Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Move along folks, nothing to see here.

SKB missed O'Reilly's promise to apologize to the american people and never trust the bush administration again if we didn't find wmds.

Which of these worthies will acknowledge reality and how wrong they were? (My bet: none.)

My favorite is Charles Krauthammer:
"Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We've had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven't found any, we will have a credibility problem. I don't have any doubt that we will locate them. I think it takes time." 4/22/03

(http://www.aei.org/events/filter.,eventID.274/transcript.asp)

I guess I would come back to him, but I might be diagnosed with some sort of derangement syndrome.

Well, there is an argument to be made that partisanship on both sides is muddying the waters. But that's to be expected in an election year, I suppose.

While Bush supporters are obviously being obtuse and spinning the whole thing as anything but a setback, opponents spin the other way too.

For instance, the "I don't think they existed" quote that Brad showed was actually about "large stockpiles of weapons." But that doesn't stop people from using it to say that he doesn't think there were any WMD.

Through equally selective quoting, you could say that Kay "thinks we will find program activities, some of them quite substantial" and believes that "what we learned during the inspections made Iraq a more dangerous place potentially than in fact we thought it was even before the war." Plus, he confirmed suspicions that "a lot of material went to Syria before the war."

The fact of the matter is that it's a lot more complicated than both sides let on when they try to score partisan points. And because of that, we risk missing the important lessons about intelligence failures and the continued dangers of failed states.

The point is we and the British people were continaully misled. Neither country was in any danger from Iraq. Iraq was completely contained and there was no reason to go to war at the cost of thousands of dead and wounded and tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. A low point is American and British democracy to be so misled by elected leaders.

Richard,

It should be obvious by now that the administration knew all along that Saddam didn't have the WMD capabilities that they were ascribing to him during the run up to the war. They were talking about very large specific quantities of a variety of NBC agents.

Yet they were never able to point out the locations of these very specific stockpiles to the U.N. inspectors. They haven't found anything resembling those stockpiles during the occupation. They didn't take steps to secure sites full of radiological waste after they invaded Iraq. And most importantly of all, do you really think they would have taken the risk of invading Iraq in the first place if Saddam Hussein had WMDs ready to launch against allied armies or the state of Israel?

This war took place at the end of a long blockade and inspection process during which all possible WMD components were prohibited from entering Iraq. Iraqi defectors had long since told U.S. intelligence that Saddam's weapons programs were inactive. Furthermore, U.S. intelligence was well aware of the shelf life of the chemicals and delivery systems that Saddam did possess. That's why so many CIA analysts were pulling their hair out over the administration's claims.

Remember, the administration's public rationale for war was the threat from Iraqi WMDs. There was no imminent Iraqi WMD threat, and hence no legally justifiable reason for the invasion.

I think that there was a serious intelligence failure, and that it is exactly the one that people were talking about before the invasion: we had no human intelligence, and thus we were relying on old estimates, and on the assumption that if we could not prove that the stuff was gone, the it had to be there.

People were also talking about the obvious solution: on-site inspections. The Administration overruled its own people and the wiser arguments of opponents of its policies.

The lessons are learned. David Kay has provided an extensive discussion of the problems here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/26/international/middleeast/26KAY.html

I do not doubt that this is a partisan evaluation, but the failures permitted the abuse of the worthless information we had by this administration.

Since we have learned the intelligence lessons, or should be able to, perhaps a little partisan assault on the administration is forgivable.

Richard, there are "intelligence failurs," and there there is "cherrypicking of intel."

The intel services believed that it was likely that saddam had something. That's a problem, largely attriutable not to failure, but as masaccio points out, to the absence of up-to-date human intel. (After all, Rumsfeld told us this last May, when he testified that we didn't know anything knew since '98, we simply examined what we knew through the prism of 9/11.)

And then there's cherrypicking, in which the bush administration took out the hedges and the caveats and sold it as fact.

PS. The biggest intel failure that did occur was the Feith stovepipe operation, which was challenged by the CIA and others as it was happening.

he was going to destroy the world with one lousy vial of B. toxin! don't you know it's illegal to smoke maryjane.

Aurelian,

Well, I tried to carefully phrase my comment to avoid having to have the debate again as to whether the war was justified. I simply thought it was worth pointing out that he actually said some pretty nuanced things that both sides were pouncing on as vindication -- in fact, that may be a definition of partisanship: when both sides point to the same fact as clear evidence that they are right.

Second, your own points are themselves contestable. There was a plausible case for war, even limiting ourselves to the question of WMD, without the existence of "large stockpiles", much less the imminent threat of their use. Even small quantities could wreak havoc in the wrong hands.

In the end, it does look as though the Bush Administration exaggerated the quantities and the likelihood that they would end up in those hands (as well as whose hands they would be).

