BETTING ON SADDAM

Be Patient, Keep Looking (Gary Schmitt, June 8, 2003, LA Times)

Intelligence products are not gospel, and they should not be treated as such. For most questions, intelligence assessments are a combination of some secret material and a whole lot of ordinary analysis. To make sense of the data, an analyst will have to pick and order the information using assumptions and methodologies any thoughtful policy analyst would normally use. This is not some arcane exercise. And there are good reasons to believe that any number of experienced policymakers will be as good at this as the intelligence official - or better.

There is something else going on. Opponents of the war - most of whom probably never had a good word to say about the CIA - are rushing to defend "the sanctity" of the intelligence process in an effort to undermine the legitimacy of the war and call into question a president's judgment that, in the years ahead, "the community of nations may see more and more of the very kind of threat Iraq poses now - a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists." But since this was the assessment of President Clinton in a February 1998 speech at the Pentagon, Bush critics have a larger task in front of them than just going after the current administration.

There is no question that U.S. credibility is at stake in accounting for Iraq's weapons programs. Failure to find them would complicate a president's ability to rally support for taking action in similar situations in the future.

But like the conduct of the early days of the war itself, the fact that things have not turned out precisely as some might have predicted doesn't mean failure, incompetence or, worse, duplicity. It simply means we have been engaged in a struggle with a clever and deceptive enemy.

One interesting dynamic that's at work here is that because the anti-war folks have made the finding of WMD their obsession, when we do locate the stuff it will effectively legitimize the war, even though several of their other objections--from Just War theory to financial and human costs to the improbability of installing democracy--are more difficult to answer. In effect they've staked their entire case on the absence of weapons that Saddam long ago acknowledged he had and never demonstrated that he'd destroyed. That seems unwise. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 8, 2003 7:19 AM