that the invasion was carried out on false intelligence.

However, conclusive statements on the second part - regarding the culpability of the administration of President George W Bush, whether it went to war for the wrong reasons, by creating disinformation about the weapons of mass destruction-related capabilities of Saddam Hussein and his intentions toward the United States - will come out after the November presidential elections. Yet that is the most important part of the investigation.

The essence of democracy is that elected officials must be judged on the basis of their performance. No attempt should be made to cover up any wrong-headed decisions, for all such endeavors are nothing but an unadulterated sabotage of democracy. The American people have the right to know whether their country was dragged into war on the basis of disinformation, false premises and scary scenarios that were reportedly created by highly partisan officials of the current government. Politics in a democracy not only remains an art of possibles but, alas, at times it is also about circumventing - or even outright manufacturing - the truth to gain undeservedly the trust of a majority of the people.

Let us be clear about one thing. The CIA has indeed made mistakes in providing faulty intelligence; however, in a democracy, intelligence agencies don't make the high-stake decisions related to war and peace. Elected officials and their appointed subordinates do. In this sense, the real responsibility about the decision to invade Iraq resides at the doorsteps of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and a whole slew of second- and third-string functionaries who worked directly for Cheney's office, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (the civilian side of the Pentagon), and some members of the Defense Policy Advisory Group, a counseling arm of the Pentagon. Secretary of State Colin Powell was a latecomer to the decision to invade Iraq, but even he cannot escape blame. Those people at the top were driving policy, not the CIA.

One of the oldest dictums governing the role of intelligence in national-security decision-making in Washington - to which everyone pays lip service but is fully cognizant that, more often than not, it is not part of the reality - is that intelligence should not be politicized. Yet intelligence is frequently politicized. One can write books just on how many times intelligence was used for political purposes in various presidencies. The only caveat is that, under some circumstances, it is less or more politicized, depending on the stakes involved, and is also based on who is involved at the top in his/her attempt to use it to back up certain decisions that are intended, or have already been made.

In the case of the Bush administration, the decision to invade Iraq was never in question. In fact, it was made within 10 days after Bush entered the White House. All published sources and background information coming out of Washington on that issue consistently support that fact. One can explain it either in terms of personal preference of the sitting president - by stating that Bush hated Saddam with a passion and entered office with a steely determination to topple him, no matter what - or couch it in more grandiose terms - by arguing that Bush genuinely felt that Saddam's regime posed a serious threat to the vital interests, indeed, the very security of the US. Harping on personality-based explanations risks trivializing the matter. However, by selecting grandiose explanations, one has to look for evidence supporting the premise that Iraq under Saddam was a major threat to the security of the United States and the United Kingdom, thereby justifying a preemptive war - a more telling phrase describing that war is "the war of choice".

That is where one is back to Square 1. The important questions become whether the evidence provided by the CIA was indeed out there, and it supported Bush's description related to Iraq, or whether the intelligence officials were browbeaten into creating such evidence. The Senate Intelligence Committee decided to put the blame on the CIA for providing false evidence, but not to disclose the most crucial - and explosive - issue: clarifying whether the Bush administration put pressure on the CIA in that regard.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, the ranking Democratic member of that committee, was quite blunt in stating, "We went into Iraq based on false claims. The fact is that the administration at all levels ... used bad information to bolster its case for war, and we in Congress would not have authorized that war ... if we knew what we know now." Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of that committee, lamely insisted that the invasion of Iraq was justified on humanitarian grounds, "to liberate the people of Iraq".

The most surprising aspect of the whole brouhaha about the role of the CIA is why there is no outcry in Congress to investigate the role Cheney, his aides - Lewis "Scooter" Libby and David Wurmser - Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and their chief cohort, Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith. From accounts that are presented in at least five books - Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies; Bob Woodword's Plan of Attack; Paul O'Neill's account presented in Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty; James Mann's The Rise of the Vulcans; and James Bamford's A Pretext for War - it is quite clear that Cheney was the strongest of the "true believers" regarding the urgency and necessity of toppling Saddam. But Bamford presents the most damning discussion of manipulation of intelligence in the Bush administration. He quotes retired Air Force Lieutenant-Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski , who worked in Feith's intelligence unit in the Pentagon's Near East South Asia division, stating, "It was not intelligence, it was propaganda. They take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together" (p 290).

The Senate Intelligence Committee's report also cited changes made in the National Intelligence Estimates (NIE), prepared by the CIA. It noted, "The classified version presented intelligence findings as assessments - usually beginning with the words 'we assess that' - whereas the white paper [the unclassified version] omitted those words and stated assessments as facts." For instance, regarding Iraq's chemical weapons, the classified NIE reads, "Although we have little specific information of Iraq's CW [chemical weapons] stockpile, Saddam Hussein probably has stocked at least 100 metric tons of such poisons." In the unclassified version of the report, on the contrary, the phrase "although we have little specific information" was deleted. The unclassified version more categorically reported "Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of CW agents".

Bamford writes, "From the very first moment, the Bush foreign policy would focus on three key objectives: Get rid of Saddam Hussein, end America's involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and rearrange the dominos in the Middle East. A key to the policy shift would be the concept of 'preemption'" (p 261). The authors of that Bush blueprint, notes Bamford, were Richard Perle, Feith, and Wurmser. "Ironically, the plan was originally intended not for Bush but for ... [former Israeli] prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu." The partial purpose underlying their "grand strategy" was to gain control of Iraq. "Whoever inherits Iraq," they wrote, "dominates the entire Levant strategically." Another objective of that strategy was conquest of Syria. One should recall that the Bush officials made a lot of accusatory noises, immediately after the toppling of Saddam, about the purported role of Syria in supplying weapons to Iraq during military hostilities. There was also speculation that Syria became the burial ground for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Netanyahu rejected the plan of Perle, Feith and Wurmser. However, when Bush was elected, its authors "dusted off their preemptive-war strategy and began getting ready to put it to use". Bamford cites the remarkable National Security Council meeting of January 30, 2001, which the newly elected president chaired. In that meeting, Bush observed, "We are going to correct the imbalances of the previous administration on the Middle East conflict. We are going to tilt it back toward Israel ..." (p 265).

Bamford also notes that Bush's chief of staff Andy Card, Deputy National Security Adviser Steven Hadley, and Libby were part of creating, in August 2002, another secret entity, the White House Iraq Group (WHIG). WHIG's "job was to sell the war to the general public, largely through televised addresses and by selectively leading the intelligence to the media". Karl Rove, another top adviser of Bush, "revealed a White House political plan", writes Bamford, "to use the war as a way to 'maintain a positive issue environment'. But the real pro-war media blitz was scheduled for the fall and the start of the election season. Card's explanation for this rationale: ... because from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August" (p 318).

The overarching temptation is to dismiss the preceding as baseless babbling of Bush-bashers. That is precisely why the Senate Intelligence Committee must forthrightly and imminently reveal its own findings on the subject. If the Bush administration is being wrongly accused, its name and record should be cleared. However, if it indeed dragged the country into a "war of choice", based on fictitious descriptions of a threat to the United States and on make-belief evidence, and by browbeating the intelligence community to buttress its version of dangers related to Iraq, then those aspects should be brought to the full attention of the American people before November 4. Anything short of this will only lead to the ultimate crime against US democracy: using deception, mendacity and falsehood to sabotage the will of the people.

Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an Alexandria, Virginia, US-based independent strategic analyst

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