Who Lied When People Died?--An exchange between Michael Isikoff and the authors of Party of Defeat

[The following is an exchange between Michael Isikoff and the authors of Party of Defeat. It is a pleasure to have Mr. Isikoff join us here at Frontpage -- The Editors.]

Turning Reality on Its Head
By Michael Isikoff

There was a time that David Horowitz (with Peter Collier) wrote absorbing works of history, filled with fresh research and nuanced insights, about great American families like the Rockefellers and the Roosevelts. Now he writes partisan talking points that masquerade as history. How else to describe Party of Defeat? In this work, Horowitz with Ben Johnson presents a full-throttled defense of President George W. Bush's foreign policy while sliming the president's critics (and journalists) as unpatriotic subversives and unscrupulous opportunists. Leave aside Horowitz's inability to make distinctions. ( I am called a "left leaning journalist-a description that will surprise certain members of the Clinton administration who once cast me as a member of the "vast right wing conspiracy.) At almost ever turn, the book's arguments are based on a skewed and selective reading of the public record that turns reality on its head. .

Horowitz' most astonishing - and misleading– assertions relate to Iraq. He and his co-author argue that the president's critics have "distorted" the rationale for the war in Iraq, which they contend was really about enforcing Security Council resolutions and upholding the rule of "international law." It was not, as everybody in the country thought, the perceived threat of Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda. True, those were the claims repeatedly made by the President and other senior officials in the run up to war-and which turned out to be almost entirely wrong. But the contention that Iraq had a vast arsenal of WMD, Horowitz and Johnson tell us, was only about "selling" the decision to go to war to the American public, a political exercise that "inevitably involves over-simplification" and the "use of symbolic representations" in place of "complex arguments." There is, to say the last, a rather brazen cynicism implicit in the idea that presidents are justified in not leveling with the country, or "oversimplifying" as they put it, when it comes to basic decisions of war and peace.

Horowitz and Johnson argue that, in any case, President Bush did not really distort the intelligence about Iraqi WMD because his assertions were fully backed by the Oct. 1, 2002 classified National Intelligence Estimate and "confirmed by government intelligence agencies around the world." But the canard that "everybody" in the U.S. and international intelligence community believed what the White House said about Iraq's weapons programs is way too facile. The actual state of the U.S. intelligence about the Iraqi threat- before the White House began its campaign for war-was murky at best. It could best be reconstructed by examining the March, 19, 2002 testimony of Admiral Thomas Wilson, then director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, to the Senate Armed Services committee. Wilson outlined the five most pressing "near term" threats to U.s. security threats around the world-and Iraq didn't even make the list. When he did speak about Iraq, Wilson noted that Saddam's military capabilities had been "significantly degraded" thanks to years for United Nations sanctions and that, as far as US. intelligence agencies knew, the regime possessed only "residual" chemical and biological stockpiles left over from before the Gulf War.

Now cut to the saber rattling rhetoric six months later when the White House launched its political drumbeat for war. Horowitz and Johnson lamely argue that Bush never described the Iraqi threat as "imminent." He said everything but. Iraq was a "grave and gathering danger.", Bush told the United Nations on September 12. 2002. It was a "threat of unique urgency," he told congressional leaders in the Rose Garden on October 2, 2002. In Cincinnati on October 7, 2002, Bush declared that Saddam was rebuilding his nuclear weapons programs and exploring ways of using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS) to deliver chemical and biological agents "for missions targeting the United States." Most alarming of all, Saddam had forged ties with Al Qaeda-the very terrorists who had attacked America on 9/11. U.S. intelligence, the president proclaimed, had "learned" that Saddam's regime was "training Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gasses."

Horowitz and Johnson insist these claims were supported by the CIA-vetted NIE, thereby absolving the administration once and for all of the charge of manipulating intelligence. But they totally miss the point about the NIE. The declassified segments of the NIE they quote from in their book (which were publicly released in July, 2003, not in 2006 as they wrongly assert) were not especially newsworthy at the time; they simply mirrored the language in the CIA approved white paper that had been released by the administration on the eve of the congressional vote to go to war. What was significant about the NIE declassified after the war were the striking dissents from within the U.S. intelligence community that had been concealed from the public before the war. Those dissents (unmentioned in Party of Defeat) showed that the Department of Energy (whose nuclear scientists were the country's foremost experts on the subject) had disputed the most critical part of the administration's case relating to Iraq's nuclear program-the conclusion that aluminum tubes being acquired by the Iraqis could only be used for nuclear centrifuges to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb. (The tubes, as the DOE scientists rightly suspected, were actually being used for conventional rockets.) The Air Force's intelligence office (whose analysts were once again the chief experts on the subject) had dissented from the conclusion that Iraq's UAVs were being designed to deliver chemical and biological weapons. The State Department's intelligence office, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) had dissented from the whole idea that Iraq was rebuilding its nuclear program. (Vice President Cheney had said before the war that the U.S. knew that Iraq was enriching uranium for a nuclear bomb with "absolute certainty.") INR labeled another part of the nuclear case-the assertion that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium from Africa - "highly dubious."

