The Intelligence Issue

I can't believe we are still hung up on the issue of intelligence two and a half years into this war. The Democrats say that the Bush administration misled the country into the war by claiming a threat from weapons that didn't exist. Bush responds that the Democrats who voted for the war had access to the same intelligence he did. He says they're hypocrites and ready to rewrite the history of the origins of the war. The war was wrong as a moral decision, and it was wrong as a strategic decision. It was also illegal. The war was wrong on all three grounds, and the arguments required to make that case don't depend on the quality of the intelligence, or on our judgments about its signigicance. Iraq could have possessed all of the weapons materials that Bush said it possessed, and going to war would still have been a huge mistake. The debate about intelligence works to Bush's advantage, because it let's him respond with the kind of arguments he made in his Veteran's Day speech. When I hear the president call his critics deeply irresponsible, I know we have reached the bottom in this discussion.

Opponents of the war should remember something about this discussion. The president is sure he has done the right thing, and he's not going to change his mind. Yet many critics, including Democrats in Congress, talk as if they can change his mind. Remember that reporters and others have challenged Bush on the grounds for war for a long time now. They asked him less than a year into the war how he could justify the attack, given that we had not found any weapons. Bush responded, "What difference does it make?" He continued with the argument we have heard so many times since: The man was a threat. We had to get rid of him. Period.

Well, Bush was right when he said, "What difference does it make?," but not in a way he ever imagined. The weapons issue, and the intelligence issue, don't make a difference, The war was wrong whether or not Hussein had the weapons, or the materials, or the programs, or the desire. The war was justified only if Hussein posed an imminent threat. So rather than analyze the intelligence with hindsight, let's do a little threat analysis. Rather than ask how we could have blundered into a war we can't win because of bad intelligence, let's ask how we can win the war we should be fighting once we understand the threat better.

An imminent threat is one that's real and about to be carried out. It can't be imaginary, or doubtful, or far in the future. A fear is not a threat. A child is afraid of many things that aren't actually dangerous. After September 11, people became afraid of things that weren't actually threats. Iraq was one of them. The Bush administration argued after September 11 that we had to reconceive the threats around us. Before 9/11, we underestimated the potency of our enemies - we underestimated their ability to do us harm. We would not make the same mistake again. Now we would preempt our enemies. We would attack them before they could attack us. We had to redefine our idea of what counted as an imminent threat in the new world that existed after September 11.

Whenever someone argues that it's time to revise a tested principle, watch out. The person is going to advocate a course of action that's unsound. That's not to say that the bits conventional wisdom we use to help us make decisions are the only or the best guides available. Some principles, though, rise above conventional wisdom. They're carefully reasoned and tested through time. They have to do with decisions where a lot is at stake. They're anchored with the lessons and experiences of many generations of people just like us. The principles that tell us when a preemptive war is justifed are among these higher-level rules. They tell us that you can't attack someone simply out of fear. You can't attack someone because you think they might attack you sometime in the future. The threat has to be real and present.

We didn't think that Hussein's military activies justified a preemptive war before 9/11. The only way to argue that Iraq posed an imminent threat after 9/11 was to make a connection between Hussein and Al Qaeda. If Hussein actively cooperated with Al Qaeda, and he had the weapons we said he had, then he was an imminent threat. That's exactly the argument that Bush and his advisors made. They actually tried to convince people that Hussein had helped Al Qaeda carry out the 9/11 attacks. The argument was ridiculous on its face, but enough people believed it that the administration carried the day, and won approval from Congress to go to war. He might have found a way to launch the war even if he had not had enough votes in Congress, and that sense of inevitability about the fighting may have led some Democrats to vote for what they regarded as a foregone conclusion anyway.

Remember, Bush sincerely believes that he's doing what's best for the country. People sometimes admit their mistakes, but they're much less likely to admit incompetence. Bush clearly does not know what he is doing. That's why he says things like, "What difference does it make?" A debate about intelligence makes no logical sense because it really doesn't matter whether or the intelligence was bad or good. He only posed an imminent threat if he was in league with bin Laden, and that charge was laughable. It was so clearly cooked up that only people carried away by fear could believe it. And Bush played upon fear. He's the first president we've had who could accurately be called a fear monger.

A debate about intelligence makes no practical sense either, because no one who launched the war will admit the mistake. No one on the Bush team will say, "Whoa, you're right - we over-estimated the threat from Hussein and attacked the wrong guy as a result. Better go back and rethink this one." If the administration won't rethink its actions, why try to persuade it to do so? The citizenry already believes that Bush blew it. How do the Democrats gain by saying, "You misled us into war"? They don't gain any advantage in the debate, and they give Bush an opportunity to counter-charges. The only reasonable thing to do is to make Bush irrelevant, and to find leadership that's both competent and courageous enough to do everything we need to do. It may take three years or more to do that, but that's okay.