Bush trusted his experts who blew it and some courageous soldiers and civilians died, but so did lots of terrorists; many experienced freedom for the first time

That’s the bumper-sticker I want!

This is relatively old news, but gross misconceptions about the Iraq War continue to pervade the public discourse (primarily on the left, although in fairness the right doesn’t appear to know how to counter the misconceptions effectively). Plus, during the election I believe that it was an area where McCain allowed himself to be tied to President Bush unnecessarily, thus benefiting Obama.

It appears to me that the mantra “Bush lied, people died” has become the common wisdom on the Left and has become the main argument for withdrawing troops immediately from the region. (Note:what passes for truth on the Left generally amounts to a pithy statement about a complicated issue that can fit onto a bumper sticker).

“Bush lied…”

Webster’s dictionary defines a lie as

an assertion of something known or believed by the speaker to be untrue with intent to deceive.

Thus, in order for the “Bush lied” part of the maxim to be true, one of two things must be true:

1. Bush knew absolutely that Saddam did not have WMD

2. Bush believed it highly likely that Saddam did not have WMD

Now, the judgment that Saddam had WMD hung on several points (at least those that are unclassified):

1. The human source known as Curveball, an Iraqi who claimed (falsely as it turns out) to have inside knowledge of Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons operations. His primary claim was that Saddam had reconstituted his chemical/biological weapons program via mobile facilities.

2. Satellite photos that indicated the presence of heavy-duty flatbed trucks, forklifts (necessary for transporting chemical weapons) and decontamination trailers (in case of emergency) at Al-Musayib, known prior to Operation Desert Storm to have been a chemical weapons facility.

3.The fact that the intelligence community had failed to accurately assess Saddam’s chemical, biological and nuclear programs (which proved to be extensive) prior to the Persian Gulf War in 1991. As the intelligence community had failed to accurately assess his weapons programs previously, analysts overcompensated and made leaps of faith that should not have been made.

4. Saddam relied on various deception campaigns (including the expulsion of UN weapons inspectors). He wanted the West to believe that he had WMD. Obviously at the time, the West did not know that they were deception campaigns, but hindsight is 20/20. (Note: the motive for these deception campaigns is still unclear. In the collective Western mind it makes no sense to fake that you have WMD when the world’s superpower says that it will invade your country and kill you if you have WMD, but clearly Saddam’s decision-making calculus was different. He called our bluff, thinking we would not invade, and it didn’t work out in his favor. We misread him and he misread us. Most believe that Saddam wanted the West to believe he had WMD because he wanted Iran (and his own people) to believe that he had WMD as a deterrent to a threat on his power and as a status symbol.)

None of this is meant to excuse the US Intelligence Community or President Bush from relying on false intelligence reports to invade Iraq in 2003. The intelligence community (and the intelligence communities of nearly every other country in the world) simply blew it. The “slam dunk” clanged embarrassingly off the back of the rim. However, relying on the experts who turned out to be wrong does not amount to “Bush lied.” Ultimately, it is the President who makes decisions, so the responsibility does lie as his feet, but it does not amount to lying as he had no reason to believe that his experts (and those of all his allies) were wrong. His experts simply got it wrong. [As an aside, this amounts to an intelligence error - incorrectly assessing something to be true when it is false - and not an intelligence failure - failing to adequately warn or prepare the executive for a situation that occurred.] Similar to when FDR’s experts failed to alert him to the possibility of a Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, when Truman’s experts failed to anticipate that the Chinese would intervene on behalf of North Korea, or when Kennedy’s experts told him, two days prior to the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba, that the Soviets would never attempt to place missiles in Cuba. (Note that all three examples are of Democratic administrations, two of which caused mass casualties and one brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, yet these three presidents are never reviled as “the worst President ever.”  On the contrary, the first two are widely considered to be in the top ten and JFK is held up by the liberal establishment as a great man and wonderful leader, an agent of change if you will.)

Some make the argument that the Bush administration pressured the intelligence community into giving them the answer they wanted to hear, namely that Saddam had WMD. This is a joke.

1.) This would also mean that the intelligence communities of Britain, France, Germany, and Israel (among others) were also pressured to provide “the right answer” to the Bush administration. Seeing as they did not want the US to invade Iraq (and at least Britain provided troops as well), why would they do that? You’d have to believe in really large conspiracy theories (such as “blood for oil” to believe this.

2.) What respectable person in their right mind knowingly distorts the truth simply because they are nagged about it? Just because a question is asked often doesn’t mean that the answer should change if the truth remains the same. (eg. is Churchill dead? Yes. Is Churchill dead? Yes. Is Churchill dead? Yes. Is Churchill dead? No, he’s actually living in my attic.) It’s absurd. Analysts aren’t teenagers at a party bowing to peer pressure to smoke pot, they’re professionals who make these sorts of difficult judgments for a living. Do they have their own biases? Certainly. Do they personally favor policy decisions over others? I’m sure they do. But do they deliberately distort the truth because the President asks them if they’re sure about a particular issue? No.

