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The Coming Debate

Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction do not exist. Now -- a great debate opens on the main stage.

None will be able to miss it.

Liberals are going to claim that the President “exaggerated” or “lied.” Conservatives will claim the President did the right thing in destroying Saddam Hussein. Both will direct our attention to “the facts.” But it's not a factual matter….

This will be a political debate; that is, it will be an argument over trust and the meaning of good judgment in public affairs. It will go to the heart of the question: what are our values?

I’ll show you why….

The New York Times editorial of 2/1/04 -- “Intelligence on the Eve of War” -- provides a good summation of the coming liberal argument to be aired during the presidential campaign.

Allowing that the CIA performed miserably and provided flawed intelligence information -- and further, admitting that the former weapons inspector David Kay said he had “seen no evidence that administration officials put pressure on analysts to come up with preconceived results” -- the Times emphasized that some other analysts believe the Bush Administration exaggerated the CIA information, hand-picked portions that would suit its needs, and pressured the CIA to come up with views the Administration wanted.

Evidence?

The Times turns to two sources: the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Kenneth M. Pollack -- a Clinton administration national security official who wrote the book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq (New York: Random House, 2002).

The Carnegie is a think-tank with a reputation for being leftist. But Pollack is more serious, a moderate realist. I read his book before the war, and it convinced me to support the invasion.

According to the Times: “Mr. Pollack says, he received numerous complaints from friends in the intelligence community that administration officials showed aggressive, negative reactions when presented with information that contradicted what they believed about Iraq. They allegedly subjected the analysts to barrages of questions, requests for more information and fights over the credibility of sources that passed beyond responsible oversight to become a form of pressure.”

This comes from an article Pollack wrote in the January/February 2004 issue of The Atlantic entitled “Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong.” You can also get an abbreviated version of Pollack’s views by reading the interview with him that appeared on The Atlantic Online called “Weapons of Misperception.”

Pollack gives credence to the idea that the Bush Administration exaggerated the intelligence information in some fashion, but the question is -- how much? For after all…one still has to grapple with Pollack’s insistence (in the article) that:

“Because of the consensus among American and foreign intelligence agencies, outside experts, and former UN weapons inspectors, I had been convinced [before the war] that Iraq was only years away from having a nuclear weapon -- probably only four or five years, as Robert Einhorn had testified. That estimate was clearly off, possibly by quite a bit.”

So, Pollack based his (pre-war) opinion in favor of war -- directly on information from intelligence experts and agencies. He DID NOT claim that he relied on the public pronouncements of Bush Administration officials in the months preceding the war.

THAT raises the logical point: if Pollack came to his conclusion to support an invasion -- without relying on Administration “spin” -- THEN HOW IS IT THAT THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S EXAGGERATIONS CAN BE BLAMED NOW?

(Am I missing something?)

In other words: the Bush Administration may have “shaped” the information for the public, but that exaggeration is moot -- as far as Pollack’s own opinion on the threat from Iraq goes.

Perhaps Pollack himself -- a former Democrat administration official -- is having a “political moment,” as we say.

To be fair -- Pollack needs to be read carefully and seriously. But he makes a big POLITICAL mistake. To explain why, let me set this up….

Pollack says (in the interview) that:

“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.”

In his interview, he says:

“[Pollack:] 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 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.

”[Interviewer:] But it might not have resulted in going to war.

”[Pollack:] 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.”

SO -- despite the importance I think Pollack’s opinions have -- Pollack made a crucial error, here. That is: he claimed that the Administration’s arguments for war “are not political arguments.”

Preposterous!

The decision of whether to go to war is the MOST POLITICAL issue one can raise in a democratic nation. It has to do with the very essence of politics -- the art and science of power. After all: it is not the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the CIA, that makes the decision of whether to go to war or not. Rather, it is the chief political officers -- the President and the Congress. We have civilian control over the military, here. Perhaps Pollack, being a technical expert in intelligence issues, can be forgiven for missing this. But we citizens in the public sphere cannot.

While Pollack only considered the question of whether the country should go to war or not -- the political leaders have to consider the larger question of HOW this policy is going to be carried out.

The President of the country (with the Congress) has to consider: how to rally the nation to go to war; how to finance the war and impel congressional support; how to organize and compel the military and its far-flung organization to ready itself for war; how to deal with the domestic political opposition to war; how to consider the short-term and long-term ramifications of international relations before and after the war; how to compel the support of key allies and others who will support us; how to handle the possibly disastrous consequences of going to war too soon -- or of waiting too long -- or of not going to war at all.

The President may have realized that we could afford technically to wait some years before dealing with Iraq. But if war is necessary at some near future date -- would we politically be ready when the President is in a second term (if there is a second term)? Given the nature of the uncertain intelligence information -- would it be better to act now rather that to take the chance that Iraq may have advanced weapons in the near future? Then there’s the question: would passivity and the tendency to put off difficult decisions dither away our time as terrorists advance towards their goal of acquiring the ability to commit mass murder?

Could our waiting -- result in another 9/11?

The President has to ask: HAS THE POLITICAL OPORTUNE MOMENT ARRIVED? After all -- the other definition of “politics” (other than “the art and science of power”) is: politics is the art of the possible. The President’s main problem is to see that policy goals are carried out.

This means: the President may have felt that he had to exaggerate publicly-available intelligence information in order to force the issue IF he was convinced that the security of the nation rested on his ability to disarm Hussein as quickly as possible. (What? You’d rather be politically correct but dead? Ask FDR!)

So the REAL DEBATE during this next year is going to revolve around the intangible question: will Americans trust the President’s decision to go to war against a gathering possible nuclear threat from a rogue nation -- or will the public think the President should have WAITED for a more secure time when we could be SURE that we wouldn’t have made a mistake?

So it is, after all, a values-question.

What kind of decision do you intuitively respect?

Wherein is wisdom?

Posted by Rick Penner at February 2, 2004 10:45 PM