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Hoodwinked: The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War
In America, the wife of the former ambassador who exposed George Bush's sixteen-word State of the Union fib about uranium from Niger, is now being harassed by allies of the administration. In Britain, the scientist who blew the whistle on Tony Blair has been driven to suicide. For all of us who, thanks to these whistle-blowers, now realize that we have been hoodwinked and want to understand exactly how, national security analyst John Prados has compiled and annotated the key source documents behind the selling of the Iraq war to the American public. As these CIA reports, Pentagon briefings, and other materials clearly show, Bush and his spokespeople were playing a crude game of three-card monte, claiming Iraqi ties to Al Qaeda, weapons of mass destruction, and imminent threats, which are here exposed as half-truths, exaggerations, and outright fabrications of a warmongering administration. Prados, a noted historian of intelligence and national security, offers readers a firsthand view of incontrovertible evidence that we were had.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
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About the author
John Prados
44 books34 followersDr. John Prados is an American historian & researcher whose primary areas of specialisation are the history of World War II, the Vietnam War, the Cold War and politico-military affairs generally. He earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University in Political Science (International Relations). Dr. Prados is a senior fellow and project director with the National Security Archive at George Washington University (Washington, D.C.).
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November 15, 2024
In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq in violation of international law. The invasion and occupation resulted in maybe a million or more Iraqi deaths, the destruction of an entire country, and the devastation of an entire region. Jihadi terrorism also received a huge shot in the arm thanks to the invasion. How did this catastrophe come to pass?
The answer is provided in this volume, in which national security analyst John Prados has compiled the key documents that bear on the Bush administration's efforts to justify the U.S. invasion, along with in-depth analysis of their significance. It is the author's contention that the charges about Iraqi development of weapons of mass destruction, the official pretext offered for the war, were trumped up -- contrived as a cover for plans the administration was intent on executing in any case, rather than driven by genuine security concerns. As Prados puts it, "[T]he succession of charges the Bush administration leveled against Iraq were offensive rather than defensive tactics: they were designed to create the conditions President Bush hoped would justify a war." (xii) This is a rather serious charge, with ominous implications, and the book is devoted to substantiating it.
In the early months of the Bush II administration, the objective of "regime change" in Iraq was articulated by the circle of Neoconservatives in the administration, but the dominant view was that a continuation of the process of "containing" Iraq through the sanctions regime maintained under U.S. pressure by the UN Security Council (which, incidentally, caused hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths) was the preferred course. There was a notable shift in the consensus in the administration after the 9/11 atrocities. Prados observes that "[I]t appears that in either late December 2001 or early 2002, George W. Bush issued a series of orders", among them "authoriz[ing] a CIA covert operation ... against Saddam" and "instructing the Pentagon to initiate planning for an invasion of Iraq". (7-8) In other words, already at this stage, the objective of "regime change" was firmly implanted in administration thinking. This demonstrates the disingenuousness in attempts at justifying the invasion by reference to Saddam's alleged non-compliance with UN resolutions on disarmament. Putting aside the fact that the explicit wording of these resolutions forbade such a unilateral use of force, the claim also overlooks the fact that the Bush administration clearly had no intention of giving the UN disarmament procedures a chance to work. While the Bush gang participated in a charade of diplomacy, they were in reality conspiring to commit aggression. In the face of considerable opposition to the administration's war plans, domestic and international, it would be necessary to undertake a major propaganda offensive to pull this off. These efforts went into high gear, Prados shows, in August 2002.
