I wrote recently about the perils of unfounded certainty.
Courtesy of the Guardian--always reliable for a spinless snippet--we have an example:
David Kay, the man who led the CIA's postwar effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has called on the Bush administration to "come clean with the American people" and admit it was wrong about the existence of the weapons.In an interview with the Guardian, Mr Kay said the administration's reluctance to make that admission was delaying essential reforms of US intelligence agencies, and further undermining its credibility at home and abroad.
This is not an occasion to hop up onto the desk and crow Bush Liiied! You may, however, do a small discreet jig in the corner and mumble quietly to yourself, if you are so inclined.
As I've noted previously, Mr. Kay himself believed that he would find much more than he did. This expectation was held by many other people at various times over the past decade, including UNSCOM's former chief inspector, Scott Ritter. The idea that there was intelligence which unequivocally claimed that Hussein did not have WMD, and that Bush deliberately lied about those findings, doesn't seem especially credible to me. Too many other disparate sources inside and outside of the global intelligence community expressed concern about Iraqi WMD for too many years prior to September 11. I would challenge anyone who claims otherwise to come up with the definitive intelligence that sufficiently outweighs all of those previous claims to the contrary.
There are three other possibilities. One: the intelligence was mistaken, and Hussein had, in fact, disposed of the bulk of his WMD after 1991. Two: the intelligence was not mistaken, but Hussein relocated his stockpiles prior to the beginning of the war. Three: the intelligence was not mistaken, and there are WMD inside Iraq, but we haven't found them yet.
The problem is that, no matter which of those three possibilities is true, the Bush administration is behaving as though they are certain of something that is, to all outside observers, quite uncertain. Their behavior is that of an administration that knows something: that, for example, Iraq's WMD stockpiles were shipped off to Syria, or that the WMD are still in-country, hidden somewhere. But I don't believe that's what they know, and they're doing a lousy job of explaining themselves.
In keeping with the cultural tendency, the Bush administration has equated uncertainty with vulnerability.
When confronting a man such as Hussein, with his megalomania, his historical appetite for expansion, and his murderous nature, it is prudent to err on the side of caution. On September 11, we witnessed Islamic terrorists make use of any means available to strike at the heart of our greatest city and our nation's capital. Iraq, ostensibly secular, lies well within the boundaries of the world in which those terrorists moved and thrived. But, then, so does Pakistan, to the point of having an intelligence service rife with Muslim fundamentalists.
And Pakistan has nuclear weapons.
So, why Iraq, and not Pakistan? Isn't the Big Fear--that terrorists would acquire WMD for use in the U.S.--far more likely in a country that already has nuclear weapons, as opposed to one that doesn't now but might someday?
The Big Fear was never the sole reason for American intervention in Iraq. Unfortunately, gaining the shimmering golden seal of UN approval so coveted by the internationalists required that emphasis, because the UN resolutions of which Hussein was in flagrant and repeated violation concerned the proven disposition of his WMD stockpiles. As Scott Ritter wrote in 1998:
Since Saddam has blocked the inspectors from conducting any meaningful information- gathering for the past four months, the targets of their "surprise" inspections will most likely be drawn from a list of suspicious sites dating to last summer. Today, surely, those facilities will be empty, their contents having been moved to secret locations elsewhere. In effect, Saddam will have managed to have his cake and eat it too. He will have prevented the inspectors from gathering any real evidence against him, while at the same time appearing to give them unfettered access to sensitive sites.
The consequences of falling for this deception, Ritter warned, would be UNSCOM's mistaken bestowal of a "clean bill of health" upon Iraq, and the consequences of that would be even worse:
The Baghdad regime--strengthened by having retained the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction and psychologically fortified by having outlasted the world's sole remaining superpower--will rapidly restore its internal and regional constituencies and reemerge as a force to be reckoned with. Since his defeat in the Gulf war, Saddam has built up eight years' worth of resentment and frustration that can only be released through renewed efforts at territorial expansion through armed aggression and blackmail, both economic and military.
