DEAD RECKONING

In Sketchy Data, Trying to Gauge Iraq Threat THE NEW YORK TIMES: James Risen, David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker, July 19, 2003, NY Times)

[A]merican intelligence officials and senior members of the administration have acknowledged that there was little new evidence flowing into
American intelligence agencies in the five years since United Nations inspectors left Iraq, creating an intelligence vacuum.

"Once the inspectors were gone, it was like losing your G.P.S. guidance," added a Pentagon official, invoking as a metaphor the initials of the military's navigational satellites. "We were reduced to dead reckoning. We had to go back to our last fixed position, what we knew in '98, and plot a course from there. With dead reckoning, you're heading generally in the right direction, but you can swing way off to one side or the other."

Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, said today that the question of new evidence versus old was beside the point. "The question of what is new after 1998 is not an interesting question," she said. "There is a body of evidence since 1991. You have to look at that body of evidence and say what does this require the United States to do? Then you are compelled to act.

"To my mind, the most telling and eye-catching point in the judgment of five of the six intelligence agencies was that if left unchecked, Iraq would most likely have a nuclear weapon in this decade. The president of the United States could not afford to trust Saddam's motives or give him the benefit of the doubt," she said. [...]

"Intelligence doesn't necessarily mean something is true," Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Pentagon news briefing after major combat ended in Iraq. "You know, it's your best estimate of the situation. It doesn't mean it's a fact. I mean, that's not what intelligence is."

Ms Rice may not necessarily be correct in her assessment that we were "required" to act, but consider the question if it's framed this way: given all we knew about Saddam Hussein's anti-Western aspirations, the barbarity of his regime, and the undisputed fact that he was violating the existing cease-fire agreement, was there any compelling reason to leave him in power? Posted by Orrin Judd at July 20, 2003 6:33 AM