It seems even to me to be almost mean-spirited to bring up the votes of candidates for the Democratic party’s nomination for President on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq yet again; surely, one single vote so long ago is not the most important issue in the upcoming election. However, a couple of weeks ago an event took place which placed front and center in my mind the importance of that vote.
That event was the August 3rd vote to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. The particular thing that set off this reaction in me was the explanation of Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia for his vote to amend FISA in accordance with the wishes of the Bush administration. Sen. Webb explained:
These measures were considered against the backdrop of heightened concerns from our nation's intelligence community abut the threat of international terrorism. The ramifications of the two amendments before us last night were not political. Instead they related to the urgent demands of national security. I chose to heed those warnings. We now have six months to work in earnest to bring full accountability to the process.
This distinction and the threats to national security were stated clearly by Admiral McConnell as well as four of the eight Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. These members, Senators Feinstein, Mikulski, Bayh, and Bill Nelson, have extensive experience on intelligence matters and are respected champions of civil rights and liberties. They chose to give significant weight and deference to the intelligence community on FISA reform, and so did I.
Why does this bring to mind the AUMF vote on Iraq? Because it is a continuation of the greatest fallacy that governments and their agents ever try to sell to their constituents, namely, that decisions are made based on "intelligence", or secret information which is not available to you and I, mere citizens in a Constitutional republic.
There was only one meaningful question regarding the FISA "reform"; did each legislator believe that the additional intelligence that might be collected beyond what would have been collected without said reform was of greater value than the risks of giving greater surveillance power to the military and intelligence wings of the executive branch. That is a call which is entirely based on judgment, and not any secret information possessed by the members of the Intelligence Committee.
But the claim that "the intelligence made me do it", or that decisions were made based on secret information is at the heart of the question of who should be our next President, and why the Authorization for the Use of Military Force in Iraq was such a terrible mistake on the part of those who supported it. And that is for a very simple reason: because intelligence is of negligible strategic value in all cases, and the decisions made by the President and Congress are exclusively strategic decisions.
While there were, as we all know, any number and variety of falsehoods and errors which led to the Iraq War, the most glaring is often the most overlooked. The biggest mistake was not in thinking that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or ties to al-Qaeda, or that the war would be easy and democracy would flourish. The most glaring error in the run-up to the Iraq war was the assumption shared by most, including myself, that Iraq under Saddam Hussein intended to harm the United States. That was the essential question. Because if they did intend to harm the United States, then and only then did the other questions matter. The possession of WMD by Iraq only mattered if they intended to use them against the United States. Whether Iraqi intelligence was meeting with al-Qaeda representatives only mattered if Iraq and its intelligence agencies shared al-Qaeda’s intentions to harm us.
Intelligence could not answer those questions. Intelligence could only tell us (and our ‘leaders’) whether the meetings might have taken place, or whether the weapons might exist. They could say nothing about what Iraq may have intended to do if they had those weapons or those connections. And indeed, we have since learned that while Saddam Hussein had no love for the United States, he had neither the intention nor the capability to attack us in the near or intermediate future.
In the run up to the AUMF vote in Congress, our representatives heard a lot of intelligence reports (although, few delved into it deeply, by for example reading the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq). But the fundamental question was one they had to answer independent of the intelligence. That question was whether or not in their judgment Iraq posed a threat to the United States. Everything else had to flow out of that single judgment call. Once any legislator decided that Iraq was a threat, that was the basis for evaluating everything else. Once any legislator decided that Iraq was not a threat, none of the intelligence about weapons or al-Qaeda meetings mattered.
Sadly, so far it seems that the candidates for President don’t understand this, or won’t tell us because they fear we will not understand. In his statement accepting responsibility for his mistaken vote on the AUMF, John Edwards points to the intelligence. "The argument for going to war with Iraq was based on intelligence that we now know was inaccurate. The information the American people were hearing from the president -- and that I was being given by our intelligence community -- wasn't the whole story. Had I known this at the time, I never would have voted for this war." Joe Biden has expressed similar contrition, as has Chris Dodd while Hillary Clinton has said "Based on the information that we have today, Congress never would have been asked to give the president authority to use force against Iraq." But all of them have avoided what I consider the real question.
To have erred in judgment is not a disqualified for the role of President. But to deny voters understanding of how they will judge differently is a significant problem. The only means for any of these representatives to have been "taken in" by false intelligence is for them to have already made an error in judgment regarding the threat to the United States posed by Iraq. We need to know how these candidates have learned from that mistake, and how they will put themselves beyond the manipulations and vagaries of intelligence in the future. Intelligence is usually wrong, as it was in Vietnam, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, for Operation Barbarossa and all the way back to Cornwallis at Yorktown. If there is one sure bet for the next President of the United States, it is that they will be confronted yet again with incorrect intelligence.
The improvement of their judgment before the intelligence arrives is what we need to know from the candidates about their lessons from the Iraq War Resolution.
(To attempt to preclude various accusations or questions, I’ll let everyone know that I am not currently a supporter of any of the candidates for President, nor in the employ of any campaign. If the primary were held today, I would probably vote for Gravel, Kucinich, or Obama, in that order. If the general election were held today, I would probably vote for whoever was the Democratic nominee.)