Posted on 01/12/2004 6:25:43 PM PST by quidnunc
Let's start with one truth: last March, when the United States and its coalition partners invaded Iraq, the American public and much of the rest of the world believed that after Saddam Hussein's regime sank, a vast flotsam of weapons of mass destruction would bob to the surface. That, of course, has not been the case. In the words of David Kay, the principal adviser to the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), an organization created late last spring to search for prohibited weaponry, "I think all of us who entered Iraq expected the job of actually discovering deployed weapons to be easier than it has turned out to be." Many people are now asking very reasonable questions about why they were misled.
Democrats have typically accused the Bush Administration of exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq in order to justify an unnecessary war. Republicans have typically claimed that the fault lay with the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, which they say overestimated the threat from Iraq — a claim that carries the unlikely implication that Bush's team might not have opted for war if it had understood that Saddam was not as dangerous as he seemed.
Both sides appear to be at least partly right. The intelligence community did overestimate the scope and progress of Iraq's WMD programs, although not to the extent that many people believe. The Administration stretched those estimates to make a case not only for going to war but for doing so at once, rather than taking the time to build regional and international support for military action.
This issue has some personal relevance for me. I began my career as a Persian Gulf military analyst at the CIA, where I saw an earlier generation of technical analysts mistakenly conclude that Saddam Hussein was much further away from having a nuclear weapon than the post-Gulf War inspections revealed. I later moved on to the National Security Council, where I served two tours, in 1995-1996 and 1999-2001. During the latter stint the intelligence community convinced me and the rest of the Clinton Administration that Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programs following the withdrawal of the UN inspectors, in 1998, and was only a matter of years away from having a nuclear weapon. In 2002 I wrote a book called The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, in which I argued that because all our other options had failed, the United States would ultimately have to go to war to remove Saddam before he acquired a functioning nuclear weapon. Thus it was with more than a little interest that I pondered the question of why we didn't find in Iraq what we were so certain we would.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Why now?
Saddam had 150 fighter planes fly to Iran during Gulf War I. So there is a precedent of Saddam moving assets rather than losing them. Why is a shell game with Iraq's WMD such a novel concept?
If it turns out that most of America really doesn't care that we didn't find WMD, they are sunk. It will also indicate that similar cards in their deck are going to be easily trumped as well.
The conclusion, if his "the whole world, including me, was wrong" is accurate, then Saddam was much less a threat than portrayed by the Administration. Like everyone but some Dim presidential candidates, he's very glad Saddam is gone. He outlines multiple valid reasons to remove him, all regurgitated from his book.
I almost didn't read it myself, for that reason. But I've never before found any Atlantic Monthly article to be a waste of time (it's one of the finest magazines on the planet), so I took a chance and read this one, even though the opening paragraph sounds like it might have been a the start of a Michael Moore screed.
I'm glad I did, it's an *excellent* article for the most part, and a real "must read" for anyone who wants to be able to debate this subject well.
For the most part, it actually absolutely vindicates President Bush, far more than even I had realized was the case. It also includes a lot of "inside" information about what we've found that I had not encountered before.
The bulk of the article explains in very convincing detail why a) the *world* (not just the CIA) overestimated Saddam's current capabilities, b) it was entirely reasonable to do so, and c) Saddam would have restarted his WMD programs full speed ahead if sanctions and inspections were ever ended.
The author also explains that even aside from WMD he feels the world (and Iraq) is better off with Saddam gone.
There's also a lot of good info on how Iraq "bought" the cooperation of France, Germany, and probably other countries -- as a direct result of the UN's "food for oil" program.
The only two things he faults the Bush administration on are 1) accepting only what it wanted to hear about Iraq instead of accepting the final "weighted" CIA analysis, and 2) "rushing" to a war that could have been delayed to gain more world support.
HOWEVER... I think that the rest of the author's article undercuts his own complaints about the Bush administration, and he just doesn't realize it.
By the author's own admission, world/UN support for continued tough sanctions/inspections on Iraq was slowly crumbling, *and* Saddam would have restarted his WMD programs as soon as oversights ended. The author also admits that Iraq then could have built nuclear weapons within 5-7 years.
So I think what he's really missing is that the Bush administration realized it *had* to "rush to war" and eliminate Saddam. It was "now or never". If the case for war had dragged out any longer, more and more people would have lost interest in the process and thought, "why bother now?" The longer the threat of war went on, the less likely we could have gotten the momentum to actually do it.
The push to war would have failed, and before long sanctions would have been dropped -- there had already been many rumblings to that end.
Then Saddam would have been on the fast track to crank out all the WMDs he wanted, and he would have.
Bush, thank god, was wise enough to realize that this would have been disastrous. Instead, he knew it was time to go to war and take down Saddam's regime in the short time left while Congress was still willing to approve it. So if he had to "sex up" the "current" WMD danger in order to get support for a necessary war to prevent a certain *future* WMD danger from Iraq, well, bravo for him.
Never play poker with a Texan.
I don't think that's the case at all...Bush did nothing of the sort. He saw the same evidence, even a little more that his predecessors did and was convinced Iraq had WMD just like the others...The Iraq/terrorist link has shown itself already.
I think he still believes they are there and I think we will find them sooner or later whether they will be in Iraq, Iran, or Syria.
Not only that but the fact:
Prior to 1991 the intelligence communities in the United States and elsewhere believed that Iraq was at least five, and probably closer to ten, years away from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Of course, after the war we learned that in 1991 Iraq had been only six to twenty-four months away from having a workable nuclear weapon. This revelation stunned the analysts responsible for following the Iraqi nuclear program.
This is a fact that gets overlooked very often. I think this was evidence that we should have erred on the side of caution when dealing with a mad man like Saddam.
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