Two big disagreements

Dear Jersey girls;
thanks for your cogent and sensible remarks on the difficulties facing us in dealing with the Invasion of Iraq.
I have two big differences with your positions.
First, I am dismayed by your hope that Bush's assessments work out, I don't recall the exact wording. How can the invasion of a non-threatening country ever be justified? Have we really sunken to the point that we can justify the certainty of war, death and destruction based on an improbable and containable threat to our own?
Second, your statement on the oversight of the Intelligence "community" disturbs me. Review of public press reports and academic journals in the period leading up to the Invasion of Iraq will show that the professional level analysts were uncertain about the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Many experts stated their professional opinions that these weapons were not there. The prevailing professional and academic opinion regarding the existence of Iraqi programs to develop weapons was even stronger in its dissonance with the subsequent Administration pronouncements.
The failure in pre-Iraq intelligence analysis lies at the political level, not at the agency or professional level.
To put it bluntly, Tenent, Bolton, Cheney, Libby, Wolfowicz and others deliberately and DECEITFULLY sifted through the intelligence, rejected the contrary views and presented the views buttressing their pre-determined policy as the definitive intelligence.
This was deceitful in that each and every publicly reported citation they used had such serious methodological flaws that professional level analysts were unwilling to stand by them.
The political officials also rejected contrary evidence as speculative until confirmed by US military inspectors.
The US military inspection has occurred and the WMD and the WMD programs are non-existent.
What the US needs to protect from future debacles of this sort is not so much oversight of the intelligence "community" as accountability for the political policy makers.

Robert Chapman
Lansing, New York

by Robert Chapman (28 articles, 0 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 556 comments) on Saturday, January 21, 2006 at 1:08:28 PM