Last week, the Senate Intelligence Committee released Phase ii of its report on prewar Iraq intelligence and the Bush administration’s rationale for going to war. The committee chairman, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, introduced the committee’s findings by saying the Bush administration “made significant claims that were not supported by the intelligence.” Rockefeller said, “In making the case for war, the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”

But instead of implicating the Bush administration in any wrongdoing, the committee’s report actually reveals how deep the antiwar agenda runs within the Democratic Party—and how far they are willing to go in order to distort the facts.

“Substantiated” by Intelligence

The Senate committee subdivided its report into eight categories regarding prewar intelligence: nuclear weapons, biological weapons, chemical weapons, weapons of mass destruction, delivery methods, Iraq’s link to terrorism, Saddam’s intent, and postwar assessments.

Statements the administration made about Saddam’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, according to the report, were all “substantiated” by prewar intelligence estimates.

Regarding weapons of mass destruction—an all-encompassing term often used to include nuclear, biological and chemical weapons—and Saddam’s missile systems, the Senate Intelligence Committee report also concluded that comments by the Bush administration in the lead-up to the war were generally “substantiated” by intelligence information.

On the links between Iraq and terrorist organizations, the Rockefeller report cites a June 2002 cia report which found that there were “more than a decade of contacts between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda based on shared anti-U.S. goals and bin Laden’s interest in unconventional weapons and safe haven” (page 63). Three of their four conclusions “substantiated” statements made by the Bush administration prior to the war.

Where the Bush administration supposedly manipulated the intelligence was when it implied that Iraq and al Qaeda had a “partnership” and that Iraq helped “train” al Qaeda terrorists. But while the Bush administration made several prewar statements about a definite relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda—one that included low-level training—the administration did not say Iraq and al Qaeda were full-fledged partners or that Saddam was directly responsible for 9/11.

If anything, postwar intelligence has revealed a stronger link between Saddam and terrorists organizations. A Pentagon review of about 600,000 documents captured during the Iraq war, for example, revealed that if it suited his interests, Saddam was willing to work and associate with just about any jihadist organization. As Eli Lake wrote in the New York Sun, the Pentagon report “undercuts the claim made by many on the left and many at the cia that Saddam, as a national socialist, was incapable of supporting or collaborating with the Islamist al Qaeda.”

Saddam’s Intent

Thus, the key findings from the first six categories of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report reveal no “smoking gun” implicating the Bush administration of lying to the American people. The committee’s conclusions actually provide additional support for President Bush’s rationale prior to the war.

It’s the last two points in the report where the Democrats hammer President Bush the hardest—and where they are most unscrupulous in how they treat the facts. For example, President Bush was supposedly wrong to ever assume that Saddam might share his wmds (given that prewar intelligence said he had them) with terrorist groups that might then use them on the United States.

Yet this was a concern U.S. officials had years before George Bush became president—and before 9/11. In 1998, President Clinton said Saddam’s regime was a threat to the safety of his own people, the Middle East and “all the rest of us” (Feb. 17, 1998). The U.S. had to defend its future, President Clinton told the American people in a nationwide address. We simply could not allow Saddam to accelerate his buildup of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, Clinton said.

And if we failed to act in 1998? Saddam “will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction,” Clinton said. “And some day, some way, I guarantee you, he’ll use the arsenal.”

Later that year, the New York Times enthusiastically endorsed President Clinton’s new Iraq policy of “regime change”—as opposed to “containment.” According to the Times,UN inspectors had “concluded that Iraq could be hiding two to five times more deadly germ agents than it had admitted to making, as well as the warheads to deliver them. … Iraq has already confessed to making enough deadly microbes to kill all the people on Earth several times over” (Dec. 17, 1998). The Times, like President Clinton, wanted regime change.

Moving ahead to the January 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush prepared the nation for Operation Iraqi Freedom by saying, “Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.”

Reasoning along the same lines that his predecessor did four years earlier, Bush said it would be too late for us to act once the threat was visibly apparent—an argument made more persuasive by the hard reality of a post-9/11 world.

This point was not lost on Senator Rockefeller in late 2002, when he supported President Bush’s Iraq plan and voted in favor of the war. Back then, he said there was no doubt in his mind that Saddam Hussein was a “growing threat” to the U.S., particularly because of his “contact with many international terrorist organizations” (Oct. 10, 2002).

“Some argue it would be totally irrational for Saddam Hussein to initiate an attack against the mainland United States and believe he would not do so,” Rockefeller said.

But if Saddam thought he could attack America through terrorist proxies and cover the trail back to Baghdad, he might not think it is so irrational. If he thought, as he got older and looked around an impoverished and isolated Iraq, his principal legacy to the Arab world to be a brutal attack on the United States, he might not think it is so irrational. If he thought the U.S. would be too paralyzed with fear to respond, he might not think it was too irrational. …As the attacks of September 11 demonstrated, the immense destructiveness of modern technology means we can no longer afford to wait around for a smoking gun. The fact that an attack on our homeland has not occurred since September 11 cannot give us any false sense of security that one will not occur in the future or on any day. We no longer have that luxury. …There has been some debate over how “imminent” a threat Iraq poses. I do believe Iraq poses an imminent threat. I also believe after September 11, that question is increasingly outdated.

Today, Rockefeller has revised the historical record, saying that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat and that President Bush shouldn’t have launched the war. In last week’s report, Rockefeller’s committee relied on the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to “expose” Bush’s missteps. While the estimate confirmed Saddam’s buildup of chemical and biological weapons, it also said, “Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks … against the United States.”

