Weapons of Misperception theatlantic.com
Kenneth M. Pollack, the author of "Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong," explains how the road to war with Iraq was paved with misleading and manipulated intelligence.
[ Pollack has always had some problems with the W party line. A few choice excerpts:]
Pollack does not suggest, however, that the seemingly false pretenses under which the U.S. entered Iraq were all, or even mostly, the intelligence community's fault. His most scathing criticism falls on the Bush Administration and, particularly, its tendency to misstate the facts of the case when trying to persuade the country to go to war. In his eyes, the Administration consistently engaged in "creative omission," overstating the imminence of the Iraqi threat, even though it had evidence to the contrary. "The President is responsible for serving the entire nation," Pollack writes. "Only the Administration has access to all the information available to various agencies of the U.S. government—and withholding or downplaying some of that information for its own purposes is a betrayal of that responsibility." . . .
Your book, The Threatening Storm, argued that we would eventually have to go to war in order to remove Saddam and keep him from acquiring nuclear weapons. The book was said to have been very useful to the Bush Administration in the run-up to war. Can you tell me how and why it was helpful? Was the book's argument ever misrepresented?
I think there were a lot of people who did nothing but read the subtitle to the book, which was The Case for Invading Iraq. I made it very clear that while I did have one belief in common with Bush Administration, which was that it would eventually be necessary to go to war to prevent Saddam Hussein from acquiring nuclear weapons, I had very different ideas about why the war was necessary, how it should be fought, and what the United States needed to do to deal with all the unintended consequences that might result. For example, I never believed that it was necessary for the United States to go to war as early as 2003. I did not believe the threat was imminent.
I also thought that it was critical for the United States to do a whole bunch of important things first. We needed to deal with the war on terrorism, get the Middle East peace process back on track, and develop a comprehensive plan for the reconstruction of Iraq. All of these were major sections in my book. The case I made for war was very different from the case the Bush Administration made for war. There was a lot in my book that would be critical of the Bush Administration's actual run-up to war and that argued against the arguments that the Bush Administration were making.
So then, in some ways, your argument was misrepresented?
I certainly can't point to any Bush Administration official who held up my book and misrepresented it. But it certainly was the case that a lot of people misunderstood what my case for war was. In fact, my case for war was as much a critique of the Bush Administration and an argument against what the Bush Administration was doing as it was an argument for it. One of my most important points was that going to war was a potentially very messy undertaking that had all kinds of big problems associated with it. I argued that it was critical, therefore, that the United States do everything it could to prevent those unforeseen, potential problems from arising before we went to war. If we didn't, we would just end up substituting one set of problems for another.
And would you say that's come to pass?
Certainly we have created a whole lot of problems that we didn't need to. Two of them come to mind. One, I think that clearly we should have and could have done a much better job planning for post-war reconstruction. Of course, the wonderful companion piece by James Fallows points out that there was a tremendous amount of good planning that was going on within the U.S. government, but that it was the hubris of certain other individuals within the government that caused us to simply disregard all those plans. My own perspective and the one you get from reading Jim's piece is that the vast majority of problems that we are currently experiencing in post-war Iraq were entirely avoidable. This did not need to be as messy, as dangerous, as deadly, and as expensive as it has proved to be.
[ Note: I'm about half way through the Fallows piece, and it is extremely interesting. Rest assured that it will be posted here when it becomes available electronically, and referenced a few times beyond that. ]
Another problem is that many of the troubles we are experiencing in the Middle East are the result of the Administration's absolute unwillingness to engage in the Middle East peace process before going to war with Iraq. Their argument was always that the road to Jerusalem ran through Baghdad. My argument was the exact opposite—the road to Baghdad needed to run through Jerusalem. That wasn't to say that you needed a peace agreement before you could go to war with Saddam Hussein. I thought that was unlikely and unnecessary. But we did need to get the negotiations back on track. I think we could have avoided a lot of the violence, tension, and animosities in the Middle East today if we'd pursued that route rather than the one we did. . . .
You also criticize the Administration for their interpretation of the available intelligence. Would you say they failed the American people?
There are certain members of the Administration who did a disservice to the American people. I don't want to fault the entire Administration, because I think there were a lot of people in the Administration who were saying things that were completely true and what they were doing was completely above-board. But there were others in the Administration who really weren't.
The thing that upset and disappointed me the most was that there were some Administration officials, and particularly some high Administration officials, who were making statements that weren't the whole truth. The one thing for which I can find no excuse is this question of not telling the American people the whole truth. The nuclear issue is the most important example of this. The judgment of the intelligence community, expressed in a number of written documents, some of which have been made public, was that Saddam had reconstituted his nuclear-weapons programs and that he could possibly acquire a nuclear weapon in one to two years if he managed to get fissile material on the black market. The intelligence community felt that it was much more likely that he would not be able to acquire a nuclear weapon for five to seven years. In making the case for war, a number of high-level officials in the Administration stressed the one-to-two year figure, which made the threat from Iraq seem imminent. The intelligence community couldn't rule it out, but the best judgment was that it was a more distant threat.
I think the Administration was only telling part of the truth to the American people because it was trying to justify a war in 2003. The intelligence estimates just didn't really support that imminence. The Administration could have said, "Look, the intelligence community thinks it may be five to seven years away, but they do think it's also possible that they could get it in one to two years. After 9/11, we shouldn't take even that kind of a risk." I think that would have been a much more honest way of presenting it to the American people.
But it might not have resulted in going to war.
That is my sense. My sense is that the Administration recognized that that kind of argument would not generate the same enthusiasm for a war in 2003 as the argument the way they cast it did. As far as I'm concerned, these are not political arguments. This is an argument about U.S. national security and about going to war. That's supposed to transcend politics. Of course, I've lived in Washington long enough to know that it's rare that national security actually does end up transcending politics—but that doesn't make it right. |