America does not have the history with Pakistan that it does with Iraq. The first Gulf War never really ended, because Hussein never fully abided by the agreements that ended the conflict, and the country remained a zone of low intensity conflict for the next decade. While Pervez Musharraf's ideas about what constitutes democracy may not precisely align with ours, they're much closer than Hussein's. Within days of September 11, canny Musharraf threw in his lot with America's, at great political and personal risk to himself, co-operating with our efforts in Afghanistan and, later, working with us to secure Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. The small, anonymous denial of this security arrangement, issued to the Islamic Republic News Agency, only serves to illustrate the delicate balance Musharraf is striking between his relationships with America and the extremist elements by which he is surrounded. We get to secure Pakistan's nuclear arsenal to our satisfaction, and in return he gets to deny that arrangement and pardon A.Q. Khan to placate the radicals. But make no mistake: for the rest of his natural life, Khan won't be able to eat a fig without American intelligence knowing how many seeds were in it.
In other words, Musharraf is a reasonable person. America is able to meet its security requirements with regard to Pakistan through reasonable means. Deals and arrangements can and have been made. Is there risk involved? Certainly. But the total risk has been considerably lessened.
Hussein, on the other hand, is a most troublesome and unreasonable fellow. There was no question of even verifying the existence or non-existence of his WMD arsenal, let alone assisting with securing it. That's the micro-perspective.
The macro-perspective involves the entirety of the Arabic Muslim community and its relation to American security interests, and it is this relationship that so many reflexive Bush-foes and anti-war activists do not accept--so much so that the administration itself relies heavily on idealistic rhetoric of the "freedom-loving people of Iraq" sort, and avoids blunt, pragmatic discussions of American self-interest that would redefine the public debate if begun in earnest.
Ironically, national self-interest is often anathema in our Boomer-dominated culture of dedicated personal self-interest. Writing in Paris, Nidra Poller described this oh-so-European distaste:
This, it seems, is their new Maginot line: the sneer of hatred. Hand in hand with the government and the intellectual classes, the French media are channeling the national dismay over lost grandeur into contempt for America. Watch these suave Europeans, snickering to themselves because American soldiers are getting killed in Iraq. Is that (they sneer) any way to risk your life? Go on a crusade to fight incurable disease, cross in front of a moving car, smoke a cigarette. But fight to defend your own country? It’s indecent!
It is not in our national self-interest to allow the Arab Muslim countries to remain the oppressed, impoverished dictatorships which they have been since their former European colonial masters drew their borders on a map. At the same time, neither is it in our interest to pretend that we are eagles of freedom, fighting to establish democracy out of grand altruism...this is simply not so. We must undertake risky ventures in that region, and not in other, equally poor or oppressed areas of the world, for the simple reason that that's where our enemies are. That's where they're bred, trained, and supported.
It is where the relief of oppression intersects with our own interests that we act, and serving those interests does not invalidate the relief, or render continued oppression preferable to action.
This is what the Bush administration knows, but because of the uncertainty/vulnerability equation, they are compelled to publicly ignore the glaring intelligence failures. The Vulcan mindset of Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney and others regards outright admission of error as an unnecessary demonstration of uncertainty and, hence, a vulnerability. To those outside the White House bubble, this looks like simple prevarication. It causes doubt in Bush's supporters and reinforces the beliefs of his detractors.
This attitude is a mistake, and is, unfortunately, endemic among that peculiar breed of human known as the Politician. The Politician fears the judgement of the People, and cannot bring itself to be completely forthright. This is what crippled the Clinton presidency. The Politician tends to believe that leadership requires the appearance of inerrancy in all things, and consistently regards silence in the face of error as a sort of magical rite that will cause the People to be blinded to its existence.
But what the People need to hear is not inerrancy, but firm and reasonable commitment to the valid principles of national self-interest. Not absolutist declarations of perfect American righteousness, but sensible presentations of risks and rewards.
It's OK to be mistaken, Mr. President...but tell us why it was still worth it.
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[Nidra Poller's essay via Twisted Spinster]
