Think Progress

Feith Defends Rice’s Pre-War ‘Mushroom Cloud’ Claim On Iraq: It Was Neither A ‘Gaffe’ Nor A ‘Lie’

On CNN on Sept. 8, 2002, then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice infamously warned — incorrectly — that Saddam Hussein may be close to producing a nuclear weapon. When asked how “close” Saddam was to “developing a nuclear capacity,” Rice replied:

RICE: The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

As a push for action against Iraq, she added, “How long are we going to wait to deal with what is clearly a gathering threat against the United States, against our allies and against his own region?”

Over at the Corner today, Douglas Feith attempts to defend this statement. “Rice’s reference to the mushroom cloud has been widely denounced as a gaffe or a lie,” he writes. “But it was neither.” From his post:

Rice was highlighting the limits of U.S. intelligence. While emphasizing the disparate estimates about how close Saddam was to a nuclear bomb, Rice was saying that the CIA would not necessarily know when Saddam acquired one.

She was warning that we might not learn this until after a detonation. This was an important and accurate statement. … Rice deserves credit for stressing here the gaps and uncertainties in U.S. intelligence.

While there were gaps in U.S. intelligence, the administration repeatedly chose the interpretation that was the most favorable to its case for war. In fact, almost a year before her 2002 interview, Rice’s staff “had been told that the government’s foremost nuclear experts seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons.”

Additionally, as Michael Isikoff and David Corn wrote in “Hubris,” speechwriter Michael Gerson — who came up with the phrase — clearly intended the metaphor to be used to sell the American public on the alleged nuclear danger of Saddam. It was also used by President Bush on Oct. 7, 2002, not to debate intelligence gaps, but to push for war:

Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. … Understanding the threats of our time, knowing the designs and deceptions of the Iraqi regime, we have every reason to assume the worst, and we have an urgent duty to prevent the worst from occurring.

So according to Feith, whenever U.S. intelligence officials are unsure of how great a threat a country poses, the United States should just attack anyway?

Feith: ‘We Did Not’ Exaggerate Iraq Threat, Just Made ‘Errors’ In Presentation »

Earlier today, former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith refused to appear at a House Judiciary hearing. But while he didn’t have the time for Congress, he did have the time to appear on Bill Bennett’s radio show this morning.

During the interview, Bennett asked Feith if the Bush administration exaggerated the case for war with “the mushroom clouds and so on.” “Did we overstate the case?” asked Bennett. “I think that we did not,” replied Feith, though he conceded, “There were errors made in the presentation”:

BENNETT: One, did we overstate the case, the mushroom clouds and so on? Was there exaggeration? Not inaccuracy about the weapons, but did we overblow it?

FEITH: I think that we did not. I don’t think that administration officials purposely overstated, I do think there were errors made in the presentation and the main error was of course relying on the CIA’s assessment that we would find not just the chemical and biological weapons programs, but actual stockpiles.

Feith went on to claim that it is a common misconception that “the Bush administration officials came into office hell bent on war.” Listen here:

Feith’s claim that there was no “exaggeration” by the White House before the war is yet another example of his misremembering the facts in an effort to save his tattered reputation. In fact, the New York Times article earlier this month on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the administration’s pre-war claims was titled, “Senate Panel Finds Iraq Intelligence Exaggerations.”

Here are just a few examples of the exaggerations found by the Senate Intelligence Committee:

- Statements and implications by the President and Secretary of State suggesting that Iraq and al-Qa’ida had a partnership, or that Iraq had provided al-Qa’ida with weapons training, were not substantiated by the intelligence.

- Statements by the President and the Vice President indicating that Saddam Hussein was prepared to give weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups for attacks against the United States were contradicted by available intelligence information.

- Statements by the President and Vice President prior to the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate regarding Iraq’s chemical weapons production capability and activities did not reflect the intelligence community’s uncertainties as to whether such production was ongoing.

Feith’s claim that Bush administration officials were not “hell bent” on war is contradicted by others who served in the administration. For instance, in 2004, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill told CBS News that “from the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go.”

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Feith Claims His Memoir Is Not A ‘Blame Laying And Finger-Pointing Book’

News reports have described Iraq war architect Douglas Feith’s new book “War and Decision” as a score-settling account in which Feith “assails” his former colleagues for mishandling the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

But during a discussion of the book at the conservative Hudson Institute today, Feith argued that the book is not a “blame-laying and finger-pointing book”:

FEITH: I was conscious of that when I wrote the book. And I went out of my way to write a book that I do not believe that anybody who actually bothers to read even just substantial piece of it, would find is a blame-laying and finger-pointing book.

Watch it:

In fact, in the book and while promoting it, Feith has done nothing but blame others for the war’s failures. Indeed, at a similar event recently, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank got the impression that according to Feith, the “Iraq war is everyone else’s fault.” Some examples from the book:

– Feith blamed former Iraq occupation governor L. Paul Bremer for “mishandling…the political transition” in Iraq and the general policy of “setting up an occupation government.”

