Solid Intelligence

I think I agree more with what Andrew says here about Dick Cheney than I do with Ross' belief that Cheney and others were perfectly sincere in their WMD scare stories. Among other things, it's worth recalling that there were always sort of two different Iraq debates happening on parallel tracks.

One debate, for the cognescenti, was about America's strategic posture in the Persian Gulf vis-a-vis Iraq. You have Ken Pollack worrying that a nuclear-armed Saddam may invade Kuwait again, forcing us to either fight a second war to dislodge him (potentially subjecting our troops to nuclear attack) or else to acquiesce in Iraqi hegemony in the Gulf. You have concerns that a nuclear-armed Iraq might feel able to become much bolder in its sponsorship of anti-Israel groups. You have concerns that a nuclear-armed Iraq might become incredibly prestigious in the Arab world, making Saddam a kind of new Nasser and creating problems for our friendly governments in the region.

I have no doubt that the hawks inside the administration really thought Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program that was making meaningful progress, or at least that the odds of this being the case were quite high. Absent that sincere conviction, the war simply doesn't make sense.

The argument the administration actually offered, however, had very little to do with America's strategic posture in the Persian Gulf in the event that Saddam Hussein acquired nuclear weapons. It had a great deal to do with the risk that Saddam, in league with al-Qaeda, would mount an unprovoked WMD attack on the United States and that invading Iraq constituted a form of pre-emptive defense of the homeland. It simply beggars belief that they genuinely believed that. Consequently, a lot of arguments were simply offered in bad faith -- tidbits about mustard gas or aerial drones or "he gassed his own people" -- that were just kind of tossed off to help create a maximally scary storyline about warnings coming in the form of a mushroom cloud.

All of which is part of the reason I get a little queasy when I hear Democrats talk about Iraq teaching lessons about the need for solid intelligence. The lessons I've learned about Iraq go to the strategic calculus that says "we should engage in unilateral preventive military strikes to prevent countries from acquiring nuclear weapons in order to bolster US hegemony in the Persian Gulf," not a lesson about how one should or shouldn't process internal Intelligence Community disagreement about the state of a foreign WMD program.

Photo by Flickr user tswartz used under a Creative Commons license.

Comments

As I said over at the American Scene, if you claim that you know something to be true, when in fact you don't know for certain, you're a liar, even if you sincerely believe the statement to be true. Cheney said we knew there were WMDs. He said there could be no doubt. Rumsfeld said we knew the exact positions of the WMDs. These men are liars.

Posted by Freddie | July 11, 2007 4:49 PM

> I have no doubt that the hawks inside the
> administration really thought Iraq had an active
> nuclear weapons program that was making
> meaningful progress, or at least that the odds of
> this being the case were quite high. Absent that
> sincere conviction, the war simply doesn't make
> sense.

Then they were being delusional, because it was perfectly clear to me from publicly-available information (much of it released by the hawks themselves) that the odds were 20:1 Iraq did NOT have such a program, and that if it did that finishing the inspections was the best plan of action.

The aluminum tubes was my favorite: as soon as I read the NYT article I said to myself "81 millimeter aluminum tubes? That has been the standard diameter for light rockets since World War 2. Sounds as if ole Saddam is trying to recreate the Stalin's Organ rocket launcher". And that (or something similar) appears to have been what was going on.

So if you are saying the hawks are so delusional that they can't properly read intelligence that conflicts with their pre-existing anchors and beliefs then...

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | July 11, 2007 4:51 PM

. Absent that sincere conviction, the war simply doesn't make sense.

It does if you think the war is going to be over quickly and you're going to win very easily. (This is, IIRC what most evidence suggests the Administration believed.) People mislead others all of the time, in every field, on the assumption that once everything turns up roses, no one will care that they were lied to in the first place. This strikes me as the norm, rather than an aberration.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 11, 2007 4:56 PM

I have no doubt that the hawks inside the administration really thought Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program that was making meaningful progress, or at least that the odds of this being the case were quite high.

Really?

You know, those types of programs aren't the easiest things to hide. They require large facilities, and lots of other activities that tend to trip the wires.

The INR and IAEA strongly disagreed with the assertion that Iraq had an active program. The Bush team went with their own custom intelligence products - and others gained through ginning the process.

The fact that they knowingly misled about specific items like yellowcake and aluminum tubes was a clue as to actual beliefs.

It is likely that they believed Saddam had some chem and bio stuff lying around (many observers did - at least until pre-war inspections were turning up nada), but when it comes to the only WMD that matters (nukes), they knew they were BS-ing the world.

Posted by Eric Martin | July 11, 2007 4:57 PM

Cheney is simply not an evidence-based person. These guys came into office with a preconceived notion that Saddam had to go and what they cared about was getting that done, not whether it was justified by some evidence. They already knew it was justified.

Posted by Steve | July 11, 2007 4:57 PM

On whether they believed the nuclear program was making progress, I think it depends on the time period. On September 12, 2001, they probably did think there was a good chance Saddam was making meaningful progress, and it wasn't delusional. On January 29, 2003? Not so much. By then, even on that limited issue they were either lying or crazy.

Posted by JP | July 11, 2007 4:58 PM

> not a lesson about how one should
> or shouldn't process internal Intelligence
> Community disagreement about the state of a
> foreign WMD program.

