CNN’s Bill Schneider posted the following article on September 12, 2002.

There’s a big question hanging over President Bush’s Iraq policy: Why now? Why, more than 11 years after the Gulf War, is it suddenly so urgent for the U.S. to go after Saddam Hussein now?…

Why did the Administration wait until September to make its case against Iraq? White House chief of staff Andrew Card told The New York Times last week, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”

In his speech to the United Nations, President Bush tried to shut down the political speculation. This is a life-and-death matter, the President insisted. “Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year,” he told the U.N. General Assembly in New York Thursday.

To those who say, we want more evidence that there’s a real threat, the Administration says, we can’t wait for a smoking gun to turn up. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice said on CNN’s Late Edition recently.

So, we see the White House used their August Crawford vacation more productively in 2002 than they did in 2001 (when they ignored warning signs about a 9/11 type plot).

In August 2002, the administration decided to roll out a ‘new product’. The product was a war in Iraq. The sales pitch was the spector of a mushroom cloud going off in an American city. Seen in this light, it makes the following very interesting:

Today’s exclusive report in La Repubblica reveals that [Nicolo] Pollari [chief of Italy’s military intelligence service, known as Sismi] met secretly in Washington on September 9, 2002, with then–Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. Their secret meeting came at a critical moment in the White House campaign to convince Congress and the American public that war in Iraq was necessary to prevent Saddam Hussein from developing nuclear weapons. National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones confirmed the meeting to the Prospect on Tuesday.

Pollari told the newspaper that since 2001, when he became Sismi’s director, the only member of the U.S. administration he has met officially is his former CIA counterpart George Tenet. But the Italian newspaper quotes a high-ranking Italian Sismi source asserting a meeting with Hadley. La Repubblica also quotes a Bush administration official saying, “I can confirm that on September 9, 2002, General Nicolo Pollari met Stephen Hadley.”

The paper goes on to note the significance of that date, highlighting the appearance of a little-noticed story in Panorama a weekly magazine owned by Italian Prime Minister and Bush ally Silvio Berlusconi, that was published three days after Pollari’s meeting with Hadley. The magazine’s September 12, 2002, issue claimed that Iraq’s intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat, had acquired 500 tons of uranium from Nigeria through a Jordanian intermediary. (While this September 2002 Panorama report mentioned Nigeria, the forgeries another Panorama reporter would be proferred less than a month later purportedly concerned Niger.)

September 12, 2002, perhaps not so coincidently, was also the day Bush gave his speech at the United Nations, where he famously said:

“With every step the Iraqi regime takes toward gaining and deploying the most terrible weapons, our own options to confront that regime will narrow. And if an emboldened regime were to supply these weapons to terrorist allies, then the attacks of September the 11th would be a prelude to far greater horrors.”

Even before the UN speech, the Bush administration began pushing the idea that Iraq sought aluminum tubes for uranium enriching centrifuges:

September 8, 2002

When asked if Saddam Hussein presents a “clear and present danger” to the United States, Condoleezza Rice tells Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s Late Edition there is [no doubt] that “the danger is gathering momentum.” “We do know that there have been shipments going … into Iraq … of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to—high-quality aluminum tools [sic] that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.” [CNN Late Night with Wolf Blitzer, 9/8/02; New York Times, 7/20/03; Iraq on the Record database, 3/16/04] link

(1:00am) September 8, 2002

The New York Times publishes a front page story reporting that Iraq has attempted to obtain aluminum tubes which, US intelligence believes, were intended for use in a nuclear weapons program. The article—written by Times reporters Judith Miller and Michael Gordon—cites unnamed intelligence officials as its sources. “In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium,” reports the newspaper. “The diameter, thickness and other technical specifications of the aluminum tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq’s nuclear program ….” The article does not say that experts at the Department of Energy do not believe the tubes were intended for use in a gas centrifuge. link

The next step in the game was to make us think that Saddam was likely to ‘supply these [non-existent] weapons to terrorist allies’. That element of the ‘marketing’ began two weeks later:

President Bush’s national security adviser Wednesday said Saddam Hussein has sheltered al Qaeda terrorists in Baghdad and helped train some in chemical weapons development — information she said has been gleaned from captives in the ongoing war on terrorism.