As the war drums began seriously beating in the fall of 2002, there were increasing demands for an official intelligence assessment regarding the threat posed to the United States by Iraq. Such an assessment came in the form of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which remains classified but have been made public in a "distilled" form. The press, the public, and Congress were provided with a CIA "white paper", purporting to reproduce the evidence given in the NIE. As Prados points out "George Bush's war began with the hoodwinking of America" with this "white paper", which contained charges against Iraq "the sum total of [which] hardly justified all-out war", many of which were "demonstrably false" or "ambiguous" and all of which "could have been resolved by a process of international inspection to which Iraq had already agreed." (49) The "white paper" is featured in this volume along with point-by-point commentary by the author showing most of the claims to be deeply problematic from a factual and/or analytical viewpoint -- in fact, they amounted in several instances to laughably crude deception tactics. Two key claims advanced by the administration in justification for the invasion are discussed in-depth: Iraq's procurement of certain aluminum tubes that allegedly could be used for centrifuges in nuclear weapons systems. Confident proclamations were repeatedly made by administration officials to the effect that these constituted certain proof of Iraqi intent to go nuclear. In fact, highly knowledgeable observers, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, State Department intelligence, and others, maintained throughout this period that the discovery proved nothing of the sort, and they had solid grounds for making this claim, as Prados shows. Another key administration claim was that Iraq possessed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles capable of delivering chemical or biological weapons on a scale that constituted a clear and present danger to the United States -- an absurdity, as the author demonstrates. When presented with the actual detailed documentation of these shenanigans, even the most cynical and jaded observer of world events, can't failed to be astonished at the level of brazen dishonesty that the U.S. government was able to get away with, during this fateful moment in history.
Some members of Congress had further inquiries, and demanded direct answers from the CIA. Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote a letter to CIA director George Tenet asking questions about the Iraqi threat. The response letter, signed by Tenet, contained answers, but they were compromised by the Agency's refusal to publicly reveal information regarding "sources and methods". Elements of Tenet's response were problematic in other respects. One example, noted by Prados, is that "the [National Intelligence Estimate repeated in the response letter] foresees the American attack intended by President Bush as not only making weapons use more likely, but as driving Saddam into the arms of Al Qaeda, both of which Bush policy was ostensibly designed to prevent." (118-19) Thus, a war supposedly waged to reduce the threat of Iraqi WMD use, in fact was anticipated by US intelligence to increase that very threat. It is facts like this which make the government's use of secrecy (from the public and even from Congress) in its war planning so problematic, since it prevents informed debate about real threats and risks.
As revealed in this book's analysis, the claims about Iraq posing a threat that required invasion, remained highly dubious, throughout the time attempts were made to drum up support for the plan. One of the administration's more notable attempt to "sell" the war to the American people came in October 2002, when President Bush gave a speech to Veterans of Foreign Wars in Cincinnati, arguing the case for going to war in the event Saddam should be deemed not to comply with UN resolutions on disarmament. As Prados observes, this speech "contained nothing much that was new. What was significant was how George Bush made the charges and the fact the president was now enunciating them." (127) In other words, what the administration lacked in solid intelligence, it made up for in public relations.
The administration managed to get a new Security Council Resolution on Iraqi disarmament (Res. 1441) passed, enabling inspectors from the UN as well as from the International Atomic Energy Agency to enter Iraq to work to ensure that the country was disarmed. Prados observes, accurately, that "the actual progress of inspections permits a reasonable conclusion that, given sufficient time, Iraq would have been fully deprived of any weapons of mass destruction it possessed as well as any capacity to manufacture them." (149) This prospect, however, was clearly not to the satisfaction of the Bush administration, which labored intensively to undermine the work of the inspectors, by methods ranging from issuing frivolous charges questioning the inspectors' published findings, to the withholding of intelligence that the U.S. claimed to possess. These events demonstrate even more clearly that the U.S. was bent on invading Iraq in any case and that the disarmament pretext given was nothing more than a smokescreen. The background for the key assertion made in Bush's January 2003 State of the Union Speech regarding alleged Iraqi acquisition of uranium from Niger, is reviewed in-depth in the book. The discussion yields the plausible conclusion that this story amounted to another deception tactic.
