Like pressure building up beneath the ground before an earthquake, a vast store of pent-up energy is swelling beneath the US body politic over the failed war in Iraq. To be sure, so far that pressure has barely begun to register in open political debate: it is nearly impossible to find a leading politician, Republican or Democrat, willing to put forward a concrete exit strategy or to support the idea of setting a date for withdrawal. But there are tremors, and it’s clear that a political earthquake could come as early as the beginning of 2006.

It isn’t just the Democrats who are starting to waver in their support for the war. Quietly, behind the scenes, many Republican members of Congress – worried about the effects of the public’s disenchantment with President Bush’s war when voters go to the polls next November – are expressing grave doubts. “I’ve been hearing from a lot of folks on the Hill, from Republicans, who are worried about Iraq,” says a former senior State Department official. “They’re calling me to ask, How long can this go on? And when members of Congress ask How long? they mean, Can it go on like this until November, 2006?”

Public opinion, which began shifting decisively against the Bush administration’s Iraq policy one year ago, now overwhelmingly favours getting out; and clear majorities now say that the war in Iraq wasn’t worth fighting in the first place. A stunning poll from CNN and USA Today released recently asked voters, “If you could talk with President George W Bush for 15 minutes about the situation in Iraq, what would you, personally, advise him to do?” Far and away the most popular answer was: get out now. Forty-one per cent picked: “Pull the troops out and come home. End it.” Others picked more subtle variations on the same theme: “Come up with and execute a well-thought-out exit strategy (6 per cent); “Join in and work with the United Nations” (3 per cent); and “Admit to past mistakes. Apologize” (3 per cent). A total of 53 per cent picked options opposed to Bush’s stubborn, stick-it-out policy. Only 18 per cent picked “Finish what we started”, with scattered support for other stay-the-course options.

Not surprisingly, anti-war sentiment among Democratic politicians is being championed mostly by the party’s hard-core left. More than 60 members of Congress, all Democrats, have joined an informal “Out of Iraq Caucus” in the House of Representatives. In mid-September, two dozen of them attended a rump, Democrats-only hearing to examine the possibility of exiting Iraq.

The hearing was organised by Lynn Woolsey, a California Democrat. It had to be held in a tiny corner room in a House office building, with barely enough room for members of Congress and half a dozen panellists to sit crammed in cheek by jowl, because Republicans wouldn’t cede any meeting space for the event. Still, the fact that so many Democrats showed up is an important sign that the search for answers to the quagmire in Iraq is increasingly attracting the attention of members of Congress. The star of the hearing was the lone Republican who showed up, Representative Walter Jones of North Carolina, a staunch supporter of the war in Iraq in 2003, who has reversed his position and has now introduced a bill in Congress asking Bush to develop a strategy for getting out. Since the hearing, Jones has recruited at least five other Republicans to co-sponsor his bill.

There are also important cracks among the foreign policy elite. Fatal misgivings about the war in Iraq have been registered by men such as John Deutch, the former CIA director, who proclaimed the war lost and called for a “prompt withdrawal plan”; Gary Hart, the former Democratic senator and presidential candidate, who criticized Democrats for lack of courage in confronting the war; and William Odom, a hard-line conservative and former director of the super-secret National Security Agency, who penned a widely-read document entitled What’s wrong with cutting and running? In the senate, senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, a Democrat, has called for setting a date for US withdrawal, putting him at odds with the Democratic leadership. And at least one Republican senator is speaking out. “We should start figuring out how we get out of there,” said senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a conservative Republican and Vietnam veteran. “I think our involvement there has destabilised the Middle East. And the longer we stay there, I think the further destabilisation will occur.”

Still, in calls to members of Congress, foreign policy experts, and Washington think-tanks, there is precious little evidence that plans to develop an exit plan are underway. The premier US research outfits – such as the Brookings Institution and the Council on Foreign Relations – have yet to announce any ideas for an exit strategy. The CFR’s chief, Leslie Gelb, a renowned foreign policy guru and a liberal hawk who backed the war in 2003, is now deeply discouraged about the situation in Iraq. “We’re all grasping at straws,” he told a packed meeting of the CFR in Washington. “It’s a horrible situation.” But Gelb has little to say about how to end it.