Can you imagine what Bill Clinton, or Theodore Roosevelt, or Abraham Lincoln what would have done in such a situation? That is to say, an actual possibility of an existential threat to the nation? I think any of them would have forced the intelligence agencies to sit down in a room and present all the information and all their best argument and asked detailed, thoughtful, intelligent, probing, uncomfortable questions for hours, days, or weeks until he was satisfied he understood the situation correctly and could make a good decision.

Instead we had W outsourcing the thinking to The Snarl and then rubber-stamping the decision. Same way he rubber-stamped Cheney's self-selection as VP in fact.

So I am not sure exactly what lessons Democrats can draw from that unless it is (1) don't elect utterly stupid and impressionable Presidents who are incapable of understanding difficult things (2) but in the event such a President is elected /don't give them the authority to wage unlimited war/.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | July 11, 2007 4:59 PM

I think the argument that Cheney and co. actually believed that Iraq had an active nuclear program is just barely plausible for the time period until the inspectors were back in Iraq. By the time of the actual invasion they had to have known there was no active nuclear program.

Posted by peep | July 11, 2007 5:00 PM

I do not know what was in their minds. I do know that 1) the constant lumping of nuclear weapons with chemical and biological weapons, which we knew they had; 2) the persistent refusal to identify the location of any nuclear site; 3) the total lack of photographic evidence and 4) the complete inability of Iraq to fire a rocket out of the Middle East, led me to believe that there were no nuclear weapons and we were not in danger, imminent or otherwise. I do not know why we went to war, but it was not because any actual, thoughtful person saw Saddam as a threat to the United States. You would have to have been delusional to believe that.

Posted by Peter Driscoll | July 11, 2007 5:01 PM

I strongly disagree with Freddie. The reactor at Osirak was certainly designed to create nuclear weapons. Furthermore, throughout the Clinton years, many politicians including democrats accused Saddam of trying to develop WMDs. In fact, Clinton launched airstrikes on multiple occasions, presumably to punish Saddam for not allowing inspectors their full access. If you call Bush and Cheney a liar about WMDs, then you better call Clinton one too (among others).

The WMD story was the easy-to-understand cover for the average American. Its not even worth thinking about, unless you want to find some BS reason to condemn Bush for politics sake. If that is your goal, go ahead and try to build the case that they were liars. I personally think thats a waste; there are plenty of real issues that one could skewer them over, without needing to contrive one from nothing.

The real debate was regarding the strategic implications that Matt spoke of. Had we not driven Saddam from Kuwait, its also very possible he could have grabbed oil fields in Saudi Arabia or Iran, if his military could operate under the cover of nuclear weapons. A nuclear armed dictator controlling 70-80 percent of the world's oil sounds scary to me.

But even if we are concerned with the strategic implications of Saddam getting nukes, it doesn't follow that the invasion of 2003 was necessary. It was not, because the situation had changed; Saddam was contained in Iraq. He didn't have the economic resources to rebuild a powerful military of his pre-1991 sort. Thus, even if he was able to gain limited nuclear capabilities, his conventional forces were too weak to launch an invasion of the surrounding territory again.

At the end of the day, Saddam Hussein was very similar to Joe Stalin (in fact, he emulated Stalin). He was ruthless, but rational. That is precisely why Saddam was containable. He could have created nuclear weapons, but wouldn't have done anything with them other than deter his own destruction. He certainly wouldn't have passed them off to Al Qaeda, after he spent years murdering Islamic fundamentalists in Iraq. That is why we didn't need to invade Iraq. Assuming, of course, that you don't mind the horrible effect that the UN sanctions had on the populace. There isn't always a good option in these situations, just the lesser of many bad ones...

Posted by Nick | July 11, 2007 5:09 PM

Is it true that inside the brain of every liberal pundit there is an Alan Colmes sitting somewhere prompting him on some issues to be ultra-nice to the neocons and the conservatives?

Posted by gregor | July 11, 2007 5:09 PM

I do not know why we went to war, but it was not because any actual, thoughtful person saw Saddam as a threat to the United States.

My pet theory.

Blix was going to those places to the east and north of Baghdad that Rummy spoke up, and coming up empty handed.

Suddenly it's "Oh Crap! He really doesn't have any significant WMD's!! What now?

At that point, we had to get Blix out of there and invade. What happens if in 5 more months Blix reports to the UN that Saddam is clean?

Bye bye sanctions, and any support either abroad or at home for an invasion.

Posted by Davebo | July 11, 2007 5:11 PM

I believe the thinking was:
1 Saddam was always going to be a threat to Saudi Arabia.
2 We can not keep troops in Saudi Arabia because it will destabilise the regime.
3 If Saddam gets WMDs, it will be hard to get public opinion behind a war against him.
4 Invading Iraq gets rid of Saddam.
5 Invading Iraq gives us a place to keep our troops where they will be accepted.

It is not necessary for this train of thought to believe that Saddam Hussein was currently working on WMDs or would even begin working on them in the near future. As long as the neocons believed that it would happen some day, they believed they had to act while they had the chance. If intelligence turned up no evidence of WMDs, it would be necessary to invent it.

Indeed, it would be considered more dangerous if Hussein wasn't working on WMDs. It would make war harder to start. The biggest danger to them was the possibility that they would not be able to gin up a war before losing the presidency. Then, Iraq could get WMDs while Democrats were in power, leaving Saudi Arabia vulnerable.

