The Story That Won't Go Away

I really don't have the time to do a full post about the continuing story of Iraq's (apparent lack of) weapons of mass destruction, but I wanted to call your attention to an article in today's USA Today that makes some interesting points. While the piece does seem to imply that the war was wrong because WMDs have not been found and wonders about Bush's "determination" to oust Saddam, it ends up making the case for war in spite of itself:

U.S. intelligence analysts were reluctant to give Iraq the benefit of the doubt because Saddam had fooled them before.

After the 1991 war, U.N. weapons inspectors, tipped off by an Iraqi defector, uncovered a much more extensive program to develop nuclear weapons than the CIA had estimated. It happened again in 1995 when Iraq admitted to a biological weapons program undetected by U.S. intelligence.

"The lesson of '91 was that (Saddam) was much more effective at denial and deception than we understood, and consequently he was a lot further along than we understood," Stuart Cohen, vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, a senior advisory board, said in an interview.

Virtually all of the CIA's recent, painful lessons revolved around the failure to detect and warn of a threat. These included a bombing at the Khobar Towers military barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996; nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in 1998; the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000; and, most traumatically, the Sept. 11 attacks.

Furthermore, as this Washington Post editorial - a must-read on the subject - points out [emphasis mine]:

The intelligence community has a sorry record of assessing just how advanced an incipient WMD program really is. In fact, there is a striking pattern. In each of these cases, new evidence turned out to rebut the established consensus of the intelligence community: the Soviet Union in 1949, China in 1964, India in 1974, Iraq in 1991, North Korea in 1994, Iraq in 1995, India in 1998, Pakistan in 1998, North Korea in 2002, Iran in 2003 and Libya in 2003. In each of these cases, the WMD program turned out to be more advanced than the intelligence community thought. Iraq in 2003 may be the only exception (though there is reason to believe that North Korea is, like Iraq, exaggerating its nuclear progress).

In a world where intelligence information is never certain, what exactly had Saddam done to earn "the benefit of the doubt" (let alone the fact that he failed to demonstrate disarmament as required by 12 years of UN resolutions)?

As USA Today concludes:

Bush didn't believe that U.N. inspectors had forced Iraq to get rid of its banned weapons after the 1991 war. Indeed, Bush's policy assumed that U.N. inspections couldn't work. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the watchwords at the White House and CIA headquarters were, assume the worst.

Sept. 11 showed the consequences of failing to warn of an imminent threat. Now U.S. intelligence is grappling with the consequences of perceiving a threat that was not there.

Again, I think all of this argues for an invasion. Of course, "after Sept. 11", we should assume the worst. We saw the consequences of giving our enemies the benefit of the doubt. And despite USA Today's trite closing lines, the "consequences" of the two types of failure are not the same. In the former, you have the deaths of 3,000 civillians in the span of minutes. In the latter, you have the deaths of 500+ volunteer soldiers who have the training and tools to defend themselves, and are compensated in honor and treasure both before and after their deaths.

The "consequences of perceiving a threat that was not there" also include the liberations of tens of millions of people, the end of child prisons and rape rooms, and a possible democratic example in a region of 7th Century barbarism, while the "consequences of failing to warn of an imminent threat" also included billions of dollars (trillions?) in economic consquences in additional to the slaughter of men, women and children.

posted by Michael 4:36:47 PM

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