Was War Based on a Lie?
John Nichols, 11 July 2003, Madison Capital Times
The web of deceit on which the Bush administration built its case for war with Iraq continues to unravel. The latest revelation of wrongdoing comes from Joseph Wilson, a former National Security Council aide, who has raised the prospect that Vice President Dick Cheney and his aides knew that the "case" President Bush made for going to war with Iraq was based on fabricated data.
Wilson, the former U.S. ambassador to the West African nation of Gabon, traveled to Africa in February 2002 at the behest of the Central Intelligence Agency to investigate murky allegations regarding Iraq's supposed attempt to buy uranium from Niger. On Sunday, in a damning New York Times opinion piece and in an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press," Wilson argued that his inquiry found little evidence to support the allegation that the government of Saddam Hussein had sought to purchase materials needed for nuclear weapons development from Niger, the world's third-largest producer of mined uranium.
Wilson says he concluded in short order "that it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place." (All indications are that Wilson came to the right conclusion, as a United Nations review of documents that purported to detail the Iraq-Niger uranium dealings revealed them to be forgeries.) What is most significant about Wilson's revelation is his assertion that his conclusions regarding the dubious nature of the Iraq-Niger "connection" were communicated to high-level officials in the Bush administration long before the president ordered the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that the country posed an imminent threat.
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