I can believe that the neocons thought there was a real danger to American interests that would be alleviated by war. What I don't believe is that they really thought Iraq still had any WMD programs. They lied to start a war they thought was a good idea. They all think they are Themistocles tricking us into fighting for our own good. The problem is they are black-hearted bastards for whom the phrase "our own good" does not match well with what the rest of us think of as "our own good".

Posted by Njorl | July 11, 2007 5:17 PM

I would make one change:

"As long as the neocons believed that it would happen some day, they believed they [had to] WANTED TO act while they had the chance."

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | July 11, 2007 5:21 PM

Ugh. I agree with Cranky and others. Of course they knew Iraq wasn't making nukes. THAT'S STUPID. Cheney and his ilk (unlike certain liberal lambkins) were sophisticated enough to know you need tens of thousands of centrifuges and an electrical grid powerful enough to light up a city to build nukes.
Matt Y., Josh M. and others never learned some of the basic rules of journalism: 1) Trust no one 2) If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

Posted by down goes frazier | July 11, 2007 5:29 PM

IIRC, in the months after the initial 2003 invasion, didn't many reports come out indicating that numerous pre-identified potential WMD sites had been left unsecured by the US Army, and had subsequently been looted? If this was the case, surely that would indicate that the WMD thing was a cover story? After all if you invade a country to deal with WMD, your primary strategic objectives (after the usual Command & Control) would be the WMD sites, and I'm pretty sure that journalists at the time didn't see that. But I'd be happy to be proved wrong

Posted by JohnTh | July 11, 2007 5:30 PM

I believe the thinking was: [....]

I used to believe at one point that "thinking", of one form or another, was involved. Snark aside, I'm not so sure any more.

Posted by BP | July 11, 2007 5:31 PM

I have no doubt that the hawks inside the administration really thought Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program that was making meaningful progress, or at least that the odds of this being the case were quite high. Absent that sincere conviction, the war simply doesn't make sense.

Except that this is inconsistent with everything we know about the run up to war.

The so-called evidence relied upon was complete and utter garbage, offered for public consumption but not credible to anyone actually inside the administration.

Aluminum tubes - repeatedly discredited

Niger documents - repeatedly discredited

Curveball - repeatedly discredited

Once the inspectors returned, they could find nothing. The administration rushed to war, in part, because it appeared increasingly likely that the inspectors would never find anything.

Posted by blah | July 11, 2007 5:36 PM

Cheney accused Saddam of involvement in 9/11 in the immediate aftermath (one or two days) of the attack, certainly BEFORE any intelligence was gathered.

Posted by della Rovere | July 11, 2007 5:36 PM

Yeah the first gambit was to tie Saddam to Al Qaeda. When that didn't appear like it would work, they turned to the WMD strategy. In part, they did so because they thought it would be easier to obtain a UN mandate (useful for placating Tony Blair, among others) once Saddam refused to allow the inspectors to return. Except Saddam did allow the inspectors to return and they found nothing. At which point the administration offered Colin Powell to spew a bunch of garbage before the UN that managed convince only the U.S. press corps.

Posted by blah | July 11, 2007 5:41 PM

It doesn't matter whether they were liars or not. What matters is that it is simply not possible to believe that Iraq was a threat to the United States itself. I would love to know why we went to war. Maybe it was for some bona fide strategic interest. Today it is only possible to be sure that we did not go to war because Saddam was a real threat to our security in the homeland. We could have had a democratic debate about the war, instead we had a charade and the entire goverment is responsible for the lack of that debate and our folly.

Posted by Peter Driscoll | July 11, 2007 5:45 PM

The reactor at Osirak was certainly designed to create nuclear weapons.

Wasn't that reactor destroyed in the 1980s? Was it rebuilt? Wouldn't the whole rebuilding process show up on satellite?

Posted by Eric Martin | July 11, 2007 5:52 PM

Matt,

For once, I disagree. Wolfowitz, in that incredibly long colloquy with was it Rolling Stone admitted that WMD was simply a lowest-common-denominator "reason"--one that everyone could get on board with, because everyone--all the players in the administration--believed he had some.

From everything I've read, and I've watched for this like a hawk, the "real" reason--as adminstration insiders explain it in retrospect--was a conflation of "because we could" and as an object lesson to everyone else: look what we can do to you too if you don't comply with us in our GWOT. There also was some thought of securing strategic bases to substitute for those we had been tossed out of/left in Saudi Arabia.

Now doesn't that last paragraph sound like Dick Cheney? And doesn't the first not sound like him, but rather like a product of Rove's shop?

They "believed" Feith's work product and the rest of the stovepiped intelligence just like they believed the earlier, and eerily similar Team B exercise: it was their self-generated, super-
scary worst case scenario, but they "believe" it because it serves their other aims.

You're still thinking too much that they really were acting in good faith. They weren't; they were driving an agenda. Re-read Richard Clarke on the immediate meetings after 9/11, when everyone was unguarded. And reconsider what General Clark was told was afoot when he visited Rumsfeld's Pentagon in 2001. Iraq was just the first step, and most of the other steps are still underway.

Posted by Wendell | July 11, 2007 5:57 PM

Osirak was destroyed by an Israeli raid in 1981. Whatever was left was pulverized by the US Air Force during the first Gulf War in 1991.

