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Just Out: My new piece on David Kay's conclusions that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction when the US invaded Iraq last spring. [While I strongly admire the views of the people I interviewed for this story -- Joe Cirincione at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Anthony Cordesman at CSIS, Greg Thielmann recently of the State Department Intelligence and Research bureau, and others, I confess to being a bit uncomfortable with the title and tone the piece assumed in the editing process. The case is definitely not closed, and certainly the intelligence failure of Iraq cannot be solely attributed to administration pressure.]
Writing on the same issue, Joe Conason says don't look to Kansas Republican Pat Roberts, head of the Senate Select Intelligence committee, to conduct an honest inquiry into how the US got Iraq WMD intel so wrong.
Don't look for the White House to admit it was wrong, either, a senior Republican official who has been conferring with White House advisors tells the New York Times' David Sanger. "They've made a pretty huge mess of it," he says. "They wove this giant story, based on intelligence assessments that in hindsight — and this is hindsight, remember — were wrong. It's exposed a huge problem in our intelligence gathering. But who wants to take that on in an election year? Or while you are fighting terrorists?"
"A receding threat," the Federation of American Scientists' Steven Aftergood sums up the Kay conclusions on the danger posed by Saddam Hussein.
My feeling? Not only does the Iraq intel debacle reawaken all the questions about whether the US should have gone to war in Iraq last spring, and the consternation over the dubiousness of some of the administration's stated justifications for that war, such as an alleged Al Qaeda-Saddam connection. It also brings to the fore what seems a congenital character flaw of the Bush administration: Its total war against "doubt." Nothing Bush or Cheney or Condoleeza Rice asserts ever admits the potential for uncertainty that is an undeniable component of so many of these national security assessments and foreign policy decisions. They almost always speak with exaggerated false certainty, in phrases such as "there is no doubt," "it is clear," "we know," "no one can deny," etc.
Counterpunch put together a nice summary of such statements -- that have all been proved wrong -- including:
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."
--Dick Cheney August 26, 2002
"We know for a fact that there are weapons there."
--Ari Fleischer January 9, 2003
"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
--George Bush March 17, 2003
"There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. As this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them."
--Gen. Tommy Franks March 22, 2003
"I have no doubt we're going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction."
--Kenneth Adelman, Defense Policy Board , March 23, 2003
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