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I'd like to make a few comments concerning the whole issue of US intelligence regarding Iraqi WMD, and of the level of faith the administration placed in it as compared to that level which was warranted and justifiable.
To begin with, it seems the core of this whole issue is one of certainty vs. uncertainty, or evidentiary strength. There is an established and known principle that "Absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence." In other words, just because you cannot find any evidence for something does not mean, as a verifiable fact, that it does not exist.
However, look at the level of uncertainty involved in this. It's saying that failure to find any evidence of something can make you 90%, or 99%, or 99.9% certain that it does not exist, but there's always that element of doubt, that 1% chance you were mistaken.
To put it simply, this 1% chance of error, this 1% chance that maybe Saddam DID have weapons of mass destruction after all, contrary to the complete lack of tangible evidence of such, is not sufficient justification for starting a war, and it's not a sufficiently strong rationalization to use as the public excuse for starting a war. Governments must be held to a higher standard, especially when it comes to starting wars. For months and months, George W. Bush trumpeted the threat of Iraqi WMD, and about half of America repeatedly asked, "Where's the beef?" And it was never forthcoming. Not one shred of convincing evidence could be shown. We kept hearing, "We will reveal hard evidence next week," or "tomorrow," and tomorrow would come, and there would be a press conference at which nothing would happen but more hand-waving, more evasive generalizations, and more proof-by-allegation.
But we went to war on this rationale anyway.
Now, you can argue a couple of different ways on this. You can say, "George Bush knowingly lied to the world and the American people in order to justify his war." In that case, we should be impeaching him for starting a war under false pretences. Let's face it, when you have that large of an intelligence effort devoted to digging up evidence for that long and you still can't find anything, it's pretty hard to continue convincingly pretending you didn't know that you didn't have anything.
You can say, "George Bush thinks that a 1% chance of a nation having WMD is justification to go to war." In that case, who are we going to declare war on next? India? Brazil? South Africa? Japan? We have, after all, strong satellite evidence that South Africa has tested nuclear weapons, and there are organizations known to operate in South Africa that are officially considered terrorist. Heck, Nelson Mandela was imprisoned in connection with terrorism.
Or you can say that the Bush administration made an incredibly stupid error in trying to justify the war, both to America and to the world, solely on the grounds of "Well, all our intelligence to the contrary, we cannot absolutely rule out the possibility that Iraq may have WMD," instead of "This man is a butcher who is oppressing and slaughtering his own people, who has committed atrocities against his own country's ethnic minorities with chemical weapons, whom we believe is a threat to the entire region, and in addition we know he had WMD programs, we know he has attempted to procure weapons of mass destruction in the past, and we cannot be certain that he does not actually possess them now." On an issue this important and this major, how stunningly stupid is it to knowingly and voluntarily weaken your case?
Whichever way you look at it, though, whichever viewpoint you take, there is one conclusion that cannot be avoided: No matter which specific error you select, and irrespective of the question of the actual merit of the war in Iraq and the twelve-years-overdue removal from power of Saddam Hussein, it cannot be denied that George Bush made gross errors of judgement at the highest level and in the most crucial arena of government, that of taking the nation to war, and that he continued and perpetuated those errors throughout the course of said war.
It is my opinion that those errors are undeniable signs of gross unfitness to continue to lead this nation.
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You write a cogent argument, using complete sentences in Standard American English, and you have no idea how refreshing that it to me! You don't always choose the same reasons for arguing that I would, but I nearly always agree with you anyway.... may I friend you and read all of your arguments?
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Except it isn't. Trust me. It's Standard English. He just dropped the extra "u"s when he moved to the US. That is still an English mind at work.
nice...
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If you're talking about the incident at Haljaba (which is what most people refer to when they talk about President Hussein using chemical weapons on Kurds) you may be interested to know that the CIA report on that says it was most likely Iranian chemical weapons used. They based this on the type of weapon used (blood agents vs: nerve agents) and we'd certainly know what kind of chemicals Iraq had, since we delivered them.
-Ogre
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Kind of amusing that Hussein had probably-Iranian chemical weapons after ten years of war with Iran.
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Sorry, I seem to have failed to explain myself.
The incident that everybody keeps talking about, with Iraq using chemical weapons on Kurds? Our best intelligence is that the Iranians were actually the guys that gassed them. Not that the Iraqis were using Iranian weapons.