It is, of course, absolutely true that the full NIE was available to all members of Congress, including leading Democrats like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry -and virtually none of them took the time to actually read it. There is plenty of blame to go around here. But the dissents within the NIE were only a small part of what turned out to be even more sordid story. Further investigations by the Congress showed that doubts were rampant throughout the U.S. intelligence community about almost every aspect of the administration's case. The claim that Iraq was developing mobile biological weapons labs (a prominent part of Secretary of State Colin Powell's later speech to the Security Council) turned out to rest almost entirely on a shady Iraqi refugee in Germany code-named Curveball. When senior U.S. intelligence officials raised doubts about his credibility, they were brushed aside by their superiors. The assertion that Saddam was training Al Qaeda members in chemical and biological warfare was based on an even shaker single source -an Al Qaeda operative named Ibn al Shaykh Al-Libi, who had been picked up by the U.S. military during the invasion of Afghanistan and "rendered" by the CIA to Egypt for "enhanced" interrogations. After being beaten and tortured, he coughed up his story about Saddam and Al Qaeda. After the war, he recanted the whole thing - and the CIA withdrew all its reporting (having nothing else to support the idea that anything al-Libi said had ever taken place.) The Al-Libi story is a scandal for which administration officials have never been held accountable. We now know that DIA and the CIA analysts had questioned his story from the outset. One August, 2002 CIA report sent to the White House (only disclosed this year) had concluded that al-Libi had likely "fabricated" parts of his account-a red flag that was ignored by White House officials intent on marshaling the most powerful public case they could make against Saddam, no matter how shaky its foundations.

Horowitz and Johnson charge that in the summer of 2003 leading Democrats-fed by "disinformation" from Iraq war critic Joseph Wilson - launched a "reckless" attack on the war in order to gain political advantage. They call this, rather hyperbolically, "the most disgraceful episode in America's history." But some of the sharpest attacks on the war from the outset came from sober minded Republicans who rightly worried invading Iraq could harm U.S. security by distracting the country from the more pressing threat of Al Qaeda. It was Brent Scowcroft, President George H.W. Bush's national security advisor, who wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in August, 2002 under the headline "Don't Attack Saddam." And it was Dick Armey, the conservative House Republican Majority Leader, who that month expressed disbelief at the United States would go to war without a legitimate casus belli. "We Americans don't make unprovoked attacks," he said.

It is true that leading Democrats (many of whom had backed the war in the fall of 2002) pivoted and started criticizing the administration on Iraq in the summer of 2003. But this probably had less to do with scoring cheap political points than the cold hard facts on the ground. After three months of occupying the country by the U.S. military, not a whiff of WMD could be found. AS Carl Ford, the sage State Department intelligence chief (who Dick Cheney had once tried to recruit for his vice presidential staff) later put it, "the whole underpinning and logic of the war was unraveling." That, coupled with the disclosure of pre-war dissents from inside the intelligence community and the emergence of a deadly Sunni insurgency that nobody in the administration had predicted or planned for, rightly raised the question as to whether the country had been conned.

There is much else that is wrong or distorted in the Party of Defeat. The authors bizarrely claim that the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee "subsequently confirmed" the President's State of the Union assertion about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa. Actually, the committee's last word on the subject (on p. 25 of its September 12, 2006 report) was to endorse the Iraq Survey Group's unequivocal conclusion: there is "no evidence that Iraq sought uranium from foreign sources after 1991." They claim that Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's convicted chief of staff, never leaked the identity of Joe Wilson's wife, CIA officer Valerie Plame. Actually, he did - to Judith Miller of the New York Times over breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel on July 8, 2003. They rightly chastise President Clinton for failing to respond aggressively enough to intelligence warnings that "sooner or later, Bin Laden will attack U.S. interests, perhaps using WMD." Then they whitewash the Bush White House's own inattention to the subject in its first nine months in office even after the president received the Aug. 6, 2001 Daily Intelligence Brief entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

But why muck up a partisan story line with such inconvenient facts? Far easier to oversimplify.

We want to begin by thanking Michael Isikoff for having the courtesy to respond to a conservative argument. We live in a cultural moment, where this has become unusual. Liberals so dominate the organs of the culture –the news magazines such as Time and Isikoff’s own journal Newsweek, the news pages of virtually every major metropolitan newspaper, the op-ed pages of virtually every paper save the Wall Street Journal, the major journals of opinion both online and in print – that they are rarely moved to notice, let alone confront a serious argument when it is offered by conservatives like ourselves. Although our book, Party of Defeat levels the most serious charges against the Democratic Party leadership over its conduct in the war on terror and although it has been endorsed by 18 members of Congress, including the ranking members of the Intelligence, Homeland Security, Counter-terrorism and International Affairs committees, and although the book has been out for months, not a single review of has appeared in the liberal media, and we are fairly confident that none will. Moreover, even though FrontPage has offered its own pages to the editors of Slate, The American Prospect, The New Republic, and other liberal journals, Michael Isikoff is the only liberal commentator on foreign policy who has responded. So, it is appropriate to begin our reply to his critique by commending him for being willing to write one.

Unfortunately he has chosen to begin his argument with a series of misrepresentations. Our book is not “a full-throttled defense of President George W. Bush’s foreign policy” as Isikoff claims. It contains in fact harsh criticisms of Bush and praise for critics such as generals Shinseki and Scowcroft. Nor is it a series of “partisan talking points that masquerade as history,” as Isikoff suggests. Our book does not pretend to be a history of the Iraq war or the war on terror. It is specifically and explicitly a focused critique of the critics of the president’s war policy – including Michael Isikoff.

