The Buck Stops Here: WMDs

Asking if the recent finding that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction retroactively affects the justification for the war, The Buck Stops Here points out

No matter how many times people try to pretend that it was only Bush who thought Iraq had winds, nearly everyone thought that at the time. Kerry repeatedly said so, as did numerous other Democrats. Israel thought so, as did Britain, France, Jordan, Egypt, and more. You can't judge the legitimacy of a decision by information that you learn only in retrospect.

Obviously, this is correct. Before the Iraq war, just about everyone seemed to agree that Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. Heck, even I agreed. The president has tried to use this fact to support his decision to go to war. But Stuart misses a couple of things in making this argument.

First of all, why did so many believe it? They didn't have access to intelligence data. (Well, members of Congress did, and they chose to not bother reading it. But I've already commented on that.) Only the president did, and the rest of us chose to believe the president. We trusted him to make an accurate assessment of the information he had, and to report it accurately. This trust, of course, was misplaced. He made a complete mess assessing the information, and exaggerated it to his own purposes when reporting to the public what had been found.

The second point, and this will connect back to the first, is that not everyone did believe it. The weapons inspectors sent by the UN to find these stockpiles Bush was claiming were finding nothing. The conclusion that there were no WMDs in Iraq is not new. The Hans Blix and his team were demonstrating this before the war even began. So this is not a retroactive repudiation of the war. The administration's case for war was being undermined and destroyed before the first bomb even fell. Bush just ignored it. He knew the truth, and anyone who came up with facts contrary to his vision were wrong, or were dupes of Hussein.

Sooner or later, beliefs have to give way to observable facts. Regardless of how strongly one believes intelligence that Iraq had stockpiles of WMDs, one cannot simply dismiss the complete absence of any support from inspections. I can believe there is $1 million in a bag in some locker, but if person after person looks into that locker and finds nothing, how stupid would I have to be to continue insisting the money is there? Bush made a mess assessing the intelligence because he's the guy who continues insisting the money is in the locker. He would not allow facts to get in the way of his beliefs. Our trust in President Bush was misplaced because he lacked the imagination to step beyond his beliefs and look at facts.

The president wants to make his decisiveness a point in his favor for the election. The question is, do we want a president who is so decisive that not even facts will dissuade him from his course of action? The president ignored intelligence information that contradicted his conclusions. (Witness the infamous aluminum tubes that CIA said were not for nuclear reactors. British intelligence said otherwise. The president decided CIA was obviously wrong, because he knew Iraq was pursuing a nuclear program. Whatever supported that conclusion was solid intelligence, anything that contradicted it was questionable, or maybe even non-existent.) When inspectors investigated sites that US intelligence indicated were storehouses for WMDs and found nothing, he just ignored them. One even wonders if Bush dispensed with the inspections regime so quickly simply because they weren't finding anything, which undermined his argument.

Is this how we want a president to make far reaching decisions? Stuart says, "You can't judge the legitimacy of a decision by information that you learn only in retrospect." I agree. But you can judge the legitimacy of a decision by information you had at hand at the time, and that information has always been that Iraq did not have the WMDs Bush said over and over were there. There never was support for Bush's fantasies. Bush just never let that get in his way.