THE NEW REPUBLIC VS. ITSELF (via <~text text="Kevin Whited">

Don't Look Now (Michael Crowley & Spencer Ackerman, 07.17.03, New Republic)

Democrats say the inquiry's format is designed to sideline them. [Committee Chair Pat] Roberts has created four separate areas of inquiry into possible failures of Iraq intelligence: WMD, Al Qaeda links, human rights, and regional threat. The latter two, of course, are not matters of public dispute--and, not coincidentally, are the two topics Roberts has allowed Democratic staffers to oversee. The first two--politically explosive--areas are being managed by GOP staffers. The team investigating WMD issues includes three Republican aides and just one Democrat. Such is Roberts's idea of a "bipartisan" effort. What's more, at least two of the committee's GOP staffers are former officials at the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, a focal point of the current controversy, creating a potential conflict of interest if they're called upon to investigate their own past analyses or those of former colleagues.

Roberts, however, doesn't seem particularly interested in a dispassionate analysis of how the administration developed its claims about Iraq's weapons programs.

The first two aren't matters of controversy either, are they? It is universally acknowledged that Saddam had a WMD program and that he offered, at least twice, to let al Qaeda use Iraq as their base of operations, though Osama bin Laden, who hated him for his secularist Ba'athism, refused the offers. Saddam Hussein at one point had certain weapons, chemicals, etc. that he was required by UN Resolutions to account for as a condition for suspending hostilities from the 1991 War. He failed to do so. The war resumed. Do we really need congressional investigations to track down the truth of individual claims in a wide series made by three different administrations, the UN, various allies, and innumerable media outlets? The New Republic endorsed the war. Is it now their position that Saddam Hussein never had WMD or that he had duly accounted for them? Posted by Orrin Judd at July 21, 2003 4:55 PM