In the corridors of power – at the Pentagon, at the State Department, in the CIA – the professional civil servants who make the wheels of foreign policy turn are blackly pessimistic on Iraq. In the military, experts are dusting off contingency plans for a quick exit, and most analysts believe that sometime early next year the Pentagon will start to draw back US forces, albeit slowly.

“You’d assume, and I know you do, that we have contingency plans for exiting Iraq at various rates,” says General David Petraeus, who spent the past two years in Iraq leading the US effort to train Iraqi army and police forces. But Petraeus refuses to say a word about any of those plans. Meanwhile, at the State Department, lower level officials are hashing out plans to find a diplomatic solution to the war in Iraq, perhaps involving some of Iraq’s neighbours, perhaps through negotiations or talks with the nationalist and former Ba’ath Party, Sunni-led resistance in Iraq. But so far, according to all accounts, at the top levels of the US government, there is not the slightest willingness to explore a non-military solution.

In the end, if the war in Iraq is to be concluded before 2009, when President Bush leaves office, there are only three paths toward that goal. Each could result from the combination of the growing public disenchantment with the war and the quagmire-like nature of the battle itself.

First, consider what happened in March 1968 to President Lyndon B Johnson in the wake of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Then, a group of foreign policy wise men, led by Averill Harriman and Clark Clifford, met with LBJ to read him the riot act. Vietnam, they told him, was an unwinnable war. Johnson halted the bombing, sought talks with North Vietnam, and announced his decision not to run for re-election. Today, a team of similar gurus, perhaps led by the Republican veterans of the first Bush administration such as General Brent Scowcroft and former Secretary of State James Baker, joined by Colin Powell and others, could collectively get to Bush and persuade him to change course.

Second, it’s not impossible that the members of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and others in the uniformed military, many of whom have already reached the conclusion that the war in Iraq cannot be won, will descend on Rumsfeld and convince him to approach the president about leaving Iraq.

Or third, the burgeoning political opposition to the war among the public might cause the Republican Party’s political strategists to conclude that continuing the war will result in catastrophic losses for the party in 2006 and 2008. Such fears are already leading many political experts in Washington to conclude that the Bush administration will try to have at least a token military force reduction next year in order to calm public concern in advance of the November 2006 congressional election.

One, or perhaps all, of these scenarios could begin to unfold over the next several months. If not, then there is the other exit strategy: a helter-skelter scramble for the exit forced by chaos and civil war in Iraq. At Lynn Woolsey’s anti-war congressional hearing, this option was put most succinctly by Max Cleland, a former senator from Georgia who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam. “The key word in -exit strategy- is not ‘exit’ but ‘strategy’,” he said. Citing Vietnam, he declared: “We need an exit strategy we choose. Or, it will certainly be chosen for us.”Robert Dreyfuss covers national security for Rolling Stone and writes frequently for The Nation, The American Prospect, and Mother Jones. His book, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, has just been published by Henry Holt/Metropolitan (New York, 2005)

With at least four separate official bodies conducting investigations into whether the Bush administration distorted or fabricated intelligence that it used to justify the war in Iraq, it’s at least an even bet that the scandal over Iraq’s missing weapons of mass destruction will explode in Bush’s face later this year.

John Dean, the whistleblower who helped unravel Nixon’s administration in 1973, is already comparing the current situation to Watergate. And Charles Freeman, a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, says this scandal is far worse. “Watergate was an interference with the electoral process,” Freeman says. “But this involves systematic deception, prevarication and lies in matters of national security.”

At the heart of the matter is a tiny but very powerful team of intelligence people who took root at the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP). Started as a two-person shop in October 2001, the OSP swelled to 18 under the leadership of Abram Shulsky, a hard-line neo-conservative strategist with close ties to the hawks in the Bush administration.

Operating in utter secrecy, the unit took intelligence developed by the CIA, the DIA and other bodies, blended it with information generated by Ahmed Chalabi’s unreliable Iraqi National Congress, and produced intelligence bits and pieces that guided statements by leading administration officials.

So far the scandal has barely hit the political register, however. Polls continue to show that Americans aren’t concerned that the Pentagon has failed to uncover WMD in Iraq. And most of the Democratic candidates for president have skittered away from the issue. “I don’t think the failure to find WMD is going to resonate with the US people,” says the campaign manager for one of the Democrats” leading presidential hopefuls.

But that could change quickly. The CIA has brought back four retired officials, led by former CIA deputy director Richard Kerr, to examine the agency’s pre-war intelligence and reporting on Iraq. The intelligence committees of both the House of Representatives and the Senate plan to hold inquiries. And Brent Scowcroft, chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), is conducting an investigation of his own.

