Last week, President Bush likened his bipartisan panel on weapons of mass destruction intelligence to the Warren Commission. Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's Daily Show put it best: "Good, because that totally closed the book on the Kennedy assassination."
An independent, bipartisan committee charged with investigating the massive intelligence failures leading up to the war in Iraq is an excellent idea. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has made it painstakingly clear the panel will be constructed to minimize political fallout first and discover the truth second.
From the outset, two facts are quite telling. First, President Bush himself appointed the members of the commission. Aside from the obvious conflict of interest, the panel begins with its credibility and impartiality already thrown into question. Second, no report will be issued until after the 2004 election. This is blatant politicking and only serves to insulate the president and cast further doubt that the panel is anything but a political ploy.
In a Feb. 2 letter to the president, prominent House and Senate Democrats (including Senate minority leader Tom Daschle and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi) correctly called for a truly independent commission. "While we support the need for an independent commission," the letter read, "this commission should not be one whose members are appointed by and report to the White House. One of the major questions that needs to be addressed is whether senior Administration officials ... misled the Congress and the public about the nature of the threat from Iraq."
Although the appointments that have been announced are indeed bipartisan, perception (as so often happens in politics) is as critical as fact.Former Virginia Sen. Chuck Robb and Arizona Sen. John McCain are anything but pro-Bush cronies, yet the sense of impropriety that stems from the president appointing a panel to investigate the president cannot be shrugged off.
In a search for the truth, Bush is making it as hard as possible for the panel to find any. We have already seen vis-à-vis the September 11 commission that the administration is reticent to provide full disclosure in these types of investigations. Members of the September 11 commission have complained repeatedly about the administration's lack of cooperation. The commission's spokesperson, Al Felzenberg, bemoaned last year, "We have to get through these piles of material and to start writing a report ... we need the evidence. We need the data" ("White House Urged to Submit September 11 Documents," CNN.com, Oct. 26, 2003).
It is imperative that the Iraq panel is allowed to do its job. Bush's entire doctrine of preemptive strike is centered on solid intelligence. Something went horribly wrong in the lead-up to the Iraq war, and if the world is to take us seriously the next time we claim that Iran or Syria is developing WMD, we have to know what that something was.
Of course, if the president is to be believed, the panel will have its work cut out for it. Speaking after a cabinet Meeting last Monday, Bush opined that, "What we don't know yet is what we thought and what the Iraqi Survey Group has found." Well, what we thought is that there were WMDs in Iraq, and we went to war because of it. What the Iraqi Survey Group has found is that those thoughts were "all wrong," and we went to war under false pretenses.
Put another way, American lives are being lost because we invaded a country on a lie. Don't be swayed by the argument that America went into Iraq for humanitarian reasons, to liberate the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator. That wasn't the reason, the cassus belli, the president gave the country. That wasn't the cassus belli the president gave the world. Weapons of mass destruction. Imminent threat. Mushroom clouds.
Naturally, such a monumental intelligence failure requires a monumentally politicized response.
Little good will come of the Iraq commission. It is already avowedly political so its members will be feeling pressure from all sides. Also, both due to the panel's political nature and the mandated timing of its report, any finding will be instantly tainted and decried as illegitimate by whichever party it injures. Finally, there is no indication that the administration plans to cooperate with the Iraq panel any better than it has with the September 11 commission.
It's truly sad that such a critically important event has been so horribly bungled by the Bush administration. The president's conduct in this matter is perhaps best exemplified by another comment made after the cabinet meeting -- "I want to know all the facts." To once again quote Jon Stewart, "Great! Welcome aboard the U.S.S. Curiosity, Mr. President."
(Elliot Haspel is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. He can be reached at ehaspel@cavalierdaily.com)
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