Stuart Buck is right about how to react to the whole Iraq WMD report stuff, but I would go farther. Among many other things, we’re faced here not with the question of accountability for intelligence failures, but of responsibility for acting in the face of imperfect information. When choosing a President, we want someone who will make the best possible decision in a circumstance when there is sketchy, imperfect information. Intelligence information is always sketchy; it is extremely rare that you have a smoking gun, Adelai Stevenson-style. Usually, you’ve got hints of this, a grainy photo of that, and so on. In such a circumstance, we could take the more studious route, and hold off to await further information before acting. Or we could act on the basis of imperfect information. Both options are risky. In the case of Iraq, as Buck points out, everyone thought at the time that the information justified action—everyone; John Kerry; Europe; everyone. Not acting on the basis of the information we had might have turned out okay. On the other hand, it might not have. And if it had not, the President would have been at least as guilty of negligence as the Clinton administration, which is known to have missed opportunities to strike against terrorists.
That the intelligence turns out to be faulty is therefore a fine argument for improving our intelligence apparatus, but is not a good argument that Bush was wrong in acting. The question is how we ought to act in the face of information which is sketchy. And the problem is, if we repudiate the Bush answer to that, and get Kerry instead, we will create an incentive for all future presidents to avoid acting in the face of imperfect information. Presidents will say “I better not act on such sketchy info, because Bush got canned for it.” That’s not necessarily a bad thing, certainly! But in this war, when we are unlikely to get better quality intelligence, I think we need to take care not to teach future presidents timidity in these situations.
Again, I’m not saying that it’s always or even usually a good idea to engage war on the basis of sketchy information. But the case for war against Iraq was justified not just on the basis of this information, but on the fact that Saddam Hussein, a sworn enemy of the United States, was himself a terrorist leader, whether or not he had any connection to Al Quaeda specifically. Nobody denies that he paid for suicide bombers in Israel, that he launched missiles at Israel, that he gassed the Kurds, that he bombed Bush the Elder’s plane, and so on. Also, Hussein was a tyrant who was violating the rights of the people in Iraq. Finally, Hussein lacked powerful Arab support, so that an attack against him was unlikely to unite the Arab world against the United States—something we’re trying hard to avoid here. When you add these things together, the reasonable move was to attack. (Yes, war is a bad thing which ends up killing people. But we have to think about these things—not feel about them.)
As a lawyer, I’m often looking at the precedent something will set. If we set a precedent here that says that Presidents should hesitate to attack even our sworn enemies when confronted with imperfect information, then we are, as Bush says, going back to a September 10th mentality.
Again, the question is not as much whether, knowing what we know now, Iraq was a good idea. The question is what sort of decisions we should make when we don’t know very much—should we wait, and run the risk of letting a disastrous terrorist attack occur—or should we take the risk of acting on imperfect information? In the case of Iraq, the President made the right decision because, in addition to the imperfect information, we at least knew that we would not be doing a bad thing getting rid of Hussein. (Nothing of what I’ve said justifies or condemns the policy with regard to Iraq post-Hussein, of course.) The question is not whether war is a good thing or a bad thing. The question is not whether the Vice President is part of an evil capitalist conspiracy to exploit the proletarians in Iraq. The question is not even whether Bush’s domestic policies are good for the country, which they almost invariably are not. The question is what sort of mentality should we have toward undeniably dangerous states in the future. The answer to that, I think, is that we should be willing to attack even on the basis of imperfect information regarding a potential threat.
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