How likely are these investigations to pinpoint evidence that Bush, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and vice president Dick Cheney either lied or willfully manipulated intelligence to stampede US opinion into supporting their crusade against Iraq? Let’s take them one by one.

The CIA investigation will focus on last October’s National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded: “Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions. If left unchecked, it will probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade.”

According to The Washington Post, which obtained a still-secret portion of the estimate, the back-up material was far more inconclusive and filled with cautionary notes. The back-up data is developed by mid-level analysts, but the conclusions at the top are prepared by far more senior officials close to CIA director George Tenet. The latter is a highly political director, who midway into the build-up to war with Iraq decisively cast his lot in with the Pentagon hawks.

Within the CIA, there is enormous anger about what many agency analysts see as deliberate distortion of their carefully reasoned work product. Some former CIA officials who keep ties with people inside the agency have formed an organisation called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (Vips) to protest against the Pentagon’s distortion of intelligence on Iraq.

According to Ray McGovern, the CIA veteran who founded Vips, Tenet originally tried to resist enormous pressure from Bush, Cheney and deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz to come up with information to justify war with Iraq. “But when Tenet sat like a potted plant behind Colin Powell at the UN Security Council [in February], that was the cave-in.”

Still, the CIA’s inquiry will remain secret. Besides, observers say that the individuals conducting the investigation are probably unwilling to accuse the administration of deception or lying anyway.

In Congress some Democrats are pushing hard for a broad investigation. But because the Republicans control both the House and the Senate, and thus both intelligence committees, a full-scale investigation has already been ruled out in favour of a few closed-door hearings.

More promisingly, however, the congressional inquiries have asked for a list of statements made by senior US officials, with back-up intelligence attached to support each statement.

The flat-out, alarmist statements from Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld will provide grist for the mill. As long ago as August 2002, in the speech that kicked off the US campaign against Iraq, Cheney told a meeting of the US Veterans of Foreign Wars: “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” The relevant back-up document for this speech, which will almost certainly reveal glaring contradictions between official pronouncements and the underlying intelligence, will also remain classified. But there’s no doubt that it will be leaked to reporters.

Several members of Congress, all Democrats, continue to pound the issue. Californian Representative Henry Waxman has been demanding answers on WMD in a series of angry epistles sent to Rumsfeld. But the war’s most outspoken opponent has been West Virginian Senator Robert Byrd, who at 85 is the oldest Democrat in Congress. In a letter to the president last week, Byrd wondered if the WMD claims were “a manufactured excuse by an administration eager to seize a country”. He added: “We need a thorough, open, gloves-off investigation of this matter, and we need it quickly.”

Finally, there is the Scowcroft investigation, which could be the most significant of them all. Last August Scowcroft came out forcefully against the war. As PFIAB chairman he has the power to take a wide-ranging look at the White House and at intelligence across various agencies. But a former State Department official with CIA connections questions whether Scowcroft has the fortitude for such an investigation: “You almost have to be a junkyard dog,” he says. “Scowcroft is an establishment voice. So the question is: ‘How hard will he fight? How far will he go?’”

Driving the inquiry process is the anger, bordering on outrage, among many CIA officials who feel that their intelligence conclusions were distorted by the hawks, including the OSP, Rumsfeld, and Cheney. (Scrambling to defend Bush against charges of deception, The Wall Street Journal noted alarmingly that the CIA has joined the not-so-loyal opposition. “Within the US,” the paper editorialised on 2 June, “the role of the French and the European left is being played by elements of the intelligence community.”)

Even if the four investigations stall, it’s certain that intelligence officials will leak reams of material to the media. The Washington Post’s veteran intelligence reporter Walter Pincus says that he expects there to be a “feeding frenzy” over the WMD scandal this summer.

Already, the media are producing a steady stream of articles undermining the administration’s WMD and Iraq-al-Qaeda arguments. The New York Times revealed that the two trailers found in Iraq may have had nothing to do with biological weapons at all.

The Times also reported that al-Qaeda captives have been telling interrogators for many months that Iraq had no truck with Osama bin Laden. The forgery of the papers claiming that Iraq sought uranium

for weapons in Niger is being widely investigated by the media. And there are more and more reports of intelligence agency warnings that Iraq’s WMD threat was minor or non-existent. Most damning is a DIA report issued last fall that said there was “no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing or stockpiling chemical weapons or [on whether it] will establish chemical production facilities”.

