Talk about “speaking truth to power.”
The Bush administration, with its obsessive secrecy and its demands that none of its believers break rank for fear of being banished in shame, didn’t know what it was getting into when it sent David Kay to Baghdad as its primary weapons inspector.
His sense of honor and decency showed even when I spoke with him briefly after he had initially returned from Iraq last summer. He shook his head with concern that day at the American Enterprise Institute and commented quietly: “The biggest problem over there is `force protection’–American forces are doing everything they can just to keep the Iraqis as far away from them as possible. The second is that the U.S. Governing Coalition has no real organization.”
Now Kay, a capable man with a wry sense of humor, has returned again, not only to confirm that by the time of the war Saddam Hussein almost assuredly had no weapons of mass destruction, but that a conspiracy of biblical proportions, right out of Iraq’s own sinuous history of Babylon, Nineveh and Ur, was taking place in the last several years of Hussein’s convulsive rule.
Tariq Aziz, Hussein’s long-time face to the West and a highly reliable interlocutor, told Kay that over the last two years of his rule, Hussein lived in a pathologically isolated world, peppering Aziz with novels he was writing. (Remember how Hitler always wanted to paint? There is often a profound artistic pretension in tyrants.)
Meanwhile, his supposedly great nuclear scientists were only doing what terrified but sometimes innovative acolytes of khans, emperors and dictators in that part of the Middle East have always done. They went to the tyrant with vast, fanciful plans for great weapons programs; the essentially absent Great Leader approved them, and the money went into the pockets of men living in a feverish, leaderless society that was being taken over by what Kay called a “vortex of corruption.”
He had more to say in his long interviews upon his return here: While there were attempts to revive the nuclear program during the ’90s, these were largely stillborn, and in truth countries like Iran and Libya were far ahead in weapons development; there was no evidence whatsoever that the African country of Niger tried to sell uranium to Iraq; the famous threatening “mobile trailers” were only weather testers; there was no evidence that the Iraqis were going to use chemical weapons against American troops; and there was no conclusive evidence that Iraq had moved any weapons to Syria, as the Bushies have claimed.
Kay’s detailed and utterly believable exposition of his findings carries us to some dramatic new conclusions:
The big, bad United Nations, so derided by this administration, probably did rid Iraq of its weapons in the early 1990s, partly through the meticulous inspections under UNSCOM, the UN inspections group, through UN-imposed sanctions, and through U.S. satellite technology.
Backing up Kay’s findings are those of Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei , director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He now says that while the U.S. was obsessed with weapons and Iraq, other countries had turned the world into a veritable “Wal-Mart of private-sector proliferation,” where countries and movements could shop for terror instruments virtually without attention while America was hypnotized by Iraq.
These countries, it is now known, include Libya, Iran, Malaysia, Dubai, North Korea and Pakistan, where the president this week admitted that individual nuclear scientists had sold nuclear secrets and weaponry for personal financial gain.
Finally comes the oddest fact of all–but also the most revealing. In the calculus of why America should invade Iraq, weapons of mass destruction were not, as we once thought, at the center of the administration’s thinking. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz volunteered this recently in Vanity Fair magazine, when he said that there was so much disarray in the administration about an invasion that they decided to stress the WMD issue because only it could provide a banner under which to unite everyone.
Why, otherwise, would Vice President Dick Cheney have made all those trips to the CIA to insist they find weapons of mass destruction? Why else were American intelligence agents who did not agree on the issue put down or dismissed? Why were special intelligence groupings formed among the war-obsessed civilians in the Pentagon to find weapons of mass destruction at any cost, when the CIA refused to provide them with the rationale they needed to go to war?
David Kay did us all a great favor with his honesty, which is so rare in this administration and can be so costly (and, please note, even President Bush this week lightened his position on weapons of mass destruction). But whether the intelligence was right or wrong was not the core problem. That problem was and remains the intention of a small special-interest group within the administration to go to war with Iraq, no matter what.
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E-mail: gigi(underscore)geyer@juno.com
