A Democracy Worth Reclaiming

Former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson was a diplomat for 25 years, but it took the Bush administration to bring him into the public eye. At government request, Wilson traveled to Africa in 2001 to investigate claims that Iraq had been buying yellow-cake uranium. He reported back that the reports were false—months before the purported sale was cited, in the State of the Union address in 2003 and elsewhere, to justify a U.S. invasion of Iraq. Last July, Wilson went public with the information from his trip and the subsequent apparent distortion by the Bush camp. Coincidentally, a short time later, someone in the White House leaked to the press that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent. A federal grand jury is now investigating the leak. Wilson served in the U.S. Foreign Service from 1976 to 1998. Among his posts: deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad from 1988-91; acting ambassador to Iraq during Operation Desert Shield; ambassador to Gabon; and director for African affairs at the National Security Council in 1997-98. As an experienced hand in the heart of the U.S. diplomatic community, Wilson was ideally suited for the uranium mission. His outspokenness in its wake, against all his training, underscores the radical nature of the Bush administration. Diplomats don't usually sound off like this.

We interviewed Wilson recently in anticipation of his appearance at McCaw Hall on Friday, Feb. 6, as part of the "American Voices" series sponsored by Foolproof Performing Arts and co-sponsored by Seattle Weekly.

Seattle Weekly: Let's start with today's news. How much have you had a chance to look at the Hutton verdict? It seemed like the Bush administration used Blair's dossiers rather than releasing its own evidence at a number of points, and I'm wondering, as a result of that, whether some people here are going to view today's verdict as a vindication for Bush as well. Or whether it's too totally far afield.

I think it's too far afield. The fact that we used the British claim on uranium doesn't obviate that the uranium claim was false. It did not rise to the level of inclusion in the State of the Union address. We spend $30 billion a year, at least, on our intelligence apparatus. A good part of that money is spent on the analytical side, just to make sure that these rumors do not end up in the decision-making process. The agency did everything it could, as did the Defense Department and as did our State Department, to try to ensure that the allegation that Saddam was trying to purchase uranium from Niger was thoroughly studied. There were three reports done, of which mine was one, all of which concluded that this was not possible, that it did not happen. Yet those weren't factored into the decision to include those 16 words into the State of the Union address.

Now the British claim that they have another piece of information, but that information has never seen the light of day. They say that it hasn't seen the light of day because they were not permitted to share it with the United States, which means our $30 billion intelligence apparatus did not have an opportunity to vet that information to determine whether it was accurate or not.

Has it been particularly unusual in this administration that there seems to be a remarkable disconnect between what gets produced out of the State Department and the diplomatic community and the intelligence community, and what the political decision makers at the top are claiming? We still have Vice President Cheney saying there are weapons of mass destruction, even after David Kay has been converted by his experiences in Iraq.

Well, it's not only weapons of mass destruction. It's also on terrorism, after everybody else has said there's nothing on this, and the question is, what is the vice president basing his assertions on? It's all been discredited. It is clear that they've set up within this administration an unprecedented shadow government with offices in a number of different departments, notably this Office of Special Plans in Defense, the operation in John Bolton's office—he is the undersecretary for disarmament/arms control—as well as this parallel National Security Council in the vice president's office. The people who play in this all circumvent established communications networks and talk directly with each other, and as Sy Hersch reported in The New Yorker, stovepipe information directly up to the policy makers before analysts have had a chance to vet them.

To what extent, in the case of Iraq especially, were weapons of mass destruction a genuine security concern, and to what extent was this a solution in search of a problem?

To the extent that it was important for the international community to persuade itself that Saddam had been effectively disarmed and to impose a monitoring program to ensure that he didn't rearm, that was a legitimate international objective. Now, the real question is whether you had to invade, conquer, and occupy Baghdad in order to achieve that objective, and I think it's clear that we didn't. It's clear that, in fact, the inspections that had taken place in the 1990s were very effective at taking down his regime—a combination of our no-fly zones and sanctions, which, even if they had been modified, could have put limits on what he could bring in militarily—were far more effective than this administration wanted to give credence to. The traditional reason to go to war is to defend your country against an imminent threat. Even using the president's watered-down version of what we were going to use our military forces for, against a grave and gathering danger, it's hard to see where and how Saddam Hussein posed a grave and gathering danger to our national security.