Just found this GREAT column by Canadian/American/British journalist and pundit Mark Steyn:
http://www.steynonline.com/pageprint.cfm?edit_id=68
BUSH LIED!!! (NOT)
How do you feel about uranium from Niger?
That?s how I began a Spectator column on July 19th 2003 when Niger and ?Bush?s LIE??? about it was supposedly the biggest issue of the day. One year later, a British inquiry, led by Lord Butler, into pre-war intelligence has concluded that ? whaddayaknow? ? MI6 were justified in claiming Saddam was trying to buy uranium from Niger.
Strange how, one by one, the ?BUSH LIES??? turn out to be factually accurate. The obvious conclusion is that the ?anti-war movement? is not so much anti-war as in denial. It denies that there is a war, that there?s anything to worry about, and it?s so invested in this delusion that it?s prepared to stand reality on its head. The ?BUSH LIE??? on Niger will persist even if footage turns up of Saddam in Africa taking personal possession of the yellowcake order.
The real issue, yet again, is the pitiful state of US intelligence. Here?s what I wrote last July:
?Anyway, the other day for the umpteenth time in the last week some anti-war type demanded to know how I felt about uranium in Niger. Well, I have no strong views about it. I would not number it with raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens among my favourite things. But then I never said I did. And neither did George W. Bush, despite the best efforts of the anti-war crowd to assert that he led us into an ?illegitimate war? over uranium in Niger. ?Bush Lied Over Niger Uranium Claims!!!?, as a good couple of dozen emails a day scream from my in-box.
I wrote a gazillion pieces urging war with Iraq, and never found the time to let the word Niger pass my lips. And, if it had passed, my lips would have said ?Ny-juh? and not ?Nee-zhaire?. But here?s what the President had to say, when he ?LIED OVER NIGER URANIUM CLAIMS??? back in the State of the Union address in January:
The British government has learnt that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
That?s it: 16 words. Where?s the lie? Though the CIA director George Tenet now says his boys shouldn?t have approved that sentence, Tony Blair is standing by it.
Nonetheless, the Democrats smell blood and don?t want to be told that it?s their own. ?President Bush Deceives the American People? roars the Democratic National Committee, headed by Clinton stain-mopper Terry McAuliffe. Bush did not wag his finger and say ?Saddam Hussein did have radioactive relations with that yellowcake, Miss Niger.? All he did was report that America?s closest ally had asserted something which it continues to assert to this day.
Intelligence is a hit-and-miss business. In 1998, when Bill Clinton launched mid-Monica cruise-missile attacks on Afghanistan and the Sudan, he hit a Khartoum aspirin factory and missed Osama bin Laden. The claims that the aspirin factory was producing nerve gas and was an al-Qa?eda front proved to be untrue. Does that mean Clinton lied to us? I mean, apart from about Gennifer, Monica, and which part of the party of the first part?s enumerated parts came into contact with part of the party of the second part?s enumerated parts. Or was it just that the intelligence was lousy? The intel bureaucracy got the Sudanese aspirin factory wrong, failed to spot 9/11 coming, and insisted it was impossible for any American to penetrate bin Laden?s network, only to have Johnnie bin Joss-Stick from hippy-dippy Marin County on a self-discovery jaunt round the region stroll into the cave and be sharing the executive latrine with the A-list jihadi within 20 minutes.
So, if you?re the President and the same intelligence bureaucrats who got all the above wrong say the Brits are way off the mark, there?s nothing going on with Saddam and Africa, what do you do? Do you say, ?Hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day?? Or do you make the reasonable assumption that, given what you?ve learnt about the state of your humint (human intelligence) in the CIA, is it likely they?ve got much of a clue about what?s going on in French Africa? Isn?t this one of those deals where the Brits and the shifty French (Niger?s uranium operations are under the supervision of the French Atomic Energy Commission) are more plugged in?
