Taking on the Week's Big Issue: The Case for War
Answering The War's Big Questions
Time to revisit the questions we asked at the start of this debate:
1. Did the administration know more than it chose to reveal?
Little of the intelligence supporting the decision to go to war was definitive, and much of it was open to challenge from other, more reliable intelligence. The administration failed to reveal those important qualifications to the case it was making.
In a speech in March of 2004, Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota noted, "All the evidence we have now shows the administration knew at the time the statements were made that its own intelligence undercut the statements it was making." That might not technically qualify as lying, but omitting those key facts and findings that cast great doubt on the case for war at least counts as dishonest.
Richard Cohen writes that none of those pesky facts "mattered to Vice President Cheney, who warned of a 'reconstituted' nuclear weapons program, promoted the nonexistent Prague meeting and went after legitimate critics with a zealousness that Tony Soprano would have admired: 'We will not hesitate to discredit you,' Cheney told ElBaradei and Hans Blix, the other important U.N. inspector. ElBaradei recently won the Nobel Peace Prize. Cheney's gonna have to wait for his."
Intelligence reports issued before the Iraq war began did contain important findings that ran contrary to the administration's case. Though we don't know exactly when or if those reports ever made it to the president's of vice president's desk, the information was available to them but went largely unmentioned by the administration.
As Washington Monthly blogger Kevin Drum notes, the contradictory information became increasingly prevalent in the months and weeks leading up to the invasion.
It's true that virtually everyone believed in 2002 that Saddam had an active WMD program or, at the very least, large stockpiles of existing WMD. But the Bush administration was repeating the exact same arguments about Saddam's WMD even in March 2003, when UN inspectors had been combing Iraq with the help of U.S. intelligence for three months and had found nothing. The evidence by that time suggested just the opposite of what we originally believed, but that prompted nothing from Bush supporters except heaps of abuse aimed at Hans Blix. The invasion went off as scheduled."
2. How much of the case for war was based on an exaggeration of the threat?
It seems to me that it's not easy to prove that the administration exaggerated particular claims, since it's likely that each of those claims was in an intelligence report somewhere at some time. The bigger problem was the tendency to select bits of information for public consumption based more on whether they bolstered the administration's case than on the actual reliability of the intelligence. So the real issue was less an exaggeration of the threat than it was an exaggeration of the inevitability of the threat. Key doubts and caveats were downplayed and omitted by the administration as it pushed for the removal of Saddam Hussein.
The Chicago Tribune argues that the war could have been sold without relying on the least reliable intelligence -- the wmd claims -- but would the American people and U.S. allies have supported the war without an imminent threat? Would Bush's idea that tyrants don't "politely [put] us on notice" before an attack been enough on its own to convince Americans that a real threat existed, if not necessarily an immediate one?
And if it had not been enough, would a war solely to spread democracy have passed muster with the American people? If a good outcome were guaranteed, perhaps. But Debater ErrinF offers a comment echoing what many of us have been arguing since this democracy seeding idea entered the fray as one of the main rationales for war: True democracy cannot be forced upon a people. A democracy is a precious and delicate institution -- if a people aren’t willing or aren't able to be meticulous guards of their freedom, they could lose it. This simple idea was not accepted by the Bush administration.
"Bush omitted that establishing a democracy by inciting this war had a high probability of not working," ErrinF argues. "It is painfully obvious now that what ever Iraq becomes, it will NOT be becoming in any way an America-like democracy. I agree with the noble intentions of the war, but now recognize those intentions for what they were: noble, but not feasible. You cannot impose democracy on others; rather, they must create it for themselves."
3.Were such omissions and exaggerations a result of carelessness or irresponsibility, or were they intentional?
It's tough to say with what top Bush administration figures intended. Further investigation might answer that question -- or we might never know for sure.
It is instructive, however, to look back at what then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay was saying at the time. DeLay played a big role in Republican campaigns -- and in trying to squash Democratic candidates -- and from his hard-charging rhetoric, it's reasonable to conclude that his bullying on the Iraq issue was politically motivated. Less than two months before the midterm elections in 2002, he said on CNN's Inside Politics that Congressional Dems against the war "don't want to protect the American people ... they will do anything, spend all the time and resources they can, to avoid confronting evil."
DeLay also said, "No one is playing politics with this war; the war that started in 9/11 is an ongoing war that we have to deal with. But at the same time, we have campaigns in this country, and what would you have the vice president do: get on the campaign trail and give a silent speech?"
No, Mr. DeLay. What I expect is for the president to do what his father did: Wait until after the midterm elections to debate going to war. It was obvious then -- and is even more painfully obvious now -- that a productive and honest debate about taking the country to war cannot take place in the politicized atmosphere that prevails in the month and a half before an election. It's just not fair to anyone involved, especially the American people.
Even if you buy what DeLay said, from an objective post-911 American point of view, the evil bin Laden was infinitely more deserving of an invasion and concentrated manhunt than was Saddam Hussein. Democratic Sen. Bob Graham was very much in favor of protecting the American people; he just felt it would best be done by maintaining adequate forces in Afghanistan to secure the whole country (not just parts of it) and to hunt down Al Qaeda.
Perhaps more legislators felt these nagging doubts, but also felt they coluldn't listen to those doubts because they were being pressured to vote on the resolution immediately before an election and couldn't afford to be pegged as soft on terrorism.
4. What role did the media play in the administration's case for war?
The two widespread criticisms of the media regarding Iraq have been that a) journalists didn't look closely enough into the administration's pre-war claims; and b) journalists never report on the good news in Iraq. I'll leave the second item alone for now, because although I have a lot to say on it, it's not properly part of this week's topic. On the first criticism, though, I find it tough to say whether the media really could have effectively debunked the claims without access to classified information. Assuming journalists would have needed to see the intelligence in order to cast doubt on the case for war, could they have gotten those documents?
The Media Education Foundation posits that by and large, initial media coverage of the war didn't bother to dig up the relevant facts because it was too busy jumping on the traditional bandwagon. That is, when the military goes to war, the press goes, too.
AmeriPundit says it was a matter of ownership consolidation, and points to this fascinating op-ed in the Seattle Times.
I'm inclined to think that while both those factors probably played a role, it was the post-9/11 paralysis of criticism that most stifled the Iraq debate. That said, there were actually a fair number of pre-war news stories in the big papers (including the Post) that cast doubt on particular claims, but they tended not to end up on the front page; when they did, they didn’t capture as much attention as perhaps they should have. (I'll leave futher comment on this to the ombudsmen.)
Still, I don't think this was a concerted effort by the media to launch the country into war. The media are powerful, but we should resist the temptation to shoot the messenger and instead continue to investigate the origin of the messages that sent us to war.
By Emily Messner | December 9, 2005
blogs.washingtonpost.com |