Another key part of the administration's drive for war was Secretary of State Colin Powell's now-infamous performance at the UN Security Council where he did all in his power to "demonstrate" that Iraq was in "material breach" of its obligations under 1441. The speech is featured in its entirety in this book, followed by a systematic demolition of its charges. Tales of WMD were evidently not deemed a sufficiently effective fearmongering device, so they were embellished with claims of alleged links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. This crucial topic is discussed in-depth in the book. The claims are shown to have been highly dubious right from the start. This judgment was confirmed in an investigation by the UN study group charged with monitoring Al-Qaeda after the invasion. As Prados notes, the "investigation found no evidence of alliance between Saddam and Al Qaeda." (254) The Council was correct in not placing its trust in Secretary Powell.
It soon became clear that the administration would not receive Security Council authorization for its war plans. They went ahead and attacked anyway, thus committing the "supreme international crime", in the words of the Nuremberg judgment. Was this decision truly guided by a concern about Iraqi WMD? This is hard to reconcile with the fact, pointed out by Prados, that Bush was "insisting ... that Saddam Hussein would have to step down ... proof of Bush's real goals in the Iraq war." (262) The war's aftermath is covered in the book, focusing on the administration's desperate efforts to unearth evidence of WMD's in Iraq -- finding virtually nil, as the head of inspections, Dr. David Kay, conceded. The "Cabal" operated by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, for the purpose of acquiring "intelligence" on the threat of Iraq, that conformed to executive demands better than that of the actual intelligence agencies, is documented, along with embarrassing attempts at denial by Feith. The infamous outing by the administration of CIA agent Valerie Plame, in retaliation for the revelation made by her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, that the claim about alleged Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, lacked merit, is also discussed at length. All of this constitutes further evidence of administration deception on the issue of Iraqi WMDs.
The book ends by noting that the American people had been "hoodwinked" into a disastrous war. The gloomy consequences following this scam are reviewed. One such consequence is, as the author puts it, that "[t]he American people, subjected to a systematic effort to mislead, to frighten them into acquiescence, lost a measure of the checks and balances that hold back the dogs of war, and are still paying the price in blood and treasure for Bush's folly." (350) The chief culprits are identified as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, and Tenet. It is good to have definitive documentary evidence of the criminal activities engaged in by these figures (in case one should feel like setting up a bill of indictment), masterfully compiled in this excellent book.
The invasion of Iraq was, as noted, a crime under international law. Prados also makes the important observation that "The march to war with Baghdad did not meet the constitutional or legal requirements for initiating a war in the American political system" (355), thus amounting to a crime under U.S. law as well. Any American citizen should be deeply troubled. The nature of the crime is irrefutably laid out, down to every sordid detail, in this work, which ought to be essential reading for anyone wishing to understand how the enormous tragedy of Iraq came to transpire and who bears responsibility for what happened.
The answer is provided in this volume, in which national security analyst John Prados has compiled the key documents that bear on the Bush administration's efforts to justify the U.S. invasion, along with in-depth analysis of their significance. It is the author's contention that the charges about Iraqi development of weapons of mass destruction, the official pretext offered for the war, were trumped up -- contrived as a cover for plans the administration was intent on executing in any case, rather than driven by genuine security concerns. As Prados puts it, "[T]he succession of charges the Bush administration leveled against Iraq were offensive rather than defensive tactics: they were designed to create the conditions President Bush hoped would justify a war." (xii) This is a rather serious charge, with ominous implications, and the book is devoted to substantiating it.
