Old evidence in a new light

With all the controversy swirling around about the Nigerien documents (thank you Jan for finding that word for me - it makes sentence structure SO much easier!), a couple other comments haven't gotten quite the attention they might deserve. Between them, statements by President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld raise some interesting questions.

A couple days ago, while trying to defend himself from the accusations of using false information in the State of the Union address, Bush made the comment

He leaned forward on a podium shared with President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and said angrily: ''Imagine a world in which this tyrant had a nuclear weapon. In 1998, my predecessor raided Iraq, based upon the very same intelligence. And in 2003, after the world had demanded he disarm, we decided to disarm him.''[Emphasis mine]

Today, Donald Rumsfeld announced that there was no new evidence involved in the decision to go to war.

The coalition did not act in Iraq because we had discovered dramatic new evidence of Iraq's pursuit" of weapons of mass destruction, Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "We acted because we saw the evidence in a dramatic new light — through the prism of our experience on 9/11."

If there wasn't any new evidence, as Rumsfeld indicates, and if we were using the same evidence that Clinton had used in deciding to bomb Iraq in 1998, as Bush indicates, are they saying the decision to go to war against Iraq was predicated on 5-year-old or older evidence?

I've mentioned before the possiblity that whatever WMD Saddam may have had might have been destroyed in the 1998 bombings - but the admission from Rumsfeld that there was no new evidence used in making the decision to go to war makes that scenario even more likely. If that's the case, it could explain why there are no WMD to be found.

Remember, Bush said that Clinton had bombed Iraq "based upon the very same intelligence" - meaning it was intelligence gathered before the bombing occurred. Rumsfeld now confirms that they weren't using new intelligence to determine that Saddam was a threat, but older intelligence seen "in a dramatic new light".

Of course, it's been reported in several places that the neo-cons wanted this war for a very long time - even before Bush took office - but that doesn't mean using 5-year-old evidence, even if it's seen in a "new light", makes much sense.

This, of course, is still speculative at this point - but it does raise some very interesting questions. Rumsfeld has said that they used old intelligence, but they didn't say how old. It is Bush's statement that leads to the inference that it is 5 years old. And its possible that even if the WMD were destroyed in 1998, if Saddam was trying to rebuild his program, that he may have developed weapons during that 5-year period. There are a lot of things, in fact, that could have happened during those 5 years.

But that's also exactly the problem with what the combination of Bush and Rumsfeld's statement seems to be saying: A lot can happen in 5 years, and if they were relying on 5-year-old intelligence, then they'd have no way to know how much - if any of it - was accurate - and that's not the kind of intelligence you can depend on when operating on a basis of waging pre-emptive wars.

Justifying a pre-emptive war depends on specific, accurate and timely information. Seeing old intelligence in a new light doesn't qualify on any of those points, and should never be used for something this serious.

Whether one considers the result of the war to be sufficient justification for it having been waged or not, its still important that we understand exactly how and why we got into the war in the first place. Saddam being out of power is a good thing - there's no disagreement with that. But even Paul Wolfowitz acknowledged in his interview with Sam Tannenhaus from Vanity Fair (as taken from the DOD transcripts of the interview)

"[the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people] ...is a reason to help the Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it.

We went to war because the President and his people assured us that Saddam was an imminent and intolerable threat to the safety of the United States. Now we're hearing that the decision was not based on new evidence and that the "very same" evidence was used to justify Clinton's bombing, can we really say that the threat was truly imminent?

When it comes to waging war, the end cannot be used to justify the means - especially if we're waging a pre-emptive war. There's a lot more riding on this than just President Bush's image or even his presidency. We have to know what happened and why. The lives of our soldiers, the credibility of our nation, and our ability to obtain help from our allies if we are truly in need are at stake.

Posted by thorswitch at July 12, 2003 12:21 AM | TrackBack