No administration in history ever has approached its reelection campaign with so many insider accounts of its most sensitive deliberations freely circulating through the country's bookstores and libraries.
To the expanding shelf of books that propose descriptions of how President Bush and his advisors did or did not meet the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda and of how and why they marshaled the march to war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, we now can add former ambassador Joseph Wilson's "The Politics of Truth," which goes on sale today.
This is a fascinating if somewhat awkward book, whose character is fairly summarized by not one but two subtitles: "Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity" and "A Diplomat's Memoir." You don't have to know much about marketing books to figure out who insisted on that first one.
In any event, it's a blunt-force reminder of Wilson's reluctant relevance to the current moment. The whole affair actually turns on 16 words spoken by Bush during his State of the Union address on Jan. 28, 2003. At the time, the administration's principal justification for a preemptive invasion of Iraq was the allegation that Hussein either possessed or was on the verge of acquiring weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear devices.
That night, Bush flatly declared: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
It wasn't true. A month later, when the administration submitted the supporting documents to the International Atomic Energy Agency, it concluded they were "not authentic." Within 24 hours, the State Department alleged that it had been taken in by forged intelligence claiming that Iraq had attempted to purchase 40 tons of cake uranium from the African country of Niger, where it is mined.
For its part, the White House continued to insist not only that Hussein might already have the bomb, but also that the president had relayed the fraudulent allegation about the Nigerien purchase in good faith.
