George W Bush Administration Propaganda for an Invasion of Iraq by Larry Hartenian

Author:Larry Hartenian [Hartenian, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, General, United States, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781000382365
Google: cLQgEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-04-28T16:03:35+00:00

With the new request from the senators, Pillar was told to redo the old white paper and to make it consistent with the NIE. By this time, Pillar and his staff decided that the white paper needed a “‘full blown’ key judgments section.” Pillar and team thus took the Key Judgments from the NIE, had them declassified and placed them at the front of the white paper, presumably making the White Paper the “unclassified equivalent of the NIE.” The staff drawing up the paper said this would also “ensure that the two papers were as consistent as possible.”

But they were very different. Even though the NIE served the administration’s purposes,56 the White Paper made a blistering case against Iraq. The boldness of its assertion was matched by its certainty. Statements of greater specificity than previously made were asserted, e.g.: “All key aspects—R&D, production and weaponization—of Iraq’s offensive BW program are active and most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf war.” The overall sense was that the administration had a very clear view of just how advanced Iraqi WMD programs were and it was frightening. Explaining why the White Paper was more certain in its statements and conclusions than the NIE, with which it presumably was consistent, Tenet explained that the difference was fundamentally one of style. An NIE is full of “we assess” and “we judge,” but “the White Paper had been crafted in a different style.” “Out went the ‘we’s, and what remained were bolder assertions, such as ‘Saddam has.’” But both Tenet’s and Pillar’s protests that the issue was one of style do not explain why virtually all caveats were removed from the key judgments. Indeed, rather than just “we,” out went “we assess” and “we judge,” as if it were not possible to indicate the certainty of judgment without using the first person plural. In the White Paper, “we judge” and “we assess” were deleted from five key findings. This fundamentally altered the document and made a caricature of the announced intent to keep the two documents as consistent as possible. And anyone who participated in writing up these reports knew that; this after all is their expertise.57 Each of these statements was an assertion of fact, not the statement of a judgment which was less than certain.

For the US public and Congress who were looking for an answer to the question of whether or not Iraq was continuing to pursue WMD, the two documents responded differently.

NIE: “We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction programs….”

White Paper: “Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction programs….”

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