Here is how we describe our agendas in the introduction to Party of Defeat: “This book is about unprecedented attacks on an American president and a war in progress. It is about the impact of a divided national leadership on the prosecution of the war. It is an attempt to understand the defection of leaders from a war they supported and from a national purpose they presumably share. It is also an effort to understand the influence on the Democratic Party of a radical Left, which has defected from that purpose and no longer regards itself as part of the nation.”

Isikoff begins his response with two other charges that require comment. We do not “slime” critics of the war nor do we fail to make distinctions. We did refer to Isikoff as “left-leaning journalist.” However, Isikoff’s observation that the Clintons smeared him as a member of the “vast right wing conspiracy” because he did a superlative reporting job on their antics says more about the Clintons than it says about him. His book Hubris, which can fairly described as a 400-page partisan attack on the Bush administration’s foreign policy bolstering the main talking points of Democratic critics. Of all the investigative reporters available, Isikoff chose to co-author his book with David Corn, the Washington Bureau chief of The Nation, as much a movement organ of the political Left as Human Events of the political Right. If Isikoff were a writer for the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal instead of Newsweek and had co-authored a stock defense of Bush’s war policy with National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, would he think it odd if, say, Frank Rich described him as a “right-leaning journalist?”

In our book, we accuse critics of the war of conflating the political selling of the war with the rationale for the war. The rationale for the war – the reasons why the administration actually decided to go to war – was laid out in several statements and documents, none of which is analyzed in Isikoff’s book. The first of these was the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq, passed by both houses of Congress in October 2002. Twelve of the bill’s 23 justifications for the use of force relate to the 16 violated UN resolutions designed to enforce the Gulf War truce – a fact Isikoff neither mentions nor confronts in his book and which he dismisses in his critique of ours. Were the Democrats duped into incorporating this language into the bill and making these their chief justifications for action?

The rationale for the war was further laid out in the joint U.S. and British statement of December 19, 2002, that Iraq was in material breach of the UN Security Council ultimatum (Resolution 1441) whose deadline was December 7. It was again defined in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, which declared that the U.S. would not allow Iraq to become an “imminent threat.” British Prime Minister Tony Blair eloquently defended the decision to parliament on the eve of the war, rehearsing the evidence that Saddam Hussein could no longer be trusted to comply with international law and the Gulf War truce, and concluding that allowing him to remain in power posed an unacceptable threat.

It was Saddam’s defiance of UN Security Council Resolution 1441 whose deadline was December 7, 2002, that provided the legal basis for the war, a fact that Isikoff fails to mention. The main criticism we level against Isikoff’s book is that in 458 closely argued pages indicting the Bush administration for launching a needless and unjustified war, he refers to this resolution in a cursory two paragraphs which fail to mention or confront its significance. Isikoff’s failure to defend this omission in his response to our book or to deal with our argument we take as a vindication of our thesis. Isikoff and and all the other critics of the war fail to make a distinction between the selling of the war and the rationale for the war, and thus fail to make their case. Not one of them, for example, provides a realistic alternative to the war decision, short of capitulation to Saddam and acquiescence in his plan to become a nuclear power.

Instead Isikoff’s book focuses on the Administration’s efforts to sell the war to the public, most notoriously in Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN on February 5, 2003, five weeks before the invasion began and almost certainly after the decision to use force was made. Powell’s speech was an ill-conceived attempt to get Saddam’s allies – Russia, China and France – to enforce Resolution 1441 and defend international law. It was more importantly an attempt to persuade the left-wing Laborites in Britain, who were violently opposed to Blair’s support for the war, to relent. Saddam’s violation of the Gulf War true and defiance of a 17th UN Security Council Resolution, a war ultimatum, had not been enough to convince the British Labor Party or the French of the need to use force.

Powell’s emphasis on WMDs and invocation of the aluminum tubes was unfortunate but was part of a political effort to sell the war to the public. It was not a strategic defense of the decision to go to war. Isikoff regards as “brazen cynicism” on our part the suggestion that moving masses politically requires simplification and the use of symbols such as WMDs. But are there any political arguments that are conducted differently? In a nuanced manner? War critics often hail George H.W. Bush’s actions before the first Gulf War as a model for interventions. Bush-41 secured a UN resolution for military action, but he also sold the war by recounting Saddam’s atrocities – even referring to Hussein as “Hitler revisited,” hardly a nuanced claim.

The real question for critics like Michael Isikoff, who oppose the war, is this: Do they believe that if the United States withdrew its 150,000 troops from the Iraqi border in 2003 Saddam Hussein would not have proceeded to develop WMDs and use them? The Duelfer Report concluded that Saddam would have developed them as soon as sanctions were lifted. Does Isikoff believe the United States could have kept 150,000 troops on the Iraqi border indefinitely in order to use them when Saddam developed nuclear weapons? Does he think that invading a power that possessed nuclear weapons would be more prudent than invading a power that was planning to get them? Is this the case he wants to make? He should make it then, instead of throwing up red herrings like aluminum tubes and Niger uranium deals – which is precisely what we argued in our book.