But here?s a much more pertinent question than whether BUSH LIED!!!: how loopy are the Democrats? One reason why the President, in defiance of last week?s Spectator, is all but certain to win re-election is the descent into madness of his opponents. They?ve let post-impeachment, post-chad-dangling bitterness unhinge them to the point where, given a choice between investigating the intelligence lapses that led to 9/11 and the intelligence lapses that led to a victorious war in Iraq, they stampede for the latter. Iraq was a brilliant campaign fought with minimal casualties, 11 September was a humiliating failure by government to fulfill its primary role of national defence. But Democrats who complained that Bush was too slow to act on doubtful intelligence re 9/11 now profess to be horrified that he was too quick to act on doubtful intelligence re Iraq. This is not a serious party.
Who knows what really happened in Africa? Maybe the CIA guy in Niamey (assuming they have one) filed a report on uranium in Niger and back at head office the assistant deputy paper-shuffler looked at it upside-down and said, ?There?s something here about Saddam getting nigerium from Uranus,? and the deputy assistant paper shuffler said, ?Jeez, we need to go into full ass-covering mode.? Either way, you could ask a million folks and never find one whose view on the war was determined by anything to do with Niger, which, insofar as anybody?s ever heard of it, is mostly assumed to be either an abbreviation of Nigeria or a breakaway republic thereof, leaving the rump statelet of Ia to go it alone. But Democratic candidates have somehow been persuaded that it?s in their interest to pretend that the entire case for war rested on one footnote: ?It?s beginning to sound a little like Watergate,? says Howard Dean. What did the President not know and when did he not know it? Struggling to keep up, John Kerry has said that Bush ?misled every one of us?, even though the Senator himself has been warning about Saddam?s weapons for years and voted in favour of the Iraq war months before the State of the Union or Colin Powell?s UN presentations or anything else.
The trouble with all this bleating about how you feel ?misled? is that you sound not like a putative commander-in-chief but like an Arkansas state employee in Bill Clinton?s motel room…
A few weeks later, the story got hijacked in perpetuity by the great narcissist Joseph C Wilson IV, whose basic line ever since has been ?But enough about nuclear proliferation, let?s talk about me.? Alas, even the fickle Democrats have moved on, abandoning Joe for Michael Moore and other diversions. Again, the real issue in the whole Wilson/Plame story is about the competence of US intelligence: Why did the CIA send an unqualified man on the payroll of a Saudi-funded think-tank to investigate this issue? Come to that, why does the conspirazoid left suddenly take the CIA?s word for everything? Here?s what I wrote in The Spectator on October 11th last year:
Early last year, the Bush administration dispatched a career diplomat to Niger to check out whether there was anything to the rumours that Saddam was trying to buy uranium from Africa. The former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV returned from the dark continent, reported his findings and was distressed to discover from this January?s state of the Union address that the White House still inclined to the British view of the situation. So in July he wrote a column for The New York Times headlined ?What I Didn?t Find In Africa?. By ?Africa?, the Times meant Niger, which is the only country Ambassador Wilson visited. Shortly thereafter, two SAOs (Senior Administration Officials) leaked the name of Wilson?s wife to my Chicago Sun-Times colleague Robert Novak: her name is Valerie Plame and she works for the CIA. Nobody paid any attention for two months. Then another SAO from some other faction in the administration counter-leaked details of the original leak from the original SAOs. And now it?s Watergate. In theory.
And if you watch the network news that?s pretty much where the facts stop. The Independent summed up the angle most of the press seems to be interested in: ?Disclosed CIA Officer Fears For Her Life? ? i.e., Ms Plame?s name was leaked in order to put her in danger. The notion that Ms Plame ?fears for her life? is somewhat undermined by the fact that her gabby hubby, currently on TV, radio and sympathetic websites 22 hours a day, is clearly having a ball, loving the attention and happy to yuk it up about how he and the missus have been ?discussing who would play her in the movie?.
