A movement in denial

Do you remember a year ago when the Democratic National Committee put out press releases headlined “President Bush deceives the American people”?

Yawn. What’s new? But last summer the Bush Lie of the Week was all to do with Saddam trying to buy uranium from Niger. CNN and company replayed endlessly the critical 16 words from the president’s 2003 State of the Union address:

“The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

Sixteen words that could break a presidency. Mr. Bush “misled every one of us,” huffed Sen. John Kerry. “It’s beginning to sound like Watergate,” said Howard Dean. Joseph C Wilson IV, the man the CIA sent to Africa to investigate, wrote a piece for the New York Times titled “What I didn’t find in Africa.”

Can you guess what he didn’t find, dear reader? That’s right, he didn’t find a big package of uranium bearing the address label “S. Hussein, Suite 27, the Saddam Hussein Center for Armageddon Studies, Saddam Hussein Parkway, Baghdad.” Ambassador Wilson said relax, he had been to Niger, spent “eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people,” and there was nothing going on.

Well, on Wednesday in London, Lord Robin Butler will publish his report into the quality of the intelligence on which Britain’s case for going to war with Iraq rested. The report is said to be critical of some of Tony Blair’s claims, supportive of others.

Among the latter, he says the statements about Iraq and Niger are justified and supported by the intelligence. In other words, the British Government did learn that Saddam Hussein did seek significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

As a gazillion e-mails a day shrieked from my in-box back then, “Bush lied.” So where exactly in that State of the Union observation is the lie?

Last summer, the comparatively minor matter of uranium from Niger was all over the front pages and the news shows. Do you think Lord Butler’s report will be? Do you think Terry McAuliffe and John Kerry and Howard Dean will eat humble yellowcake?

In July last year, I wrote about the Bush Lie of the Week in this space. The CIA had disowned the Niger story, and I noted these were the same fellows who botched the Sudanese aspirin factory business, failed to spot September 11 coming, etc, etc.

“So,” I wrote, “if you’re the president and the same intelligence bureaucrats who got all the above wrong say the Brits are way off the mark, there’s nothing going on with Saddam and Africa, what do you do? Do you say, ’Hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day’? Or, given what you’ve learned about the state of your humint [human intelligence], is it likely they’ve got much of a clue about what’s going on in French Africa? Isn’t this one of those deals where the Brits and the shifty French [Niger’s uranium operations are under the supervision of the French Atomic Energy Commission[ are more plugged in?”[$PARAGRAPH_OFF$]

And so it’s proved. Almost every European intelligence service reckoned Saddam was trying to buy uranium in Africa. The only folks who didn’t think so were the CIA.

Let’s weigh their comparative interest in the story. The Financial Times revealed last week that one Continental intelligence agency had a uranium-smuggling operation involving Iraq under surveillance for three years.

In return, the only primary investigation initiated by the most powerful nation on Earth was to send a narcissistic kook from a Saudi-funded think tank on vacation for a week to sip mint tea with government stooges. He didn’t even bother filing a written report and the “Bush spurned my advice” column he wrote for the Times reads like a bad travelogue: “Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger River.” After that, the great narcissist somehow managed to make himself the center of the story: But hey, enough about Saddam’s nuclear ambitions; let’s talk about me.

A few weeks before September 11, 2001, Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote a timely piece in the Atlantic Monthly on the woeful state of U.S counterterrorism intelligence in a CIA neutered by politically correct bureaucracy. Mr. Gerecht’s many memorable quotes included this line from a young CIA man reflecting on an agency used to desk-bound life in Virginia: “Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don’t happen.”

That’s Niger in a nutshell: Diarrhea Central. Who would want to be stationed there when they could be back at Langley monitoring the world’s e-mail in an air-conditioned office?

But Niger is a 99.5 percent Sunni Muslim country with the world’s second-highest birthrate and a load of uranium. It’s exactly the sort of place an intelligence agency in the war on terror ought to keep an eye on. And that doesn’t mean sending Mint Tea Boy to write it up for the travel section.

That’s the issue here: CIA folks are tourists in the heart of darkness. This spring, the ever-complacent George Tenet told the September 11 Commission another half-decade would be needed to rebuild the clandestine service. So three years after September 11 the CIA says it needs another five years.

Imagine if Franklin Roosevelt had turned to Mr. Tenet to start up the OSS, the CIA’s wartime predecessor. In 1942, he would have told the president it would be up and running by 1950.

President Bush didn’t lie. He was right, and the CIA was wrong. That doesn’t mean, they lied either. Intelligence is never 100 percent. You make a judgment, and in this instance the judgments of the British and Europeans were right, and the judgment of the principal intelligence agency of the world’s hyperpower was wrong. That should be a cause of great concern — for all Americans.

National security shouldn’t be a Republican/Democrat thing. But it’s become one because, for too many Americans, when it’s a choice between Mr. Bush and anybody else, they’ll take anybody else. So, in the Michael Moore movie “Fahrenheit 9/11,” if it’s a choice between Mr. Bush and Saddam, Mr. Moore comes down on the side of the genocidal whacko and shows us lyrical slo-mo shots of kiddies flying kites in a Ba’athist utopia.

In the Afghan war, if it’s a choice between George Bush and the women-enslaving homosexual-executing Taliban, Susan Sarandon and company side with the Taliban. And in the most exquisite reductio of this now universal rule, if it’s a choice between Mr. Bush and the CIA, the left sides with the CIA.

There’s one for the peace marches: Hey, hey, CIA/How many Bush lies did you expose today? This isn’t an antiwar movement. This is a movement in denial.

Mark Steyn is the senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc. Publications, senior North American columnist for Britain’s Telegraph Group, North American editor for the Spectator, and a nationally syndicated columnist.