Posted by blah | July 11, 2007 5:57 PM

There were multiple motives for deposing Sadddam, but Wendell identifies the most important ones. The Iraq War is what happened when the PNAC doctrine of "American hegemony" got merged into the War on Terror. The Bush administration decided that we needed to make an aggressive show of force to teach the rest of the world a lesson about American superiority, and particularly the Middle East, while at the same time increasing our control over that region.

Posted by blah | July 11, 2007 6:08 PM

What I clearly recall from the pre-war debates, particularly arguments with conservative friends in the hinterlands, is that most Americans would have supported the war even if Dick Cheney had been as relatively restrained as Powell in his proclamations.

No one I know ever cited the specific claims made by Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld. Nobody quoted Powell's speech at the UN. It was the fact that our leaders supported the war that mattered, not *why* they supported it.

I see three crucial reasons why the majority of Americans supported the war.

1. Respected elders like Cheney and Powell claimed Saddam Hussein was a threat, therefore he was a threat. It was widely assumed that the intelligence we read about in the papers was only the tip of the iceberg.

2. After 9/11, Americans were prepared to assume the worst. The public bought into Cheney's "one percent doctrine" in which any threat, however implausible, had to be dealt with forcefully. I can't count the number of acquaintances who simply stated that any risk of Saddam giving his WMDs to terrorists was too much risk.

3. Most importantly, there was hardly anyone willing to stand up on TV and challenge the utter lack of hard evidence to support the WMD claims. Democrats, liberal journalists, national security bureaucrats... they all made mistakes #1 and #2 right along with the rest of the country, and ended up powerfully reinforcing the Administration's narrative.

Maybe Cheney is a big fat liar who consciously manipulated the public. Maybe he looked at the evidence, read between the lines, assumed the worst about Saddam, and mistook his assumptions for fact. It really doesn't matter in the end.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | July 11, 2007 6:20 PM

LFP, don't forget the reason proffered by the administration that made the whole thing palatable to so many: it was going to be so easy! That little line of BS was entirely separate from the WMD hyping.

Posted by SV | July 11, 2007 6:28 PM

I just read on Wikipedia that before the Israelis' raid on Osirak, the reactor had already been damaged - by the Iranians, who attacked it in 1980, at the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War (although they failed to destroy it). The Iranians were urged to conduct the raid by... the Israelis. Nobody could bring folks together like Saddam Hussein.

Posted by JP | July 11, 2007 6:47 PM

I recall listening to a program on the radio one Friday night out of a PBS station in Santa Monica that had Matt Miller (former Clinton staffer representing the middle) as moderator, Arianna Huffington (representing space), Robert Scheer (representing the left), and the right wing guy from Canada who previously wrote speeches for Bush. The program was just before or after the war began and Scheer and Huffington were stating that Hans Blix and his team had not found the weapons so why the rush to war. The right wing guy said something to the effect that everyone knew that Hans Blix was incompetent (not citing evidence) as an inspector, that would come out, that the WMD's were there, they just needed someone competent to find them and when they did, everyone would see that Saddam had them. So this was the talking point at the time which I am sure the guy who spoke had gotten from his friends inside the administration or in the think tanks. Check the transcipt. It's there.

Posted by Jim | July 11, 2007 6:48 PM

How in the world does anyone end up thinking that Bush Cheney et al sincerely believed Saddam might be building nuclear weapons?

An exceptionally gullible person might have thought that once- before Cheney exposed the CIA operation that was actually watching for dangerous developments of that nature, before we learned that these guys are not just liars, but pathological liars, before the cash registers went ka-ching 520 billion times making our lying leaders obscenely more wealthy until the end of time.

But to still believe, after all the sewage that has flowed under the bridge- I just don't get it.

Study what happened, Matt, because this won't be the last time you hear a duck fart underwater.

Posted by serial catowner | July 11, 2007 6:57 PM

My thoughts: Dick Cheney is a smart man. He is evil, but smart. He cares only for his own advancement and his powerful friends (board of directors of Haliburton?). He made some of his very powerful friends a lot of money by convincing the idiot in chief to invade Iraq.

I expect Dick Cheney to easily step into many highly paid corporate board positions in 2009, laughing all the way to the bank.

Dick Cheney is a smart man. He didn't care whether Saddam had a nuclear program, just that he could invade an oil rich country so that his friends in the oil services industry could get a bonanza of no-bid contracts. The guy is not an intellectual or a wonk, he's just made a career out of doing the bidding of oil, hand gun, defense, and other industries.