The subject of which, to reiterate, was the opposition to the war by the leaders of the Democratic Party. When Isikoff discusses the intelligence debate that preceded the war he conveniently elides this issue and makes the irrelevant and inflammatory case that the public was not given access to the internal administration conflicts over the intelligence that underpinned the decision to go to war. The public was not told that there was opposition inside the intelligence and military communities to the views the administration finally adopted. Of course they weren’t. What nation in all history has operated its intelligence as an open book? When has any commander laid all his intelligence to any enemy who happens to be monitoring his national press? What can Isikoff be thinking?

The real issue is what the Democrats knew about the intelligence debate, not the public. The Democrats voted to use force, endorsed the war, and then within three months – three months! – turned against it and attacked it calling their own country an aggressor nation, their president a liar who sent American youth to die for no reason, and U.S. troops bloody occupiers and war criminals. In defense of this betrayal, the Democrats claim that Bush manipulated the intelligence and deceived them. But this is demonstrably false. It is itself the biggest lie of the war. As the major opposition party in a democratic nation, the Democrats had full access to the intelligence debate and participated in it. Isikoff’s confusion of “the public” with the Democratic leadership has the effect of amplifying the confusion that sustains the Democrats’ claim that they were duped.

But unlike the public, the Democrats had access to all the intelligence information the government had. The Senate Intelligence Committee oversees the CIA and America’s other intelligence agencies. In other words the Democrats knew, or if they didn’t know all they had to do was ask CIA chief George Tenet – a Clinton appointee -- and he would have been required by law to tell them.

As we note in our book, the “striking dissents” the Democrats cited for their abrupt about-face were frauds: Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, and Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski. The Senate Intelligence Committee ruled that Wilson provided “misleading” information to the press about his trip to Niger and that his report “lent more credibility” to the notion that Iraq had sought African yellowcake. Similarly, the Butler Report (never rescinded) deemed the assertion that was the basis for Bush’s 16 words “well-founded.” Ted Kennedy reference Kwiatkowski’s testimony that analysts were pressured by a Zionist cabal, but the Senate Intelligence Committee found she “had no direct knowledge to support any claims that intelligence analysts were pressured, and much of what she said is contradicted by information from other interviews.” If the president’s effort to enforce 17 UN Security Council resolutions and remove a murderous tyrant from office – a goal Al Gore endorsed in 1992 and Bill Clinton seconded in 1998 – certainly the Democrats’ vicious attack on the commander-in-chief’s integrity (allegations that would have been illegal during previous wars) rest on equally flawed intelligence.

In short, their opposition to the war was political, unprincipled, and unconscionable. With a war in progress, and American soldiers in harm’s way, they launched a psychological warfare campaign against their own commander-in-chief whose aim was to discredit their own country as an aggressor nation, violating international law. This is what we described as “the most disgraceful episode in American history” and this is the substance of the charge we made in our book. Michael Isikoff’s critique doesn’t begin to address it.

Instead Isikoff returns to the side issues that serve only distract attention from the question at hand – and in particular the famous aluminum tubes which were presented as evidence by Powell that Iraq was more advanced than it actually was in developing its nuclear program. But Bush had made very clear that his policy was not to take down a regime that already had nuclear weapons. It was to prevent Saddam from getting to the point where he would have them. This is inarguably what Bush meant when he said in his State of the Union address in January 2003 that he would not allow Iraq to become an “imminent threat.” Isikoff simply dismisses this substantive policy position as rhetoric. But it was not rhetoric. It was a substantive policy – the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war. If Saddam was not going to abide by international law and the UN arms control agreements he had signed, which were designed to prevent him from developing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, the United States was determined to remove him by force. That was the message and that was the policy, first enunciated by President Clinton, then endorsed by his entire national security team, and finally passed by a majority of Democrats in the United States Senate.

Isikoff’s counter-claim that Bush already regarded Iraq as an “imminent threat” is refuted by Bush’s eleventh hour ultimatum to Saddam to leave Iraq and thereby avoid war. If Bush was concocting evidence to justify an invasion of Iraq, why would he give Saddam this loophole? If his concern was stockpiles of WMDs, the question is the same. The answer is that Bush thought that any Iraqi dictator besides Saddam was likely to yield to the pressure the United States and its allies were exerting and comply with the UN resolutions and international law without an armed intervention. In the 458 pages of his book, Michael Isikoff does not address this issue – which is crucial to evaluating the decision to go to war – nor has a single Bush critic known to us. Turning reality on its head is blaming Bush, rather than Saddam Hussein, for the war that ensued.

Isikoff’s indictment of the U.S. government for its treatment of al-Libi, and the pivotal role the misinformation he supposed volunteered to end his torture, is dubious. The Senate Intelligence Committee notes, “The foreign government service denies using any pressure during al-Libi’s interrogation…while CIA believes al-Libi fabricated information, the CIA cannot determine whether, or what portions of, the original statements or the later recants are true or false.” George Tenet is more specific: al-Libi “clearly lied. We just don't know when. Did he lie when he first said that al-Qa’ida members received training in Iraq or did he lie when he said they did not?” Did he offer up false information to end his torture (torture the foreign service denies occurred), or did he crack under pressure and later recant the truth he had spoken? Tenet concludes, “In my mind, either case might still be true…since we don’t know, we can assume nothing.” There is also the question of al-Libi’s motive in lying, whichever portion of his testimony he invented. One intelligence operative has asserted al-Libi fabricated ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda, not to pacify his torturers, but to provoke the United States into toppling Saddam, whom he considered an enemy. In that case, al-Libi is not the victim of Isikoff’s scenario but a liar and jihadist provocateur.

