|
|
|
|
11/16/03 Interpreting Intelligence In their attempt to argue that the Bush administration was guilty of "sexing up" the intelligence, distorting what we really knew to juice up support for an unjust war on an innocent Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq, liberal pundits and "journalists" seize upon current and former CIA analysts and appointees who agree with some portion or another of their argument, as though these are objective sources of information. Former political appointees are obviously not objective: they came to office as clients of one or another political party, and they participated in policies that might be at odds with those of any current administration. Even career CIA analysts, who are not subject to political appointment, can be highly political people. Many might be partisan Democrats, just as angry that Bush is in office as all those liberals who say he is an illegitimate president. But if we stipulate for the sake of argument that none of the analysts on either side are guilty of consciously overestimating or underestimating any particular threat, the political philosophy of each is likely to impact conclusions. One of the main differences between ideological conservatives and ideological liberals is in the way they conceive of patriotism. Conservatives, like me, criticize the patriotism of liberals because they defend the points of view of people who are avowed enemies of the United States; it was liberals, in the wake of 9-11, who asked what we had done to provoke such anger in the Muslim world. Liberals, on the other hand, categorize conservative patriotism as jingoism that blinds us to the rights of others. The fact that I take a side in this debate still allows me to draw this objective conclusion: liberals think we should be more willing to give our enemies the benefit of the doubt than conservatives do. A CIA analyst who happens to be a liberal is going to be more sympathetic to the point of view of, say, a Hans Blix, than to, say, a George W. Bush. Furthermore, when it comes time to construct the documents that carry the imprimatur of the CIA, if the liberal analysts perceive that their less confident conclusions are being overwhelmed, they will naturally feel that some force is at work to diminish the value of their work, and some will take that personally. We all want to be right, and there is a tendency to suspect that people with whom we disagree are disingenuous or foolish. The conclusion that we can draw, therefore, from the fact that some CIA analysts thought we drew excessively confident conclusions about the state of Hussein's WMD prior to going to war is that there was disagreement then, and continues to be disagreement, about what the evidence justifies. That is the nature of analysis, and does not indicate any deficiency of method or even of results. The fact is that, with all the facts on the table, many conservatives see plenty of evidence today that justifies the conclusions that were drawn and argued prior to the war, because, as the administration maintained, Saddam Hussein was nowhere near compliance with U.N. Security Council resolutions, and Blix's inspections were unlikely ever to uncover any smoking gun to demonstrate it to the satisfaction of liberals who didn't really want to go to war. Many liberals see evidence that one of the conclusions--that Hussein had WMD ready to deploy--must be false because it hasn't yet been confirmed. Of course, this is an argument from silence that could be refuted at any moment, as we go through hundreds of football-field-sized ammunition dumps that have not yet been searched. Even if it is never confirmed, it is indisputably the case that the behavior of the Hussein regime prior to the war, by refusing to supply any credible evidence that weapons we know he had years ago had been destroyed or dismantled, gave us no reason to conclude that he did not have them. In other words, if he had no WMD any more, he bluffed, and we called his bluff. That was the right thing to do, and nothing any CIA analyst can say will change that. Modified: 09/10/2004 |
|
|
All Original Content (C) 2003, 2004, 2005 SoothSeeker.Com
SoothSeeker Welcomes your Comments at letters@soothseeker.com Report problems to webmaster@soothseeker.com
Hits on this site:
|