January 29, 2004 - David Kay’s candid public remarks admitting that Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime had no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction has Karl Rove’s spinsters operating in full Whirling Dervish mode. That President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld and Condi Rice, all of whom described Saddam’s arsenal in excruciating detail a year ago, were victims of faulty intelligence is now the party line. And, of course, that faulty intelligence is all Bill Clinton’s fault. After all Clinton gutted the CIA and its Director, George Tenet, is a Clinton appointee held over into the third year of the Bush Administrations. Chicken George and Dugout Dick did not mislead us into war – they were victims.

The problem is that the facts don’t support that spin. Just days into the Bush Administration the Pentagon was ordered to plan the invasion of Iraq. Osama Bin Laden was pushed on to the back burner and the intelligence estimates and action plan that Sandy Berger handed to Condi Rice lay on her desk until September 10th. Don Rumsfeld’s first reaction to the September 11th attack was to call on the President to implement the invasion plans. But the FBI’s investigation moved too fast and too publicly. Within hours the world knew that it was Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda and not Saddam’s Iraq that had attacked America. Saddam would have to wait in his turn.

Allied troops had hardly entered Kabul when the Bush Administration embarked upon its campaign to sell the American people and the world that Saddam posed the kind of threat to the United States that justified a resort to war. Through the spring and summer the campaign went on, a curious long distance dialogue in which first Washington demanded disarmament and Baghdad declared that it had done so already.

In the fall the build up of the invasion force went on while UNSCOM and IAEA returned to the Iraqi sands to search for forbidden arms. Through October and November the number of troops gathered in Kuwait grew daily. It was an army of US and British soldiers arrayed for the planned invasion, waiting for the command to go, and deployed within easy missile range of its adversary while the United States presented its alleged inventory of Iraqi arms to the skeptical world – and UNSCOM could not find.

A prudent commander does not place his troops in a harms way in a position where an enemy’s preemptive attack can devastate his strength. Yet that is exactly what the Bush Administration did. Either the Bush Administration believed that the Iraqi arsenal of unconventional arms was deployed and ready for launch on a half-hour’s notice and provided Saddam with a tempting target in spite of the danger; or it knew that the danger that it trumpeted was merely a diplomatic fiction and the deployed army was safe from unconventional attack. Either a cynical President deployed an army as bait hoping it would be struck or he knew that the deployment was secure.

That is the one fact that no matter how dizzyingly the Rovian Dervishes whirls they cannot spin away. Even today the President and his Administration is relying on faulty intelligence to pull it through – counting on our faulty intelligence and that this is the “some of the time” during which it can fool “all of the people” – or at least most of them.