Imminent Threat

GEORGE J. TENET, the CIA chief, defended his agency's analysts and their reports on Iraq's weapon programs with a forceful and unapologetic speech at Georgetown University yesterday, a speech that was built around a central assertion: "They never said there was an imminent threat." That caught plenty of people's attention. How can that be? Wasn't that the whole point? In fact -- disturbingly -- it wasn't. Let's examine this idea, because of the truths that it reveals. In the fall of 2002, the CIA produced an alarmist assessment of Iraq's likely stores of chemical and biological weapons, its prospects for producing more, and its efforts to construct a nuclear weapons program.

WASHINGTON - CIA Director George J. Tenet offered a rare and forceful defense yesterday of the nation's prewar intelligence, saying his agents never said that Iraq posed an "imminent" threat but acknowledging weaknesses in U.S. efforts to penetrate high levels of Saddam Hussein's regime. Under criticism that flawed intelligence information led to the invasion of Iraq, Tenet asserted that his agents accurately portrayed Hussein as a rising danger who sought nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace spent five months studying whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that threatened the world, and last week it concluded that the answer was no. The study -- by Jessica Mathews, president of the think tank, George Perkovich, its vice president for studies, and Joseph Cirincione, senior associate and director of the nonproliferation project -- concludes that U.S. officials distorted intelligence to...

In the structure of a classical play, a problem is presented in Act 1. Complications arise in Act 2, and all is resolved in Act 3. In Iraq this spring, while much of Europe was still enmeshed in Act 2, George W. Bush plunged directly into Act 3, without acknowledging the complications or fully considering the consequences of his actions. The result was the most heated year in trans-Atlantic relations since the Suez crisis of 1956. The Iraq war ignited tinder already piled high by clashes over trade, arms control, the Middle East, global warming and the International Criminal Court.

WASHINGTON -- When I wrote in my previous column that President Bush, in defending his Iraq invasion by citing the horrors of Saddam Hussein, "seemed to have forgotten those missing weapons of mass destruction he insisted earlier posed such an imminent threat," the e-mails poured in. One reader, saying I was repeating the "imminent threat myth," said the president had never used those words. Another offered: "Perhaps you know something the rest of us do not. Would you be so kind as to quote the president -- or any member of his cabinet -- making that argument?

LAST WEEK, a sliver of truth seeped out of the circle of mendacity that surrounds the Bush administration's war in Iraq. "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th," said President Bush. Americans who have been drawing that connection because Bush and his folks have been encouraging it so persistently to advance, and now defend, the war in Iraq, might not have noticed the direct statement of truth on this issue. It was buried in the middle of a general story in this newspaper.

WASHINGTON - Pardon me, but has anyone noticed the similarity between the recent deceptions by a New York Times reporter and the Bush administration's rationales for invading Iraq? At the top levels of both the Times and the administration, major reviews are under way over their particular embarrassments. The notable exception is that the Times has admitted that somebody was blowing smoke - big time, as Vice President Dick Cheney might say. President Bush continues to talk about links (unproved)

WASHINGTON -- In a visit to the heavily Arab community of Dearborn, Mich., the other day, President Bush made a strong case for his invasion of Iraq, ticking off the deprivation of its people under Saddam Hussein. "In a nation where the dictator treated himself to palaces with gold faucets and grand fountains," he said, "four out of 10 citizens did not even have clean water to drink. While the former regime exported milk and dates and corn and grain for its own profit, more than half a million Iraqi children were malnourished."

WASHINGTON - Now that regime change in Baghdad is at hand, does it matter whether those weapons of mass destruction that posed an "imminent" threat to us are found? Their discovery in substantial quantity, along with effective means to deliver them, would certainly provide additional justification in the eyes of the world for the invasion and conquest of the Saddam Hussein regime and for the concept of "anticipatory self-defense." But in retrospect, it is clear that the U.S. emphasis before the United Nations on removing such weapons came from a calculation that the threat of them was a much easier sell than the notion of the pre-emptive invasion of a sovereign country.

WASHINGTON - Now that our own Gary Cooper has declared High Noon and given Saddam Hussein 48 hours to get out of Dodge, it's being said that diplomacy has failed. Closer to the truth is that it was ambushed before it ran its course. Although the Iraqi dictator was destroying missiles deemed in violation of U.N. strictures and slowly yielding to other demands of the U.N. inspectors, the pace was intolerable to an impatient President Bush, who continued to talk of an imminent threat from weapons of mass destruction not yet found.