The Politics of Truth_Inside the Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity

by Joseph Wilson

  By the next day, August 4, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was quoting me in an interview, noting that “Even Joe Wilson agrees that we will find weapons of mass destruction.” Suddenly, senior officials were reacting to things that I said. Not surprisingly, Wolfowitz selectively used my words to bolster his point without noting my assessment that the threat posed by such programs as there may have been had not constituted a grave and gathering danger and had not merited the military response we had executed.

  That Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal editorial page took a whack at me too. They charged that I was moving the goalposts by saying that the threat posed by Saddam’s weapons programs did not meet the “imminent threat test.” The Journal argued that the president had never mentioned “imminent threat” in his comments, and that no senior administration officials had either. While the Journal may have been technically correct that the president had not uttered those exact words, he walked right up to the phrase when, on November 23, 2002, he said, “The world is also uniting to answer the unique and urgent threat posed by Iraq, whose dictator has already used weapons of mass destruction to kill thousands.” His staff and administration allies, of course, had been less concerned about splitting hairs as they promoted the invasion.

  The Journal also conveniently ignored the second part of my statement that the threat had not even met the test of grave and gathering danger, the administration’s own watered-down justification for preemptive war. The administration and its supporters were the ones moving the goalposts. I had always said that the presence of a WMD threat was worthy of an international response, despite their efforts to claim otherwise about my statements.

  The insistence by the Journal and senior administration officials that they had never said Saddam posed an imminent threat led to a contest sponsored by Josh Marshall, the author of one of the most compulsively readable weblogs (“blogs”) on the Internet, Talkingpointsmemo.com. In the best tradition of Internet community, Josh’s contest elicited from his readers statements by administration officials and their confederates spoken before the war that contradicted their best efforts at postwar spin. Josh wrote that not only did the administration blur the distinction between imminent threat and grave and gathering danger, it actually equated the two, dangerously lowering the bar for future action. Among the more notable of the five hundred submissions:Richard Perle: “As long as Saddam is there, with everything we know about Saddam, as long as he possesses the weapons that we know he possesses, there is a threat, and I believe it’s imminent because he could choose at any time to take an action we all very much hope he won’t take.”

  Dan Bartlett, the president’s communications director, in response to the following question from Wolf Blitzer: “Is [Saddam] an imminent threat to U.S. interests, either in that part of the world or to Americans right here at home?” Bartlett: “Well, of course he is.”

  Ari Fleischer, the president’s spokesman, in response to the following question from a reporter a month after the war: “Well, we went to war, didn’t we, to find these—because we said that these weapons were a direct and imminent threat to the United States? Isn’t that true?” Fleischer: “Absolutely.”

  President Bush himself, from his October 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati, Ohio: “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints. . . . Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

  The point I had been making on Late Edition was that while we needed to be aggressive in disarming Saddam, the threat to our national security posed by those weapons never merited the invasion-conquest-occupation war scenario that the administration had chosen to wage.

  When Wolfowitz selectively quoted me to support his war, that was a misrepresentation of my position; when the Journal accused me of moving the goalposts, that, too, was a misrepresentation of my position. I remembered that in Washington, your status is derivative of the status of your enemies. With Wolfowitz and the Wall Street Journal declared as adversaries, my status was clearly higher than it had been when I was at the National Security Council and only State Department desk officers had differed with me.

  The week after my trip to Los Angeles, I traveled to Seattle to participate in a town meeting hosted by Democratic Congressman Jay Inslee, to discuss the use or misuse of intelligence in the run-up to the war. When he invited me, he said that he expected about 150 people to attend and that it would take a couple of hours. Though he could not offer a speaker’s fee, and would have to use his own frequent-flyer miles to cover my economy-class ticket, he did promise a golf game afterwards, an offer too tempting to refuse.

  I arrived in Seattle on August 20. Though I had lived nearby in the 1970s, in Sequim on the Olympic Peninsula, and had taken my Foreign Service oral exam in Seattle, I had only been back to the city twice in the intervening quarter century. The approach by air was as spectacular as I remembered. It was a clear day, not a cloud in the sky, as we flew over and around the Cascade Mountain range. Few sights are as majestic as the craggy peaks of Mount Rainier with broad Mount Olympus of the Olympic Mountains in the background on the western horizon. We swooped down and landed at Sea-Tac Airport, and I was soon on the ferry to Whidbey Island across Puget Sound, watching the Seattle Seahawks’ new football stadium fade into the distance.

  The next day, we learned that the town meeting had attracted an overwhelming response. Instead of 150 people, there would be more than 1,100 attendees. The auditorium at the high school would only handle 600, so they had put closed-circuit televisions in neighboring classrooms for the considerable overflow. I would be on a panel with retired Admiral Bill Center and Brewster Denny, the retired dean of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, whom I had first met close to thirty years earlier when I was looking at graduate schools. I looked forward to reintroducing myself to Dean Denny and telling the audience that I owed my entire career to the fact that to get in to his graduate program, I had been obliged to demonstrate a commitment to public service. That requirement had led me to take the Foreign Service exam, and my diplomatic career was soon underway.

