July
18, 2003, 9:45 a.m.
No Yellowcake Walk
Questions the
administration’s critics ought to be asking.
wo facts bring perspective to bear on what some are now calling Yellowcakegate.
1) Democrats who are serious about national security — e.g. Joe Biden,
Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman — all voted in favor of the use of military
force in Iraq, and none is saying he now regrets that vote. They should
be commended for courage because, as CNN's Bill Schneider has pointed
out, they are all feeling intense heat from the far left of their party,
a faction that was vehemently opposed to intervention in Iraq and is highly
active during this primary season.
2) Everyone who
is serious about national security — British intelligence, U.S. intelligence,
even Dominique de Villepin — recognizes that Saddam Hussein had weapons
of mass destruction (WMD). He used chemical WMDs against his own people;
he admitted to having biological WMDs; and he intended to reconstitute his
nuclear WMD program. To do that, uranium was required. Where does a rogue
dictator shop for uranium? Impoverished African countries are recommended.
The British believe that's why Saddam sent a "trade delegation"
to Niger in 1999. That may even explain the forged documents: Apparently,
an African official understood that there were Europeans and Americans who
would pay good money for documentary evidence that Saddam's trade delegation
had successfully completed its mission.
One more pertinent fact: Human
Rights Watch estimates there are 300,000 people missing in Iraq. New
mass graves containing thousands of bodies are being found virtually every
day. It is not a misuse of the English language to say that Saddam himself
was a WMD.
None of this should imply that President Bush is beyond criticism —
by Democrats or even by those who generally support his policies on fighting
terrorists and terrorist masters. None of this should imply that there are
no questions that deserve inquiry by members of Congress. Let me start with
three:
1) The 16 words in Bush's State of the Union speech were hardly "infamous"
as so many journalists have been reporting. (Actually, those who use such
adjectives are not reporting — they are editorializing.) But Bush should
not have said that the British government "has learned" that Saddam
sought uranium from Africa. He should have said that the British government
"believes" or "strongly suspects" that Saddam sought
uranium in Africa. As far as we know, the evidence on which the British
relied isn't certain enough to use a word as conclusive as "learned."
I don't really expect Bush to be a wordsmith. That's hardly his strong suit.
But there are wordsmiths on the White House staff, and they deserve to be
scolded for their imprecision.
2) Bush has said that the intelligence he's been receiving is "darned
good." Distressingly, that is not true. It needs to be candidly acknowledged
that since the end of the Cold War our intelligence services have not responded
effectively to the threat of jihadist terrorism. For example:
We did not have reliable human-intelligence assets inside Saddam's regime,
either before the first chapter of the Gulf War or over the past 13 years
leading up to the most recent phase of the conflict. Our intelligence
has not been able to discover what Saddam did with his stockpiles of chemical
and biological weapons. Did he hide them, transfer them, or destroy them?
We did not
have intelligence assets in the radicalized European mosques where many
terrorists were being recruited. In the 1990s,
it appears our intelligence analysts didn't grasp how dangerous it was
that tens of thousands of terrorists were being trained in al Qaeda camps
in Afghanistan. (I assume they at least knew that such training was taking
place.) Our intelligence
experts did not know that even as we were paying North Korea billions
of dollars in exchange for not building nuclear weapons, they were building
them anyway. President
Clinton bombed an aspirin factory in the Sudan based on what was apparently
faulty intelligence. President
Clinton bombed suspected WMD sites in Iraq — did he hit any? Our intelligence
services didn't predict or prevent the attacks on our embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania or on the USS Cole. Our intelligence
services still haven't been able to determine whether those Iraqis implicated
in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center were doing so on Saddam's
orders, as researcher and former Clinton adviser Laurie
Mylroie has long maintained. Our intelligence
services failed to respond to increasing terrorist threats from the Middle
East and Central Asia by recruiting and training a sufficient number of
agents and analysts fluent in such languages as Arabic, Urdu, and Pashtun.
Our intelligence
didn't predict or prevent 9/11.
I could go on, but you get the point. It is not President Bush's fault
that our intelligence-gathering and clandestine capabilities are today
insufficient for the challenges of the 21st century, but it is his responsibility
to fix the problem. If he believes George Tenet is the man to accomplish
that, fine. But it has to get done and the president is responsible for
making sure that happens as quickly and effectively as possible. If not,
this will be a legitimate issue for the Democratic presidential candidate.
3) What may be the biggest mystery in this melodrama has been missed by
all the major media as far as I'm aware. Early in 2002, Vice President
Dick Cheney had questions about reports of Saddam buying uranium from
Niger. So he asked the Central Intelligence Agency to find out the truth.
Consider: Here's a request from the White House on a vital national-security
issue. Does the CIA put their top spies on the case? No. Who do they put
on the case? No one. Instead, they apparently decided to give the assignment
to a diplomat.
I assume they contacted the State Department. Even so, they didn't get
the Foreign Service's most talented ambassador, someone with investigative
skills and broad experience in nuclear proliferation and related issues.
No, the assignment went to a retiree who is far to the left of the Bush
administration. Why?
That retiree was Joseph C. Wilson IV, former ambassador to Gabon, and
one-time deputy to ambassador April Glaspie in Iraq. (You'll recall she
was the U.S. official who reportedly told Saddam: "We have no opinion
on your Arab-Arab conflicts, such as your dispute with Kuwait.")
Wilson's investigation, according
to his recent New York Times op-ed, consisted of his spending
"eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people."
He added: "It did not take long to conclude that it was highly doubtful
that any such transaction [sale of uranium from Niger to Iraq] had ever
taken place."
Wilson's conclusion was probably correct. It's likely that no such transaction
occurred — which begs the question of whether Saddam attempted to
complete such a transaction, as the British believe and as Bush said in
his SOTU.
But let's imagine for just a moment that one of the officials with whom
Wilson met had accepted a million-dollar bribe for facilitating the transfer
of uranium to Saddam's agents. What is the likelihood that that information
would have been disclosed to Wilson over sips of sweet mint tea? Not huge,
I'd wager.
When did the vice president learn that this was the manner in which his
orders had been carried out? Is there an explanation for such dereliction
of duty by CIA and, possibly, by State as well? Was anyone held accountable?
Inquiring minds should want to know.
— Clifford D. May, a former New York
Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation
for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism.
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wo facts bring perspective to bear on what some are now calling Yellowcakegate.
We did not have reliable human-intelligence assets inside Saddam's regime,
either before the first chapter of the Gulf War or over the past 13 years
leading up to the most recent phase of the conflict. 
