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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (106161)	7/20/2003 9:12:47 PM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 281500

Do I take it that when discussing what is "the question", you mean to disassociate yourself from the current screams of "Bush lied! there was no threat! he made it up about WMDs!" that are coming from the left? If you meant to discuss more rational questions, like the quality of our intelligence gathering efforts and political pressures that it has been subject to, my apologies. When have I ever associated myself with the hysterical shriekers on either side of the political fence? They certainly aren't limited to the left, as anybody who's followed this thread for any length of time knows well. I think that the quality of intelligence gathering is less an issue than the quality of intelligence interpretation, especially above the level of the intelligence agencies. As I've said all along, I suspect that we have a case of cherry picking - excessive weighting of information that tends to support a conclusion that has already been reached, on ideological grounds. I think it's very likely that this was done, and that it resulted in exaggeration of the level and nature of the threat. Whether such distortion can be called a lie is a semantic issue that I don't think is terribly relevant. Way too many people are taking the attitude that there was either no threat or grave threat, forgetting that there is an entire range of threat in between. That, of course, is just stupid. It is equally stupid to pretend that the issue is irrelevant. We are facing situations around the world that will require us to accurately assess threats and devise appropriate responses. We will have to trust the assessments of many of the same people that were assessing the threats from Iraq. If those assessments were distorted in the past, they might be distorted again in the future. If leaders have been giving ideological and political considerations undue weight, and if this has distorted threat assessments, changes need to be made. Raise your hand if think it's unlikely that Saddam really stripped himself of all these useful weapons. As we all know, or should, creating CBW is child's play compared to creating effective delivery systems. Weapons that were useful against villages with no air defense system could be completely useless against a modern army. I think it's entirely likely that Saddam's WMD deterrent was largely hypothetical, that he had some weapons but no effective way of using them. If that was the case, it's quite likely that the bulk of the arsenal was destroyed once it became clear that the bluff was going to be called. It's also quite likely that he's still got some stuff, probably in small quantities that can easily be moved and hidden. It's also very likely that these will be given to terrorists, in fact it's far more likely than it was before the invasion. We knew that when we invaded, and elected to take the risk. I really wouldn't give much credence to any hypothesis coming from Stratfor. Melodrama is their stock in trade, and they could turn the seashells of the Seychelles into an imminent threat to global security.

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (106161)	7/22/2003 3:52:27 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Do I take it that when discussing what is "the question", you mean to disassociate yourself from the current screams of "Bush lied! there was no threat! he made it up about WMDs!" that are coming from the left? Ah, that old devil, the left, rises again. Covers a host of stereotypes, to put it mildly, doesn't it. This kind of attack is a screen to cover the real issues which are the degree to which the Cheney-Bush folk politicized intelligence gathering and reporting, the degree to which they fail to take responsibility for using the flawed Niger report in the State of the Union address (and thus overcharacterized the threat from Iraq for their own political gain), for their failure to plan, apparently at all, at least seriously, for a post invasion Iraq. I could, as you might guess, go on. The problem is not that the critics never saw Iraq as a problem. The problem is that the Bush folk used the wmd argument as an imminent threat to get public support, to get the Senate to vote in favor of the resolution, and it's now clear that it was not an imminent threat. That's enormously different from saying critics say Saddam never had or did not have wmd.