On the WMD Trail
Published June 30, 2003
This is quite clever and funny from our friends at the Specious Report, but Fred Kaplan explains that assumptions aren't the same thing as lying:
- We may never know if Saddam Hussein really had weapons of mass destruction during the final months or years before his ouster, but it is worth asking why the Bush administration claimed he did with a degree of certainty far exceeding that of U.S. intelligence reports.
Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and the other Pentagon officials who made these claims so fiercely probably weren't lying. Clearly, they had formed their conclusions first, then went scrounging for the evidence. Clearly, they stretched the evidence they found right up to, and in some cases beyond, the logical limits. However, it's a fair bet that they genuinely believed that Saddam had these weapons. They probably also believed that the analysts in the CIA and DIA, who were uncertain or skeptical about the matter, just didn't, or didn't want to, look hard enough.
In this sense, Rumsfeld and company saw themselves as something like a district attorney who twists the facts a bit to "frame a guilty man"--or like Dean Acheson, Harry Truman's secretary of state, who admitted in his memoirs that, while pushing for a massive U.S. arms buildup against what he saw as a grave Soviet threat, he made his points "clearer than truth."
In fact, the history of the Cold War offers many parallels to this pattern, few more enlightening or pertinent than the controversy over the "missile gap"--another case of a threat that everyone perceived as real and immediate (it even helped elect a president) but that, in this case, turned out to be completely false..... [Slate]
- On the WMD Trail
- Published: June 30, 2003
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- Section: Politics
- Writer: Eric Olsen
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Josh Marshall, who seems to agree with Kaplan on this issue:
...Sometimes politicians or military people believe so deeply that something is true (they just know it) that they start ignoring all the evidence that contradicts their belief and glomming on to every bit of data that confirms it.
Sometimes they're just so sure it's true that they'll even start fiddling with the facts a bit just to make sure you don't come away from the presentation with any doubts about how right they are. Zeal can become the hand-maiden of self-deception and even outright deception -- and like that hot place you've heard about the road to get there is paved with good intentions.
Chris Nelson, of The Nelson Report, has come up with the best word for it: faith-based intelligence analysis.
...
By and large, I think this is what happened. I also think there were at least a few cases where they bulldozed right over the line into simply telling the American public things they flat-out knew weren't true. But I'd say most of it was willful ignorance and in some cases a reckless disregard for the truth.
I've had people write in and say to me: if the administration was really lying about the WMD, why weren't they smart enough to plant some stuff for themselves to find and avoid the current embarrassment? And my answer is that I think they were as surprised as anyone to come up empty-handed. Really surprised. I think they knew the Niger uranium documents were bogus. But they figured there'd at least be plenty of chemicals and biologicals to go around once they got there.
In any case, what I think Kaplan was talking about was something quite different from the "usual vagaries of intelligence assessments."
Just speaking for myself, what I think it really comes down to is this: does it make it okay to have hoodwinked the American people, if you hoodwinked yourself in the process?
See the full post for the context (a dispute with Andrew Sullivan's interpretation of Kaplan's piece).
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And I don't have a problem with it. This is clearly one case where the policy was correct, even if (and it's a big if) the evidence wasn't complete.