Facts Continue to Change Their Shape

Today's column by Frank Rich, "So You Call This Breaking News," illuminates a frustrating reality of today's political debate. Facts mean nothing. Those of us still trapped in the reality-based community think that we can simply make a stronger factual argument and the sheer power of the truth will win the day. We've had almost six years of the Bush administration, more than enough time to realize that's nothing but a pipe dream.

The facts of Iraq are not in dispute. But the truth is that facts don't matter anyway to this administration, and that's what makes this whole N.I.E. debate beside the point. From the start, honest information has never figured into the prosecution of this war. The White House doesn't care about intelligence, good or bad, classified or unclassified, because it believes it knows best, regardless of what anyone else has to say. The debate over the latest N.I.E. or any yet to leak will not alter that fundamental and self-destructive operating principle. That's the truly bad news.

This war has now gone on so long that we tend to forget the early history that foretold the present. Yet this is the history we must remember now more than ever, because it keeps repeating itself, with ever more tragic results. In the run-up to the war, it should be recalled, the administration did not even bother to commission an N.I.E., a summary of the latest findings from every American intelligence agency, on Iraq’s weapons.

Why not? The answer can be found in what remains the most revealing Iraq war document leaked to date: the Downing Street memo of July 23, 2002, written eight months before the invasion. In that secret report to the Blair government, the head of British intelligence reported on a trip to Washington, where he learned that the Bush administration was fixing the "intelligence and facts" around the predetermined policy of going to war in Iraq. If we were going to fix the intelligence anyway, there was no need for an N.I.E., except as window dressing, since it might expose the thinness of the administration’s case.

A prewar N.I.E. was hastily (and sloppily) assembled only because Congress demanded it. By the time it was delivered to the Capitol after much stalling, on Oct. 1, 2002, less than two weeks remained before the House and Senate would vote on the Iraq war resolution. "No more than six senators and only a handful of House members got beyond the five-page executive summary," according to an article last spring in Foreign Affairs by Paul Pillar, the C.I.A. senior analyst for the Middle East from 2000 to 2005. In a White House press briefing after the war started, an official said Condi Rice hadn’t read it at all, leaving that menial duty to her retinue of "experts."

The Bushies are coming up with all the facts they need--the real ones are meaningless to them. We've got to start going around the White House and the executive branch as a whole. We've got to put a Congress in place that will no longer kowtow to the fantasy-based Bush administration.

(Thanks to Wealthy Frenchman for access to this week's column.)