I think a report issued by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in January of 2004 (
link) makes a nice companion to the Downing Street Minutes. The Bush administration got what it wanted to bolster its war effort. The official intelligence estimates changed. As mentioned
here, the CEIP report showed in great detail how the intelligence estimates changed suddenly. The report notes that in 2002, the intelligence community mysteriously reversed its cautious approach on Iraq's weapons capabilities and issued a strikingly alarmist intelligence estimate (like
this) supporting the administration's most dire allegations.
The dramatic shift "suggests that the intelligence community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers' views sometime in 2002," the Carnegie report concludes.
The changes noted in the CEIP report are explained by Bush administration policies as revealed by Mother Jones and the New Yorker. The misinformation campaign on Iraq started very early and ramped up after 9/11. From
Mother Jones:
The reports, virtually all false, of Iraqi weapons and terrorism ties emanated from an apparatus that began to gestate almost as soon as the Bush administration took power. In the very first meeting of the Bush national-security team, one day after President Bush took the oath of office in January 2001, the issue of invading Iraq was raised, according to one of the participants in the meeting, -- and officials all the way down the line started to get the message, long before 9/11.
Called in to help organize the Iraq war-planning team was a longtime Pentagon official, Harold Rhode... Rhode helped Feith lay down the law about the department's new anti-Iraq, and broadly anti-Arab, orientation. In one telling incident, Rhode accosted and harangued a visiting senior Arab diplomat, telling him that there would be no "bartering in the bazaar anymore. You're going to have to sit up and pay attention when we say so."
Seymour Hersh reported similar findings in the New Yorker:
Part of the answer lies in decisions made early in the Bush Administration, before the events of September 11, 2001. In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government's customary procedures for vetting intelligence.
Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, whose book "The Threatening Storm" generally supported the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein, told me that what the Bush people did was "dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. "They were forcing the intelligence community to defend its good information and good analysis so aggressively that the intelligence analysts didn't have the time or the energy to go after the bad information."
The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. "The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet"--the C.I.A. director--"for not protecting them. I've never seen a government like this."
Bush seems to have played a very central role in pushing for the Iraq War. From a Woodward 60 Minutes interview, we see him pushing Rumsfeld in November 2001 (link):
"And there's this low boil on Iraq until the day before Thanksgiving, Nov. 21, 2001. This is 72 days after 9/11. This is part of this secret history. President Bush, after a National Security Council meeting, takes Don Rumsfeld aside, collars him physically, and takes him into a little cubbyhole room and closes the door and says, 'What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret.'"
From Richard Clarke's 60 Minutes interview, a similar trip to such a room after 9/11 is mentioned with browbeating by Bush (link):
"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.
Here is an interesting bit from the Boston Globe that shows Arab leaders already knew by January 2002 that the Bush administration had made up its mind to go to war with Iraq:
Kerry described a trip he made to the Middle East in January 2002, when he met with President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, King Abdullah II of Jordan, and top members of Saudi Arabia's ruling family, and was told they believed the Bush administration had already decided on a course for war.
"They said to me that it was their strong belief that the administration was very clear that they wanted to go do this. They didn't have a specific timing," Kerry said.
It's possible that the Saudis got their info directly from W, but the buildup in their region that Bob Graham found out about in February 2002 might have been what clued them in (link):
Graham also revealed that Gen. Tommy Franks told him on Feb. 19, 2002, just four months after the invasion of Afghanistan, that many important resources -- including the Predator drone aircraft crucial to the search for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda leaders -- were being shifted to prepare for a war against Iraq.
Graham recalled this conversation at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa with Franks, then head of Central Command, who was ``looking troubled'':
``Senator, we are not engaged in a war in Afghanistan.''
''Excuse me?'' I asked.
''Military and intelligence personnel are being redeployed to prepare for an action in Iraq,'' he continued.
The Bushites had already made up their mind to invade Iraq by late 2001/early 2002. But they still needed to manufacture an excuse to use to deceive congress and get public support. They had already started the twisting and coercion that was soon to result in noticeable changes in intelligence estimates, changes that supported the lies they wanted to tell the American public.