Curveball

by tristero

Here’s an interview with Bob Drogin who wrote a book about Curveball, the Iraqi refugee who invented, out of thin air, Saddam’s reconstituted WMD program and whose lies were used by Bush to invade Iraq, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity (as Ann “The Perfected One” Coulter put it). His conclusion is that it is groundless conspiracy-theory mongering to claim the neo-cons really are to blame. It’s the CIA, who bought Curveball’s lies and passed them upwards who were the main actors at fault for Bush/Iraq.

There’s a problem with that scenario, namely the inconvenient truth that a gaggle of neocons, chickenhawks and related birdbrains wrote a letter to President Clinton in 1998, one year before Curveball defected from Iraq to Germany and started lying to support his asylum request. There is also abundant evidence that the Bush administration intended to invade Iraq from the earliest days of his regime.

In short, Curveball’s lies were useful, but not necessary. There really was (still is) a “Cabal.” That was the actual word used – as “self-mockery,” to be sure – by the Office of Special Plans, conceived by Wolfowitz to fix the intelligence around the policy of invading Iraq. And they really wanted to invade Iraq as the first part of an intended large scale regional war. And Bush was in agreement with the Cabal, long before 9/11, and probably long before anyone in his administration ever heard of Curveball.

Drogin urges us to accept the incompetence line about Bush, et al as the main reason for Bush/Iraq, essentially that the administration was misled by bad intelligence analysis by the CIA and failed to vet that intelligence carefully. Bush’s decision was “political” but presumably justifiable to Drogin, given what the White House knew. (Drogin also thinks that “Judy” Miller did a good job as a reporter, given what she knew at the time.)

First of all, it is easy to agree with Drogin that Bush is hopelessly incompetent. What Drogin fails to understand is that advocating and executing an invasion of Iraq for no good reason whatsoever is prima facie evidence of that incompetence and it was quite clear to most of the world that he had no good reasons despite the Curveballed intelligence. Also, there is nothing about being incompetent that precludes conspiring – in fact, one could argue that the two go together quite nicely, like Larry Craig and public toilets.

Furthermore, there is no question that the CIA fucked up royally, but it is not clear that they did so primarily in the way Drogin claims. Hersh’s story – that the CIA was essentially spineless and, after an enormous amount of vice-presidential arm-twisting, reported what Bush wanted reported – smells like the truth, given what we know about the way the Bush administration coerces so many people in so many different areas to do their wacky bidding.

Finally, while it looks as if Drogin has done some good work in fleshing out the Curveball story, including his complicated relationship with Chalabi’s gang, the overall picture he is trying to create – that the invasion and conquest of Iraq was, no matter how badly managed, a reasonable response to incompetent intelligence – is simply wrong. The neocons really did, and still are, pushing as hard as they can for a regional war in the Middle East. Bush really did greenlight this foreign policy from the earliest days, and the CIA – while no doubt riddled with serious problems including rampant incompetence – was coerced into manufacturing reports that were in agreement with these goals. Drogin asks:

I’ve never quite understood … the fixation that people have to try and prove that George Bush or George Tenet or somebody else deliberately lied. I mean, they took us into a war based on shockingly insufficient evidence; isn’t that bad enough?

Yes, it is. But that’s not all that happened.