In blame game, take a number

CONSIDER for just a moment these events of the last few days:

The number of American servicemen and women killed in the Iraq war reached 2,000. An additional 14,000 have been badly wounded, many maimed for life.

The Iraqi people’s approval of their country’s new, democratic constitution was certified as complete.

I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby -- Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff -- resigned after being indicted, on charges of obstructing justice, perjury and making false statements, by a federal grand jury investigating allegations that senior officials in the Bush administration illegally revealed covert intelligence agent Valerie Plame’s identity to journalists.

The officials’ ostensible purpose was to plant stories in the media that would discredit the agent’s husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had charged that the White House distorted intelligence reports on Saddam Hussein’s purported possession of nuclear weapons to justify invading Iraq. Karl Rove, the president’s deputy chief of staff and top political advisor, remains under investigation in connection with the affair.

Connect the dots and what do you get?

Clearly, it’s a picture of an administration in disarray -- particularly when you shade the scene with the fact that more than half of all Americans now say the invasion of Iraq was a mistake; the implosion of presidential crony Harriet E. Miers’ Supreme Court nomination; the indictment of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and the investigation into possible insider trading by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist.

That’s the foreground.

In the background is a more ambiguous image, and bringing it into clearer focus is the most urgent challenge now confronting the American news media. Plainly put, the issue is this: George W. Bush and the key members of his administration -- particularly Cheney, Libby’s former boss -- convinced the American people, still traumatized by the Sept. 11 atrocities, to support war against Hussein by telling them that he had both nuclear and biological weapons of mass destruction. It was only a matter of time, they said, before the vengeful Iraqi dictator, a mass murderer of his own people, made those weapons available to terrorists who would use them against the United States.

Who can forget Cheney, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and others telling audiences that the first absolute confirmation of Hussein’s intentions might be a mushroom cloud rising over an American city?

As we now know, there were no such weapons. The Iraqi regime’s programs to develop them, to the extent they ever amounted to more than malevolently wishful tinkering, had ended years before.

So the question that presents itself with new urgency is this: Was the Bush administration led to believe what it told us because it received faulty intelligence, or did it consciously distort what the CIA and other spy agencies reported to win public support for a war people otherwise would have resisted?

For all their high-tech gadgets and cinematic aura of omniscience, our spies are wrong more often than they’re right. No nation in the history of the world ever expended more time, people and money -- unimaginable sums of money -- as the United States did in its decades-long surveillance of the Soviet Union and its East Bloc allies. Yet, as then-CIA Director William H. Webster once told this writer, no single report ever produced by the labyrinthine U.S. intelligence establishment ever foresaw the collapse of communism, let alone the peaceful breakup of the USSR. It’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility that the spooks were just plain wrong about what Hussein was doing.

Moreover, American wars more than once have achieved things far more important than their immediate casus belli. Emancipation was the Civil War’s great moral outcome, but Northern public opinion never would have supported a fight to achieve it. It’s doubtful a majority of Americans ever would have approved a confrontation with German fascism or Japanese militarism -- all their murderous oppressions notwithstanding -- if Pearl Harbor had not occurred. Many now will argue that, however we got into Iraq, the overthrow of a homicidal tyrant and democratic adoption of the Muslim Middle East’s first real constitution is an achievement that more than justifies the monetary and human sacrifices that have been made.

They, of course, are the Americans still alive to make the argument. The fact is, however, that serious-minded people can have a serious and civil disagreement over the point.

What they should not have to disagree over is whether the sacrifices made to overthrow Hussein were made not out of conviction but as the consequence of a calculated official deceit.

The leading American newspapers bear a special responsibility in this matter because they all swallowed the administration’s argument hook, line and sinker.

The Los Angeles Times, for example, worried editorially that the congressional resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq gave Bush too much power but stated unequivocally: “It is well established that Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction.”

The New York Times flatly told its readers that “no further debate is needed to establish that Saddam Hussein is an evil dictator whose continued effort to build unconventional weapons ... threatens the Middle East and beyond.”

The Washington Post editorially declared that Congress was “right” to pass the resolution and singled out Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) for praise because he “acknowledged [that Hussein’s] ‘pursuit of lethal weapons of mass destruction cannot be tolerated.’ ” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial similarly singled out the House and Senate Democrats who publicly accepted the reality of Iraq’s nuclear and biological weapon programs.

Bob Woodward’s book “Plan of Attack” remains the best basic introduction on the administration’s march to war. It outlines an extreme preoccupation with Iraq initially shared only by Cheney and a circle of ideologically neoconservatives on his staff and around then-Deputy Secretary of State Paul D. Wolfowitz. Then, there was a murky progress in the intelligence used to intensify that preoccupation into a national security imperative. In 2000, according to Woodward, “[t]he CIA had never declared categorically that it believed Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.”

Two years later, Cheney had told a group, “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” Shortly afterward, the National Intelligence Council began resifting intelligence on the matter and, according to Woodward, concluded that “the real and best answer was that [Hussein] probably had WMD, but that there was no proof and the case was circumstantial.” One year later, on the eve of war, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet sat in the Oval Office and told President Bush that the case for Hussein’s possession of nuclear and biological weapons was “a slam dunk.”

The American people need to know how that progression occurred because that knowledge is key to the responsible exercise of citizenship in the upcoming midterm elections and beyond. In an address to the Online News Assn. on Friday, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the New York Times’ publisher, said that his paper had been far too slow to correct its prewar news reports that Hussein, in fact, had weapons of mass destruction. “It was an institutional failure. We didn’t own up to it quickly enough,” he said.

The New York Times clearly wasn’t the only journalistic institution that failed, and the duty to set the public record straight about how this mistake was made is a shared one. There will be shame enough for all if the media as a whole fail to accept this obligation.