Here’s a thing Donald Trump said, and I want you to sit with
it for a moment before we go any further.
It was February of 2016, the early days of what was shaping
up to be one of the strangest carnivals in American political history—and
brother, that’s saying something, because this country has always had a gift
for the grotesque. Trump was standing somewhere under hot lights, his face that
particular shade of orange that suggested either self-tanner or a man who’d
made some kind of terrible bargain, and he said: “I don’t care what you call
it. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There
weren’t any. And they knew it.”
Now. Consider the source. This wasn’t some peacenik
folksinger at a Vermont coffee shop. This was a Republican. His party—the
neoconservative wing of it, anyway, the guys who’d been circling Iraq like
buzzards since the early nineties—had helped put George W. Bush in the White
House in the first place. And here was their golden boy calling the whole thing
a lie, plain as bread.
The lie—if that’s what it was, and I’ll let you decide—had
its official birthday on March 20, 2003. That was the first day of the U.S.-led
invasion of Iraq: American boots, British boots, Australian and Polish boots,
all of them hitting the sand together. Operation Iraqi Freedom, they called it.
Isn’t that something? They had a name for it. A brand. Freedom. Like a
soft drink. Like a bumper sticker you’d slap on the back of a pickup.
Major combat operations wrapped up twenty days later. Twenty
days. Which was, in retrospect, the easy part. The easy part always is.
The stated mission had three legs, like a stool. First:
liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein, who was, depending on which
speech you were listening to, either a genocidal monster or the greatest
existential threat to American safety since the Soviet Union. Maybe both.
Sometimes it was hard to keep track.
Second: sever Saddam’s alleged ties to al-Qaeda, the
organization that had turned two towers of glass and steel into a crematorium
on a clear September morning in 2001 and killed more than six thousand people.
The grief from that day was still raw. Still bleeding. And in Washington, grief
has a way of curdling into something uglier when the right people are doing the
whispering.
Third, and this is the one that really matters for our
story: disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.
WMDs. The acronym alone carried a kind of thundercloud
weight in those years. Chemical weapons. Biological weapons. Nuclear
weapons. Say those words in the right room, in the right tone of voice, with
the right photographs projected on a screen behind you—photographs that might
show trucks, or bunkers, or aluminum tubes that could, with a little
imagination, be enriched uranium centrifuges—and you could make reasonable
people believe almost anything.
Colin Powell did exactly that at the United Nations in
February of 2003, and he was smooth about it, too. Authoritative. Credible. The
kind of man you trusted. He was the good soldier who delivered the message and,
years later, called it a blot on his record. A blot. That’s a gentle word for
it. Like calling a grease fire a kitchen inconvenience.
Here’s what was happening behind the curtain.
In October of 2002, at the request of Democratic lawmakers
who wanted—who needed—some factual foundation before they voted to send
American kids to die in the desert, the intelligence community produced what’s
called a National Intelligence Estimate. The NIE. It was classified for over a
decade. When it finally saw daylight in 2014, what it revealed was…
complicated. Like finding a document in an attic that explains, in careful
bureaucratic language, exactly how a haunted house got haunted.
On nuclear weapons: some agencies said Iraq was restarting a
program. Others said no. The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and
Research and the Department of Energy—the people who actually knew about
nuclear physics, the ones whose job it was to understand uranium enrichment—said
the aluminum tubes everyone was so excited about were almost certainly for
conventional artillery rockets. The NIE itself flagged this disagreement. “Substantial
disagreement within the intelligence community,” it said.
But by the time the story reached the American public, the
disagreement had been ironed out. Smoothed over. The tubes became centrifuges
in the telling. Uncertainty became conviction. That’s a kind of alchemy, and
Washington has always been good at it.
On biological weapons: agencies were confident. Or said they
were. But there were dissenters, other intelligence groups that weren’t so
sure, and the NIE noted the gap. The Bush administration, in its public
statements, did not.
On chemical weapons: reports claimed Iraq had somewhere
between a hundred and five hundred metric tons of chemical agents stockpiled.
Five hundred metric tons. That’s not a number you can hear without your
stomach dropping. One agency suggested Saddam had ambitions to expand his
chemical production capability. But even the NIE—even this document designed to
support the administration’s case—stated plainly that as of October 2002, there
was no evidence of the specific kind of production process they were
alleging.
No evidence.
Those two words don’t carry much weight in wartime,
apparently.
The truth came out afterward, the way truth usually does:
too late, and wearing the wrong clothes for the occasion. Post-invasion
investigations revealed that Iraq’s nuclear program had been dead since 1991.
Biological weapons research had gone dark in 1996. Chemical weapons development
had been abandoned in the 1980s. No plans existed to revive any of it in
the early 2000s. None. The cupboard was bare.
And here’s the dark joke buried in all of it: the United
States itself bore some responsibility for Saddam’s chemical weapons capability
in the first place. American companies had helped with production in the
eighties. Iraq used those weapons during the Iran-Iraq War. We knew. And we
looked away, the way you look away from a thing that’s useful to you, even when
it’s ugly.
Saddam Hussein was, in the calculus of 1980s foreign policy,
our son of a bitch. Until he stopped being useful.
