We need to heed the lessons of past wars
For Memorial Day, Kitty Elliot of Lewes wrote a poignant, haunting letter to the Cape Gazette about a relative, a young man from Lewes, who served in Vietnam.
Elliot recalled how Michael Jay Massey didn’t want to go to Vietnam and didn’t expect to come back.
He didn’t. Michael Jay Massey died May 1, 1968. He was 21.
I thought about the late Mr. Massey after listening to Jeb Bush stumble when asked if he would go into Iraq “knowing what we know now.”
Bush said yes, adding that others, including Hillary Clinton, would have done the same.
This was clearly the wrong answer. Later, speaking to Sean Hannity, he acknowledged that “mistakes were made.”
“So lessons learned,” Bush said. “The United States needs to be engaged. We need to have the best intelligence in the world.”
According to Bush, the problem was intelligence. If only we had better intelligence, the Iraq War wouldn’t have happened.
This has become the accepted wisdom not only of Republican presidential candidates, but of many Americans, including astute members of the media.
Bob Schieffer, for example, a veteran newsman who has covered politics for decades, offered this assessment Tuesday on NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show.”
“I think we know now the intelligence was simply wrong,” Schieffer said. “I don’t think anybody would have gone in there had they known that they didn’t have weapons of mass destruction.”
According to Schieffer, if the evidence was good enough for Colin Powell, who laid out the administration’s case for war before the United Nations, it was good enough for him.
Rehm mentioned an interview she had conducted with Powell in 2012. She had pressed him on why he didn’t resign rather than deliver that speech to the UN.
“He was not a very happy man when he left the studio,” Rehm said.
After reading the transcript, it was easy to understand why. Under tough questioning - Rehm asked him if he had been a “patsy” - Powell came across as defensive.
Many Americans, such as Schieffer, were swayed by the secretary of state’s assertions in 2003. Perhaps Powell’s answers on the Rehm show in 2012 can help Americans assess the real state of pre-war intelligence on Iraq.
The following quotes are from the show’s transcripts:
POWELL: … Slowly over time, the various sources that seemed so firm to me at the time I presented it, they started to fade away and fall apart.
REHM: Such as those …
POWELL: Such as Curveball. Curveball was a gentleman who the Germans had in their custody and who said convincingly that there were these vans that were going to make biological agents. And it turned out that instead of having four solid sources for this information, we really didn’t have anything but Curveball, and our intelligence people had never spoken to him.
Our intelligence people had never spoken to him.
Here we were, deciding whether to go to war, and the CIA had not deemed it necessary to speak directly with the man who was our chief source.
According to The National Security Archive, the Germans “refused to certify the Curveball data and denied CIA access to the original transcripts recording the conversations. Thus, the agency never had direct contact with Curveball, who in fact had only been seen once by an American, an official of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who had harbored doubts about the man.”
(Powell’s recollection on the Rehm show wasn’t completely accurate. While the CIA had not spoken to Curveball, one analyst from the DIA had, and he, like the Germans, doubted his veracity.)
But concerns about Curveball weren’t passed on to Powell.
A 2004 Washington Post story by Glenn Kessler suggests why. Shortly before Powell’s speech, a government analyst emailed his boss, warning him that sources for reports about mobile bioweapons labs were considered unreliable.
His boss, as detailed in a Senate Select Intelligence Committee report, replied, “This war’s going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn’t say, and . . . the Powers That Be probably aren’t terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he’s talking about.”
In 2011, Curveball admitted that he had made up stories.
Oddly enough, the CIA collected evidence that Saddam had abandoned his WMD programs. The operation was described in “State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” by James Risen, a reporter for The New York Times.
Charles Allen, a CIA assistant director, contacted Iraqis living abroad whose relatives were believed to be involved in the secret weapons program. Allen asked them to travel to Iraq and talk to their relatives.
Following their trip, all 30 reported that their relatives told them that Iraq had discontinued its WMD program.
The result: nothing. The intelligence was ignored.
If we were conducting an honest assessment of our need to invade another country, wouldn’t the information from Allen’s CIA operation at least have thrown up a red flag? After all, Iraq had not attacked us.
This wasn’t like Dec. 7, 1941, or Sept. 11, 2001. In those cases, we had to go to war. In Iraq and Vietnam, we didn’t.
I’m not saying there was no intelligence suggesting that Iraq was pursuing WMD, but it was, as Powell’s quotes make clear, shockingly weak.
It was not enough to send our soldiers into harm’s way.
Candidates such as Bush, Sen. Mark Rubio and others, who say we did have enough intelligence to invade Iraq are the ones more likely to lead us into another war.
And on a future Memorial Day, we’ll be reading about another courageous young man, barely an adult, dying in a war we had no business fighting.