Thus, based on available intelligence in 2002, an honest administration—while it might have acknowledged Iraq’s wmd buildup, its 1991 invasion of an American ally in Kuwait, Saddam’s attempted assassination of President H.W. Bush in 1993, Iraq’s expulsion of UN inspectors in 1998, its 12-year defiance of 17 UN resolutions and its constant barrage of anti-aircraft fire against American and British planes patrolling the no-fly zone—would have simultaneously insisted that Iraq was not an imminent threat to the United States of America.

President Bush should have known the Iraq threat wasn’t dangerous. He should have trusted Saddam Hussein. At least, that’s what these critics are saying now—even as they undoubtedly hope their own prewar remarks won’t be examined.

Postwar Iraq

The Rockefeller report’s final conclusion says that statements from the Bush administration about “the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of the political, security and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.” Just below that statement, however, the report admits that “there were relatively few intelligence products on this subject prior to January 2003, and senior policymakers did not request them.”

The reason the administration didn’t make these requests, as Doug Feith explains in his new book War and Decision, is that President Bush wanted to first exercise every available option, short of war, to solve the Iraq problem. To push for a peaceful solution even as his administration planned for a postwar Iraq would have sent conflicting signals.

As Feith points out, after Hans Blix expressed dissatisfaction with Saddam’s weapons declaration on Dec. 7, 2002, the Bush administration began work on drawing up plans for postwar Iraq.

Postwar Iraq has had its share of surprises and setbacks, but honest observers must admit that no one in the Bush administration ever said it would be quick and easy. At the same time, five years on, honest observers cannot deny that real progress has been made in the war effort. Ralph Peters recently highlighted these positive developments in the New York Post:

* After our troops reached Baghdad, al Qaeda’s leaders made a colossal strategic miscalculation and publicly declared that Iraq was now the central front in their jihad against us. Matter of record, in the enemy’s own words.* Some Iraqi Sunni Arabs, lamenting the national preeminence they’d lost, rallied to the terrorists.* Al Qaeda in Iraq and its affiliates then embarked on a campaign of widespread atrocities: videotaped beheadings, mass bombings of civilians, assassinations, widespread rape (of boys and girls, as well as of women), kidnappings and brutal efforts to dictate the intimate details of Iraqi lives.* Al Qaeda’s savagery alienated the Sunni Arab masses in record time. Suddenly, those American “occupiers” looked like saviors.* By the millions, Sunni Muslims turned against al Qaeda and turned to the U.S. military, inflicting a catastrophic propaganda defeat on the terrorists.* Supported by the population, U.S. and Iraqi forces inflicted a massive military defeat on al Qaeda. At present, the terror organization’s own Web masters admit that al Qaeda is nearing final collapse in Iraq.

These are facts, Peters says. But like the Bush administration’s march to war in 2002, postwar Iraq is also history—even more recent—that Bush’s critics are feverishly working to revise.

Antiwar Movement

When the Senate Intelligence Committee released Phase i of its prewar intelligence report in July 2004, it said that while the intelligence community had made numerous mistakes in its prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons capabilities, the committee “did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.” (A similar study in Britain, the Butler Report, also cleared Tony Blair of any dishonesty in the run-up to the war.) The committee’s conclusions received bipartisan support from Republicans and Democrats alike.

Around that time, in an interview with Time, Bill Clinton expressed sympathy for the position President Bush was in after 9/11. He said,

After 9/11, let’s be fair here, if you had been president, you’d think, Well, this fellow bin Laden just turned these three airplanes full of fuel into weapons of mass destruction, right? … Well, my first responsibility now is to try everything possible to make sure that this terrorist network and other terrorist networks cannot reach chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material.That’s why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for. So I thought the president had an absolute responsibility to go to the UN and say, “Look, guys, after 9/11, you have got to demand that Saddam Hussein lets us finish the inspection process.” You couldn’t responsibly ignore [the possibility that] a tyrant had these stocks. I never really thought he’d [use them]. What I was far more worried about was that he’d sell this stuff or give it away.

The next year, in 2005, the Silberman-Robb Commission—appointed by executive order to investigate prewar intelligence failures—also concluded, with unanimous support, that the Bush administration neither exaggerated the Iraqi threat nor pressured intelligence agencies to do so.

Last week’s highly politicized Rockefeller report was supported by only two of the seven Republicans on the 15-member panel. The partisan historical revision, nevertheless, met with high praise from editors at the New York Times. “The report shows clearly that President Bush should have known that important claims he made about Iraq did not conform with intelligence reports,” the Timeswrote.

“We cannot say with certainty whether Mr. Bush lied about Iraq,” the Times concluded. “But when the president withholds vital information from the public—or leads them to believe things that he knows are not true—to justify the invasion of another country, that is bad enough.”

That’s how narrow the gap now is between the Times’ editorial position and the lunatic left mantra, “Bush lied, people died!”

Smooth Things

For nearly seven years now, we have gone without a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil—a remarkable feat by any standard, and one that Bush’s critics rarely give him credit for. But this seven-year respite has lulled us to sleep! We now have a false sense of security. Our leaders, the Prophet Isaiah foretold, reassure us with “smooth things”—prophesying deceit (Isaiah 30:10).

Despite what men may say, God’s word foretells the cold, harsh reality of our modern time: The United States is in the midst of a pacifist malaise that rises above the level of appeasement during the 1930s. Ours is the generation God was thinking of when He inspired the Apostle Paul to write, “For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them …” (1 Thessalonians 5:3).

After that, Paul writes in the preceding verse, the day of Christ’s appearance on this Earth will come!