Connect those stories, number two
It's time to play "connect the story" -- the game where we show the
relationship between seemingly disconnected news stories -- again, as we recently did
regarding the California energy and budget crises.
There isn't much more to say about the flap over President Bush's State
of the Union use of fraudulent evidence regarding Iraq's nuclear program.
We know that an administration desperate to make a case for war seized upon
material that it had been repeatedly warned was suspect or (as is actually
the case) outright forged and presented it to the American public. That
impeachment hearings aren't already being held is just another sign of the
deep dysfunctionality of our political system -- in which partisan
operatives in Congress can drum up an impeachment vote when a president
lies about his sex life, but when a president lies about the gravest
matters of war and peace, it's not even considered worth an investigation.
What is interesting here is that this story is playing out at
precisely the same time the nation may be slowly coming to the belated
realization that things really aren't going so well in the president's
open-ended, no-clearly-defined-goals "war on terrorism." Our principal foe,
Osama bin Laden, remains on the loose, and his organization continues to
operate in a region sandwiched between one nation that we conquered and one
that is nominally our ally. His principal ally, Mullah Omar, is also on the
loose. The leader of the other nation we've recently invaded, Saddam
Hussein, is also on the loose. Is there a pattern here? Why can't we find
these guys?
This is, of course, an intelligence failure -- and that's where these
two stories intersect. At the very same time that the Bush administration
was corrupting our intelligence agencies by demanding that they produce the
evidence for an already decided-upon war, it needed to rely upon them to
locate its foes. I'm not an intelligence insider and I don't know whether
U.S. intelligence's failure to locate Osama et al. is a function of
incompetence, demoralization, structural weakness (reliance on technical
means rather than people who speak the language, for example) or other
factors.
But it's obvious that the bogus Iraq/Niger nuclear connection story is a
sign of just how derailed, corrupted and ineffectual the U.S.intelligence
effort has become. If you're busy squabbling over whether to offer
fabricated evidence for a trumped-up war, you have that much less time to
do your real job.
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