In the early months of the Bush II administration, the objective of "regime change" in Iraq was articulated by the circle of Neoconservatives in the administration, but the dominant view was that a continuation of the process of "containing" Iraq through the sanctions regime maintained under U.S. pressure by the UN Security Council (which, incidentally, caused hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths) was the preferred course. There was a notable shift in the consensus in the administration after the 9/11 atrocities. Prados observes that "[I]t appears that in either late December 2001 or early 2002, George W. Bush issued a series of orders", among them "authoriz[ing] a CIA covert operation ... against Saddam" and "instructing the Pentagon to initiate planning for an invasion of Iraq". (7-8) In other words, already at this stage, the objective of "regime change" was firmly implanted in administration thinking. This demonstrates the disingenuousness in attempts at justifying the invasion by reference to Saddam's alleged non-compliance with UN resolutions on disarmament. Putting aside the fact that the explicit wording of these resolutions forbade such a unilateral use of force, the claim also overlooks the fact that the Bush administration clearly had no intention of giving the UN disarmament procedures a chance to work. While the Bush gang participated in a charade of diplomacy, they were in reality conspiring to commit aggression. In the face of considerable opposition to the administration's war plans, domestic and international, it would be necessary to undertake a major propaganda offensive to pull this off. These efforts went into high gear, Prados shows, in August 2002.
As the war drums began seriously beating in the fall of 2002, there were increasing demands for an official intelligence assessment regarding the threat posed to the United States by Iraq. Such an assessment came in the form of a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which remains classified but have been made public in a "distilled" form. The press, the public, and Congress were provided with a CIA "white paper", purporting to reproduce the evidence given in the NIE. As Prados points out "George Bush's war began with the hoodwinking of America" with this "white paper", which contained charges against Iraq "the sum total of [which] hardly justified all-out war", many of which were "demonstrably false" or "ambiguous" and all of which "could have been resolved by a process of international inspection to which Iraq had already agreed." (49) The "white paper" is featured in this volume along with point-by-point commentary by the author showing most of the claims to be deeply problematic from a factual and/or analytical viewpoint -- in fact, they amounted in several instances to laughably crude deception tactics. Two key claims advanced by the administration in justification for the invasion are discussed in-depth: Iraq's procurement of certain aluminum tubes that allegedly could be used for centrifuges in nuclear weapons systems. Confident proclamations were repeatedly made by administration officials to the effect that these constituted certain proof of Iraqi intent to go nuclear. In fact, highly knowledgeable observers, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, State Department intelligence, and others, maintained throughout this period that the discovery proved nothing of the sort, and they had solid grounds for making this claim, as Prados shows. Another key administration claim was that Iraq possessed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles capable of delivering chemical or biological weapons on a scale that constituted a clear and present danger to the United States -- an absurdity, as the author demonstrates. When presented with the actual detailed documentation of these shenanigans, even the most cynical and jaded observer of world events, can't failed to be astonished at the level of brazen dishonesty that the U.S. government was able to get away with, during this fateful moment in history.
Some members of Congress had further inquiries, and demanded direct answers from the CIA. Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote a letter to CIA director George Tenet asking questions about the Iraqi threat. The response letter, signed by Tenet, contained answers, but they were compromised by the Agency's refusal to publicly reveal information regarding "sources and methods". Elements of Tenet's response were problematic in other respects. One example, noted by Prados, is that "the [National Intelligence Estimate repeated in the response letter] foresees the American attack intended by President Bush as not only making weapons use more likely, but as driving Saddam into the arms of Al Qaeda, both of which Bush policy was ostensibly designed to prevent." (118-19) Thus, a war supposedly waged to reduce the threat of Iraqi WMD use, in fact was anticipated by US intelligence to increase that very threat. It is facts like this which make the government's use of secrecy (from the public and even from Congress) in its war planning so problematic, since it prevents informed debate about real threats and risks.
As revealed in this book's analysis, the claims about Iraq posing a threat that required invasion, remained highly dubious, throughout the time attempts were made to drum up support for the plan. One of the administration's more notable attempt to "sell" the war to the American people came in October 2002, when President Bush gave a speech to Veterans of Foreign Wars in Cincinnati, arguing the case for going to war in the event Saddam should be deemed not to comply with UN resolutions on disarmament. As Prados observes, this speech "contained nothing much that was new. What was significant was how George Bush made the charges and the fact the president was now enunciating them." (127) In other words, what the administration lacked in solid intelligence, it made up for in public relations.