All of this has led Jane Harman, a moderate Democrat who is the second-ranking member of the House intelligence committee, to raise the possibility that the threat of WMD was a “hoax”, and to pledge to “review the pre-war intelligence case and the portrayal of intelligence by proponents of military action in Iraq”.

Of course, it’s possible that the investigations will run aground, especially if they concentrate on the complex and varied estimates produced by the agencies and fail to focus on the distortion factory in Shulsky’s OSP. “the real issue is Shulsky,” says one former US official. “they’ll want to look at the intelligence output. But what they’ve got to do is look at what got into the president’s in-box.” If that happens, and if the media continue their drumbeat of exposés, then it’s very possible that by this fall the scandal will have left the arcane realm of the intelligence world and entered the rough and tumble world of politics.

Then, the question won’t be (as it was in Watergate): “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” Bush, a know-nothing president, apparently had neither the interest nor the intellectual capacity to question the information he was receiving. The question will be: “What did the president not know, and when didn’t he know it?”Robert Dreyfuss is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect and a Mother Jones contributing writer

But in Washington everybody is looking for a weapon of another kind: a ‘smoking gun’. Thirty years ago, the smoking gun of Watergate brought down the president.

With at least four separate official bodies conducting investigations into whether the Bush administration distorted or fabricated intelligence that it used to justify the war in Iraq, it’s at least an even bet that the scandal over Iraq’s missing weapons of mass destruction will explode in Bush’s face later this year.

John Dean, the whistleblower who helped unravel Nixon’s administration in 1973, is already comparing the current situation to Watergate. And Charles Freeman, a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, says this scandal is far worse. ‘Watergate was an interference with the electoral process,’ Freeman says. ‘But this involves systematic deception, prevarication and lies in matters of national security.’

At the heart of the matter is a tiny but very powerful team of intelligence people who took root at the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans (OSP). Started as a two-person shop in October 2001, the OSP swelled to 18 under the leadership of Abram Shulsky, a hard-line neo-conservative strategist with close ties to the hawks in the Bush administration.

Operating in utter secrecy, the unit took intelligence developed by the CIA, the DIA and other bodies, blended it with information generated by Ahmed Chalabi’s unreliable Iraqi National Congress, and produced intelligence bits and pieces that guided statements by leading administration officials.

So far the scandal has barely hit the political register, however. Polls continue to show that Americans aren’t concerned that the Pentagon has failed to uncover WMD in Iraq. And most of the Democratic candidates for president have skittered away from the issue. ‘I don’t think the failure to find WMD is going to resonate with the US people,’ says the campaign manager for one of the Democrats’ leading presidential hopefuls.

But that could change quickly. The CIA has brought back four retired officials, led by former CIA deputy director Richard Kerr, to examine the agency’s pre-war intelligence and reporting on Iraq. The intelligence committees of both the House of Representatives and the Senate plan to hold inquiries. And Brent Scowcroft, chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), is conducting an investigation of his own.

How likely are these investigations to pinpoint evidence that Bush, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and vice president Dick Cheney either lied or willfully manipulated intelligence to stampede US opinion into supporting their crusade against Iraq? Let’s take them one by one.

The CIA investigation will focus on last October’s National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded: ‘Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions. If left unchecked, it will probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade.’

According to The Washington Post, which obtained a still-secret portion of the estimate, the back-up material was far more inconclusive and filled with cautionary notes. The back-up data is developed by mid-level analysts, but the conclusions at the top are prepared by far more senior officials close to CIA director George Tenet. The latter is a highly political director, who midway into the build-up to war with Iraq decisively cast his lot in with the Pentagon hawks.

Within the CIA, there is enormous anger about what many agency analysts see as deliberate distortion of their carefully reasoned work product. Some former CIA officials who keep ties with people inside the agency have formed an organisation called Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (Vips) to protest against the Pentagon’s distortion of intelligence on Iraq.

According to Ray McGovern, the CIA veteran who founded Vips, Tenet originally tried to resist enormous pressure from Bush, Cheney and deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz to come up with information to justify war with Iraq. ‘But when Tenet sat like a potted plant behind Colin Powell at the UN Security Council [in February], that was the cave-in.’

