personal and policy disputes of the Bush era. But Draper has written a compelling narrative of just how calamitous an ideology-first approach to fact-finding can be in the White House, and why
Americans were so badly deluded.
Unlike President Trump, who utters falsehoods daily, Bush was a true believer — which is exactly what made him impervious to conflicting evidence or doubts about the supposed Iraqi threat.
That folly has given Americans just cause to question U.S. intelligence estimates and, perhaps worse, has gifted Trump with a regular foil for jabs at experts and specialists even in his own administration. The erosion of trust that fueled his base is just one of the many poisonous after-effects of the war.
The road to that war began a few days after the 2001 attacks, when Vice President Dick Cheney led his aides to CIA headquarters in Virginia. The nation’s top spy agency was frantically searching for a follow-up assault by bin Laden, who was based in Afghanistan.
But Cheney insisted the CIA needed to focus on Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, despite the CIA briefer’s conviction that there was no evidence of Iraqi involvement in the attacks. As one later said, it was like asking, “Did Belgium do this?”
Over the next year, Cheney and other ideologues would push their bogus theory, as well as increasingly dire but equally false claims that Saddam had secretly produced and stockpiled an arsenal of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
The Pentagon created its own so-called intelligence shop to funnel unsubstantiated reports to Cheney and Bush, many from informants with little credibility. Led by a deferential George Tenet, the CIA quickly fell in line, repeatedly strengthening its cautious assessments of the Iraqi threat to help the White House convince the public of an urgent danger.
Bush needed little convincing: He had ordered up Iraq war plans only two months after the Sept. 11 attacks. As Draper writes, the rush to war was driven by fear, not hard intelligence, and “by imagination, not facts.” It was thus difficult for critics to push back when Bush warned, in October 2002, that “we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
Yet Iraq had no nuclear program, no poison gases, no shells filled with deadly viruses. U.N. inspectors had scoured the country for months, but their failure to find illicit weapons was viewed in Washington only as proof that Iraq had cleverly hidden them.
Was Iraq in league with bin Laden, as Cheney claimed? An