Tips for (This Week's?) Coming WMD Report

After being out-maneuvered last week, the Republican chair of the Senate intel committee has suggested that he's about to release  the committee's long-MIA report  on whether the administration accurately portrayed pre-war intel. The chairman, Senator Roberts, has suggested the report will exonerate the administration and find that the White House did nothing really wrong.

Assuming his suggestions accurately portray what's in the report, I thought I'd offer a bit of preemptive...context:

Roberts suggests that the committee found no evidence that the White House pressured intel analysts, which is a reasonable conclusion and as it happens irrelevant. After all, you don't need to bully intel analysts in order to distort intelligence; you can just ignore their conclusions.

Second, we'll be hearing a lot-- at least from talking head types--about how everybody thought the case was a, ahem, slam-dunk. I just have a minor clarification: That's not true.  (Suggested reading, two Wash Post (buried) stories published before the war: 1. Bush Clings Dubious Allegations About Iraq. 2. U.S. Lacks Specifics on Banned Arms. And bonus reading #3 and #4: Pre-war doubts from experts.)

What “most everybody” thought was that Saddam might have some chemical weapons, that he might have a few biological weapons. What “most everybody” people did not think was that Saddam was anywhere near the finish-line on getting nukes. (The use of the brilliantly manipulative term "weapon of mass destruction"—conflating the vastly lower threat posed by chemical and biological weapons with that of nukes— helped to muck up that debate.)

The pre-war debate, such as it was, was whether Saddam posed a threat to the U.S.

The answer to that question, logically, didn’t rest on the binary question of whether or not Saddam had “WMD.” After all, I thought Saddam had “WMD.” But I didn’t think Saddam was a threat. Why? Because I figured he just had a handful SCUDs filled with near-the-expiration date mustard gas. That, of course, put me solidly in “he has WMD!” category and far, far away from agreeing that Saddam was an impending threat to the U.S.

As it turns out, contrary to the defensive rhetoric nowadays, the administration was plenty of sensitive to those distinctions during the run-up the war.

One could have made an honest argument for war by saying something along the lines of, “Saddam is a bad guy, he might have chemical and biological weapons, and he obviously wants nuclear weapons. We don’t have hard evidence that he has the weapons or has restarted his nukes program. But our intel capabilities are limited and in this post-9/11 world we simply can’t wait.” The problem is while that line would have been good enough for Andrew Sullivan, it might have been a wee bit underwhelming for the nation-at-large.

The White House knew that. So again and again it played up a potential threat to the U.S. Whether consciously misleading or not, White House officials went beyond intel agencies’ assessments, warning about the potential for being six moths from a  “mushroom cloud,” about Saddam backing al-Qaida men including possible sleeper cells in the U.S.., and about drones that could be used “for missions targeting the United States.” That’s how you mislead citizens and, not coincidentally, how you rally them to war.

Comments

[Zathras]

Well, that's how you might do it if previous intelligence assessments of Iraq's WMD capacity and of the terrorist threat to the United States had both been wrong in fairly dramatic ways, and if the destructive potential of biological weapons was poorly understood.

The emerging Democratic critique of the administration's moves toward war with Iraq in 2002-03 exclude all of these factors. I doubt this is politically smart -- the mileage one can get in wartime by focusing on events years in the past is bound to be limited, and there is always a risk that this focus may make one seem indifferent to the war being waged now -- and am sure it is a mistake from a historical standpoint.

The assumption behind the critique is understandable enough: the war having gone badly and in unexpected ways, prewar intelligence should be analyzed in plain hindsight. Caveats about Iraq's WMD programs have been borne out, fears about the worst cases have not, and had we acted on the caveats and not the fears we would not be in the situation we are now. But if you knew that intelligence analysis of Saddam's WMD programs (including his nuclear programs) prior to the Gulf War had grossly understated their state of development (as Cheney, the elder Bush's Secretary of Defense, certainly did) and knew also that every major terrorist attack on Americans since 1993 had come as a surprise (as everyone in Washington did) you might well think with respect to Iraq that three strikes were rather a lot to give intelligence arguments for something better than the worst case.

Now, as it happens, I don't think that's the end of the story by any means. I have little doubt that the decisive factor in the drive for war with Iraq was President Bush's ignorance of foreign affairs when he took office and his disinterest in deep engagement with them afterward. This meant that at the Presidential level -- where the decision for war on Iraq was made -- this decision was very likely based on a very small amount of data. It meant also that the decision once made had to drive policy afterward, since the task of revisiting Presidential decisions and getting new ones was (and remains) an impossibly daunting task. This would also explain some of the tactics used by the administration to dramatize the threat from Iraq; these tactics were not unreasonable based on what the President knew, and the alternative to using them would have been to force the administration to devise and the President to approve an entirely new policy -- a task well beyond the capacity of this White House.

That the President did not know enough and was compelled to persist in policies because he and his team lacked the internal resources needed to adjust them is by my lights a fairly damning critique. It is admittedly a less politically convenient critique than the one built around the theme of the administration's deception -- but the latter relies far too much on hindsight and the assumption that not only was what we know now known in 2002-3, but was known by the man most responsible for setting the direction of policy.

[Eric Umansky]

Joe - I'm on deadline so I don't have much time to get into it. But I just want to say this: I agree with you in the abstract--it's why I use caveats like "whether consciously misleading or not." Unlike some I don't think the administration was knowingly lying. But, and here we probably part, I do think administration officials were intellectually reckless. It's not that they lied. It's that they didn't so much care about the truth. Now you might object again. And again yr position makes a lot of sense in teh abstract. But let's look at the specific examples: Saddam-AQ links, aluminum tubes, drones, yellowcake. In all of those instances the administration didn't just go beyond the doubts expressed by some intel services, it suggested to the american people that the doubts *didn't exist.* That's not worst-case scenarioing, it's dishonest cherry-picking.

[This was a very interesting dialog]

Thanks for posting this information.Going back and seeing what the Washington Post and others (but not Judith Miller) were saying before the invasion was enlightening.

Just as Dan Rather's statement that the documents about Bush's military record came from an "unimpeachable source," the Bush administration's statements that there was no disagreement about the existence of wmds is simply a lie, as were the constant implications by the Bush admin (which I was suckered into believing) that there was secret evidence that backed up their claims. It wasn't just intellectually dishonest to ignore the other sides of this argument or to claim that one had secret evidence that one did not have, it was flat-out lying.