OT-
>Such controversies are pretty much routine after any war. The congressional hearings over the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack ran 39 volumes, for example, and the Ford administration formally chartered a "Team B" to second-guess estimates of the Soviet military build-up. Generally the losing side within the intelligence community will wrap itself in "professionalism" and charge "political interference." This is under way both in the U.S. and in the U.K., with Greg Thielmann, a retired State Department intelligence officer, joining Mr. Wilson on this side of the Atlantic.<
.
.
.
.
>Especially so since it frequently turns out that disagreements are above the professionals' pay grade. Mr. Thielmann, for example, concludes that "Iraq posed no imminent threat to either its neighbors or to the United States." Interesting word, "imminent." It also appears in the DNC ad and increasingly in press commentary.
The word does appear once in the president's State of the Union. To wit, "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent." He rejected this: "Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option." The whole thrust of the policy of pre-emption, after all, is that in a world of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer wait until a threat is imminent. A madman like Saddam heading a nation-state is itself an intolerable threat.
This conclusion is of course subject to debate, but it is a matter for presidents, not intelligence "professionals." As Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has tried to point out above the din, September 11 changed the American view of what threat is tolerable; hence decisions to call Saddam to account at the U.N. and to go to war if necessary. The war resolution passed the Senate by 77-23 and 29-21 among Democrats. The ayes included Senators Kerry, Lieberman, Edwards, Daschle, Dodd and Clinton. For that matter, the policy of regime change was signed into law by President William Jefferson Clinton with the Iraqi Liberation Act back in 1998.<
opinionjournal.com |