Posted by preslove | July 11, 2007 7:09 PM

> My thoughts: Dick Cheney is a smart
> man. He is evil, but smart. He cares
> only for his own advancement and his
> powerful friends

Cheney also has that weird fear thing going though. He and Rove _use_ fear to advance their goals, but Cheney actually does seem to be terrified down deep. Although I don't want to play Dr. Frist on the Intertubes I have to wonder if this is connected to the multiple heart attacks and periods on the heart/lung machine.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | July 11, 2007 7:29 PM

Dick Cheney is the supreme Washington infighter, someone who works to find the most vulnerable point in an argument to push his opponent on, who is persistent and dirty in a more "respectable" way than Rove, but because of his power of high elective office and the fact that Bush defers to him (I will only meet with you if I can bring Dick along),more dangerous. He is "their" son of a bitch. He learned his trade in his earlier life working for Ford, Rusmfeld, Wyoming, and Sec. of Defense. His office leaks something to the NY Times which publishes it on he morning of his arranged appearance on Meet the Press and he quotes the fact that it was published in the NY Times as support for the point he is making. He makes the case for his rich constituency that the tax cut is our due, thereby benefitting the likes of Jack Welch and Sumner Redstone and who is Tim Russert and Chris Matthews and Bob Scheiffer and Katie Curic to argue with the boss.He knows the way the game is played. This is the guy who said in the VP debate in 2000 that he was glad to be out of government and working for a private corp. therefore not looking to the government to pay his way. If that was not a softball waiting to be hit out of the park by his opponent, one Joe Liebrman, who might have mentioned the amount of bucks that Halbertan had contracted with the govt. to receive during that time. But Joe, being cordial, polite Joe, and like Russert, not wanting to ruffle any feathers, particularly of the great Cheney, the king of corporate interest, the enemy of workers, compassion, fairness, justice, civil liberties, let it pass.

Posted by Jim | July 11, 2007 7:41 PM

"People mislead others all of the time, in every field..."

SCMT makes a good point. Unfortunately the American intellectual class is so thoroughly domesticated that even adversarial writers such as Yglesias assume as a matter of course the good faith of their leaders, no matter how extensive their record of dishonesty. Hence this incredible statement:

"I have no doubt that the hawks inside the administration really thought Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program that was making meaningful progress, or at least that the odds of this being the case were quite high. Absent that sincere conviction, the war simply doesn't make sense."

Yglesias has no doubt! Because he was there? Or because he was communing telepathically with Cheney at the time? No matter, for as Yglesias claims, absent Cheney's sincere conviction, "the war simply doesn't make sense."

Well, let's put aside for a moment the current administration's extensive record of irrational behaviour, as well as the world historical record of governmental inanity, as well as the dread O-word that shall never pass our lips. What actually doesn't make sense--at least to anyone with a grain of intellectual self-respect--is the idea that an utterly third-rate, bankrupted, starving, militarily-enveloped nation could possess the means to develop a nuclear weapon less than ten years after its pre-existing WMD-capabilities had been severely dismantled. And what makes even less sense is the "idea" that, assuming the Iraqis did build their far-out nuke, this same bankrupted, starving third rate power would resume its Hitlerian march to the Arabian sea, impervious to the surrounding American military, obvious resource constraints and all notions of MAD.

Truly, senseless. And yet much of the American intellectual class bought it hook line and sinker--proof that people indeed act irrationally?

But happily, the speculation is moot, as there exists an extensive record, assembled by serious people (Bill Moyers, for instance), detailing the contradictory intelligence that existed at the time and the measures the administration took in suppressing or manipulating it. And who knows, maybe someday a prominent liberal blogger with access to the resources of major American publication will get off his ass, collect the information and present a case publically on his website. My fellow liberal lambkins (good tag, "down goes frazier") shall we hold our breath?

Posted by Mark | July 11, 2007 8:06 PM

I have no doubt that the hawks inside the administration really thought Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program that was making meaningful progress, or at least that the odds of this being the case were quite high. Absent that sincere conviction, the war simply doesn't make sense.

sorry Matt, I really respect you as a blogger, but that is an incredibly inane statement and one is left wondering if you have really grasped what has been going on since September 2002, i.e. Cheney's speech before the veterans, after which it was clear to me and everybody paying attention, that we would go to war no matter what. The logic was simple:

We're going to take Saddam out. We will have to present some reasons for doing so. If we can't find any, we'll just make some shit up.

As others have noted, the real tragedy is that the US public was so gullible and/or gung ho. But that you are still so gullible is a bit of a surpirse.

Posted by novakant | July 11, 2007 8:35 PM

I think people are missing the point. This little dipsy-doodle is actually about Iran. MY has indicated in at least one earlier post he thinks there would be a good case for bombing Iran to prevent it from obtaining nuclear weapons, as long as the balance of material-damage-to-them/diplomatic-damage-to-us was positive for us, by some reckoning. His point here is that such an exercise of "reasonableness" would be in keeping with the reasonableness of what he says was the Bush-Cheney calculation on Iraq. Hence this seemingly weird assertion that the case for hitting Iraq to prevent WMD from making them a prestigious regional power was a good case that Bush and Cheney believed in. It will be a good case again, vis-a-vis Iran, is MY's point. He likely hopes to become an establishment hero by bringing progressives along with him on this trip of his.

Posted by Badger | July 11, 2007 8:47 PM

Almost all the comments I have seen presume that the framework for the decision had something to do with the strategic interests of the United States.

I find that assumption about this Administration's behavior to be unsupportable.

IMO, all decisions made by this Administration were made with the purpose of strengthening Bush's electoral prospects, the Republican party generally, and business allies specifically. The DA purge is a good example of this.

Back to the war. Before Bush was elected President, he pointed out that no President had ever been denied a 2nd term during wartime. He had the war. He got his 2nd term. Therefore, the war achieved its most important objective.

The one thing in life that Bush is good at is winning elections. It seems to also be one of the only things he cares about. The simplest explanation is often the best.