Still, the CIA’s inquiry will remain secret. Besides, observers say that the individuals conducting the investigation are probably unwilling to accuse the administration of deception or lying anyway.

In Congress some Democrats are pushing hard for a broad investigation. But because the Republicans control both the House and the Senate, and thus both intelligence committees, a full-scale investigation has already been ruled out in favour of a few closed-door hearings.

More promisingly, however, the congressional inquiries have asked for a list of statements made by senior US officials, with back-up intelligence attached to support each statement.

The flat-out, alarmist statements from Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld will provide grist for the mill. As long ago as August 2002, in the speech that kicked off the US campaign against Iraq, Cheney told a meeting of the US Veterans of Foreign Wars: ‘There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.’ The relevant back-up document for this speech, which will almost certainly reveal glaring contradictions between official pronouncements and the underlying intelligence, will also remain classified. But there’s no doubt that it will be leaked to reporters.

Several members of Congress, all Democrats, continue to pound the issue. Californian Representative Henry Waxman has been demanding answers on WMD in a series of angry epistles sent to Rumsfeld. But the war’s most outspoken opponent has been West Virginian Senator Robert Byrd, who at 85 is the oldest Democrat in Congress. In a letter to the president last week, Byrd wondered if the WMD claims were ‘a manufactured excuse by an administration eager to seize a country’. He added: ‘We need a thorough, open, gloves-off investigation of this matter, and we need it quickly.’

Finally, there is the Scowcroft investigation, which could be the most significant of them all. Last August Scowcroft came out forcefully against the war. As PFIAB chairman he has the power to take a wide-ranging look at the White House and at intelligence across various agencies. But a former State Department official with CIA connections questions whether Scowcroft has the fortitude for such an investigation: ‘You almost have to be a junkyard dog,’ he says. ‘Scowcroft is an establishment voice. So the question is: “How hard will he fight? How far will he go?”‘

Driving the inquiry process is the anger, bordering on outrage, among many CIA officials who feel that their intelligence conclusions were distorted by the hawks, including the OSP, Rumsfeld, and Cheney. (Scrambling to defend Bush against charges of deception, The Wall Street Journal noted alarmingly that the CIA has joined the not-so-loyal opposition. ‘Within the US,’ the paper editorialised on 2 June, ‘the role of the French and the European left is being played by elements of the intelligence community.’)

Even if the four investigations stall, it’s certain that intelligence officials will leak reams of material to the media. The Washington Post’s veteran intelligence reporter Walter Pincus says that he expects there to be a ‘feeding frenzy’ over the WMD scandal this summer.

Already, the media are producing a steady stream of articles undermining the administration’s WMD and Iraq-al-Qaeda arguments. The New York Times revealed that the two trailers found in Iraq may have had nothing to do with biological weapons at all.

The Times also reported that al-Qaeda captives have been telling interrogators for many months that Iraq had no truck with Osama bin Laden. The forgery of the papers claiming that Iraq sought uranium for weapons in Niger is being widely investigated by the media. And there are more and more reports of intelligence agency warnings that Iraq’s WMD threat was minor or non-existent. Most damning is a DIA report issued last fall that said there was ‘no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing or stockpiling chemical weapons or [on whether it] will establish chemical production facilities’.

All of this has led Jane Harman, a moderate Democrat who is the second-ranking member of the House intelligence committee, to raise the possibility that the threat of WMD was a ‘hoax’, and to pledge to ‘review the pre-war intelligence case and the portrayal of intelligence by proponents of military action in Iraq’.

Of course, it’s possible that the investigations will run aground, especially if they concentrate on the complex and varied estimates produced by the agencies and fail to focus on the distortion factory in Shulsky’s OSP. ‘The real issue is Shulsky,’ says one former US official. ‘They’ll want to look at the intelligence output. But what they’ve got to do is look at what got into the president’s in-box.’ If that happens, and if the media continue their drumbeat of exposes, then it’s very possible that by this fall the scandal will have left the arcane realm of the intelligence world and entered the rough and tumble world of politics.

Then, the question won’t be (as it was in Watergate): ‘What did the president know, and when did he know it?’ Bush, a know-nothing president, apparently had neither the interest nor the intellectual capacity to question the information he was receiving. The question will be: ‘What did the president not know, and when didn’t he know it?’

Robert Dreyfuss is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect and a Mother Jones contributing writer