Nor are Isikoff’s other indictments of our book made on any firmer basis. We hardly “whitewash the Bush White House's own inattention” to terrorism. Shortly after taking office, Bush ordered a comprehensive anti-terrorism plan, which arrived on his desk September 10, 2001. As Isikoff knows, the “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” memo was elliptical, vague, and added no new information of an imminent nature. Moreover, Isikoff fails to mention how a comprehensive anti-terrorism strategy (which had been in the works for eight months) could have been produced in the one month that elapsed between this memo and the 9/11 attacks.

Isikoff takes us to task over the leak of Valerie Plame’s name to Robert Novak. Scooter Libby was not the source of this leak; rather antiwar Realist Richard Armitage was. He then told no one and let the president’s enemies in the Democratic Party and the media call him a liar for several years. Still, Isikoff’s co-author, David Corn, has tortured logic to somehow link Armitage’s inadvertent leak to the White House.

Far from ignoring Brent Scowcroft’s argument, as Isikoff suggests we refer to him on pages 158-9. His objections were discussed in detail in David Horowitz’s previous book, Unholy Alliance. In fact, we cite General Scowcroft as one of the few “isolated but conspicuous models of responsible dissent” on page 158 of Party of Defeat, because after the war began he did not call the president a liar or brand our soldiers as war criminals – or even falsely accuse them of flushing a Koran down a toilet at Guantanamo Bay. This is an exceedingly low threshold to cross but one many leftists fail to meet.

In sum, we made a case in our book that Isikoff and other critics of the war have conducted a straw man argument – inventing their own reasons why America went to war in Iraq in order to refute them. But why muck up a partisan story line with inconvenient facts? Far easier to ignore the facts and make your case without them.

[This is the second and final part of the exchange between Michael Isikoff and David Horowitz and Ben Johnson about the book Party of Defeat. To see Part I, click here.]

The chief problem with the critique of Horowitz and Johnson is they persist in seeing the world through a stale and utterly irrelevant ideological lens. There is nothing “liberal” or “conservative” about the issues here. (And for the record, I don’t put myself in either camp.) Whatever the merits of using military force to overthrow Saddam-- and there were certainly legitimate arguments to make at the time-- there is no serious dispute that the Bush administration badly misled the public about the state of intelligence about the threat posed by the Iraqi regime. It proclaimed it had “bulletproof evidence” (in Donald Rumsfeld’s words) of connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda when it had nothing of the kind. It asserted it knew with “absolute certainty” (as Vice President Cheney put it) that Saddam was acquiring equipment for a nuclear weapons programs—when the government’s chief nuclear scientists disputed the claim. These were not “side” shows. They were central to persuading the Congress and the public to back the invasion-- and an abuse of trust that undermined American credibility around the world. I’m glad that 18 Republican members of Congress endorsed Party of Defeat, a partisan attack on Democrats. But the reason that no mainstream publications have reviewed their book probably has little to do with political bias. It’s because, without offering any new information, Horowitz and Johnson try to relitigate issues about which, for most Americans, the verdict of history is already in.

In their lengthy rebuttal, Horowitz and Johnson repeat the argument in their book that the real reason Bush decided to wage war was Saddam’s “defiance” of Resolution 1441. But Resolution 1441 (demanding that Saddam fully account for his pre-Gulf War WMD and permit the return of weapons inspectors for verification) wasn’t passed until November 8, 2002. That’s nearly one year after Bush ordered General Tommy Franks to draw up invasion plans, nine months after he ordered the CIA to begin covert warfare and sabotage aimed at paving the way for an invasion (Project Anabasis) and two months after he asked Congress to pass a resolution authorizing him to use military force to overthrow Saddam. There’s a reason few thought at the time the White House was terribly interested in the findings of weapons inspectors or the fine print of Security Council resolutions: they said so! “A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of [Saddam’s] compliance with U.N. resolutions,” Cheney told the Veterans of Foreign Wars on August 26, 2002. (Instead, he added, it would only provide “false comfort.”) When told, on May 1, 2002, that a reporter was questioning the grounds for the president’s “war talk” at a White House press briefing, Bush blurted out to two aides: “Did you tell her I’m going to kick his sorry motherfucking ass all over the Mideast!” Is there anybody at this point who seriously questions that the president and his top aides were determined to invade Iraq and weren’t waiting for the outcome of United Nations Security Council resolutions?

