E-Mail This Article to a Friend One year later We need a real investigation into the intelligence failures that led to the war in Iraq

THIS SATURDAY, over 200 demonstrations marking the one-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq will take place in locales across the country. Big actions are planned in New York City; Crawford, Texas; and Fayetteville, North Carolina, home to the Fort Bragg military base. Sadly, none is planned for Boston, a city that was once a center of anti-war ferment (see " Global Day of Action, " page 6).

We’ve learned a lot about the Bush administration in the year since the US dropped the first bombs of its " shock and awe " campaign against the Hussein regime. A year, it should be noted, that, as of Tuesday, saw 3250 soldiers wounded and 564 killed in Iraq — with 426 of those deaths coming after May 1, when President Bush stood beneath a banner that declared MISSION ACCOMPLISHED and proclaimed an end to hostilities. Namely, we’ve learned that the Bush administration lied to the US public and the world about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. (None of which, it should also be noted, has yet to be found.)

Shortly after the terror attacks of 9/11, we now know, an Office of Special Plans (OSP) was set up in the Pentagon to gather intelligence about Saddam’s weapons and interpret raw intelligence collected by the CIA and the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. We know that some of this " intelligence " came from Ahmad Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, a group of exiled Iraqis — a source discredited long ago by both the CIA and the US State Department. We know that Vice-President Dick Cheney, his chief of staff Lewis " Scooter " Libby, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich — who served on the administration’s Defense Policy Board, which worked closely with the OSP — made personal visits to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Visits that — intentionally or not — served to intimidate intelligence analysts into dishing up artificially tough assessments of Saddam’s regime.

In short, we now know that intelligence about Iraq was manipulated to fit a pre-existing neoconservative agenda that called for the removal of Saddam Hussein. As former weapons inspector Hans Blix put it this week: " They wanted to come to the conclusion that there were weapons. Like the former days of the witch-hunt, they are convinced that they exist, and if you see a black cat, well, that’s evidence of the witch. "

In the year since we attacked Iraq, we’ve seen President Bush shift his rationale for going to war. A year ago, we went to war to prevent Saddam from dropping a nuclear bomb on Los Angeles. Today, it’s because we wanted to free the Iraqi people. These distinctions seem lost on Bush, who was asked in December if Saddam actually possessed weapons of mass destruction or merely sought to acquire them. His reply? " So, what’s the difference? "

The difference, as Senator Ted Kennedy recently put it, is whether or not the country goes to war.

In the last year, we’ve also seen public opinion shift from approving the war in Iraq to wanting answers about how we really ended up there in the first place — and how we’re going to get out. Last month, after ignoring calls for an investigation into these questions, Bush finally signed an executive order forming a commission to investigate the intelligence failures leading up to the war.

It’s a nice start. But Bush has a long way to go if he expects anyone to take this commission seriously. Indeed, the demonstrators converging this weekend to mark Friday’s one-year anniversary of the Iraq invasion would do well to focus attention on Bush’s bogus commission. The commission’s deadline is set for a year from now — well after the fall elections, conveniently enough. It does not have power to subpoena witnesses. Its mandate is to judge the intelligence used to justify the war, when what’s clearly needed is an examination of the dangers of politicizing intelligence through operations such as the OSP and personal visits by the vice-president to CIA headquarters. Meanwhile, the commission’s members will be picked by the White House. There is no way such a group can be truly independent.

And there’s no way we’ll ever know the full truth of how we ended up in Iraq — $100 billion and hundreds of lives poorer for the venture — without such an investigation. And absent the means to hold those responsible for this debacle accountable, it could happen again. Sure, we might vote Bush out of office next November. But if the hawks who put us in Iraq (Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, to name just a few) remain at large, it will be only a matter of time before they slither back into power and we find ourselves in another quagmire.

These people don’t learn from their mistakes. Nor do they have any shame. Already, we’ve seen the president make use of footage of a body being taken from the rubble of the World Trade Center in a campaign ad. And hawk apologists are spinning the recent election results in Spain as a victory for terrorism. The horrific bombings in Madrid two days before the election surely influenced the results, which saw Prime Minister José María Aznar ousted by opposition party leader José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

But something else was at work. Aznar was a liar, just like our president. He lied about Iraq to get troops over there. And he lied about the Madrid bombings. He first tried to blame them on the Basque terrorist group ETA. This made little sense to anyone unless you considered that Aznar could gain politically by blaming the bombings on ETA. That’s because Zapatero and his Socialist Party were widely believed to be soft on ETA terrorism. Just hours before the polls in Spain opened, news came of Al Qaeda arrests in the bombings.

The realization that they were being lied to — again — is what propelled voters to send Aznar packing. It’s exactly what we should do to our court-appointed president come November.

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