Who should be on the ‘independent’ commission?

Let me propose that if the Bush administration really wants to find out what went wrong with our pre-war intelligence on Iraq, it should appoint a commission consisting of first-class investigative reporters, including first and foremost the New Yorker magazine’s Seymour Hersh and the Atlantic Monthly’s James Fallows. These two journalists have, in fact, already told us in damning detail what really went on inside the Bush administration. In several of his New Yorker articles, but particularly “The Stovepipe” (published in the October 27, 2003 issue), Hersh describes the process whereby a pro-war cabal within the administration — Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and others — set out to cherry-pick the intelligence tidbits that supported their preconceived plans for war in Iraq.

In an equally well-documented Atlantic article in the January/February 2004 issue of that magazine, James Fallows explores why so much went so badly wrong after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Why the looting? Why the continuing guerrilla attacks? Why the failure to bring the mass of the population over to our side, even after the capture of Saddam Hussein? Fallows’s answer is that most of what went wrong had long been predicted by non-governmental organizations that tried to work with the Pentagon but whose advice was studiously ignored.