The Ashford Zone Blog

Debate has grown to a fever pitch about the Iraq War — specifically, the intelligence on WMDs.  Defenders of the war seem to be applying inconsistent arguments.

For example, in this RealClearPolitics post countering Kevin Drum’s observations (which I discussed here), writer Tom Bevan notes that as of November 27, 2002, when inspectors resumed inspections in Iraq:

…there was still a general consensus among intelligence agencies around the world – not to mention policy experts and politicians from both sides of the aisle in the U.S. dating back nearly 10 years – about what type of WMD Iraq was potentially concealing.

And that seems to be ARGUMENT ONE from Bush defenders — the intelligent agencies were all in agreement.

But of course, honest Bush defenders quickly defeat their own argument, and Bevan is no exception:

Yes, we now know there were some dissenting opinions in the mix of intelligence, but that only serves to highlight a point that cannot be overstated: our ability to know exactly what Saddam had or didn’t have depended almost exclusively on his willingness to cooperate with the inspection and disarmament process.

We, the people, do now know about dissenting opinions.  We didn’t know then.  [And more evidence is coming out everyday: in the past 24 hours, there have been more documents disclosing that the CIA doubted an Iraq-al Qaeda link.]

But regardless of how intelligence was filtered, the very fact that there were dissents in the intelligence community directly contradicts that meme that the intelligence community was unified in its belief that Saddam posed a threat.

Bevan makes it even worse for himself by admitting:

Intelligence is always flawed and imprecise, even more so when you’re dealing with a closed, paranoid and authoritarian regime like Hussein’s.

This is absolutely true.  More importantly, it was just as true in 2002 as it is now.  And that’s what many of us were saying then: How can you commit American soldier’s lives to a cause based on intelligence which is inherently flawed and imprecise?

Therefore, what Bevan and others like him are basically saying is "Screw the intelligence.  Saddam was a badass and we all know it."

Again, true.  He was a badass in the 1990’s, and before 9/11.  But Bush didn’t propose an invasion then.  In fact, when running for the presidency, Bush rejected the idea of using our military for "nationbuilding".

So what, according to Bevan, did Bush do?

What President Bush did instead was put an end to the decade-long guessing game and place the burden squarely on Saddam Hussein by saying in front of the world: "This is what we think you have. It’s now your responsibility to prove us wrong."

Well, that’s a convenient little spin of recent history.   Bush didn’t articulate what he THOUGHT Saddam had.  He argued for invasion after pegging Saddam as an imminent threat — one who possessed WMDs, and one who had links to al Qaeda.  If Bush were truly interested in knowing what Saddam had or didn’t have, he would have let the inspectors continue their job.

Furthermore, placing the burden of proof on Saddam, when the deck is stacked against him, placed him in an unwinnable situation of having to prove a negative to a skeptical world.  How does Saddam prove the non-existence of WMDs?  How does he prove he has no substantive connections to al Qaeda?  How does he prove anything to people like Bevan who wouldn’t trust anything he says anyway?  Call it a "kangaroo court of world opinion", because nothing Saddam could conceiveably have done would have satisifed people like Bevan.

So it wasn’t intelligence that got us into Iraq.  And it wasn’t a desire to find the truth about what Saddam really had.  It was, quite bluntly, paranoia.  9/11-inspired fear of olive-skinned evildoers.   Saddam fit the bill, but unlike Osama, we knew where he was.  That’s why we went in there.

I agree with Matt Yglesius that the right wing talking points are falling into two contrary positions:

The right’s put two related narratives out there about the administration and the intelligence community which people need to recognize as directly contradictory. On the one hand, we’re supposed to believe that the White House was just the victim of bad intel coming from the professionals. On the other hand, we’re supposed to believe that the IC is ridden with die-hard Bush-hating anti-war types who are planting all these negative articles in the press. But of course if theory two is right, then theory one can’t also be right.

Theory two is getting some traction.  In fact, it looks like some on the right are attempting to engage in swiftboating the CIA/intelligence community.  I’m not sure how smart that is.

Rightwing bloggers are all abuzz about a Normen Podhoretz commentary, defending the Bush run-up to the war.

Kevin Drum tears the whole thing down:

MARKETING THE WAR….Ah. I see that Norman Podhoretz has an essay in Commentary purporting to show that George Bush didn’t lie about Iraqi WMD before the war. His basic case is that lots of people — including some liberals — believed that Iraq had WMD, so obviously the president did nothing wrong.

Fair enough. Lots of people did believe that Iraq had WMD before the war. The problem Podhoretz doesn’t bother wrestling with, however, is that after the war concluded we discovered that there were also a fair number of people who had been skeptical about Iraqi WMD. INR, for example, thought the African uranium was bogus. DIA thought our prime witness for Iraqi-al-Qaeda WMD collaboration was lying. The Air Force found the evidence on drones to be laughable. DOE didn’t believe in the aluminum tubes. None of these dissents was acknowledged by the Bush administration.

Nor does Podhoretz apply himself to the entire period before the war. He stops his investigation at the end of 2002. But that’s not when we went to war. We went to war in March 2003, and by that time UN inspectors had been combing Iraq for months with the help of U.S. intelligence. They found nothing, and an increasing chorus of informed minds was starting to wonder if perhaps there was nothing there. In response, President Bush and his supporters merely amped up their certainty that Saddam was hiding something.

And of course there’s the nukes. As Podhoretz surely knows, the evidence for an Iraqi nuclear program was always weak, and once the inspections started the evidence rapidly fell to zero. That kind of thing is just too hard to hide. The warnings of mushroom clouds, however, continued unabated.

Unless you think that going to war is no more serious than planning a marketing campaign for a new brand of toothpaste, all of this contrary evidence should have been publicized and acknowledged along with all the evidence that went in the other direction. It wasn’t. Given this, the fact that so many people believed that Saddam had an active WMD program simply doesn’t perform the analytic heavy lifting that Podhoretz thinks it does.

In any case, if it’s really true that the Bush administration did nothing to spin, exaggerate, or lie about WMD before the war, why are war supporters so relentlessly trying to suppress any congressional investigation into this? You’d think they’d welcome it instead. For a bunch of innocent bystanders, they sure are acting awfully guilty.