But this brings up one point that Kay made that is getting overlooked: the situation was potentially more dangerous than we had thought because the disintegration of the WMD programs under the sanction regime had led to less central control, less monitoring, and less accountability by the Iraqis. This goes directly to the heart of the question: was containment sustainable?

Even without considering the fact that France and Russia did everything in their power to weaken the sanction regime, there is a serious question as to whether the sanctions had so fragmented the weapons programs that the risk of proliferation to terrorist groups was greater than we imagined.

To me, these are interesting questions, worth debating – and more useful when not trying to score points for Shirts or Skins.

" If you find yourself on a train that's going in the wrong direction, its best to get off at the next stop." -Hans Blix

What lots of folks who opposed the war don't seem to understand is that David Kay is not on their side. If he were, he'd have gotten the O'Neill/Wilson treatment. He hasn't, and he won't.

If you go back and listen to Cheney's NPR interview from last week, he hit exactly the same points that Kay was pushing on NPR yesterday and in the NY Times today. Those points were: (1) In concluding that Iraq had WMD, the Bush Administration was relying on the work of the CIA; (2) Others who relied on similar information had reached similar conclusions; and, (3) In pursuing 'regime change' the Bush Administration was merely continuing a policy begun under Clinton.

When Cheney said these things to Juan Williams I suspected that they were meant as a hedge against the day that the Administration would have to admit the obvious -- Iraq didn't have stockpiles of WMDs. And now here's the anti-war left welcoming Kay with open arms as he repeats Cheney's talking points.

So, 11 months after this thing starts the justification falls apart? How could they have known... umm wait a second, didn't Scott Ritter say everything David Kay said in a July 20,2002 op-ed in the Boston Globe? If he knew, why didn't anybody else?

So, 11 months after this thing starts the justification falls apart? How could they have known... umm wait a second, didn't Scott Ritter say everything David Kay said in a July 20,2002 op-ed in the Boston Globe? If he knew, why didn't anybody else?

Dave R., of course it's dick cheney talking, so by definition, there are lies coming out (i think you know this by what you wrote, but just in case):

1. The bush administration didn't "rely" on the work of the CIA; it cherrypicked the work of the CIA and removed all the hedges;

2. Only one group of people in the world drew the conclusion that saddam had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program - feith's "stovepipe" intel directorate;

3. And anyone who reads the actual Iraq Liberation Act (as i believe it was called) will discover that it specifically disavowed military action.

Other than that, Cheney told the truth, but there is nothing other than that....

Kay is too biased to be reliable.
How can he say with a straight face that what we learned about Iraq's WMD programs (that there were none) makes Iraq even more dangerous than we thought before!
If there is an investigation (there won't be one while W. is in office), David Kay himself should be investigated.

Even Bush flunkies like Kay now admit the obvious fact that Saddam had no WMD. This signals the Bush apologists to shift their defense positions and find a scapegoat -- those sneaky liberals at the CIA!

Yup, David Kay is marching right in step with the White House on this one - still arguing that large quantities of weapons might have been shipped to Syria, a hypothesis offered with neither evidence nor motive.

More important, he wound up the NPR interview with a defense of the Bush Administration's actions, and a direct criticism of the CIA for getting the intelligence wrong. - Does Karl Rove have negatives of him? - Is he in line for the Treasury Secretary job?

Sure, the CIA got the intelligence wrong, but it also generally understood the limits of its knowledge and tried to hedge its judgments. The Bush people - including Donald Rumsfeld, who should have appreciated the Agency's problems of knowing - made their impatience obvious, and put every kind of public and private pressure on the CIA to give the White House what it wanted. And now that it's all turned out wrong, David Kay thinks the CIA owes BUSH an apology?! He's no better than any other administration hack.

Howard,

I agree that they cherry picked the intel. And I think that anybody who's paying attention knows that. But folks who pay attention aren't the target audience.

My point is that Kay is a crucial part of the Administration's plan to spin the admission that Iraq lacked WMDs in way that doesn't hurt them (much) politically. The hope is to position Kay as a man of integrity, and the anit-war left is helping them do this by treating Kay as a conquering hero. But then Kay goes on to frame the issue in such a way that the Administration's worst crime seems to be an excess of concern for the safety of the American people.

When the issue is the actual existence of WMDs the Bush Administration is in trouble, because facts matter. So they're trying to frame the debate around a different question: "What should you do when you suspect WMDs?" That's a question Rove can use to put critics in the soft-on-terror box.

Hi Richard,

My point was that I don't believe that there was an intelligence failure of the type that David Kay and the administration have been implying. The administration is now trying to pretend that they were ill served by the intelligence community into believing that there were more substantial WMD stockpiles and programs than actually existed.

Kay has said, "It's an issue of the capabilities of one's intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information... I actually think the intelligence community owes the president (an apology), rather than the president owing the American people." Kay appears to be shifting blame from the administration and his own failure to find WMDs onto supposed faulty intelligence from the CIA.

