elucidator said:
By what process are they supposed to determine that? Divination?
The national intelligence estimate is the document that is supposed to guide policymakers. The Iraq dossier has key conclusions that Iraq was seeking to build nuclear weapons, and would have one within the decade. The intelligence community in the U.S. estimated that Iraq could rapidly manufacture a number of biological weapons, and very likely had large quantities of deadly chemical weapons like Vx. That document IS the determination of whether there is a threat or not - it contains 90 pages of supporting evidence which has not been declassified.
BTW, that document is not all supportive of the President’s assertions. They put some pretty big error bars around the ‘purchase of uranium from Africa’ angle, and the State Department added a note calling the claims ‘dubious’. The document also says there is no hard evidence that Saddam had or was planning to provide weapons to terrorists.
But by and large, it does make a compelling case for Iraq as a real threat to the security of the world. There is a case for war in there - or rather, there is a case for threatening war if Iraq didn’t change its ways. Iraq didn’t, so war resulted.
What I hope any rational reader would conclude, however, was that this was no conspiracy to fake up a reason to go to war in order to benefit someone’s rich oil buddies. Were some claims over-stated? Possibly. We don’t know for sure, because the British have their own intelligence, and it emphases different things.
And intelligence is not a precise science. All estimates are given with a confidence interval. I note that the reporters of the story above seem to misunderstand what that means - when a report says, “we have low confidence in this conclusion”, they seemed to think that means that someone believes the conclusion is wrong. In fact, ‘low confidence’ simply means that the accuracy of the judgement us subject to more unknowns.
My conclusions so far: Bush did not lie. Tony Blair did not lie. Both were absolutely convinced that they were doing the right thing for their countries. There were no ulterior motives - this was not done to gain re-election, or to help out friends. Both men believe they are acting in the interests of their countries. They believe this fervently. They should be given the benefit of the doubt.
By shouting “Liar!”, and trying to make hay out of one sentence ina speech made long after the authorization for war was already given overwhelmingly by congress (and which was not mentioned again in subsequent arguments), and calling for impeachment, the Democrats are damaging themselves. They are going to wind up looking like they are playing politics with national security, and as being fundamentally unserious.
Especially after the Bush administration finishes making their case. I warned about overreaching in calling out Bush a couple of months ago - before you start levelling very serious charges, you’d better be sure they are going to stick. My feeling is that the Bush administration is going to wind up releasing a flurry of information at some point that is going to cut the Democrats off at the knees.