  In the morning, Congressman Inslee and I were interviewed on the local FOX station and CNNfn, the financial news network. I used the latter appearance to state publicly something I had been pondering for a while—that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and most of his senior staff should be fired for having so badly managed the reconstruction effort in Iraq. I said it was unconscionable that we had performed so poorly on the restoration of public safety and the provision of such basic services as electricity and potable water. These were two essential prerequisites for winning the peace, and we had so miserably failed that the motives of those responsible had to be suspect. Was failure an acceptable outcome to them, even if it was a certainty that failure would lead to sustained instability and, quite possibly, the Balkanization of Iraq?

  Arriving at the high school late in the morning on a Thursday, we watched as people streamed into the auditorium. We went first to the overflow rooms, so as not to deny any of those who had come to see us the opportunity to ask questions. The reception was warm and enthusiastic. It was uplifting to be among so many Americans who would take time from their daily schedules to listen to a discussion of war and peace and the policies that led to our precipitous occupation of Baghdad.

  As we made our way to the stage from the rear of the auditorium, people noticed our entry and began applauding. Soon the audience was on its feet giving the four of us a standing ovation. I said to myself: “Jay Inslee is a real popular guy. I’ll bet most congressmen would give their eyeteeth for this kind of reception in their districts.”

  Once his guests were all seated, the congressman introduced us to his constituents. When he presented me, there was another huge round of ap
plause and another standing ovation. I was overwhelmed and didn’t know quite what to do, as it went on and on. I finally motioned for people to sit down, and as they did, I leaned into the microphone and said, “Bob Novak, eat your heart out.” That caused an outburst of laughter and yet more applause.

  There was palpable anger in the hall. People were clearly worried by what they saw happening in Washington, D.C., and Iraq. There were some committed pacifists and left-wing activists among the participants but most were simply interested citizens, there to learn and share their concerns about the direction in which the administration was taking the country. Admiral Center was a balanced voice with an extensive military career behind him, and even he acknowledged that he had never believed the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons necessitated a military response. “Personally, I didn’t feel very threatened,” Center said. “I don’t think many Americans felt very threatened.”

  Brewster Denny offered the most trenchant observation when he commented on American unilateralism in the face of international opposition: “We gave the world the royal finger.” The audience responded with resounding applause and loud condemnation of what the dean said was quite possibly the administration’s violation of international law.

  In the question-and-answer session, I was asked about the investigation into the leak. I hesitated and then offered that my intention was to support the investigation because, after all, “wouldn’t it be fun to see Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs? And I measure my words.” The reaction of the audience was swift and loud. At the mention of Rove’s name the catcalls and whistles rained down followed by applause at the thought of everyone’s favorite ogre being frog-marched.

  One afternoon after I had returned home to Washington, Valerie asked if I had used the phrase in one of my speeches. Of course I always shared general details of events I participated in, but I usually didn’t get into the specifics of language, and I had not told her about “frog-marching” Karl Rove “in handcuffs.” Somebody at her office had apparently seen the reference on the Internet and told her about it. She was not thrilled by my use of the term and thought I had gone too far. Perhaps she was right. She urged me to temper my words if I was asked about the statement. There did not seem to be much other interest in the comment for a couple of weeks, giving me time to reflect on what I would say when asked.

  In mid-September, when awareness of the statement finally did reach the mainstream press, I went out of my way in several interviews to put it in context for reporters, freely acknowledging that perhaps I had been carried away by the spirit of the moment in Seattle. But I did not significantly alter the thrust of my accusation, which was that, at a minimum, Rove had engaged in unethical behavior—by pushing the disclosure of Valerie’s status to Hardball’s Chris Matthews—and had possibly committed a crime, for which he should be investigated. I explained to reporters, ultimately including Tim Russert on Meet the Press, that while I had no personal knowledge that Rove had been the original leaker or that he had authorized the leak, I was confident from what a respectable reporter had told me (I had not yet publicly identified Matthews as my source) that Rove had been retailing the Novak article, thereby giving the leak his approval. Furthermore, the CIA is an executive branch agency that reports to the president of the United States. Karl Rove is the top political adviser to the president. The act of exposing my wife was clearly a political act, designed to discredit me and discourage other critics of the administration from speaking out.

  The political office of the White House would seem like a good place to start an investigation, I mused for the press. Whether or not Rove had committed a crime, most certainly he was guilty of crassly giving credence to a story that never should have been published in the first place. He had also lent the power of the White House to the despicable act of attacking a family member as a way to smear someone who differed with the administration over policy. Criminality or lawfulness aside, the fact remains that the standard of behavior of senior public servants ought to be higher than “barely legal.” His conduct contradicted the president’s oft-stated desire to change the tone in Washington and to restore honor and dignity to the White House. If the frog-march statement brought the harsh glare of public opinion down on him, so much the better. I would never apologize or draw back from that. Considering what I knew he had done, it was immaterial to me whether, when he was frog-marched out of the White House, he was in handcuffs or not, so long as the frog-marching took place.

