Mini-Review: The Italian Letter

I’ve spent a few pleasant hours with Eisner and Royce, The Italian Letter, subtitled “How the Bush Administration Used a Fake Letter to Build the Case for War in Iraq” (link). The “letter” would, of course, be the document, passed to an Italian journalist and thence to the CIA, that seemed to suggest that Saddam was seeking uranium from Niger. The reading time was time well spent, mostly. But the downsides are several, and intertwined. For one, the title is a bit of a deception: evidently their agent told them they needed a hook, and that the letter was a good hook. But the letter is really only an anecdote in the larger story of stovepiped intelligence leading up to the great Clusterfuck. E&R know they have to put the letter into the larger context, but they can’t quite figure out how much of the larger story to tell, and how. Besides, these guys are reporters, used to thinking in 800-word blocks, and they haven’t really mastered the knack of extended narrative.

Still, there’s a certain perverse nostalgia kick in letting yourself be carried back to those palmy days before—well, before everything that has made this such a kidney stone of a decade. It’s also helpful to see these events in a larger context than day-to-day journalism (even at its best) will allow. Here you get a useful overview of the more or less constant bureaucratic push and shove that goes to define a narrative in public life. This sort of thing is always with us, but you also get the truly hair-raising overlay of Dick (don’t bother me with the facts) Cheney and his aggressive, enterprising, mischievous gang of Neocons-in-a-China-shop, so determined to let nothing stand in the way of their own apocalyptic vision. Indeed one of the enduring mysteries of this whole episode is why someone with Cheney’s undoubted skill, experience and energy could transmogrify into the batshit looney that we all know so well. E&R touch on this in a concluding chapter, but one can hardly blame them if they have failed to unravel this enigma of the human soul.

At the core, though, there is still “the letter,” passed from a small time hustler named Rocco Martino to a highly regarded journalist named Elisabetta Burba—the letter that led to the fateful “16 words” in the President’s State of the Union speech on January 28, 2003:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Almost everybody (perhaps excepting Dick Cheney) now concedes that the letter is a phony, and that the entire story is near to utter hogwash. Fine, stuff happens. The more interesting point is how serious minds recognized it as hogwash almost from the moment the letter surfaced—and how, nonetheless, it survived and prospered. These are points which, as I suggested above, I think you really can’t do justice to in day-to-day journalism, no matter how competent (and god knows there is little enough of that around these days). But in the interest of trying to preserve the record, let me itemize a few key points on the general issue of implausibility:

• This is Niger, we’re talking about, not Nigeria. Niger is one of the poorest, weakest, most forlorn countries in the world, landlocked in central Africa. Its only known commodities are uranium and dinosaur bones. Forget the bones, the uranium is under the control of the former colonial masters, the French. Whatever you say about them French, they know how to run a uranium business, and the last thing they want is to get involved with Saddam Hussein. The Nigeriens, themselves, needless to say, are desperate to stay in good grace with their Western overlords.

• The alleged quantity of uranium in the case was 500 tons. Niger did, as I say, have uranium; it was stored in 880-pound barrels, for safety reasons filled only half way—that would be 440 pounds to a barrel. Niger is inland, with no coastline; it has scarcely any roads worthy of the name, and hardly any trucks. By my arithmetic, that means you’d need over 2000 trucks. Just packing and shipping the stuff would create enough of a rumpus to trigger the seismographs at UCLA.

• And once they get it to port, where are they going to ship it, and on whose ships?

• And where are they going to unload it? Basra? Izmir? Tel Aviv? Oh, give us a break.

• And did I mention that Saddam already had uranium, and closer to bomb-ready than the crude “yellowcake” that played a central role in this drama?

In other words, anybody with a particle of knowledge about the facts on the ground would have known from this start that this story didn’t have any legs—even aside from the crude and ham-handed quality of the forgery. Except that it did have legs, and perhaps still does, and we are all the worse off for it.