Intelligence that serves to deceive
Recently George Tenet announced to the world the official perceptions on the failures of Iraqi intelligence. In general, I cannot fault the `intelligence community.' Intelligence does not make decisions; it serves to reinforce them.
The issue at hand is the action we took on the intelligence we received. With double-speak statements like this one:
Did these strands of information weave into a perfect picture? Could they answer every question? No, far from it. But taken together, this information provided a solid basis on which to estimate whether Iraq did or did not have weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them.
We can only conclude that, despite Tenet's best efforts to spin, the picture was not clear enough to wage unilateral warfare on a sovereign nation. It is unfortunate that we are being drawn into a catfight over the wrong issue. The fault was not with the intelligence we had - two presidents operated under the same intelligence and both had strong suspicions that Iraq was constructing weapons; the issue was the reaction to that information. This is the type of information you lob cruise missiles with, dispatch black ops teams, or force your diplomat to commit industrial sabotage to steal a few grain squares. It is not the type of information that can be used as a banner to launch warfare under and it is certainly obvious that this is NOT the type of information you try to sell as fact to the American people.
It is hard to imagine that Iraq posed any threat to the United States and indeed, according to Tenet's own admission there never was an `immediate threat.' (indeed, the phrase immediate threat was supposedly never uttered in those words in response to Iraq's WMD programs... so don't mince words you no-good liberal scum). The intelligence, in fact, indicated that these weapons were only a threat to the neighboring region - the Middle East. I question why American resources were used against this nation which seemed to be more interested in pretending to be a threat to its neighbors to keep them away then with dispensing weapons to terrorists in lieu of another even more menacing nation not too far from our own.
We have also found that Iraq had plans and advanced design work for a liquid-propellant missile with ranges of up to 1,000 kilometers; activity that Iraq did not report to the U.N. and which could have placed large portions of the Middle East in jeopardy.
My provisional bottom line today: We detected the development of prohibited and undeclared unmanned aerial vehicles. But the jury is still out on whether Iraq intended to use its newer, smaller unmanned aerial vehicle to deliver biological weapons.
Tenet often `bottom lined' his synopses for us while he was running off at the mouth regarding things we knew and have been espousing for the past 2 years and summarized what can only be called an obvious truth:
It also appears that Iraq had the infrastructure and the talent to resume production, but we have yet to find that it actually did so, nor have we found weapons.
No one doubted Iraq still had the men and the paperwork and the want to continue building these bombs, everyone knew he was crazy and cruel and would return to whatever vendetta he was left with as soon as he was allowed to rest. It is why I agreed with forced UN inspections and why I agreed with continued embargoes. Nevertheless, the fact is we engaged in war, real live war with now real dead people, all while we `weren't entirely sure.'
It is a certainty the 500 dead Americans are not coming back...