Since the Downing Street Memo and other documents make clear that Bush had made his judgment to invade Iraq much earlier, it makes sense that the Oval Office meeting might have been like an advertising agency's presentation to a prospective client, with the client shaking his head and telling the ad men to punch up the content.
McLaughlin's flip charts were like a rough cut that needed a lot more work.
Though that interpretation of events would fit with the known facts, it would reflect badly on both Bush and Tenet, since the CIA director would seem to have crossed a bright line in trading in his duties to provide objective information for a job selling the case for war to the American people.
Powell's speech could be viewed as a more polished version of McLaughlin's flip-chart performance in the Oval Office. In other words, Bush's dissatisfaction as expressed on Dec. 21, 2002, could have been the impetus to spice up the content by the time Powell spoke to the U.N. several weeks later.
If that was the case, Tenet's supposed assurance that the sales pitch would be a "slam dunk" would turn out to be true.
Virtually across the board, the major U.S. news media hailed Powell's presentation as compelling and convincing. The next day, the Washington Post's Op-Ed page was a solid wall of praise for Powell and his WMD case.
Today, however, from the perspective of three-plus years of war - and tens of thousands of dead - it appears that Bob Woodward and the U.S. press corps were not the only ones who got "slam-dunked."
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Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
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