-Ogre
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A few sites.
http://forums.transnationale.org/viewtopic.php?t=1458
On the other hand, maybe the CIA was lying for the Iraqis, back when they were our pets. http://www.iht.com/articles/83625.html
Maybe we'll never really know, now that so much falsehood has been sown.
-Ogre
Re: A few sites.
While the US did provide some weapons to Iraq after the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the amount that we were ever directly involved with Iraq at any time was quite small compared to Russia and France. We've got plenty of sins in the region without people going to the effort to make some up. This kind of thing, of course, makes a good conspiracy theory really hard when people insist on reading all of the sources you cite rather than just picking the coupla fact you wanna rely on.
As for Phil's post, the main issue that I think has been ignored by most everyone is that the CIA's posistion on WMDs in Iraq has remained constant for a long time now. Clinton said in Switzerland last week that his administration was sure that the Iraqis had them. In fact, this was one of the justifications for the bombing of Iraq in '98.
Ignoring who is to blame for the incorrect information for a moment, the thing I would like to know is what really did happen to them. Given that there was a point when the UN inspectors were able to prove the WMDs existed (before '98 when the UN pulled its inspectors out) and the Iraqis went out of their way to not coopoerate with Blix's inspectors (according to his reports to the UN) to show what happened to those weapons and the fact that they're clearly not there now (according to Davis Kaye), what did happen to them? Kaye's speculation is that they were moved to Syria, but he doesn't really know.
The CIA's record in this kind of thing is pretty bad. I don't have any real trouble believing that they were just wrong, given the Sudanese Aspirin Factory Incident and the Chinese Embassy Bombing Incident. Additionally, it is hard to say that Bush knew that the CIA was either wrong or that he was making it all up, when up until April 2003, John Kerry was saying the same thing as the Bush administration re: Iraq WMDs (which it should be noted that Kerry's been on the Senate Intel Committee since 1992. In theory, he's had access to the same CIA reports that Bush has since Jan 2001 and he had access to these reports for years before Bush ever did). For 11 years, he was pretty certain that Iraq's WMDs existed as well.
The most annoying part about this whole thing (ignoring that I agree with Phil that regime change in Iraq was really 12 years too late and this should've been settled back in '91) is that everyone is jockeying for political position on this one and no one seem willing to think back to only 6 years ago. The number of people that have consistently been for or against bitchslapping Iraq is painfully small. The Iraq Liberation Act was passed in 1998 (voted for by Kerry, co-sponsored by Edwards and signed by Clinton without any serious controversy in the party) set regime change in Iraq as the national policy of the United States. The opposition was mainly by many Republicans. Additionally, Bush said in the debates in 2000 that nation building was not something that the US should be involved in. Oh what a difference 2.5 years and a switch in administrations makes. Which is more likely: a) Iraq's WMDs sudden went away sometime around Dec 2000 and the Bush admin came in and started lying about the evidence/ignoring the new evidence that they weren't there or b) the CIA was wrong well before Jan 2001?
Given the whole history of this thing, it is a reasonable posistion that the US Government is fulla crap about the whole thing, but concentrating on the Bush admin being full of crap doesn't really fit the evidence. This is, I think, going to be the big problem in the 2004 election. If Kerry gains the nomination, as it appears he will, it is not likely that Karl Rove will give him the same pass on his previous posistions on Iraq like he's gotten in the primaries.
Re: A few sites.
Yeah, no shit, hunh?
Thus my statement of "on the other hand", admitting that perhaps the position I had espoused in previous comments might be wrong. Thanks for playing.
-Ogre
Re: A few sites.
Re: A few sites.
(Well, I'm sure some people would dispute it. But lots of people are very deluded about lots of stuff.)
As I said with less poetry before, it is doubtful the truth will ever out, at least to the common man.
-Ogre
Re: A few sites.
Sorry, in a less flamey mode, yes, I bothered to read my sources. In the interest of academic honesty I presented sources for arguments both for and against what I had been saying. I could have just as easily daisy-picked the sources that supported my thesis, but since I found sources which contradicted what I had said, I decided to include the most solidly planted of those to contradict my own statments, in order to present the greatest totality of writing on the subject.
-Ogre
Re: A few sites.
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(He told me I had to.)
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This is not the argument you're looking for.
We can go about our business.
Move along.
Re: A few sites.
Ignoring who is to blame for the incorrect information for a moment, the thing I would like to know is what really did happen to them. Given that there was a point when the UN inspectors were able to prove the WMDs existed (before '98 when the UN pulled its inspectors out) and the Iraqis went out of their way to not coopoerate with Blix's inspectors (according to his reports to the UN) to show what happened to those weapons and the fact that they're clearly not there now (according to Davis Kaye), what did happen to them? Kaye's speculation is that they were moved to Syria, but he doesn't really know.
