Dead Wrong

Rule number one when writing a letter to Mark Steyn, get your facts straight. Some poor, misinformed Irishman didn't bother to do so, emailed in to Steyn supporting the Joseph Wilson denials about Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger, and gets properly eviscerated. It's all in this week's Mark's Mail Box.

Read below for a great primer on the facts of the case and next time you find yourself in a hot tub with some liberal honeys and they sneeringly bring up some half understood talking point they heard from Dan Rather, you can eviscerate their arguments too. And this time without swearing.

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You are dead wrong about the Niger/Iraq link. I only hope you have the integrity and honesty to face up to it when the full story emerges.

The US, French and Italian agencies are all referring to the same original fake document whose origin may yet be revealed. You'll recall that the SSCI chose not to investigate the source of this faked document.

Why would Iraq need uranium oxide when its nuclear programme was inactive and it already had ore stocks? Also, one of the two mines cited by the source as the location of the uranium oxide is flooded. The other mine cited by the source is under the control of the French authorities. The Iraqis already have a large stock of uranium oxide in their inventory.

Mark Webb
Dublin

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MARK REPLIES: Sorry, man, but you're the one who needs to have the integrity and honesty to face up to your mistake. The idea that this all rests on one "faked document" is utterly discredited in both the Butler and Senate reports. By "faked document", you're referring to the papers delivered to the US Embassy in Rome by an Italian con man and which were rumoured by some to have been written by my National Review colleague Michael Ledeen. The idea that the intelligence communities of virtually every major western power fell for a single "faked document" is a red herring put about by the crapped-out hack Joe Wilson and eagerly swallowed by supposedly savvy "investigative journalists" like Sy Hersh.

First, the "faked document" is really, as Christopher Hitchens puts it, more of a "forgery"--that's to say, "it was a fabricated version of a true bill". (A bogus four-dollar bill is a fake, a bogus five-dollar bill is a forgery.) The information in it was broadly correct. However, it's utterly irrelevant. The documents delivered in Rome are not those upon which the French, the British or any of the other European intelligence services made their conclusions.

Second, as the Senate report explains in some detail, when the narcissistic Wilson declared those documents to be false because the names and dates were wrong, he had NEVER SEEN THEM. The CIA did not get them until eight months after his trip to Niger. Wilson was in no position to state whether the names and dates were wrong and none of his media groupies stopped giving him the full Monica long enough to ask him for any examples of names and dates. He now says feebly that he may have "misspoken".

Third, as the Senate report also explains, Niger's government officials informed Wilson about an Iraqi delegation visiting their country in 1999 on a trade mission, and the Prime Minister of Niger told Wilson that he believed they were interested in purchasing uranium. Why else would a high-level Iraqi trade mission go to Niger? Niger's principal exports are: Uranium ore, goats, cowpeas and onions. You reckon Saddam suddenly had a yen for goat en croute in an onion glaze with a side order of black-eyed peas? As the Senate report confirms, Wilson's New York Times column deliberately misrepresents "what he found in Africa".

Fourth, Iraq's nuclear programme was officially "inactive" but its inactivity was being monitored by the IAEA so its existing uranium stocks could not be used. If it had a little project in mind requiring uranium - say, involving certain groups with a certain animus against certain countries - it needed some uranium that would be off-the-books.

Fifth, Niger's uranium mines are under a very loose French regulatory supervision, not "control". As I said in my column, it's exactly the sort of joint western intelligence agencies should be keeping an eye on.

So you're the one who's dead wrong. Which is better than being dead and wrong. Which is where a lot of westerners in denial are going to be if they don't confront the reality of nuclear proliferation.