Posted by EdSez | July 11, 2007 8:48 PM

Re "I have no doubt that the hawks inside the administration really thought Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program that was making meaningful progress, or at least that the odds of this being the case were quite high. Absent that sincere conviction, the war simply doesn't make sense. "
------------
Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.

We have tons of testimony from multiple people within the Intelligence Community that Cheney and the White House LEANED on Tenet and the Intelligence Community to distort the Intelligence to fit the pre-determined policy. That's not the honest behavior of someone trying to determine how best to deal with a threat.

Look at Jim Dunnigan's rating of US military power versus Iraq: 2400+ vs 89. How likely Iraq is going to challenge the US on important matters?

Why did NO ONE point out that the "Threatening Storm" meme was total bullshit?
Saddam Hussein was 66 years old, for christsake. Why is no one intelligent enough to ask if time was on his side? Was Hussein going to wait 7 years for sanctions to expire, then spend huge sums on a 7 year development program --just so that he could start Jihad at age 80?

The invasion of Iraq makes PERFECT SENSE -- when you realize that the "WAR" was NOT a "war on terror" -- it was a war for POWER here in the USA.
Bush came within a hair of losing the 2000 election -- and of losing that $2 TRILLION tax cut for his superrich supporters. Karl Rove and CHeney know perfectly well that the Democratic Party is largely funded by billionaires who are strong supporters of Israel.

Hussein was a threat to Israel --not to the USA. But Cheney reasoned that if he took care of that threat, the billionaires of the Israel Lobby would defect from the Democrats over to the Republicans and the Democratic Party would be mortally wounded -- in the wilderness for decades.

A very important issue when you ask who is going to pay for the $8 TRILLION shortfall in Social Security and the $40 TRILLION shortfall in Medicare as the baby boomers retire.

Dealing with the threat to Israel may explain why Bush got such enormous help from some Jewish Americans on the LEFT when he lied us into war. Kenneth Pollack. Judith Miller, Punch and the New York Times owners. Josh Marshall. That's not even counting all the Jewish NeoCons on the Right who were beating the drums for war.

Are Jewish Americans as a whole responsible for this disaster? Of course not. Most of them don't even know what's going on. OF those who do, some are among the most bitter critics of the war. I'm sure there are some Jewish families in Brooklyn who have lost sons in Iraq. Not everyone dodges military service in the manner of our Washington DC politicans and intelligentsia.

The corruption seems largely among those within the communications field -- journalists, pundits and others who depend upon patronage for a living.

The price of this scam so far? 3500+ dead, thousands crippled --some for life. $1 TRILLION.

Posted by Don Williams | July 11, 2007 9:07 PM

Matt - Respectfully, I have to say you are very wrong here - Pollack did not actually believe in those fake scare options that he floated - He was just crafting propaganda for liberals who could not stomach Bush but wanted someone to articulate to them reasons for war that would make them feel comfortable.
The fact that Pollack did not believe Saddam was near obtaining nuclear weapons can easily be gleaned from certain inconstancies and conspicuius errors in his book - Not the least of which was his conspicuous failure to properly render what Saddam's son-in-law told them.
There are many other reasons why Cheney and the others never believed in the nuclear threat possibility - They did not even bother to safeguard the UN site in Iraq that actual had nuclear material under watch.

Posted by Comment | July 11, 2007 9:08 PM

The point of the war was to ensure the continued existence of the cold war era military industrial complex. Without an enemy there is no call for the US to have a military larger than any ten other nations combined. PNAC is just a manifestation of the deeper dynamics driven by the need to justify the MIC. It's not a conspiracy, just a whole bunch of people who know which side their bread is buttered on, and whose prejudices are skewed accordingly. If not Iraq, it would have been China. The fact that Iraq has been a military and diplomatic disaster is not a problem from the standpoint of the MIC - a clean victory, with sweets and flowers, would have meant going back to square one, searching for the next threat. This way, the next threat emerges naturally out of the chaos. It's not a disaster, it's everything working out just peachy. As long as you're not bothered by all the dead bodies, that is.

Posted by togolosh | July 11, 2007 9:11 PM

They might initially have been sincere (after 9/11 you had to err on the side of caution), but then Hans Blix showed them there was nothing to the WMD fears, and no need to invade to assuage the fears.

Posted by bob h | July 11, 2007 9:32 PM

The scare about Iraq and the need for that scare and the use of intelligence to create the scare aren't unique. Cheney would have learned about these things, as he seems to have learned most things, in the Ford administration, when the same scaremongers formed "team B" to hype the soviet threat. They have done this forever. They hyped the commies in Guatamala in 1954, and the commies in Iran - and in both places, to help things along, they planted false evidence. They hyped communists in Indonesia in 1958, and the CIA - in one of America's Funniest Non-Wars - did a bay of pigs on Sukarno, which resulted in many civilian casualties and a few American fliers spending years in Indonesian jails. In 1964, the Communists were taking over Brazil, and they were taking over Chile in 1973. There is nothing here that is new. It is all old. Every trick they used came out of the CIA's garage sale. So, unless Cheney is as braindead as the president, I don't think he believed Iraq had nuclear weapons capability. I do think he might have thought that someday they would have it, because Cheney is also a lobotocon like the rest of them. But otherwise, he was playing an old tune.

