Cherry Picking

Last week Paul R. Pillar accused the Bush Administration of cherry picking the evidence to justify the decision to invade Iraq. 

"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."

"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.

Remarkable assertions there.  Translation:  Our information was wrong but Bush should have relied on it anyway.  Leave it to the Post to compose an news piece indicting Bush because he didn't.  Why are we supposed to consider it a fault that Bush would use intelligence that supported a decision to invade Iraq, particularly when, according to Mr. Pillar, there wasn't any reliable information to contradict it? 

In the press's ongoing war with the Bush Administration there are presumptions. First, the case is closed on the question of Iraq's WMD capabilities.  It's a necessary presumption for the accusations such as those by Pillar to induce any talk of Administration "scandals".  Even though the Post and the rest of the mainstream press are so happy to ignore it, the fact is not everyone agrees that the case on Iraq's WMD is closed.

The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed.

The Iraqi general, Georges Sada, makes the charges in a new book, "Saddam's Secrets," released this week. He detailed the transfers in an interview yesterday with The New York Sun.

"There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands," Mr. Sada said. "I am confident they were taken over."

Mr. Sada's comments come just more than a month after Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam "transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria."

In another of the press's presumptions, Saddam Hussein's connections to terrorist organizations is a settled question.  The verdict according to the Post:  There weren't any.  Once again, we find there are dissenting views, and once again we find the mainstream press would prefer to ignore them.

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

That information comes from only a fraction of the documents captured in Iraq, with a mountain of evidence yet to be analyzed.  If the case on Saddam Hussein's connection to terrorism is anywhere close to being settled, the answer would have to be yes, there were connections. 

But the most important piece missing from this picture presented by the Post is the possibility that there might be an overarching strategy behind Administration initiatives in the Middle East.  As Iraqi democracy and stability move ever closer to reality, so do the chances for political reform in the greater Middle East.  Michael Scott Doran, former Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, made this argument before the invasion of Iraq went forward. 

Summary:  Many critics argue that the Bush administration should put off a showdown with Saddam Hussein and focus instead on achieving a breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But they fail to understand that although Palestine is central to the symbolism of Arab politics, it is actually marginal to its substance. Now, as in 1991, if a road to a calmer situation in Palestine does in fact exist, it runs through Baghdad.

From time to time the President mentions the spread of liberty, but again there is a presumption.  Wisdom at the Post says any attempt at reform in the Middle East will anger the Muslim extremist.  Popular fiction had it that Bush would become al Qaeda's most effective recruiter.  But even Mr. Pillar concedes that this hasn't happened.

The fight against Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda, the principal terrorist menace to U.S. interests since the mid-1990s, has come a long way. The disciplined, centralized organization that carried out the September 11 attacks is no more. Most of the group's senior and midlevel leaders are either incarcerated or dead, while the majority of those still at large are on the run and focused at least as much on survival as on offensive operations. Bin Laden and his senior deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, have survived to this point but have been kept on the run and in hiding, impairing their command and control of what remains of the organization.

From it's absurd premise (we were dead wrong but Bush should have listened to us anyway) the Post article comes to an even more absurd conclusion.  Pillar would like the CIA to have had more decision making authority.

Pillar suggests that the CIA and other intelligence agencies, now under Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte, remain within the executive branch but "be given greater independence."

The model he cites is the Federal Reserve, overseen by governors who serve fixed terms. That, he said, would reduce "both the politicization of the intelligence community's own work and the public misuse of intelligence by policymakers."

What an idea!  The crew that sent Joe Wilson off to Africa to drink tea should be granted political autonomy.  If I'm reading this article correctly, the only way the CIA's intelligence could have been misused is if somebody put some reliance on it.  Fortunately, as Mr. Pillar admits, nobody did.