This is, indeed, an excellent question. Were the previously known weapons destroyed? Were they shipped out of the country for storage elsewhere? And if there had been weapons which were now gone, why did Saddam balk at allowing UN weapons inspectors to verify that there were in fact no weapons there? Was it just a macho play, or was it a ploy to keep his neighbors in doubt as to whether he actually had chemical or nuclear weapons? If so, it seems it backfired on him badly.
Now, we go on from this to the next point. I think we can take it as a given that the alleged presence of Iraqi WMD wasn't the reason for the war, it was just a pretext for executing a policy which had already been decided upon. Suppose for a moment that Saddam had not made his macho play, and had simply allowed UN inspectors full access to anything they asked to see, and said, "Look, no bombs, no bugs, no nerve gas, no long-range missiles. Now leave us alone." With Iraqi WMD the sole claim for justification for war, this would have left Bush basically without a leg to stand on -- he'd have to choose between abandoning the war, coming up with a new justification, or insisting that the UN inspectors had missed vital evidence and there really were WMD that they hadn't found. (Hmm, wait a minute....)
This risk wouldn't have arisen, and Bush (and Tony Blair) would not be facing nearly as much controversy now, if the decision had not been made to present absolute certainty of the presence of Iraqi WMD, and incontrovertible "smoking gun" evidence of same that somehow never materialized, as the sole justification for war. (Whether the idiocy of the decision to do so is confined solely to the Bush administration is another of those questions we'll probably never know the answers to.)
Re: A few sites.
I think this issue gets away from what really happened versus what the marketing if it all was. That reasoning it was sold on was different from the real reasons doesn't seem like a very interesting revelation. It's seems likely the the Admin believed there was some WMDs in Iraq (even tho it seemed as if the nuclear claims were being overstated even at the time) and that Hussein had ties to terroist groups (although nothing was clear about link to al queada. Bush, of course spun, all this rather well by confusing the issue by referring to 'links to al queada-like groups' pretty regularly. Hussein's links to Hamas and Abu Abbas aren't disputed), but the Real Reasons I think had more to do with getting out of Saudia Arabia, slapping down a long time thorn in our side and establishing a better base in the region. Libya's recent capitulation shows, I think, that a serious show of strength wasn't completely useless in affecting the regions politics. I really want to read Perle-Frum's new book, having seen David Frum on The Daily Show last week.
Somewhat this gets back to something I wrote about a few weeks ago. There is no way the administration could have done anything but present a completely sure statement of fact. Any hedging of their bets would've been immediately seized on as 'See? they can't even state it as a certainty. They know it isn't true and just want to give themselve an out when it is all over' Both sides did it (and do it all the time) and that is how we talk about political issues on the national stage. The people, for instance, who said that Iraq had nothing had no better evidence of this statement at the time, but often stated it just as much certainty.
I keep trying to think back on debates on other things from WayBackWhen trying to remember the debates on other topics. I don't know if this is how we've always talked about these kinds of things, or if we've gotten so polarized that things really are worse now then when I was a kid. Things certainly seem worse now, but I don't know if this is a product of more, broader media coverage and my paying better attention now or something real. Clearly, this didn't start in 2000 and many of the Clinton years were pretty divisive, but the polarity now seems worse even than 5-6 years ago.
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After all, I could have named North Korea, which has bragged about its nuclear weapons development program and even tried to use nuclear weapons it doesn't have yet as a bargaining chip ... but, you know, suggesting Korea as next in line on the regime-change list somehow fails to satisfy the desired metric of unreasonability.
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(Matter of fact, we seem to sort of have a history of periodically doing so.)
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I.e., if we get even a sniff of a nuke program in the works, it's time to send in the Marines...
In fact, now that I've brought up the idea, I'm finding that I don't like it, yet I can't think of an alternative to it. :P
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Perhaps it's more valuable to think about causes instead of alternatives. After all, it's hard to solve any problem by trying to fix its symptoms. I have to admit the words "failure of intelligence" spring unbidden to mind, and I note that we seem to be using those words an awful lot lately. "Intelligence" is failing all over the place.
Maybe this ought to tell us something... like, say, that we're going about it wrong. There's no substitute for good on-the-spot HUMINT.
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Oh -- and Tenet's head on a pike.