Dan Among Den

I've read it, and I'm unimpressed. I'm not seeing any clear logic here . . . The first part of the article is primarily dedicated to finding quotes by Democrats who agreed with the justifications for going to war, but it completely ignores the fact that they were getting their information from the same administration they're now accusing of lying to them.

The tone of the article alone (ooooohhhhhh, you said he lied but here's where a *spit* Democrat said the same thing, so he didn't lie, you're lying about him lying and what else would we expect from you liberal liars?) is off-putting enough, but fortunately there are enough gaps in logic that I can focus on those.

There's the point he makes that "Bush consistently rejected imminence as a justification for war." Right. Bush never used The Magic Phrase, so we'll ignore whatever it was he might have meant when he called Iraq "a serious and mounting threat," when he said Iraq was "a high risk" to our country, when Scott McClellan said "this is about imminent threat," when Bush referred to Iraq as "an imminent danger" (but he didn't say threat!) and so on. Please. Saying that the White House didn't use the "imminent threat" argument is as much obfuscation and, frankly, prevarication as quibbling over the definition of "is."

I don't think that this Administration lied about Iraq either having or trying to get WMDs. Hell, the world knew that. The larger question here is whether or not there was any justification at all for invading the country. Here, the issue gets murky--most UN member nations said that Iraq just wasn't an active threat to anyone, and that their "WMD"s were substandard missiles with chemical warheads. Granted, I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of one--but they were hardly weapons of mass desrtuction, either. The world agreed that Saddam was attempting to create WMDs; America insisted that we had proof that he already had. We lied about that.

Or, if you prefer, we were thoroughly mistaken. When we said that Saddam Hussein had been importing aluminum rods for use in centrifuges, and that that was proof of imminent nuclear weapons, and the rest of the world said "they've been importing these things since the 1980s and actually they're not deisgned for centrifuges," you can either decide that our experts didn't know the difference, or that we were making deliberately misleading statements.

Both ideas are scary enough to keep me awake at night.

I was also not terribly impressed by the logic of the piece. It's not that it was illogical in anyway, just that it didn't have a good logical flow, i.e. I set out to disprove statement A, steps 1 through N, and clearly statement A is false.

Still, the long littany of Democrat statements from the 1990's through early 2000's shows that the arguments for Saddam as a threat and for regime change did not originate with Bush. They had a long history.

As for the imminent issue, that was a policy decision, not a statement of fact. The bottom line is that Bush laid out his new doctrine in that West Point speech in May 2002. We will not wait for a threat to become imminent. McClellan quotes notwithstanding, that's what Bush said, and he's the man being accused. In the end, Bush (and the Congressmen who had seen the same intel) made a judgement call that it was better to overreach and be wrong than to do nothing and be wrong. Given the data he had, I still think that was the right decision.

Mostly though, I think Bush was given bad intelligence by our various intelligence agencies, and he believed them, just like lots of people did. The CIA/etc. botched it in not seeing 9/11 coming (and no, they really didn't), and it's not that they suddenly became clairvoyant afterwards, just that they figured they'd better err on the side of overreporting threats rather than underreporting them.

In the old days of the OSS, we had a good intelligence agency, and this was even true through most of the early days of the CIA. But lately, probably since Casey, they've backed away from the messy realities of their profession, i.e. sometimes spies have to do messy things to get information.

Maybe we want to decide that we are too moral to do those messy things, and the recent outtrage over the secret CIA prisons shows that maybe we're making that decision. But let's not whine when we don't get the information that only thumbscrews or an inside man can provide.

So the buck stops everywhere but the desk in the Oval Office. This shift-the-blame strategy sounds all-too-familiar.

Thanks for posting this. It was an interesting read, if only to watch Mr. Podhoretz do all he can to distract us from the truth.

Nope, the blame falls at the White House for (at least) two things:

1) Bush didn't do enough to reform the intelligence community into providing better intel after 9/11 and before going into the Iraq War. No heads rolled, and other than boosting the FBI's powers in the Patriot Act, I didn't see many real policy changes in the intelligence community.

2) Bush did promote the pre-emptive/preventative war doctrine. Many people disagreed with this and continue to disagree with it. Many people also continue to support it, though it is hard to do so with a shoddy history on intelligence. However, this was Bush's signature on the whole thing, and if it's the wrong policy, then Bush is to blame. But he was being up front and honest about that policy, IMO.