Relations soured for good when Saddam invaded Kuwait in
1990. The U.S. backed Kuwait, defeated Iraq’s forces in 1991, and in the
aftermath—humiliated, weakened, furious—Saddam shut down his WMD programs and
allowed UN inspectors in to dismantle what remained. There it was. The programs
were over. The inspectors saw it with their own eyes.
Then, in October of 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Iraq
Liberation Act, officially making the U.S. the patron of Iraqi opposition
groups whose stated goal was regime change. Saddam, who had never exactly been
a calm and forgiving man, responded that same day by expelling the UN weapons
inspectors.
Most of the facilities they’d been monitoring were already
inactive and abandoned. The inspectors had nearly finished their work. But now
they were gone, and the door was open, and anyone who wanted to imagine what might
be behind it was free to imagine whatever they liked.
Enter the neoconservatives. They’d been eager to finish what
the first Gulf War had started—eager since the early nineties, when they’d
argued that the U.S. had made a mistake by stopping short of Baghdad. When
George W. Bush came to power, they came with him. And when the towers fell on
September 11, 2001, they finally had what they’d been waiting for: a wound that
justified almost anything.
Roger Cressey, who served on the National Security Council
under Bush, described to journalist Jane Mayer how intelligence reached the
Oval Office in those years. His words are worth sitting with. “The mistake wasn’t
just in the analysis before it reached the president,” he said. “It was that
there was no filter. Most of the analysis was garbage. Nothing was properly
vetted or screened. It went straight to the president and his advisers—who
weren’t intelligence experts. That’s where the mistakes were made.”
No filter. That’s the key phrase. In a functioning system,
bad information gets screened out. Questionable sources get questioned. Holes
get examined. What Cressey described wasn’t a functioning system. It was a
machine designed to confirm what it already believed.
And what it believed—what Bush believed, apparently from
almost the moment the World Trade Center fell—was that Saddam Hussein was
responsible. Or close enough to responsible that the distinction didn’t matter
much.
This wasn’t fabrication, exactly. It was something more
insidious than that. It was curation. Intelligence analysts, consciously
or not, surfaced information that aligned with the president’s focus and let
contradicting information sink to the bottom of the pile. It’s how confirmation
bias operates when the stakes are civilizational. It’s how you end up marching
into a desert looking for weapons that aren’t there.
There were two men who mattered most in constructing the lie’s
scaffolding.
The first was Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, captured in Afghanistan
in 2001, handed off to Egyptian intelligence, and tortured until he said what
his captors wanted to hear: that Saddam Hussein had provided chemical and
biological weapons training to al-Qaeda. The Defense Intelligence Agency had
already flagged his information as unreliable. Had already put it in writing.
Didn’t matter. Bush cited Libi in official speeches anyway, his voice steady
and presidential, because the story was too useful to let go of.
Post-invasion investigations destroyed Libi’s testimony.
Comprehensively. Utterly. He’d said what he needed to say to make the pain
stop. If you torture someone long enough, they’ll tell you whatever you need to
hear. That’s not intelligence. That’s a Ouija board.
The second was a man named Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi—an
Iraqi defector living in Germany who claimed direct, personal knowledge of
Saddam’s secret WMD programs. German intelligence was skeptical. British
intelligence was skeptical. The Americans leaned on him like a crutch anyway,
because in the absence of real evidence, you take what you can get and you
dress it up nicely.
In 2011, Janabi admitted to the Guardian that he had made it
all up. Every bit of it. His motive was simple enough, and almost pitiable in
its smallness: he hated Saddam Hussein, had fled Iraq in 1995, and wanted the
regime destroyed. He’d carried that hatred like a stone for years, and when the
Americans came knocking, hungry for any scrap that would justify what they’d
already decided to do, he gave them exactly what they wanted.
“I and my son are proud of that,” he said, “and we’re proud
because we are the reason Iraq got to taste a little bit of democracy.”
Democracy.
That word, falling from the mouth of a man who’d helped
fabricate the case for a war that would kill tens of thousands of civilians,
tear a country apart, destabilize a region for generations, and feed the
conditions that birthed ISIS—that word lands like a stone in still water. The
ripples go outward and outward and you can still see them spreading today.
Janabi got his wish. Saddam fell. The regime collapsed. What
came next was the Iraq War proper—years of occupation, sectarian slaughter, car
bombs and checkpoints and bodies in the street, an entire society unraveling in
the heat. It officially ended in 2011. In another sense, it never ended at all.
The Middle East is still living in the wreckage. The
families of the dead—American and Iraqi both—are still living in the wreckage.
And somewhere in it all, if you look hard enough, you can
find the seam where a lie was stitched in. Not a single dramatic lie, spoken by
a villain in a dark room. Something more mundane and more terrible than that: a
lie assembled in pieces, from cherry-picked intelligence, from tortured
confessions, from the fabrications of a homesick exile with a grudge, all of it
fed through a machine that wasn’t designed to find the truth.
It was designed to confirm what was already decided.
That’s the real horror here. Not a monster lurking in the
dark. Just men in suits, under fluorescent lights, sending young people off to
die in a country that posed no imminent threat, for reasons that wouldn’t
survive five minutes of honest scrutiny.
And in February of 2016, a man with orange skin and a red
tie stood in front of a crowd and said: they knew.
Whether he was right about that—whether it was deception or
delusion, malice or catastrophic incompetence—is a question history is still
arguing about.
But the weapons were never there.
That part, at least, we know.
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Sleep tight, America.
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