Rethinking Intelligence

Throughout the week it has been insinuated that the Bush Administration either exaggerated or invented the Iraqi WMD threat. The administration has countered that they acted on the best intelligence information, which told them that Hussein, indeed, was reconstituting his weapons capabilities. The most informed opinions, spokesmen have said, believed completely that Hussein posed an immediate threat. On top of this they added that even Chirac, Putin, and Schroeder believed that a WMD program existed in Iraq (of course, these three felt that the threat was insufficient to justify war and they recognized that the intelligence was insufficient, requiring further examination by weapons inspectors; it is also unclear whether these three get their intelligence independently of the US.)

The argument about the nature of intelligence is one that must be taken seriously. Intelligence failures are possible. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 would appear to be a failure by various intelligence agencies to put together information and to construct a useable defense. If there were failures, the result would have been that the US went to war on shaky grounds, and that the administration (as well as the Blair government in the UK) sold the public on a war supported by shaky, if not fallacious, information. If such is the case, the credibility of US intelligence would be crippled. Why should the American public trust anything that the CIA, FBI, or Dept of Homeland Defense would say? It would point to the fact that nothing would have changed since Sept. 11.

I hope that Bush is not using the intelligence issue to pass the buck. He would damage the credibility of people in those organizations. He presented this information as absolute truth, with COMPLETE MORAL CERTITUDE, and rammed it down the throats of the public. Here are some of the statements that Bush et al made before the war:

• "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." Cheney, August 2002


• "If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world." Fleischer, December 2002


• "We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have." Bush, February 2002


• "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."Bush, March 2003


• "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat." Rumsfeld, March 2003

Some of these statements may yet prove true. However, they express little doubt in the value of the intelligence. For the speaker, THIS IS TRUTH. And the issue of whether WMD had been deployed for use in combat should make the case even more flimsy because these weapons would have been widely distributed and difficult to recall--easily confiscated as the war proceeded.