The comments by Condoleezza Rice were the strongest and most specific to date on the White House’s accusations linking al Qaeda and Iraq.

The accusations followed those made by President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who earlier in the day said the United States has evidence linking Iraq and al Qaeda, but they did not elaborate. And the charges came as the White House sought to dispel accusations by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who blasted the administration for an “outrageous” effort to seek political gain from the Iraq debate.

We now know that this marketing campaign was total bullshit. We also can look back and see that the reality-based members of the Republican Party and foreign policy establishment were trying to save the country in August, when they became aware of the carnage to come:

August 15th, 2002: Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleberger says on ABC News that unless Mr. Hussein “has his hand on a trigger that is for a weapon of mass destruction, and our intelligence is clear, I don’t know why we have to do it now, when all our allies are opposed to it.”

August 15th, 2002: Brent Scowcroft is the source of major embarrassment for the administration when he authors an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing against the need to remove Saddam Hussein from power. He says that the toppling of Saddam’s regime would destabilize the Middle East and thus “turn the whole region into a cauldron and destroy the War on Terror.” Noting that “there is scant evidence to tie Saddam to terrorist organizations, and even less to the Sept. 11 attacks,” he calls on Bush to abandon his designs on Saddam Hussein and instead refocus his foreign policy on the war on terrorism. [Wall Street Journal] It is suggested that Scowcroft’s criticisms probably reflect the feelings of the president’s father. The Los Angeles Times reports: “Several former officials close to Scowcroft said they doubted he would have gone public with that posture without clearing the move first with the senior Bush, heightening questions about the latter’s view on confronting Iraq. The former president has not commented publicly, which has only fed speculation.”

August 18th, 2002: Retired General Norman Schwarzkopf, who commanded allied forces during the Gulf War, warns against invading Iraq without the support of allies. He explains: “In the Gulf War we had an international force and troops from many nations. We would be lacking if we went it alone at this time…. It is not going to be an easy battle but it would be much more effective if we didn’t have to do it alone.”

August 18th, 2002: In a Washington Post op-ed piece, Zbigniew Brzezinski reprimands the Bush administration for its reckless foreign policy, saying that “war is too serious a business and too unpredictable in its dynamic consequences—especially in a highly flammable region—to be undertaken because of a personal peeve, demagogically articulated fears or vague factual assertions.”

August 23rd, 2002: In a speech to the Economic Club of Florida in Tallahassee, retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, who recently served as the president’s special envoy to the Middle East, argues that there are more pressing issues than Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. Specifically, he points to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, instability in Afghanistan, the continuing existence of the al-Qaeda network, and the theocracy in Iran. He adds that the proposed war with Iraq would be expensive and would put considerable strain on the military’s resources, which already are “stretched too tight all over the world.” Furthermore, notes the general, invading Iraq would further antagonize America’s allies in the Middle East. “We need to quit making enemies that we don’t need to make enemies out of,” he says. He also notes, “It’s pretty interesting that all the generals see it the same way and all the others who have never fired a shot and are hot to go to war see it another way.”

August 25th, 2002: The New York Times publishes an opinion article by James Baker, a former secretary of state and a close friend of the Bush family. In his piece, Baker writes that the US must raise a coalition and secure a broad base of support before attempting to remove Saddam Hussein by force. Although it may be possible to successfully invade the country and depose its regime, he argues, America’s image would suffer irreparable damage as a consequence. Therefore, according to Baker, a unilateral preemptive strike in the midst of massive opposition from US allies in Europe and the Middle East would be detrimental to American strategic interests.