Two other points: Horowitz and Johnson seek to defend the disgraceful Ibn Shaykh Al-Libi episode by noting that the Egyptian security service denied having tortured him. And they believe this? The Egyptians routinely deny to U.S. officials they engage in torture. And year after the year, the U.S. State Department rejects those denials and harshly condemns the Egyptian security services for their horrific human rights abuses. (This year’s report cites “numerous, credible reports” of torture that include “stripping and blindfolding victims; suspending victims by the wrists and ankles in contorted positions or from a ceiling or doorframe with feet just touching the floor; beating victims with fists, whips, metal rods, or other objects; using electric shocks; dousing victims with cold water; and sexual abuse, including sodomy.”) Amazingly, Horowtiz and Johnson cite an unnamed intelligence operative who speculates that the reason that al-Libi fabricated his story about Saddam training Al Qaeda operatives in WMD was not to stop the torture he was being subjected to but because he considered the Iraqi leader an “enemy” and he wanted to provoke the U.S. into getting rid of him. Who knows if that were actually al-Libi’s motivation? (He has conveniently disappeared.) But of course al Qaeda considered Saddam an enemy. Most professional intelligence analysts knew that all along- and that the sketchy reports of sporadic “contacts” between Iraqi officials and Al Qaeda leaders never amounted to anything approaching “collaboration.” That’s why the steady drumbeat of pre-war administration claims that Saddam and Osama were somehow in bed together, was, not to put too fine a point on it, a fraud from the start.

Finally, Horowitz and Johnson—having been caught in their mistake about Scooter Libby not having leaked Valerie Plame’s CIA identity—subtly reshift their argument to instruct me that Richard Armitage was actually the “source” of the leak. Thanks for the info, guys. The news that it was Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage who first leaked Joe Wilson’s wife’s identity to Bob Woodward and columnist Robert Novak was revealed to the world in Hubis, the book I co-wrote with David Corn. Horowitz and Johnson criticize what they call Corn’s ‘”tortured” logic (a Freudian slip that?) regarding the White House connection. I don’t know what tortured logic they’re talking about. But as we painstakingly laid out in the book, Armitage’s role does not change the fact that Libby and Karl Rove (completely independently) leaked the same information for their own political reasons—to discredit Wilson for his criticism of the White House’s use of the phony Niger yellowcake story. Far from being tortured, it’s the same logic that special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald used to show that Libby had a genuine motivation to lie about what he knew about Wilson’s wife, resulting in his indictment and conviction for multiple felonies. I assume it was my collaboration with Corn, at the time the Washington editor for the Nation, that led Horowitz and Johnson to conclude (wrongly) that I’m a “left-leaning journalist.” David certainly qualifies. But the operative word there is “journalist.” The discovery that Armitage, an Iraq war skeptic, was the original leaker didn’t mesh well with the original liberal narrative that the entire CIA leak affair was one giant White House plot. Life, alas, is messier than partisans would like it. But once we discovered Armitage’s role, neither Corn nor I hesitated for a second about reporting it to the hilt and revealing it to the world in the book we wrote. It’s called journalism—very different from the polemic that is Party of Defeat.

The chief problem with Michael Isikoff’s latest comment is its attempt to pigeon-hole us as individuals who – unlike himself – see these issues through ideological lenses and therefore don’t really see them at all. In fact we do. There is nothing ideological in the case we have presented that Democrats turned their backs on a war they had authorized, and did so for political reasons that had nothing to do with the war itself (or with official intelligence about the war).We further argued that critics of the war such as Michael Isikoff have focused on side issues – the yellowcake uranium in Niger caper and the erroneous claims about the uses of aluminum tubes – which were irrelevant to the actual decision to go to war.

The war was not about an imminent threat posed by existing WMDs or by existing WMD programs, which renders the Niger and aluminum tubes issues irrelevant. Nor did we argue “the real reason Bush decided to wage war was Saddam’s ‘defiance’ of Resolution 1441.” The full Iraqi threat lay in:

1) Saddam’s 30 year history of aggression, and decade-long collusion with terrorists hostile to the United States;

2) Saddam’s defiance of 17 UN Security Council arms control resolutions, including the ultimatum that expired on December 7, 2002;

3) Saddam’s systematic violations of the Gulf War truce, which alone justified the resumption of war;

4) Saddam’s clear and proven intentions to proceed with WMD programs once the inspectors were neutralized or gone and sanctions were lifted, as verified by The Duefler Report; and

5) The fact that 150,000 American troops had to be placed on his border to get the UN inspectors into Iraq, and the troops could not be kept there indefinitely.

Like other critics of the war, Isikoff does not confront any of these issues, but instead focuses on peripheral matters such as those already mentioned.

A central focus of our critique of the Democratic leadership is its claim that the Bush Administration duped them into authorizing the war by manipulating the intelligence on which they based their votes. This is a lie and has been disproved by every investigation into the matter to date. Through the Senate and House Intelligence committees and the National Intelligence Estimate, the Democratic leadership had full access to all the intelligence on which the authorization for the use of force was based. They endorsed the war, again with full access to the intelligence on Iraq which the Bush Administration possessed. Their subsequent campaign against the President and the war effort – which focused on the claim that Bush misled them – was unfounded, cynical, unscrupulous, unprecedented, and malicious, and has done irreparable damage to American security and to its troops in harm’s way. Those are facts. Isikoff may dispute them, but at this point in our discussion he hasn’t. We consider that eloquent in itself.

In his critique of our book, Isikoff dodged the issue by arguing that the American “public” was misled by Administration comments about yellowcake uranium and aluminum tubes. This is quite a different argument from claiming that Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee such as John Kerry and Diane Feinstein were misled by such claims, since they had full access to the intelligence sources that President Bush had. We pointed this out in our response to Isikoff but instead of addressing this issue and clarifying his position, he has chosen to repeat his earlier statements – that is to re-conflate and thereby confuse the two separate issues (the alleged misleading of the Democratic leadership and the alleged misleading of the American public): “Whatever the merits of using military force to overthrow Saddam – and there were certainly legitimate arguments to make at the time – there is no serious dispute that the Bush administration badly misled the public about the state of intelligence about the threat posed by the Iraqi regime.” (Emphasis added.)

