To say we will not wait till we have an actionable cause to go to war, rather we will go to war based on our "intelligence" about potential causes is new to our foreign policy -- and when the first war of this new breed of wars turns out to be based on intelligence that we now know to be completely wrong, we need to, and are, asking questions about how we could have been so wrong.
But we need to go further than this and also ask whether the decision to go to war took the intelligence that was available and selectively used it to make a case for war that the intelligence itself, even if it had been correct, would not have justified. The intelligence was iffy -- but the pronouncements from the Bush Administration used to sell the war to Congress and the American public deleted any sense of the iffiness of the intelligence and posed weak data from dubious and often single sources as if we had extremely well founded, ironclad certainties. This is a large part of the answer to the question "how could we be so wrong"? We were wrong to make extreme pronouncements of certainty when the certainty just was not there at all.
In doing so, not only did we end up with a decision to go to war that would be wrong with hindsight, but we also embarked on a course of action whereby intelligence is shaped, distorted, and selectively used more for political purpose than to arrive at objective decisions for our national security.
This matter goes to the heart of the Bush policy of preemptive unilateral war -- and this is precisely why we could not rally allies, almost all of them knowing instinctively that this was a bad development for the civilized world to have a sole "superpower" taking matters into its own hands unopposed <you are with us or you are against us> -- and using whatever scraps of "intelligence" that might be available to justify military aggression for political gain. None of them could realistically support our new foreign policy. Nor did the people of other countries support our new foreign policy. In fact, our new foreign policy contributed greatly to provide new reasons to be deeply suspicious of the United States. In the end there has been little if any gain for the United States, and substantial losses all the way around. I feel most sorry for those that lost their loved-ones to a war without justification -- a war with a large dark cloud over its mission. |