Other issues to address:

“The war is unjust…”

While there are additional reasons, for the basic reason that it’s never morally wrong to depose of an authoritarian leader who slaughters his own people, I believe the Iraq War is just. Now, one can make the argument that the Iraq War is imprudent, but making the argument that God’s idea of justice would somehow side with Saddam is laughable.

“The US should withdrawal immediately…”

The American people generally did not turn against the war until it realized that it would not be an easy victory and that if Saddam didn’t have WMD, they didn’t know why we were fighting it (a communication/leadership failure on the part of the administration). Well, the US should not withdraw troops immediately simply because the war is difficult or because the President relied on faulty intelligence. The reason the US invaded Iraq was to depose of Saddam Hussein who (mistakenly) was believed to have WMD that not only would have destabilized the region, but that he would give (or threaten to give) to non-state actors to use against the United States. Now, as it turns out, that judgment was incorrect; however, now that we’ve deposed Saddam, it would be morally unethical to just up and leave because its easier for us to do it that way. The fact that we have to stay and clean up the mess has nothing to do with the fact that Saddam didn’t have WMD.

Consider a parable: The local police break down the door of a house in the neighborhood, storm into the residence and kill the husband/father as he tries to escape, setting the house ablaze in the process. The police were after the man because they believed that he was the ringleader of a drug cartel. This turned out to be false upon subsequent analysis, but it was discovered that the husband/father had not only beaten his wife over a period of twenty-five years, but that he had also sexually abused their children, their neighbor’s children and had threatened all those in the neighborhood with violence, even killing some in order to establish his authority. Legally, the actions of the police were probably wrong as their judgment (or probable cause) for obtaining the warrant was incorrect. But morally, it’s hard to fault the police as they did away with a horrible man. Nonetheless, the police cannot simply leave the wife and children to fend for themselves because the man they killed (while deplorable) was not the ringleader of the drug cartel as they had initially suspected. That would be morally reprehensible. The right thing to do is for the police to buy the family a new home and seek counseling for the wife and the children while ensuring that the neighborhood is safe and stable enough to avoid becoming a target of nearby neighborhood gangs.

“It wasn’t prudent for the US to invade Iraq…”

Now, that’s an argument with some merit that should be discussed in detail by the American public and by the country’s leaders. Most would agree that this question, too, has nothing to do with whether or not troops should remain in Iraq until the situation is fixed. (If you accidentally break a window under false pretenses, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t stay to fix the window.) Sadly, this is not the debate that rages in our society today, nor is it the debate that the presidential candidates had on the campaign trail or during the debates. Essentially, the debates devolved to:

Obama: the war was a mistake (for unspecified reasons - presumably either because Bush lied or because it was a war for oil or because Americans are capitalists and capitalists are always imperialists or cynically because it was the message that won him the primary) and we should withdraw immediately, apologizing to anyone within earshot that we’re a terrible nation filled with mean-spirited, angry, bitter people who can’t speak languages other than English.

McCain: the war was not a mistake, because the Iraqi people are now free. It was going poorly until I supported the surge. We should stay there until the job is finished. (However, this completely bypasses what makes Americans the most upset: we entered the war based on faulty intelligence.)

The winning debate answer for McCain: you’re right, we relied on faulty intelligence to invade Iraq (thereby distancing himself from Bush) and that was a mistake [although as an aside, one could make other arguments to support an invasion of Iraq - violating UN resolutions, etc]; however, this does not change the fact that we need to win the war now that it has begun. However, this proves (as does 9/11 and other intelligence gaffes of the past twenty years) that our intelligence system needs to be reformed. Namely, we need to place more emphasis on human intelligence. As Americans, we’ve grown spoiled, thinking that we can keep peace and solve all problems without getting our hands dirty by engaging in the shadowy world of espionage. Some have gotten intellectually lazy, relying on wishful-thinking that the United Nations, a morally bankrupt, feckless organization that can’t and often doesn’t enforce its own resolutions, is the answer to all the world’s problems. Nevertheless, Bin Laden & Co. now view Iraq as the primary front against the free world and we must view it that way as well. We cannot leave, thus handing the war to the terrorists, simply because it did not go as smoothly as we planned and simply because it was not fought properly from the outset. We are a united country today because Lincoln refused to allow the South to secede, despite the fact that he mishandled the war (by appointing feckless generals like McClellan) for the first three years.

In sum: I am not advocating that war should never be questioned. But when questioned, it must be done so responsibly (not done so to undermine a particular policy while US troops are in the field) and the debate must focus on the right questions. “Bush lied, people died” is a ridiculous statement made by the ignorant and intellectually bereft who place a political party and ideology above their country’s best interests. It misinforms the (already ill-informed) American populace and distracts from the necessary debate: was it prudent for the US to use force (as opposed to a combination of other tools of tradecraft) to contain Saddam even if turned out that he had WMD?