The "Cabal" That Started The Iraq War Was Led by Cheney

May 18 (EIRNS)--The following excerpt is from the upcoming feature in Executive Intelligence Review , called Cheney's Impeachable Crimes Highlighted at UDC Forum . The speakers identified here are Peter Eisner, co-author, with Knut Royce, of the new book, The Italian Letter (New York City: Rodale, Inc. 2007); Col. Larry Wilkerson, the Pamela Harriman Visiting Professor of Government at the College of William and Mary, who was the Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell in the Bush administration; and Mel Goodman, a 24-year veteran as a CIA analyst on the Soviet Union, 18 years on the faculty of the National War College, currently senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. Goodman is also the author of six books on international relations, the latest of which is The Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA .

Eisner: I have a question for everyone here. It's going to be moving into a slightly different direction. As Col. Wilkerson said, he has a different position, has held a different position, was a customer of intelligence during this whole period. He also was famously, I'm not putting him on the spot, but he's famously known for saying, that there was some form of cabal working in the Administration. When I am asked the whys of this story, when I talk about the fact that the 16 words were well-known to be false before they were uttered by President Bush, how the CIA almost, if not immediately after first getting the information about nuclear weapons, didn't even investigate very much, because many analysts discarded the information, because Iraq didn't need uranium, because it already had it. Iraq had no program to process uranium, because the act of obtaining uranium from Africa, would have been very difficult. And beyond all those things, the source for the information was highly questionable.

So, adding that to everything that's been said so far, people then come to the question: Why? What was the superstructure? Who was cooking the books?

You're talking about cooking the books, you're talking about the hijacking of intelligence. Where did it come from? And why?

Goodman: I don't think that's a very difficult question to deal with. I think the master of this war, and the one who outlined the strategy for the war, and designed--and I agree with Larry that it was just a classic case of agitprop: There was a propaganda campaign, and we were taken in by it, and the press was taken in by it--but the chief operator in all this, let's call him Geppetto, was Dick Cheney. This is Dick Cheney's war. It has always been Dick Cheney's war.

Now the one thing that Dick Cheney needed to sell this war, to market his war, was nuclear reconstitution. And remember, I think it was September the 8th, when all of the high-level members of the Bush Administration went on national television with "smoking gun" and the mushroom cloud. And what Joe Wilson was threatening, was to take down the argument about nuclear reconstitution, when he said, "I'll tell you what I found in Niger. I found nothing."

So, you had only two pins for nuclear reconstitution. It was Niger, enriched uranium, and the phony 16 words; and you had the aluminum tubes. And frankly, I'll pass the question to Larry, because people feel that Tenet should have resigned. I've always thought that Colin Powell should resign. Colin Powell is a hell of a lot more popular in this country than George Bush. If Colin Powell had stood up, and said what he thought, and told us what he knew, there would have been no war.

George Tenet is an apparatchik. I'm not impressed with George Tenet. He should never have been CIA director. But how did Colin Powell, a military officer, a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, get taken in by the aluminum tubes, which was driven by a kid, a young kid engineer by the name of Joe Turner, at the CIA, who stood up somehow to all of the PhD scientists of the weapons labs, and Department of Energy, because Foley wanted this argument out there to make the case for war. I think Powell could have stopped this.

But that's why this was so important to Cheney. That's why they desperately hounded Valerie Plame--and again, sorry Peter, but I'll go after the Washington Post on this: I don't know why Fred Hiatt is so convinced that Joe Wilson was lying about many of these issues. The Washington Post owes Joe Wilson an apology. But Fred Hiatt continues to write, and sponsor, op eds and editorials about all of the misleading advice that Joe Wilson gave the country. Joe Wilson was trying to get in the way of this moving train, that was moving toward war in 2002.

So, there are still a lot of things that we don't know. But I think the key element in the question, this was Cheney's war, this was Cheney's issue, and he had to run with it. He couldn't allow it to be compromised.

Wilkerson: I don't disagree with that. I think my previous comments about a cabal between the two secretaries of defense--one then a Vice President, the other another Secretary of Defense--you watch the body language around these two men, you wouldn't know which one was which. I didn't know whether Rumsfeld was running things, or Cheney was running things. On any particular issue, you could take your pick. But the Vice-President, in my mind, is the person who ran this country on a foreign policy perspective from 2001 to 2005, when I was at the State Department.