Posted by roger | July 11, 2007 10:36 PM

While the U.S. government and media keep focusing on defense policies and the war in Iraq, 1.2 billion people in the world continue surviving on less than $1 dollar a day. I would like see congressmen and political leaders support more international dilemmas that affect our place in this world, such as global poverty. We should not forget the commitment made towards the U.N. Millennium Goals (a pact of ending extreme world hunger by the year 2025) in 2000. While the U.S. government and media keep focusing on defense policies and the war in Iraq, 1.2 billion people in the world continue surviving on less than $1 dollar a day. According to The Borgen Project, an annual $19 billion dollars is needed to eliminate half of the extreme poverty affecting the world by the year 2015. To my sense, it is almost unacceptable to have spent so far more than $340 billion in Iraq only, when we have more than war immunities to change the world and eliminate poverty.

Posted by aileench | July 11, 2007 11:32 PM

Thomas Powers brings together, in his review in the NY Review of Books of Tenet's "At the Center of the Storm", most of the evidence to debunk Tenet's central claim that he did not cook the books on Iraq WMD. He shows pretty conclusively, from the Downing memos, Tyler Drum-heller, Suskind's "One Percent Soltion" and other documentation that fear of WMDs was not what was driving Cheney. The Bush administration had decided to remove Hussein early on, wanted to use the political environment after 9/11 to do so, and was casting about for a justification that would work well enough on the American people. An Al Qaeda link didn't fly, but WMDs fit the bill.

Posted by tib | July 12, 2007 12:44 AM

There are a lot of plausible theories posted here on the real reason for the war; but in fact, no one but Bush and Cheney knows the real reason, and I'm not so sure about Bush.
Despite Matt's feeling that there was a genuine fear of nuclear weapons, the point that seems clearest is that they were an excuse rather than a cause. A government determined to rid Iraq of any nuclear weapons would have acted one way; one determined to invade as soon as an excuse could be cobbled together would have acted in a different way. The Bush administration was clearly in the second camp, for all the reasons mentioned above.

Posted by Peter | July 12, 2007 1:26 AM

I strongly disagree with Freddie. The reactor at Osirak was certainly designed to create nuclear weapons. Furthermore, throughout the Clinton years, many politicians including democrats accused Saddam of trying to develop WMDs.

Ah, the classic bullshit move by pro-war apoligists. Talk about the genuine potential threat of a nuclear weapons program, and then avoid the fact that there's no evidence whatsoever of one by subtly switching to a discussing of "WMDs." So evidence that he might have some mustard gas become evidence he might have something that would pose an actual security threat to the United States. What's really amazing is that this actually fools some people.

Posted by Scott Lemieux | July 12, 2007 2:09 AM

"Absent that sincere conviction, the war simply doesn't make sense."

Even if you assume that the administration was sincere in their belief that WMD programs existed, does the war make sense? Invading Iraq with no plans for what to do the day after Baghdad fell, ignoring the advice of the military as to troop levels, ignoring the threat of al queda, etc.

The more we learn about the decision making in the planning for war, the more it assumes the logic of a Monty Python sketch. It didn't proceed like clockwork, but like a bunch of lumberjacks in drag doing the cancan.

Any argument that assumes that we have to make sense of it is deeply flawed.

Posted by alabasterjones | July 12, 2007 7:47 AM

If the Bush administration believed their WMD hype then why did they do nothing to secure these weapons?

No serious attempt was made to guard ammunition dumps, where all sorts of WEAPONS are stored. The ammunition dumps were completely looted, with much of the ordinance later used to kill our soldiers.

Cheney said he knew where the WMD was but a Bush official who was in Iraq immediately after the invasion reported that the suspected sites he was able to visit were being looted. He witnessed yellow cake uranium and biological laboratory equipment being carried away.

So if there was any sincere belief that there was a danger of WMD being transferred to terrorists, why was there no effort to secure the WMD? There was certainly an effort to secure the oil fields.

Posted by GPS | July 12, 2007 9:52 AM

I wonder if what Matt was doing here was displaying the lizard brain of the hyper-educated. "In the absence of that sincere conviction the war just doesn't make sense" is pretty much the same as "There must be a God because otherwise none of this makes any sense".

An ordinary person, of course, couldn't believe this. You would have to be pretty dumb not to understand what a red carpet limousine ride this has been, and will be, for everyone in the war business other than the ordinary soldiers.

In fact, what wouldn't make any sense would be an administration and party composed of war profiteers and oil company executives saying "We must seek a peaceful solution that doesn't commit the US to a long expensive stay overseas".

In a way, this is part of the same "reasoning" that says the war couldn't have been about the oil because we haven't gotten the oil (yet). What all of this misses is that the Republicans have discovered a perpetual profit machine, a world in which a resurgent AQ becomes a good thing instead of the unwelcome development most of us know it to be. This is why it doesn't bother them when one of their big contributors turns out to be a spy for the Chinese, or the VP exposes a CIA undercover operation.

"When you have eliminated all the impossible solutions, the one remaining, no matter how unlikely it may appear to be, must be correct."

But in this case, going to war to make money for people who have no intention of actually risking their own lives doesn't even qualify as "unlikely". It's just what happened.