There has been a lot of information in the last few months about the way the White House (particularly the Vice President's office) shaped the intelligence interpretation process in order to justify the decision that had already been made to go to war.

Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article "The Stovepipe" http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031027fa_fact (to cite just one source)lays out the case that it was the fault of the administration that intelligence was not properly vetted. In fact, the administration bypassed regular intelligence procedures and put political pressure on the CIA to provide information friendly to its own biases.

Thus, the primary intelligence fault lies not with the intelligence agencies as Kay and the White House have stated, but with the administration's own politicization of the issue.

The administration could have chosen to make a different case for war, one that was more nuanced and less political, but the decision was made to hit the public over the head with the most alarmist claims of Iraqi capabilities and intentions. They did so with the deliberate intent to squelch debate and ensure that they got their war. Any attempt to discuss the WMD 'debate' that lead to the war will thus be in some sense political.

Kay's new assertion, that Saddam had lost control of his weapons program, would be more frightening if there was any indication that the weapons program did in any meaningful way exist. What is more frightening are the indications that the invasion itself has forged links between Saddam loyalists and al-Qaeda, and has created a new recruitment and training ground for the organization.

So, color me bitter, but I can't stop blaming the administration for implementing what I consider to be counter-productive policies.

The 7/20/02 Scott Ritter op-ed in the Boston Globe referred to by Lindsey offers a warning that we might do well to consider even today:

"Critical hearings should be convened by Congress that will ask the Bush administration tough questions about the true nature of the threat posed to the United States by Iraq. Congress should reject speculation and demand substantive answers. The logical forum for such a hearing would be the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.

"Unfortunately, the senators entrusted with such critical oversight responsibilities shy away from this task. This includes Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, a Vietnam War veteran who should understand the realities and consequences of war and the absolute requirement for certainty before committing to a course of conflict."

Richard, Richard. Look at your wad of faux-thoughtful cliches, and then ask yourself: "Did I really want to sign my name to that?"

"Well, there is an argument to be made that partisanship on both sides is muddying the waters.... the "I don't think they existed" quote that Brad showed was actually about "large stockpiles of weapons." ....The fact of the matter is that it's a lot more complicated than both sides let on when they try to score partisan points....."

Sometimes both sides aren't partly right, and sometimes the truth isn't halfway between what the two sides are saying. Have you ever noticed that? A bold new idea for you to consider.

Listening to "conservatives" rationalize the latest zigs and zags of the administration's WMD story, I feel like I'm listening to western communists and fellow travellers just after the Hitler-Stalin pact was announced. That's probably the last time there was such an example of large scale public denial in an open society.

Zizka, here's the thing: almost without exception in any dispute both sides *are* partly right. I don't know what world you live in where this isn't true. Is it a Hollywood world where the bad guys know they're the bad guys and they wear black hats?

Your sort of criticism has always really annoyed me because it seems to me to be at least as knee-jerk as its target. I have no doubt that there are people who exhibit the sort of reasoning that you're setting up as a straw man: that the truth is always halfway in the middle. But my experience is that although it's rarely exactly in the middle, it's even more rare that it's all the way to one of the extreme partisan's sides. The truth can be pretty skewed in one direction or the other, but it's almost never as skewed as the partisans' view.

You and I keep sparring around this issue. Richard, I think, is trying to make the point that even if the truth is pretty skewed in one direction, the partisan spin on it is a sort of gilding the lilly that is not only unecessary but actually counter-productive, since there's usually lots of folks who don't know enough to figure out exactly where the truth is but can spot a partisan exageration that weakens that position's credibility.

The people here that are making the point that Kay is actually sticking pretty closely to the admin's script are demonstrating that the anti-war partisan position that tries to make Kay's statements into a vindication is possibly self-defeating. They're proving his point.

I'd like you to consider something. I call myself a "moderate" only because overall it's accurate. On balance, I'm closer to the American middle than I am either edge. But the truth is that, for the most part, on individual issues I'm as likely to be pretty extreme as I am "moderate". I really don't care where across the spectrum I think the truth is—if I think it's somewhere in the middle it's because that's where I think it is, and not because I am afraid of conflict. It's just not fair or accurate of you to assume that someone that doesn't clearly seem to conform to one partisan position or the other, either specifically or generally, is necessarily someone that think that, in principle, the truth is always foudn by splitting the difference. Okay, again, I agree that there are probably some people that are simple minded enough to believe this. But I know that in my case, at least, a position that I take somewhere in the middle isn't the result of the application of some principle of moderation.

