To the editor:

Steven Hadley, chosen Nov. 16 to replace Condoleezza Rice as national security adviser, was the Bush administration’s scapegoat for the false claim that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from Niger.

After the CIA disclosed in July 2003 that it had sent two memos to the White House in October 2002 raising doubts about the uranium claim, Hadley appeared before reporters and said that he “should have read the memos” and kept those erroneous 16 words out of Bush’s State of the Union Address. “It is now clear to me that I failed in that responsibility.” (Los Angeles Times, Nov. 17)

Whether an intelligence failure or the purposeful use of misinformation, it helped frighten Congress into approving pre-emptive war. A lot of bombs dropped before those who should be the first to know finally fessed up to what the rest of us had read about months earlier in the New Yorker and elsewhere.

Bush said Hadley was a “man of wisdom and good judgment.” In an administration where no one takes responsibility for mistakes or wrongdoing, it seems that loyalty, even when contrary to wisdom and good judgment, is prized and rewarded above all else.

Hadley favors missile defense, has argued against arms control agreements, and has, according to the L.A. Times, “argued for broadening the use of nuclear weapons to include deterrence against weapons of mass destruction.”

In this business, we can only hope he doesn’t have to play scapegoat again anytime soon.

Christy Kennedy,

Lawrence