Posted by serial catowner | July 12, 2007 9:56 AM

Here are excerpts from the articles mentioned above:

Peter Galbraith wrote, "I went to tell Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz what I had seen in Baghdad in the days following Saddam Hussein's overthrow. For nearly an hour, I described the catastrophic aftermath of the invasion -- the unchecked looting of every public institution in Baghdad, the devastation of Iraq's cultural heritage, the anger of ordinary Iraqis who couldn't understand why the world's only superpower was letting this happen. I also described two particularly disturbing incidents -- one I had witnessed and the other I had heard about. On April 16, 2003, a mob attacked and looted the Iraqi equivalent of the Centers for Disease Control, taking live HIV and black fever virus among other potentially lethal materials. US troops were stationed across the street but did not intervene because they didn't know the building was important. When he found out, the young American lieutenant was devastated. He shook his head and said, "I hope I am not responsible for Armageddon." About the same time, looters entered the warehouses at Iraq's sprawling nuclear facilities at Tuwaitha on Baghdad's outskirts. They took barrels of yellowcake (raw uranium), apparently dumping the uranium and using the barrels to hold water. US troops were at Tuwaitha but did not interfere... It appears that troops did not receive relevant intelligence about Iraq's WMD facilities, nor was there any plan to secure them.

October 14, 2003
Guerrillas in Iraq Tap Unsecured Arms Caches, Officials Say
By RAYMOND BONNER

AGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 13 - The two most recent suicide bombings here and virtually every other attack on American soldiers and Iraqis were carried out with explosives and matériel taken from Saddam Hussein's former weapons dumps, which are much larger than previously estimated and remain, for the most part, unguarded by American troops, allied officials said Monday.

The problem of uncounted and unguarded weapons sites is considerably greater than has previously been stated, a senior allied official said.

The American military now says that Iraq's army had nearly one million tons of weapons and ammunition, which is half again as much as the 650,000 tons that Gen. John P. Abizaid, the senior American commander in the Persian Gulf region, estimated only two weeks ago.

In separate interviews, the officials, civilian and military and from different countries, expressed concern about the potential of attackers with access to the weapons dumps to nurture violence and insecurity.

The officials said they were receiving intelligence about the attacks - who is carrying them out and where they are getting their munitions - from a variety of sources. Among the most fruitful, they said, have been would-be bombers who were stopped before carrying out their missions.

The officials were deliberately vague about how many attacks had been thwarted, for fear of alarming an already jumpy populace here. But one of them said several car bombings had been prevented in recent weeks, suggesting that the number was more than just a handful.

Officials also say that Mr. Hussein stockpiled at least 5,000 shoulder-fired missiles, and that fewer than a third have been recovered. They fear that many have been smuggled out of the country and may have fallen into the hands of terrorist organizations.

There are not enough American soldiers here to do the job of finding the weapons and securing them until they can be destroyed, the officials said. A private American company, Raytheon, has been awarded a contract to destroy the weapons, but it will not begin work until December, one official said.

"There are more sites than we can guard," an allied official said. "We are destroying them as fast as we can, but we are finding more and more every day."

One of the largest in the country, covering more than 10 square miles, is near Al Musaiyib, 20 miles south of Baghdad, and is still not adequately guarded, an official said this week.

Last month the Army began patrols of the site, and helicopters fly over occasionally. But it is not guarded around the clock, and officials say they believe that weapons and munitions are still being removed - and probably being used in devices that are killing Americans and Iraqis.

Posted by GPS | July 12, 2007 10:29 AM

I have no doubt that the hawks inside the administration really thought Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program that was making meaningful progress, or at least that the odds of this being the case were quite high. Absent that sincere conviction, the war simply doesn't make sense.

If you believe that, then you must also believe that they were profoundly ignorant of science and technology. Certainly nothing that's happened since discredits that notion.

But I don't think they really did believe that there was a meaningful Iraqi nuclear weapons program. And it has nothing to do with the absence of plans for securing weapons sites. (After all, they fucked every aspect of occupation planning, hell, they didn't even bother to plan.)

Throughout the pre-war disinfo campaign, they clung to the deliberately obscurantist term, "weapons of mass destruction". I thought then, and I'm convinced now, that they did this to hedge their bets, to muddy the waters so that when the inevitable cache of, say, mustard gas mortar shells turned up, they say, "Chemical weapons! WMD's! See, it was all worth it!" Morons like the unlamented Ricky Santorum were still playing this idiot's gambit not so long ago.

Posted by sglover | July 12, 2007 2:22 PM

Project for a New American Century by AEI
Clean Break: Strategy for Securing the Realm by PNAC, JINSA
Zionist Plan for the Middle East by Oded Yinon
Redrawing the Middle East Map by Ralph Peters
Complete Diaries by Theodor Herzl

Let the planners speak for themselves. They told us all we need to know.

Posted by rt | July 12, 2007 5:08 PM

"The invasion of Iraq makes PERFECT SENSE -- when you realize that the "WAR" was NOT a "war on terror" -- it was a war for POWER here in the USA."

Yeah worked real well in 2004. It's working brilliantly now. They knew it was risky. I knew it would probably hurt Republicans. I think after 9-11 they thought Saddam or one of his company might hand off a WMD to a terrorist group even if Saddam wasn't stupid enough to attack the US himself. (He was stupid enough not to comply with the UN.) Saudi Arabia is next to Iraq. Osama is from Saudia Arabia. I mean it's not totally disconnected.

These kind of arguments make your side look stupid.

Posted by Peter | July 12, 2007 5:14 PM