A PRETEXT FOR WAR: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies
By James Bamford
Reviewed by Douglas Farah
As debate continues to rage about the flaws in the American occupation of Iraq, James Bamford takes a fresh look at the run-up to the 2003 conflict, to examine how pre-war intelligence spurred the onset of war. Bamford, author of two earlier investigative studies of the National Security Agency, The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, sets out in A Pretext for War to show that key figures in the Bush administration -- national security adviser Richard Perle, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith -- locked in a plan to wage war in Iraq well before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He charges that these four leading hawks manipulated the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency in a desperate attempt to justify a regime change in Iraq that they had been strategizing to bring about for years. He suggests further that the administration's rush to war grew out of a key and chronic blind spot in American policy circles: the failure to recognize the central role of the Palestinian cause in igniting Arab rage against the United States.
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For Bamford, though, the crowning scandal was the long-incubating plan to force Saddam Hussein out of power by military force. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and other key members of this war faction -- nicknamed the Vulcans -- had long been laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq. Administration insiders such as Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill have already made influential versions of this case in their recently published books, and Bamford relies on Clarke's own account of the immediate post-Sept. 11 security meetings to underline the depth of the administration's Iraq fixation.
Bamford traces the personal relations among the key players spanning several decades. Again he adds some interesting bits to the existing record: e.g., the Pentagon's distrust of the CIA's intelligence; internal turf wars among the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney over what kind of intelligence was used in planning for Iraq; and the Pentagon's establishment of separate intelligence shops to counter the CIA and DIA. Bamford also notes that it was the Vulcans Perle and Feith, together with senior State Department adviser David Wormser, who drafted the basic outlines of Bush's plan to oust Saddam, including the doctrine of preemption, back in the mid-1990s, when they were advising Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu rejected the plan, which gathered dust until Bush's election, when the group returned to the corridors of power. Bamford says that the new fortunes of Perle, Feith and Wormser, together with Bush's personal determination to repay Saddam for his attempt to kill Bush's father, were instrumental in America's decision to go to war.
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However, Bamford does add to the public record in significant ways. His deconstruction of the role played by Ahmed Chalabi in feeding false information on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to U.S. intelligence agencies and reporters, especially Judith Miller at the New York Times, is especially timely. Chalabi has recently fallen from grace, and the New York Times is reviewing its reporting on WMD, publicly admitting it should have been more skeptical of some of its sources. The story of "Curveball," an Iraqi defector who provided information that was given great credence by both Pentagon intelligence and the national news media only to be debunked, is also instructive.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14202-2004Jun3.html