Opinion: Do you remember a year ago when the Democratic National Committee was putting out press releases headlined "President Bush Deceives The American People"? Yawn. What's new? But last summer the 'Bush Lie Of The Week' was all to do with Saddam trying to buy uranium from Niger, writes Mark Steyn
CNN and co replayed endlessly the critical 16 words from the President's 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learnt that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Sixteen words that could break a Presidency! Bush "misled every one of us," huffed Senator John Kerry. "It's beginning to sound like Watergate," said Governor Howard Dean.
Joseph C Wilson IV, the man the CIA sent to Africa to investigate, wrote a piece for The New York Times titled: "What I Didn't Find In Africa".
Can you guess what he didn't find, dear reader? That's right, he didn't find a big package of uranium bearing the address label "S Hussein, Suite 27, the Saddam Hussein Centre for Armageddon Studies, Saddam Hussein Parkway, Baghdad".
Ambassador Wilson said relax, he'd been to Niger, spent "eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people", and there's nothing going on.
Well, last Friday in Washington, the Senate Intelligence Committee's report confirmed that both British and French intelligence had informed the US separately of Iraq's efforts in Niger (the country's uranium operations are under the supervision of the French Atomic Energy Commission) and that, despite his protestations to the contrary, even Joe Wilson had discovered evidence of Iraq-Niger contacts.
This Wednesday in London, Lord Butler will publish his report into the quality of the intelligence on which rested Britain's case for going to war with Iraq rested. The report is said to be critical of some of Tony Blair's claims, supportive of others.
And, among the latter, he says that the statements about Iraq and Niger are justified and supported by the intelligence.
In other words, the British Government did learn that Saddam Hussein did seek significant quantities of uranium from Africa.
As a gazillion e-mails a day shrieked from my in-box back then, "BUSH LIED!" So where exactly in that State of the Union observation is the lie?
Last summer, the comparatively minor matter of uranium from Niger was all over the front pages and the news shows. Do you think these latest developments will be?
Will John Kerry and Howard Dean will be eating humble pie? I first wrote about this business in July last year. The CIA had disowned the Niger story, and I pointed out that these were the same fellows who'd botched the Sudanese aspirin factory business, failed to spot 9/11 coming, etc, etc.
"So," I continued, "if you're the president and the same intelligence bureaucrats who got all the above wrong say the Brits are way off the mark, there's nothing going on with Saddam and Africa, what do you do?
"Do you say, 'Hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day'? Or, given what you've learnt about the state of your humint (human intelligence), is it likely they've got much of a clue about what's going on in French Africa?
"Isn't this one of those deals where the Brits and the shifty French are more plugged in?"
And so it's proved. The fact is almost every European intelligence service reckoned Saddam was trying to buy uranium in Africa. The only folks who didn't think so were the CIA.
Let's weigh their comparative interest in the story. The Financial Times revealed last week that one Continental intelligence agency had had a uranium-smuggling operation involving Iraq under surveillance for three years.
In return, the only primary investigation initiated by the most powerful nation on the face of the earth was to send a narcissistic kook from a Saudi-funded think-tank on vacation for a week to sip mint tea with government stooges.
Joe Wilson didn't even bother filing a written report and the "Bush spurned my advice!" column he wrote for The New York Times reads like a bad travelogue: "Through the haze, I could see camel caravans crossing the Niger river."
After that, the great narcissist took to the talk-show circuit and managed to make himself the centre of the story. But hey, enough about Saddam's nuclear ambitions; let's talk about me.
A few weeks before 9/11, Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote a timely piece in The Atlantic Monthly on the woeful state of US counter-terrorism intelligence in a CIA neutered by politically correct bureaucracy.
Among Mr Gerecht's many memorable quotes was this line from a young CIA man reflecting on an agency grown used to desk-bound life in Virginia: "Operations that include diarrhoea as a way of life don't happen."
That's Niger in a nutshell: Diarrhoea Central. Who'd want to be stationed there when they could be back at Langley monitoring the world's e-mail in an air-conditioned office?
But Niger is a 99.5 per cent Sunni Muslim country with a load of uranium.
It's exactly the sort of place an intelligence agency in the war on terror ought to be keeping an eye on.
And that doesn't mean sending Mint Tea Boy to write it up for the travel section.
That's the issue here: the CIA are tourists in the heart of darkness. This spring, the ever complacent George Tenet told the 9/11 Commission that it would take another half-decade to rebuild the clandestine service.
So three years after 9/11 the CIA says it needs another five years. Imagine if Franklin Roosevelt had turned to Tenet to start up the OSS, the CIA's wartime predecessor. In 1942, he'd have told the president not to worry, he'd have it up and running by 1950.
Bush didn't LIE! He was right, and the CIA were wrong. That doesn't mean, they LIED!either. Intelligence is never 100%.
You make a judgment, and in this instance the judgments of the British and Europeans were right, and the judgment of the principal intelligence agency of the world's hyperpower was wrong.
Something is badly awry at the CIA and that should be a cause of great concern - not for Republicans or Democrats, Bush fans or Bush-haters, but for all Americans.