But, despite the media?s efforts to oomph it up into Watergate ? or ?Intimigate? ? it doesn?t make any sense as a conventional political scandal. Even if you accept that it?s technically possible to leak something that?s widely known around town and published in the guy?s Who?s Who entry, if the object was to discredit Joe Wilson why leak the name of his wife? On his own, Wilson comes over like a total flake ? not a sober striped-pants diplomat but a shaggy-maned ideologically driven kook whose hippie-lyric quotes make a lot more sense than his neocon-bashing diatribes for leftie dronefests like The Nation. This is a guy who says things like, ?Neoconservatives and religious conservatives have hijacked this administration, and I consider myself on a personal mission to destroy both.? He spends his days dreaming of the first sentence of his obituary: ?Joseph C. Wilson IV, the Bush I administration political appointee who did the most damage to the Bush II administration.? Imagine Michael Moore and his ego after dropping 300lbs on the Atkins diet and you?re close enough. By revealing the fact that Mrs Wilson is a cool blonde CIA agent, all you do is give her husband a credibility lacking in almost every aspect of his speech, mien and coiffure.
Even his original New York Times piece must rank as one of the paper?s weakest efforts to damage Bush: in Niger, Ambassador Wilson says he spent ?eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people: current government officials, former government officials, people associated with the country?s uranium business?. He concedes he never filed a written report and most of the rest of the column reads like a travelogue (?Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger river?). As a claim to expertise, it?s laughable.
No, this isn?t Watergate; it?s bigger than that. The version of the story that still fits the facts is in that Bob Novak Sun-Times column from July. Novak wanted to know why Wilson had been chosen to go to Africa. It?s one thing not to be a card-carrying neocon, quite another to be as antipathetic to the administration and the war as this fellow. The White House asked the CIA, the CIA recommended Wilson, and their recommendation was accepted automatically. But what the original leakers told Novak was that it was Mrs Wilson who?d proposed her husband for the job. The Company responded that their counter-proliferation officials came up with Wilson and they only used the wife to contact him.
It doesn?t really matter which version you believe, because the end result?s the same: an agency known to be opposed to war in Iraq sent an employee?s spouse also known to be opposed to war in Iraq on a perfunctory joke mission. And, after eight days sipping tea and meeting government officials in one city of one country, Ambassador Wilson gave a verbal report to the CIA and was horrified to switch on his TV and see Bush going on about what British Intelligence had learned about Saddam and Africa.
I?ll stand by my original assessment, as does Her Majesty?s government. No political leader is obliged to accept a particular intelligence finding. Invariably, you?re presented with contradictory pieces of information and evidence, and you?re obliged to choose. If President Bush chooses to believe British and French Intelligence over the CIA, that?s his prerogative. It?s also a telling comment on the state of the agency. When M sends Bond somewhere to nose around, his car usually gets run off the road as he?s leaving the airport and the croupier he has sex with that evening turns out to be an enemy agent. But, unless you get that lucky, you wind up doing what Wilson did: drinking tea with the stooges the government arranges for you to meet. Everything about Mr Wilson?s day trip to the heart of darkness suggests either wilful obstruction or sheer ineptness by the CIA.
Two years after 9/11, the CIA is still not up to the job of human intelligence. It has no idea of what?s going on in Iran or North Korea. It relies on aerial photographs and ?chatter? ? which is a fancy term for monitoring e-mail. But it has no insight whatsoever into the minds of the Politburo or the mullahs. So, when it comes to their nuclear ambitions, all we have is guesswork ? or, more accurately, wishful thinking, given that both Hashemi Rafsanjani and the Norks have promised to use their nukes as soon as they can.
If sending Joseph C. Wilson IV to Niger for a week is the best the world?s only hyperpower can do, that?s a serious problem. If the Company knew it was a joke all along, that?s a worse problem. It means Mr Bush is in the same position with the CIA as General Musharraf is with Pakistan?s ISI: when he makes a routine request, he has to figure out whether they?re going to use it to try and set him up. This is no way to win a terror war.