  On September 14, I published a second piece in the San Jose Mercury News, this one titled “Seeking Honesty in U.S. Policy.” I had been driven to write by the blatantly revisionist rhetoric coming from the administration, as well as by the overly rosy picture of postwar Iraq being painted by the neoconservatives both inside and outside the government. I had been particularly struck by Paul Wolfowitz’s advice to Congress that all we needed to succeed in a deteriorating situation was to project a little confidence. That was patently untrue and smacked of the irresponsible happy talk of the Vietnam era. I argued that Iraqi reconstruction was proceeding so poorly that a “more cynical reading of the agenda of certain Bush advisers could conclude that the Balkanization of Iraq was always an acceptable outcome, because Israel would then find itself surrounded by small Arab countries worried about each other instead of forming a solid bloc against Israel.” I also took umbrage at a statement by Under Secretary of State for Disarmament John Bolton, who had said while in London that whether Saddam’s government actually possessed weapons of mass destruction “isn’t really the issue. The issue, I think, has been the capability that Iraq sought to have . . . WMD programs.”

  “In other words,” I continued, “we’re now supposed to believe that we went to war not because Saddam’s arsenal of weapons of mass destruction threatened us, but because he had scientists on his payroll.”

  I concluded the article by calling on the administration to level with the American people and to redouble its efforts to ease tensions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “That is the thorn that must be pulled from the side of the region. The road to peace in the Middle East still goes through Jerusalem.” What I’d written was so highly critical of the administration that when I asked Brent Scowcroft, to whom I had sent it, if he was also going to share this one with the White House, he laughed and said he was in enough trouble with the administration already.

  A week later, Tom Andrews called and invited me to participate in promoting Win Without War’s campaign to urge Congress not to approve the administration’s $87 billion supplemental budget request for Iraq until the president fired many of his key advisers, including Donald Rumsfeld, and committed to a transfer of authority to the United Nations preparatory to a sovereign Iraqi government taking power. Tom had brought a welcome voice to the debate before the war. He was one of the few critics consistently willing to suffer the rants of the right-wing cable talk-show hosts and was unflappable in such encounters.

  At the end of 2002, he had invited me to be a part of the coalition when it was created, and I had appeared at a press conference with members of the organization at its launch ceremony. However, I had formally dissociated myself from them, “before they dissociate themselves from me,” as I said, because many of the members were pacifists who on principle were against military action at any time.

  By this point in September 2003, however, following President Bush’s nationally televised speech on September 7 announcing the request for the $87 billion, I was delighted to be part of their campaign. The administration had run roughshod over the Congress since the beginning of the debate on Iraq. The use-of-force resolution was only part of the deception. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and his deputy, Wolfowitz, had systematically refused to share with the oversight committees the anticipated costs of the operation we were now in the middle of, and of the reconstruction for which we were responsible. Both repeatedly spoke of how oil revenues from Iraq would be used to fund reconstruction, even as serious s
tudies from respected think-tanks concluded that it would be close to a decade before oil profits would be available for anything other than rehabilitation and modernization of the industry and the fields themselves. In one particularly egregious statement, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Director Andrew Natsios proclaimed to ABC’s Ted Koppel that the administration would require no more than $1.7 billion for all reconstruction in Iraq. “No more, never,” he had the audacity to tell Koppel and Nightline’ s national television audience.

  I concluded that the only way to have any impact on the administration was to hold it to account and to make demands prior to providing the money, not after. Who in Congress could forget that the resolution passed in October 2002 had been to strengthen the hand of the president in his dealings with the United Nations, not to go to war without international support? Bush himself said in his Cincinnati address to the nation on October 7, 2002, that congressional authorization of use of force “does not mean that military action is imminent or unavoidable. The resolution will tell the United Nations, and all nations, that America speaks with one voice and is determined to make the demands of the civilized world mean something.” Yet to war we went, despite the opposition on constitutional grounds so eloquently set forth by Senator Robert Byrd. Money with no strings attached would only encourage further irresponsibility from the administration.

  In their vigorous letter-writing and E-mail campaign, Win Without War was joined by Moveon.org, the Web site. Moveon.org, as I learned, was the brainchild of Wes Boyd and his wife, Joan Blades, two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, created to mobilize public opinion on key issues. Their mission statement reads: “MoveOn is working to bring ordinary people back into politics. With a system that today revolves around big money and big media, most citizens are left out. When it becomes clear that our ‘representatives’ don’t represent the public, the foundations of democracy are in peril. MoveOn is a catalyst for a new kind of grassroots involvement, supporting busy but concerned citizens in finding their political voice.”