I think the real world is very complex (thus the name of my blog—it's intended to connote complexity in this sense as well as the technical sense) and my experience is that a whole lot of problems arise out of people's desire to oversimplify it. Like supply-side economics, for example. Maybe if the tax rate was 90% overall, a tax reduction would result in a revenue increase (eventually). But these folks want to just say that "cutting taxes is good" because, dammit, anything more nuanced is just too much damn trouble. This sort of thinking is the bane of my existence. The universe is what it is, not what we want it to be.

What Cheney conveniently forgot to mention ini his NPR interview was the administration setting up its own intelligence shop in the Department of Defense to tell the White House what it wanted to hear, when the CIA cherry-picked info wasn't "good enough" to justify its war. Is Cheney really living in a fantasy world? Bush' "wmd program-related activities" from the Kay report means: Watch Out! That memo is about to go off! Is Kay incredibly naive or disingenuous to blame the whole war on bad CIA intel, without factoring in a presidential role? I couldn't believe,in Kay's NPR interview, how he kept saying it was all the fault of bad intelligence, but the presidenthad to make a separate political decision about what it meant. I yelled b ack at the radio, BHush already has politicized the intelligebnce, long since, to justify what he wanted to do. Kay was trying to separate two things which had long since become inseparable.

Charles

Stan wrote, "Why exactly are we to believe that we would continue to be able to contain Saddam? Is it because of the popularity of the sanctions or is it the ease of containing WMD?"

Did you read James Risen's piece in the NYT on Kay? Iraq's WMD programs, such as they were, were a joke, Saddam was clueless, etc.

"Why exactly is leaving Saddam in Iraq (with the sanctions and military requirements that entails) necessarily better for the war on terrorism than taking him out?"

(1) You're creating a false dichotomy. There's a third position, which is that Saddam had to go, and should have gone, later rather than as soon as Bush et al. wanted. If you read Risen's report, it's clear that intrusive inspections likely would have sped up this process.
(2) You're repeating the canard that Saddam had any meaningful connection with the terrorists (presumably you mean bin Laden).

"We are also supposed to assume that anybody believing it might make sense to take out Saddam is a fool. The radical dove position is a gaggle of logic."

Hardly. Again, you're erecting strawmen, creating false dichotomies, etc. There are other respectable positions. Daniel Davies pointed out long ago that even if you believed war was necessary, Bush et al. are so incompetent that any costs of delaying war until Bush was gone would have been far exceeded by the benefits.

Finally, there's an opportunity cost in dealing with Iraq, unless you really think North Korea and Pakistan aren't as important.

Keith M Ellis wrote, "Zizka, here's the thing: almost without exception in any dispute both sides *are* partly right. I don't know what world you live in where this isn't true. Is it a Hollywood world where the bad guys know they're the bad guys and they wear black hats?"

Certainly the world isn't black and white. But in this case, it's undeniable that the administration lied and exaggerated on the WMD issue, and those who believed them were dead wrong. It's about as close to a black and white example as you can get in modern politics.

Of course, people aren't wrong all the time, issues aren't black and white most of the time, people are entitled to change their minds and alter their positions in light of new data. But as far as I can tell, there's been nary an acknowledgement of error from the administration or their supporters on the WMD issue.

Furthermore, while it's not a crime to be wrong, there is an entirely valid question of the accuracy of people's descriptive models of the world. Those of us critical of the administation and their backers claim that a fairly reasonable model, one that will "satisfice," is that the Bush administration will lie, manipulate data, misrepresent their motives, etc, in order to carry out their radical program. (And by this I don't mean in an absolute sense, since most politicians are guilty of such manipulation to some degree or another, but in a relative sense---that the *degree* of such, and its brazenness, is astounding.) And that most if not all of those who believed Bush on WMD continue with a model which says that it's reasonable to give Bush the benefit of the doubt. And that our model is far more accurate than theirs, if not perfect.

Charles
"I yelled back at the radio". When I do this, my children regard me with some caution. And to prove that I'm OK, I dramatically push the button that shows who's boss.
Nice to know if I am headed for the looney bin I won't be without some company.
If the job that Kay was doing originated from Any other place than the WH, the American people might be able to treat it seriously.
"Is Kay incredibly naive or disingenuous to blame the whole war on bad CIA intel, without factoring in a presidential role?"
Pulleeease...not another one of these tuff dichotomies where I have to entertain the possibility that Kay might be just naive.
(Can I implore all those bloggers to leave the cherries alone and just say "selected"?)

What is clear now is that the most secure job in the Bush administration now is the Director of the CIA. The minute the White House would try to scapegoat the CIA about "bad intelligence" the CIA would be forced to correct the record, and tell on the record who the Bush people cherry-picked the intel. This is no doubt why only Bush allies outside of the White House (Like David Kay) would dare point the finger of blame at the CIA.

Would Bush dare make George Tenant into another Paul O'Neill? Not a chance.

Any certainty is a delusion.

If you understand, things are as they are. If you do not understand, things are as they are.

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Truth is a kind and gentle lie.

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