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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (21952)	7/12/2003 11:27:11 AM
From: Karen Lawrence	Respond to of 89467

Tenet said there wasn't enough evidence....ON FEB. 5, Secretary of State Colin Powell was scheduled to go to the United Nations and make the case that Saddam possessed an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. But the evidence was thin—sketchy and speculative, or uncorroborated, or just not credible. Finally, according to a government official who was there, Tenet leaned back in his chair and said, “Everyone thinks we’re Tom Cruise. We’re not. We can’t look into every bedroom and listen to every conversation. Hell, we can’t even listen to the new cell phones some of the terrorists are using.” Tenet was being truthful. Spying can help win wars (think of the Allies’ cracking the Axis codes in World War II), but intelligence is more often an incomplete puzzle (think of Pearl Harbor). Honest spies appreciate their own limitations. Their political masters, however, often prefer the Hollywood version. They want certainty and omniscience, not hedges and ambiguity. Bush administration officials wanted to be able to say, for certain, that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of chem-bio weapons; that he could make a nuclear bomb inside a year; that he was conspiring with Al Qaeda to attack America. And that is, by and large, what they did say. On close examination, some of the statements about Saddam and his WMD made by President George W. Bush and his top lieutenants in the months leading up to the Iraq war included qualifiers or nuances. But the effect—and the intent—was to convince most Americans that Saddam presented a clear and present danger and had to be removed by going to war.