To establish his case Isikoff makes these arguments: “[The Administration] proclaimed it had ‘bulletproof evidence’ (in Donald Rumsfeld’s words) of connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda when it had nothing of the kind. It asserted it knew with ‘absolute certainty’ (as Vice President Cheney put it) that Saddam was acquiring equipment for a nuclear weapons programs — when the government’s chief nuclear scientists disputed the claim. These were not ‘side’ shows. They were central to persuading the Congress and the public to back the invasion – and an abuse of trust that undermined American credibility around the world.”

The first of these claims is demonstrably false. As we noted in our book and in our previous response, the congressional authorization for the use of force in Iraq, passed by a majority of the Democrats in the Senate contains twenty-three clauses providing the rationale for extreme measures. The clauses specify Iraq’s violation of the cease fire agreement it signed to end the Gulf War, its expulsion of UN weapons inspectors tasked with enforcing the arms control agreements agreed to in the truce, and intelligence about Iraq’s programs to build weapons of mass destruction. The authorization does not mention “connections between al-Qaeda and Iraq,” a statement which implies a formal alliance. The authorization states once that al-Qaeda operatives “are known to be in Iraq” – a much more limited claim and one that is true. Ansar al-Islam was operating in northern Iraq; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was present in Baghdad, although George Tenet only learned after the NIE was compiled that he had not been there as a guest. All the same, the claim that al-Qaeda was present in Iraq is but one of twenty-three rationales given for the need for force and thus a very minor point in the rationale for the war Democrats signed onto, and one presented to Congress in accordance with the facts as they were known by non-partisan intelligence agents around the world.

Isikoff’s second claim is also false. Aluminum tubes, which are a major focus of his book Hubris, are not mentioned in the congressional authorization and, as we pointed out in our previous reply, the disputes within the intelligence community over equipment for making nuclear weapons were known to (or easily accessed by) Democratic Senators who voted for the war. In fact, Colin Powell noted in his presentation to the United Nations, “we all know that there are differences of opinion. There is controversy about what these tubes are for.” At a minimum, while the public may have been misled by allusions to these tubes, the Democratic leadership was not – at least, no more so than the President. To indulge Isikoff and Corn’s all-important theme, it is true that “nuclear experts” at the Department of Energy argued the tubes were for a conventional weapons program; however, most CIA analysts disagreed, noting the specifications of the tubes were higher than their conventional counterparts and could be used to enrich uranium. A DOE representative spoke to the CIA and, according to those present, failed to make a compelling case. Furthermore, international intelligence weighed in on behalf of the nuclear decision. Even antiwar activist Col. Lawrence Wilkerson confirms that French intelligence insisted they had conducted scientific tests and had “proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges.”

It is true others offered a more innocent explanation. According to George Tenet, the Iraqi agent who tried to procure them claimed “they were to be used in Lebanon to make race car components.” As Tenet points out in his autobiography, “Whatever their intended use, under UN sanctions, Saddam was prohibited from acquiring the tubes for any purpose.” (Emphasis added.) Colin Powell agreed, “Iraq had no business buying them for any purpose. They are banned for Iraq.” This in itself demonstrates what a sideshow Isikoff and Corn’s argument is and certifies Saddam Hussein was violating UN sanctions and seeking to acquire components of a WMD program, whether conventional or nuclear.

If Michael Isikoff and other critics want to make a serious case against the rationale for the war – as opposed to a propagandistic one – they need to show why the twenty-three reasons provided in the congressional resolution justifying the use of force are faulty, insufficient, or misleading. If they want to make a case that Bush manipulated the Democrats in Congress into supporting the war, they need to show that the rationales provided in the authorization are based on deceptive information supplied by the Administration. The fact that they have not done so is because no such case can be made.

The one substantive argument Isikoff makes in an attempt to rebut our argument is that the invasion plans for Iraq were drawn up a year before the deadline expired for the UN Security Council ultimatum (Resolution 1441). It is true that invasion plans were drawn up a year in advance. Elaborate war plans were in place during the entire Cold War, but the United States never launched a missile or fired a shot against the Soviet Union. Producing scenarios for potential military flashpoints is what responsible war commanders do.

If you want peace, prepare for war – especially in dealing with international thugs such as Saddam Hussein. The military buildup was intended to force Saddam to re-admit the UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq, which it did. What Isikoff and every other critic of the war seem to forget is that the war that ensued would have been avoided if Saddam had complied with the agreements he had had signed. Moreover, as we pointed out in our book and in our rebuttal, even after the decision to invade was made, and two days before it took place, Bush offered Saddam and his heirs the option of leaving the country. If they had done so, there would have been no war. The idea that Bush decided a year in advance of the war, that he was going to invade Iraq no matter what Saddam did is preposterous and is refuted by every move he made in the lead up to the war – including getting congressional authorization and a unanimous UN Security Council Resolution, two things that Bill Clinton failed to do in launching his war against the Serbs in Bosnia.