The administration managed to get a new Security Council Resolution on Iraqi disarmament (Res. 1441) passed, enabling inspectors from the UN as well as from the International Atomic Energy Agency to enter Iraq to work to ensure that the country was disarmed. Prados observes, accurately, that "the actual progress of inspections permits a reasonable conclusion that, given sufficient time, Iraq would have been fully deprived of any weapons of mass destruction it possessed as well as any capacity to manufacture them." (149) This prospect, however, was clearly not to the satisfaction of the Bush administration, which labored intensively to undermine the work of the inspectors, by methods ranging from issuing frivolous charges questioning the inspectors' published findings, to the withholding of intelligence that the U.S. claimed to possess. These events demonstrate even more clearly that the U.S. was bent on invading Iraq in any case and that the disarmament pretext given was nothing more than a smokescreen. The background for the key assertion made in Bush's January 2003 State of the Union Speech regarding alleged Iraqi acquisition of uranium from Niger, is reviewed in-depth in the book. The discussion yields the plausible conclusion that this story amounted to another deception tactic.
Another key part of the administration's drive for war was Secretary of State Colin Powell's now-infamous performance at the UN Security Council where he did all in his power to "demonstrate" that Iraq was in "material breach" of its obligations under 1441. The speech is featured in its entirety in this book, followed by a systematic demolition of its charges. Tales of WMD were evidently not deemed a sufficiently effective fearmongering device, so they were embellished with claims of alleged links between Saddam and Al-Qaeda. This crucial topic is discussed in-depth in the book. The claims are shown to have been highly dubious right from the start. This judgment was confirmed in an investigation by the UN study group charged with monitoring Al-Qaeda after the invasion. As Prados notes, the "investigation found no evidence of alliance between Saddam and Al Qaeda." (254) The Council was correct in not placing its trust in Secretary Powell.
It soon became clear that the administration would not receive Security Council authorization for its war plans. They went ahead and attacked anyway, thus committing the "supreme international crime", in the words of the Nuremberg judgment. Was this decision truly guided by a concern about Iraqi WMD? This is hard to reconcile with the fact, pointed out by Prados, that Bush was "insisting ... that Saddam Hussein would have to step down ... proof of Bush's real goals in the Iraq war." (262) The war's aftermath is covered in the book, focusing on the administration's desperate efforts to unearth evidence of WMD's in Iraq -- finding virtually nil, as the head of inspections, Dr. David Kay, conceded. The "Cabal" operated by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, for the purpose of acquiring "intelligence" on the threat of Iraq, that conformed to executive demands better than that of the actual intelligence agencies, is documented, along with embarrassing attempts at denial by Feith. The infamous outing by the administration of CIA agent Valerie Plame, in retaliation for the revelation made by her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, that the claim about alleged Iraqi purchases of uranium from Niger, lacked merit, is also discussed at length. All of this constitutes further evidence of administration deception on the issue of Iraqi WMDs.
The book ends by noting that the American people had been "hoodwinked" into a disastrous war. The gloomy consequences following this scam are reviewed. One such consequence is, as the author puts it, that "[t]he American people, subjected to a systematic effort to mislead, to frighten them into acquiescence, lost a measure of the checks and balances that hold back the dogs of war, and are still paying the price in blood and treasure for Bush's folly." (350) The chief culprits are identified as Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, and Tenet. It is good to have definitive documentary evidence of the criminal activities engaged in by these figures (in case one should feel like setting up a bill of indictment), masterfully compiled in this excellent book.
The invasion of Iraq was, as noted, a crime under international law. Prados also makes the important observation that "The march to war with Baghdad did not meet the constitutional or legal requirements for initiating a war in the American political system" (355), thus amounting to a crime under U.S. law as well. Any American citizen should be deeply troubled. The nature of the crime is irrefutably laid out, down to every sordid detail, in this work, which ought to be essential reading for anyone wishing to understand how the enormous tragedy of Iraq came to transpire and who bears responsibility for what happened.
March 29, 2017
Not all that facinating.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews