Were any fundamental neo-con philosophical assumptions changed by the Iraq debacle?

[jshore]

@Shodan

George Tenet, director of the CIA, disagrees with you. He said the case for Iraq possessing WMD was “a slam-dunk”.

Speaking of history, let’s go back and look at some of the news reports before the war in regards to what the intelligence community thought. For example, here is an article from Feb 1, 2003:

The Bush administration’s efforts to build a case for war against Iraq using intelligence to link it to Al Qaeda and the development of prohibited weapons has created friction within United States intelligence agencies, government officials said.

Some analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency have complained that senior administration officials have exaggerated the significance of some intelligence reports about Iraq, particularly about its possible links to terrorism, in order to strengthen their political argument for war, government officials said.

…

Interviews with administration officials revealed divisions between, on one side, the Pentagon and the National Security Council, which has become a clearinghouse for the evidence being prepared for Mr. Powell, and, on the other, the C.I.A. and, to some degree, the State Department and agencies like the F.B.I.

In the interviews, two officials, Paul D. Wolfowitz, deputy defense secretary, and Stephen J. Hadley, deputy national security adviser, were cited as being most eager to interpret evidence deemed murky by intelligence officials to show a clearer picture of Iraq’s involvement in illicit weapons programs and terrorism. Their bosses, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, have also pressed a hard line, officials said.

…

“It’s more than just skepticism,” said one official, describing the feelings of some analysts in the intelligence agencies. “I think there is also a sense of disappointment with the community’s leadership that they are not standing up for them at a time when the intelligence is obviously being politicized.”

Neither George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, nor the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, have publicly engaged in the debate about the evidence on Iraq in recent weeks, even as the Bush administration has intensified its efforts to build the case for a possible war.

And, if that is not enough for you, here are a few other pre-war stories in the N.Y. Times along the same lines.:

• October 9, 2002: Aides Split on Assessment of Iraq’s Plans
• October 24, 2002: A C.I.A. Rival; Pentagon Sets up Intelligence Unit
• March 23, 2003: C.I.A. Aides Feel Pressure in Preparing Iraqi Reports

On one thing we agree: There are people around here who are twisting themselves in knots trying to misunderstand history!

That Oct. 9 article is interesting in that it directly concerns this statement from SimonX “Even though the fear may have been “widespread” it was not shared by the American Intelligence Community. The intel Community judged that Iraq was unlikely to initiate and attack (directly or by proxy) on the US.” that prompted your statement about what Tenet said. Here is what some of what that article says:

At the heart of the debate, officials said, is the question of whether Iraq would give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists to attack the United States.

Seeking to mobilize public support for a possible military campaign to overthrow President Saddam Hussein, President Bush, in a speech on Monday in Cincinnati, cast Iraq as an imminent threat and asserted that Baghdad might seek to strike targets on American soil with the help of terrorist groups or by moving drones filled with germs or chemical weapons close to the United States.

“Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists,” Mr. Bush said. “Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraq regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.”

In the Tenet letter and in testimony to Congress, the C.I.A. took a less alarming view. The agency argued that Iraq’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons and build its arsenal of biological and chemical weapons were a serious concern that could encourage Iraqi “blackmail.”

But it also argued that Iraq would refrain from “the extreme step” of assisting terrorists in attacking the United States with weapons of mass destruction if Washington did not invade. Iraq, the agency suggested, has little reason to provoke Washington to march on Baghdad.

The agency also noted that using chemical or biological arms would undercut Iraq’s claims that it no longer has such weapons.

“Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or C.B.W. against the United States,” Mr. Tenet’s letter read, referring to chemical and biological weapons. “Should Saddam conclude that a U.S.-led attack could no longer be deterred, he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions.”

Intelligence specialists said the letter opened a window into a dispute that had been kept under wraps.

“The agency line is that it is basically unlikely that Iraq would give weapons of mass destruction to terrorists under most circumstances,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, who worked as a military analyst at the C.I.A. before serving as the top aide for Persian Gulf affairs on President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council. "It is not Iraq’s method of operation.

“The Bush administration is trying to make the case that Iraq might try to give weapons of mass destruction to Al Qaeda under current circumstances,” he added. “But what the agency is saying is that Saddam is likely to give such weapons to terrorists only under extreme circumstances, when he believes he is likely to be toppled.”

[jshore]

@jshore

• October 24, 2002: A C.I.A. Rival; Pentagon Sets up Intelligence Unit
• March 23, 2003: C.I.A. Aides Feel Pressure in Preparing Iraqi Reports

For the October 24th article:

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his senior advisers have assigned a small intelligence unit to search for information on Iraq’s hostile intentions or links to terrorists that the nation’s spy agencies may have overlooked, Pentagon officials said today.

Some officials say the creation of the team reflects frustration on the part of Mr. Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz and other senior officials that they are not receiving undiluted information on the capacities of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq and his suspected ties to terrorist organizations.

But officials who disagree say the top civilian policy makers are intent on politicizing intelligence to fit their hawkish views on Iraq.

In particular, many in the intelligence agencies disagree that Mr. Hussein can be directly linked to Osama bin Laden and his network, Al Qaeda, or that the two are likely to make common cause against the United States. In addition, the view among even some senior intelligence analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency is that Mr. Hussein is contained and is unlikely to unleash weapons of mass destruction unless he is attacked.

And, here is the March 23 article (technically, 4 days after the start of the war but “pre-war” in the sense that it doesn’t yet reflect any knowledge of what we have found in Iraq subsequent to the war):

The recent disclosure that reports claiming Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger were based partly on forged documents has renewed complaints among analysts at the C.I.A. about the way intelligence related to Iraq has been handled, several intelligence officials said.

Analysts at the agency said they had felt pressured to make their intelligence reports on Iraq conform to Bush administration policies.

For months, a few C.I.A. analysts have privately expressed concerns to colleagues and Congressional officials that they have faced pressure in writing intelligence reports to emphasize links between Saddam Hussein’s government and Al Qaeda.

As the White House contended that links between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda justified military action against Iraq, these analysts complained that reports on Iraq have attracted unusually intense scrutiny from senior policy makers within the Bush administration.

“A lot of analysts have been upset about the way the Iraq-Al Qaeda case has been handled,” said one intelligence official familiar with the debate.

…

Several analysts have told colleagues they have become so frustrated that they have considered leaving the agency, according to government officials who have talked with the analysts.

This all points to a central truth about this Administration: Rather than “management by fact,” it is what we might call “management by extreme desire” or “management by ideology.” In this Administration, ideology trumps facts every time.

[jshore]

@ElvisL1ves

jshore, we’ve also gone several times into why Saddam acted as if he had the stuff when he didn’t. We’ve always come down to his being a dictator who ruled by fear and intimidation, and therefore didn’t dare act otherwise. The warhawks (**Sam ** being as prominent as any here) had instead always insisted that he was simply insane, without minimally trying to understand what motivated him or even acknowledging that could be was even any method at all in his “madness”.

Yes, but my point is that at least in regard to his being uncooperative with inspectors in 1998, there is a much simpler explanation: He was uncooperative for the reason he said he was being, namely that he knew that the inspections regime was being used to spy on him. I am almost certain that such spying would be outside the inspections mandate and it is unrealistic to expect that any sort of leader, even a democratic one…let alone a tyrannical dictator, would be happy to have spies of foreign powers (who have engaged in hostilities with him before) freely roaming around his most sensitive military and industrial facilities.

[PatriotX]

Apparently, I’m not doing a very good job a communicating here.
Let me try again.

@SimonX

I’m looking for citation saying that the ‘primary reason’ we invaded Iraq was “that Iraq had not been cooperating with the inspection regime.”

@Shodan

This is the first two paragraphs of his speech.

This is a discussion Iraq’s failure to comply. That is true. However, nowhere does it elevate the problems of insufficient compliance over the potential threat posed by Iraq.
IIRC, on more than one occasion, the security of the US was presented as more important than UNSC resolutions.
It was the threat from rogue nations with powerful weapons that was the primary reason.
IIRC, several certain someones said that we didn’t need UN ‘permission’ (resolutions) to defend the US. This clearly is an example where the security of the US was prioritized ahead of UNSC resolutions.

@Shodan

…he had invaded Kuwait, planned assasination of former Presidents, and presented a threat to the region.

I asked, “Why is a foreign government’s compliance with UNSC resolutions a mater of vital national interest to the US?”
Your reply seems to imply (I’m not sure exactly) a discussion of these particular instances (rather than in general or on principal) that revolves around the threats to US security rather than around a US national necessity to enforce UN resolutions.
I think this is the implication because you mentioned aggressive military actions and used the word ‘threat’ specifically.
As far as I can tell, what you have just mentioned supports the idea that the potential threat was the reason that the enforcement of these specific resolutions was a matter of US interests.
This is support for my premise that the potential threat to the US from Iraq was prioritized ahead of the enforcment of UN resoutions.

@Shodan

Planning is part of an attempt. Meaningless distinction.

This an unusual conflation of terms. I’m not familiar with it Perhaps you could explain how planning to do something is so very similar to attempting to do so.
IIRC many member of the IC (pre-911) planned to take out UbL. However, there many more plans than attempts. The consequences of plans are not as great as the consequences of attempts. As previously pointed out, plans to invade Canada would be markedly different than an attempt to invade Canada.

Second, pertaining to Putin’s comments specifically, the plans that he cited were developed in response to the US intentions of invading Iraq.
It’s odd to argue that we should invade Iraq because Iraq will try to defend itself against the US.
YMMV.

@Shodan

No, against Israel, who is a long-standing ally of the US.

Just making sure we were both clear on that.

@Shodan

No it isn’t.

Yes it is.

@Shodan

Nope, never implied any such thing. You are seeing things that aren’t there.

If one conflates the threat from Iraqi WMD to the US with non-compliance with inspection regimes, then I can see how you would think so.
However, since it is possible for such a threat to the US to exist independently from such non-compliance, and since it is possible for such non-compliance to exist independently of sucha threat, I’m not sure why one would choose to conflate these two different and disparate things.
As Rush says (and Confucius too), “Words mean things.”
To needlessly conflate separate concepts has a real potential to muddy one’s thinking.
YMMV.

@Shodan

That’s both wrong and irrelevant.

I’m not sure which element you’re addressing here. There’s more than one in the quoted section that you reference.

If you’re disagreeing with, “…I note that you initially said that both the lack of compliance with inspections and ‘trying to get WMDs’ were a single, primary reason,” then I wopuld refer you to this statement of yours,
“If you are saying that the primary reason for invading Iraq was not that she was violating the inspection regime and trying to get WMDs, you are mistaken.”
The clear implication of this statement is that it is correct that the primary reason for invading Iraq was that she was violating the inspection regime and trying to get WMDs,
Maybe you intended to say something else. Maybe I’ve misread it.

If you’re disagreeing with, “Lack of compliance is not the same as ‘trying to get WMDs’,” then I would point out that while (in this instance) all pursuits of WMD were an examples of non-compliance with UN resolutions (which are something related to but separate from inspection regimes), not all examples of non-compliance are are pursuits of WMD. For instance, some areas of non-compliance involved prohibitions on inpectors ability to inspect.
Note that restrictions on inspectors is not the same thing as a pursuit of WMD.

@Shodan

Failure to cooperate is a violation of the inspection regime. Attempting to obtain WMD is a violation of the inspection regime. Possession of WMD after the first Gulf War is a violation of the inspection regime.

It’s inappropriate to conflate ‘inspection regimes’ with UNSC resolutions. While the resolutions established the regimes, they are not the regimes.
It was (theoretically) possible for Iraq to violate resolutions without violating inspection regimes. However, violating inspection regimes was a violation of UNSC resolutions.
As to this next section there’s more unecessary and counterproductive conflation occurring.

@Shodan

But Iraqi lack of cooperation was taken (by everyone) as evidence that she had something to hide - namely WMD, and the widespread fear was that she would provide them to terrorists.

@SimonX

Even though the fear may have been “widespread” it was not shared by the American Intelligence Community. The intel Community judged that Iraq was unlikely to initiate and attack (directly or by proxy) on the US.

@Shodan

George Tenet, director of the CIA, disagrees with you. He said the case for Iraq possessing WMD was “a slam-dunk”.

Not that "the widespread fear was that she would provide them to terrorists’ is not the same thing as posession of WMD.
The posession of weapons is not at al the same thing as the likelhood of using them against the US. There’re many countries in the world today who posess powerful weapons and who’re unlikely to attack the US (or pass them to terrorists who would do so).
It is markedly unhelpful to clear thinking to conflate the posession with likelihood of use.
George Tenet does not disagree with the assessment of the NIE that Iraq was unlikely to initiate and attack (directly or by proxy) on the US.
Even though it was widely assumed that Iraq had some sort of biological or chemical weapons, it was also widely assumed that the threat of Iraq’s ‘national obliteration’ (as sweet, sweet Condi puts it) rendered the probability of Iraq using these weapons against the US (either directly or by proxy) was low.

I really and truly hope that you can appreciate the differences between these two things. They are, after all, markedly different.

@Shodan

Putin said that Iraq was planning attacks on the US.

Note the time frame according to Putin. This was an Iraqi reaction to US threats of aggression.

@Shodan

The fear was (read the cited speech) that Iraq would provide WMD to terrorists, as Saddam had already shown that he supported international terrorists…

Remember that there’re major differences among the people and groups that fall under the category of ‘terrorists’. These people and groups are not interchangeable. It’s very unhelpful to ignore these differences and conflate them.

The best estimate of the IC said that Hussein was unlikely to launch an attack on the US either directly or by proxy because he was adequately deterred by the threat of what James Baker III called a ‘resounding silence’ in the Iraqi desert.
This estimate existed in light of the assumptions that Hussein probably did have WMD.

@Shodan

…had a history of contacts with terrorists (including al-Queda), and so forth.

Note that aQ and Hussein weren’t able to work out much of anything even though they tried for over a decade.
After ten years of failures, it’s safe to assume that there were some compatability issues.

@Shodan

Cripes, the knots you people tie yourselves into to try to misunderstand history.

Since this conclusion is dependent upon a number of fundamental, misleading and unhelpful conflations of disparate things, the conclusion’s bunk.

[Shodan]

@jshore

I’ll let others shred the rest of your post. But, just at a very high level, it seems to me that when one group of people ends up being so spectacularly wrong on something (the possession of signifcant WMDs by Iraq) then it is probably that group of people who needs to go back and figure out how they misunderstood things.

One group? You mean like Kerry and Clinton and Hilary and Albright and Gore and Bush and Tenet? That “one group”?

@ElvisL1ves

Please quit trying to pretend that the “primary” reason sold to us was revenge for 9/11.

What a completely moronic, willfully stupid misrepresentation this is. I have never stated at any time that Iraq was involved in 9/11, and your statements to the contrary are lies.

@ElvisL1ves

Now the reason why this was a particularly big deal in 2001 was because 9/11 showed that the US was at risk from international terrorism in general.

More spackling over. Repeat after me: Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

No, repeat after me - I neither stated nor implied anything to the contrary, and your implication that I did is a lie.

@Shodan

I realize this is probably a waste of time. Most of the time, extreme partisans of the Left have made themselves incapable of understanding any position more nuanced than “Bush is a poopyhead”, and will simply misinterpret, misrepresent, or ignore whatever they glean from the above.

Fuck this. If anyone has the intellectual honesty of a ten-dollar hooker, feel free to post and I’ll respond. Until then, I’ll leave you liars to your usual left-wing circle jerk.

[PatriotX]

@Shodan

Fuck this. If anyone has the intellectual honesty of a ten-dollar hooker, feel free to post and I’ll respond.

You conflated weapons and the likelihood fo their use against a specific target and still think you’ve a soapbox to stand on when it comes to intellectual honesty?

@Shodan

Until then, I’ll leave you liars to your usual left-wing circle jerk

‘Leftwingers’ like William Buckley jr, Brent Scowroft, Henry Kissinger, George Herbert Walker Bush, Senator Pat Roberts, Pat Buchanan, Donald Devine and myself have all expressed the idea that the invasion was not a good idea.

How does one handle objections when it’s insufficient to dismiss them out of hand because they come from ‘left-wingers’?
Or are you going to go with the idea that these people have all converted to liberalsim?

[PatriotX]

Also, what if someone has more intellectual honesty than a ten dollar hooker? Would you still be willing to respond?

[ElvisL1ves]

@Shodan

I have never stated at any time that Iraq was involved in 9/11, and your statements to the contrary are lies.

Remember writing this?

@Shodan

Now the reason why this was a particularly big deal in 2001 was because 9/11 showed that the US was at risk from international terrorism in general.

Now we hit on another hard topic. Just as it is possible to have more than one reason to do something, it is also possible to have more than one set of enemies at a time. And an attack by one set can sometimes make it clear the risks of attacks from others.

You never have gotten around to explaining why 9/11 “made clear the risk of attack” from Iraq. 9/11 in no way had any influence on the facts, such as they were, of Iraq’s involvement in “international terrorism”. Nothing about the Iraq situation had changed because of 9/11 except for the amount of what we’d been willing to believe from Bush at face value. If you’re seen as still conflating Iraq and 9/11 the way Bush still is, it’s only because that’s what you’re doing. Our ability to see through that does not make us liars. I’m sure SimonX, too, is amused to find himself in a “left-wing circle jerk”.

I don’t blame you for bailing out under the circumstances. Just don’t continue to delude yourself about the reasons.

[jshore]

@Shodan

One group? You mean like Kerry and Clinton and Hilary and Albright and Gore and Bush and Tenet? That “one group”?

While there may have been some aspects on which this whole group of people was unanimously wrong, the fact (as the New York Times articles I linked to point out) is that there were some people who were more wrong than others and some people who were in the position to know the most and yet were unwilling to entertain any new facts that contradicted their world view, and were continually exaggerating and cherry-picking the facts to fit that world view. Some of them, like Cheney, continue to do so to this very day.

For example, while Kerry and Hillary may have wrongly believed that Saddam had WMD (based at least in part on presentations of intelligence probably filtered through and/or pressured by the Administration, as the N.Y. Times articles note), they did not support making an only half-hearted attempt to find out the truth…And, then making the decision to pre-empt the inspections and go to war when Iraq wasn’t showing us, and the very intrusive inspections regime wasn’t finding, what we wanted to be shown or to find.

And, this is not even to mention the other aspects of the issue where there was less agreement (or, in some cases, where there was general agreement of the intelligence community on one side and the Administration on the other) such as the probability of Saddam giving WMDs to terrorists or the connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations.

It boggles my mind that the very same people who on these Boards were arguing that the evidence was overwhelming of Saddam being a threat to us while others of us were disputing that are now somehow trying to claim that everyone is equally at fault for having been wrong and for the actions our President decided to take on the basis of these various falsehoods! That is just ridiculous! And, I can understand your frustration in trying to defend such an indefensible position.

[Gaudere]

[Moderator Hat ON]

Shodan, cool it or take it to the Pit. (I was also not aware that ten-dollar hookers had a reputation for lack of intellectual honesty. They appear to be quite upfront to me.)

[Moderator Hat OFF]

[jshore]

@jshore

While there may have been some aspects on which this whole group of people was unanimously wrong, the fact (as the New York Times articles I linked to point out)…

It would have been more accurate if I had said “make clear” in place of “point out”.

As for us all being a bunch of liars and all that, Shodan, I am a little curious how that argument applies here. Do you think that the articles that I posted are forgeries and didn’t really appear in the N.Y. Times before the war, do you think that the reporting of what intelligent analysts were saying behind the scenes was phony or wrong even though their views have subsequently been vindicated (or at least been shown to be closer to the truth than the Administration’s views), or do you think they are somehow irrelevant to a discussion of who knew what with what certainty and when?

In regards to the FAIR piece that Mr2001 posted regarding the withdrawing of the inspectors in 1998, do you believe that the articles that FAIR referred to didn’t really appear in print or that FAIR didn’t represent them truthfully, or that these reports were somehow all wrong despite their reliance on several sources within the U.S. government and the U.N. (and also being subsequently confirmed by Hans Blix…who mentions this whole spying thing in passing when discussing his determination on how to run the new inspections process)?

If you can find lies that we are telling, by all means, tell us what they are. We are all ears and I am sure the various lurkers in this thread would be curious to know what they are too.

[jshore]

@SimonX

Reread Putin’s quote again. IIRC, he discussed planning rather than attempts.

And, worse yet, what Putin really said is that the Russian secret service had received reports or information of such planning that they turned over to us. He did not say how credible the information was believed to be. I have speculated in other threads that the Russian secret service has also received information and reports of aliens from Mars with death rays landing in Siberia…But I wouldn’t recommend an attack on Mars on the basis of such reports.

Here is some of what Putin said, according to the BBC:

He said Russia’s secret service had information on more than one occasion that Iraq was preparing acts of terror in the US and its facilities worldwide.

Mr Putin said he had no information the Iraqi ex-leader was behind any attacks.

…

He said the information received by Russian intelligence suggested Iraq was planning attacks in the United States, “and beyond its borders on American military and civilian targets”.

But he said it did not change Russia’s opposition to the war in Iraq.

“Despite that information… Russia’s position on Iraq remains unchanged,” he said.

He added: "It is one thing to have information that (Saddam) Hussein’s regime was preparing acts of terrorism - we did have this information and we handed it over.

“But we did not have information that they were involved in any terrorist acts whatsoever and, after all, these are two different things.”

[jshore]

Here is a piece by David Corn in The Nation a few months back trying to set some of the record straight on who was actually saying what in regards to WMDs:

Administration officials and other war backers have pointed to an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate to justify their prewar statements about Iraq’s unconventional weapons. An NIE is supposed to be the summation of the intelligence community’s best information on a subject, and this one did say, “Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons.” This assessment, it seems at the moment, was a historic failure, and it remains to be determined if it was the result of good-faith errors or political pressure and manipulation. But even this NIE–which included qualifiers and acknowledged serious disagreements within the intelligence community–did not contain evidence to support the more dramatic allegations that Bush put forward. A review of the declassified “key judgments” of the NIE and other pieces of intelligence–including a speech Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet gave at Georgetown University on February 5 to defend his agency–clearly shows that Bush and his national security team overstated what now appears to have been overstated intelligence.

You can read all the details therein.

And, here is an article from the L.A. Times (or a summary of the article since the full article is no longer free) about the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on how interesting revisions were made between the full NIE report and the declassified version:

SENATE INTELLIGENCE REPORT; Key Revisions Were Made to CIA Document; Prewar analysis of the threat went from hedged in private to blunt in public. Who made the changes is a mystery.

Dedicating a section of its 511-page report to discrepancies between the two versions of the crucial October 2002 NIE, the panel laid out numerous instances in which the unclassified version omitted key dissenting opinions about Iraqi weapons capabilities, overstated U.S. knowledge about Iraq’s alleged stockpiles of weapons and, in one case, inserted threatening language into the public document that was not contained in the classified …

[jshore]

Oh, and here is a piece, with lots of links to source material from “In These Times” arguing how the Administration knew…or at least was told…that its Iraq claims were weak but chose to ignore these warnings.