Isikoff’s argument falls apart when he dismisses the congressional authorization and the UN Security council resolutions, and instead cites a statement by Cheney that Saddam couldn’t be trusted and an off-the-cuff aside Bush made to an un-named reporter that he was going to “kick” Saddam’s “mother-fucking ass all over the Middle East” as proof that the entire Bush Administration was determined to go to war regardless of any facts. Cheney's VFW speech made the common sense point that the mere physical presence of the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq would no more assure Saddam's compliance with 16 UN Security Council resolutions than it did before their ejection during the Clinton administration. The UN inspectors were not there to search for weapons but to ensure his compliance – and they could not. Isikoff and Corn’s other proof is a series of expletives – the sort Bush’s predecessor launched into about everyone on Capitol Hill. His is a conclusion in search of evidence.

“Is there anybody at this point who seriously questions that the president and his top aides were determined to invade Iraq and weren’t waiting for the outcome of United Nations Security Council resolutions?” Well, Joe Lieberman and Tony Blair are two such people. Blair, a British socialist, sacrificed his political career to stand with Bush and against his own party because he believed the invasion of Iraq was absolutely essential to enforce international law and protect the peace. Isikoff should read Blair’s lengthy statement to Parliament on the eve of the war, explaining why it was necessary, and then he should respond to those arguments rather than dredging up backroom remarks Bush is alleged to have made and dismissing critics he can’t answer as “ideologues.”

We were not “caught” in a mistake about Libby: our book’s focus was on the leak to Robert Novak – the leak that sparked the appointment of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald -- in which Libby had no role. Of course, Fitzgerald knew this all along. The Washington Post has acknowledged, “Cheney was the target,” and Fitzgerald settled for Libby out of “pique at his inability” to get his boss. The instant Isikoff's partner learned of Armitage's role in the leak case, he – wait for it – tied it to George W. Bush, weakly pleading Armitage’s slip “was, in a way, linked to the White House effort.” This is not called journalism – it's calling partisan shilling, and it's what Isikoff and his partner have engaged in under cover of journalism. Yet he asserts we operate from an ideological lens. Talk about Hubris.

As we noted in our rebuttal, 18 members of congress including Peter Hoekstra, the ranking member of the House intelligence committee and Jon Kyl the ranking member of the Senate committees on terrorism and homeland security, have endorsed our book, but no liberal media outlet has reviewed it. Isikoff thinks that this has little to do with political bias. According to him “it’s because, without offering any new information, Horowitz and Johnson try to re-litigate issues about which, for most Americans the verdict of history is already in.”

Oh. Most Americans re-elected Bush in 2004. Was that the verdict of history on the war? If most Americans elect John McCain in 2008, will that be? This is just grandstanding. What significant supporters of the war agree with Michael Isikoff? Despite Isikoff’s wish to sweep it under the historical rug, this debate is far from over.

"True, those were the claims repeatedly made by the President and other senior officials in the run up to war-and which turned out to be almost entirely wrong."

Stopped reading right there. Perhaps Mr. Isikoff might want to revisit that statement. The simple fact, as uncomfortable as it might be for Isikoff to admit, is that the democrats agreed with the Pres. Look at their votes & look at their statements of support.

This is the same nitwit who reported, falsely, on the Koran that was flushed down the loo at Gitmo. And then, after something like 15 people were killed in riots his report sparked, he withdrew the report, saying that as it turned out, the report was incorrect.

This schmuck has blood on his hands. He's the last person that should be critical of Horowitz.

The UN itself was the WMD.

The UN wrecked the whole country of Iraq and let the weak die and Saddam Hussein to murder at will so the UN could get rich from the oil-for-food corruption.

That's why no WMD was found in Iraq, Saddam had the effects of potent WMD through the corrupt UN.

Making actual poisons causes a mess you have to eventually clean. Who needs that hassle when you have the UN?

Great book....everyone must by it for the ammunition in it against the UnAmerican Democrat Party alone.

One of the greatest betrayals in US history, of a President, our troops, and their missions.

I am unapologetic in my support for the war in Iraq. Iraq was crawling with terrorists in 2003. SH would have acquired WMD when the sanctions were lifted. The combination of a sanctuary for terrorists, SH, and WMD is frightening. Bush could have taken the easy road and let this threat pass to the next president. Iran is the best evidence that the Iraq war was necessary. Iran is a rogue state with WMD. Iraq would have been much worse than Iran.

Regardless of your opinion about the necessity of the GW2, the rat behavior in the occupation stage has been treasoness. They have put our brave men and women in grave danger by encouraging the enemy. How many have died because of the relentless criticism of our president and our brave men and women in uniform? If the treasoness rats had prevailed, we would have had an embarrassing retreat and Iraq would have turned into a terrorist state just like Afganistan. A terrorist Iraq would have been a much more grave threat than Afganistan because of Iraq’s immmense oil wealth.

Has David Horowitz exhibited one instance in which he doesn’t have total credibility? How is Isikoff on credibility?

And there’s a dispute why?

Leave aside Horowitz's inability to make distinctions. ( I am called a "left leaning journalist-a description that will surprise certain members of the Clinton administration who once cast me as a member of the "vast right wing conspiracy.)

Try again, Mikey...It's the Clintons who were unable to make distinctions. You were for 'em or Agin' 'em, and if you were agin' 'em you were a part of the VRWC.

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