Why Leaders Lie - Mearsheimer, John J_ [24]
Another example of this line of deception was Vice President Cheney’s claim on September 8, 2002 that “we do know, with absolute certainty, that he [Saddam] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.”31 The equipment that Cheney was referring to was the widely discussed aluminum tubes that Iraq had procured from abroad. However, there was sharp disagreement within the intelligence community about the ultimate purpose of those tubes. Some analysts argued that they were designed for centrifuges that would help make nuclear weapons. But others, including experts in the Department of Energy, the agency with the greatest technical expertise on the subject, believed (correctly) that they were designed for artillery rockets.32 More generally, there were serious doubts within the intelligence community about whether Saddam had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program.33 In short, we did not know with “absolute certainty” that Iraq was trying to procure aluminum tubes to enrich uranium.
Third, the Bush administration made numerous statements before the war that were designed to imply that Saddam was in part responsible for the attacks on September 11. But the president and his advisors never explicitly said that he was linked to those events. The aim, of course, was to lead the American public to draw a false conclusion about Saddam without plainly stating that conclusion. It is no accident that when the war began in mid-March 2003, about half of the American people believed that the Iraqi dictator had helped bring down the World Trade Center.34 There is no evidence, however, that Saddam was involved in the September 11 attacks, as President Bush, Vice President Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary Rumsfeld, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz have all admitted when directly confronted on the matter.35
That evidence notwithstanding, the administration went to great lengths to foster that false connection in the minds of the American people. For example, when Senator Mark Dayton (D-MN) asked Rumsfeld on September 19, 2002 to explain what was “compelling us now to make a precipitous decision and take precipitous action” against Iraq when the United States did not feel compelled to do so earlier, the secretary of defense replied, “What’s different?—what’s different is 3,000 people were killed.… What’s new is the nexus between terrorist networks like al Qaeda and terrorist states like Iraq.”36 In his March 18, 2003, letter to Congress laying out the justification for invading Iraq, President Bush wrote that the United States was within its legal rights “to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons whom planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”37
Even after Baghdad fell in April 2003, Bush and his lieutenants continued to imply that the war in Iraq was directly linked to September 11. For example, when the president spoke on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, he told his audience, “The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001 and still goes on.” He went on to say, “The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We have removed an ally of Al Qaida and cut off a source of terrorist funding.… We have not forgotten the victims of September the 11th, the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble. With those