Fibs and Fabulations

They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal�a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon�s Office of Special Plans … By last fall, the operation rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon�s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush�s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq�s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda. As of last week, no such weapons had been found. And although many people, within the Administration and outside it, profess confidence that something will turn up, the integrity of much of that intelligence is now in question … Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true�that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States … �They see themselves as outsiders, � a former C.I.A. expert who spent the past decade immersed in Iraqi-exile affairs said of the Special Plans people. He added, “There�s a high degree of paranoia. They�ve convinced themselves that they�re on the side of angels, and everybody else in the government is a fool.”

Why is the failure to find any evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear weapons program, or vast quantities of chemical and biological weapons (a few drums don’t qualify � though we haven’t found even that) a big deal? Mainly because it feeds suspicions that the war wasn’t waged to eliminate real threats. This suspicion is further fed by the administration’s lackadaisical attitude toward those supposed threats once Baghdad fell. For example, Iraq’s main nuclear waste dump wasn’t secured until a few days ago, by which time it had been thoroughly looted. So was it all about the photo ops?

There may be no one happier that U.S. forces have invaded and occupied Iraq than Osama bin Laden, who now has Americans where he wants them: in the heart of the Arab-Islamic world and resented by hundreds of millions of people who see this invasion as an act of imperialism. Indeed, if there was any logic behind the madness of September 11, 2001, it may have been the hope that the U.S. would be provoked to launch such an invasion and that it would spark a dramatic growth in anti-American sentiment throughout the region. If this was indeed the plan, it appears to be working. The U.S. has squandered the unprecedented sympathy of the international community in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and faces the prospect of unprecedented hostility today. This shift alone should challenge the assumption that the invasion of Iraq has somehow made the U.S. safer.