– Feith blamed former Secretary of State Colin Powell for not strongly opposing the war within the administration before the initial invasion, despite “downplay[ing]” the supposed Iraqi threat. But Feith also attacked Powell for not “wholeheartedly support[ing] it” once the war started.

– Feith accused the CIA of “politicizing” intelligence by ignoring Saddam’s ties to international terrorists despite the fact that the Pentagon’s inspector general called Feith’s own efforts to conjure up such a link — through his “Office of Special Plans” — “inapropriate.”

Bremer noted recently that the Iraq war architects are “running away from their building” and as Milbank said of Feith’s version of Iraq war history: “It must have been very difficult being Doug Feith: correct all the time, and surrounded by idiots.”

Feith: ‘We Took An Extremely Strong Pro-Geneva Convention Position In The Pentagon’

Since writing his new book, Iraq war architect Doug Feith has consistently tried to rewrite the history of Bush administration foreign policy, blaming its failures on others. Feith continued these gross distortions yesterday, in a three-hour interview with right-wing radio talker Hugh Hewitt.

It is well-known that the administration’s torture program violates the Geneva conventions, which even conservatives admit. Feith told Hewitt the administration was “strongly pro-Geneva convention,” and so was he:

FEITH: We took an extremely strongly pro-Geneva Convention position in the Pentagon. And what I said when I briefed Secretary Rumsfeld on this, and briefed the President on it, is we have troops all over the world. There is no country in the world that has a stronger interest in promoting respect for the Geneva Conventions than the United States, and there’s no institution of the U.S. government that has a stronger interest in that than the Pentagon. … [T]hey are a part of the law of the United States, they’re treaties in force, and I thought the Pentagon had an extremely strong interest in promoting respect for the Geneva Conventions.

Listen to it:

If Feith had such respect for the Geneva Conventions, then why did he help the administration evade them? In his new book on the administration’s torture program, British international lawyer Philippe Sands interviewed Feith and reported that Feith “took the steps to ensure that none of these detainees could rely on Geneva.”

Sands told Vanity Fair that Feith’s argument against Geneva “prevailed,” as the President signed an order turning Guantanamo into a “Geneva-free zone.” Feith seemed unrepentant:

The Common Article 3 restrictions on torture or “outrages upon personal dignity” were gone. “This year I was really a player,” Feith said, thinking back on 2002 and relishing the memory. I asked him whether, in the end, he was at all concerned that the Geneva decision might have diminished America’s moral authority. He was not. “The problem with moral authority,” he said, was “people who should know better, like yourself, siding with the assholes, to put it crudely.”

“As he saw it, either you were a detainee to whom Geneva didn’t apply or you were a detainee to whom Geneva applied but whose rights you couldn’t invoke,” Sands noted. “That’s the point,” Feith admitted.

Furthermore, Feith reportedly sought the help of torture advocate John Yoo, then at the Justice Department, in evading the Conventions. Judge Advocate General lawyers, who rejected Feith’s views, “said he had a dismissive, if not derisive, attitude toward the Geneva Conventions,” according to lawyer Scott Horton.

Feith: Did The Bush Administration Ever Say Iraq Would Be Easy? ‘Absolutely Not’

Douglas Feith, former Undersecretary of Defense and an architect of the Iraq war, has been hitting the media circuit to promote his new book — and to continue blaming others for the war, defending former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and distorting former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s record.

Yesterday, he appeared on the Brian Lehrer show, on WNYC. Lehrer brought up the so-called “Parade of Horribles” Feith discusses in his book, and asked why the American public was only told that the war “would be a cakewalk.” Feith insisted no one from the administration had said that:

LEHRER: The public was never told that the Parade of Horribles were considered possibilities. Instead we were told it would be a cakewalk. Were you–

FEITH: You weren’t told that by the administration. Absolutely not.

When Lehrer played a clip from Meet the Press in which Vice President Cheney claimed the U.S. would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq, Feith dismissed it as “one of the more optimistic comments” but said that others, “especially” Rumsfeld, “were a lot more reserved than that.” He also insisted that “the initial reaction of many of the Iraqis was to greet us as liberators.”

Listen to it:

In fact, as everyone knows, the Bush Administration and its allies declared repeatedly that the war would be relatively easy, quick, and painless:

Press Secretary Ari Fleisher: “My point is, the likelihood is much more like Afghanistan, where the people who live right now under a brutal dictator will view America as liberators, not conquerors.” [10/11/02]

White House Chief of Staff Andy Card: “I think the Iraqi people would welcome freedom with jubilation.” [1/26/03]

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “The people will be enormously relieved and liberated.” [3/20/03]

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz: “The Iraqi people understand what this crisis is about. Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberator. They know that America will not come as a conqueror.” [3/11/03]

Vice President Dick Cheney: “I’m confident that our troops will be successful, and I think it’ll go relatively quickly…Weeks rather than months.” [3/16/03]

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice: “I do not mean that we will need to maintain a military presence in Iraq as was the case in Europe.” [8/7/03]

Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle: “And a year from now, I’ll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they’ve been liberated. And it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense of liberation.” [9/22/03]

It looks like Feith can add “lying” to the list of his post-White House activities.