"Dead Wrong?" - I Doubt it

James Robbins in the National Review explains the media's field day with one phrase from the 600-page report on U.S. intelligence. Although the report was wide-ranging and discussed many important intelligence issues, including an underestimation of al Qaeda's WMD program and a failure to note how strongly bin Laden wanted to acquire and use radiological weapons, the media focused solely on the words "dead wrong," in regards to Iraq's WMD intelligence.

It is pretty clear to everyone that for decades now, our intelligence capabilities have been slowly destroyed, a process which only accelerated during the Reno-Deutch-Gorelick-Berger years of the Clinton Administration. Heck, when the NSA chief can't even follow the security procedures of the National Archives, how can he be expected to help with the security of a whole country? Yet somehow all this is painted as Bush's failure.

As Robbins points out, the report doesn't answer the most important questions - the millions of dollars spent on WMD programs and the widespread deception of inspectors. As the Duelfer report states,

Between 1996 and 2002, the overall MIC [Iraq's Military Industrialization Commission] budget increased over forty-fold from ID 15.5 billion to ID 700 billion. By 2003 it had grown to ID 1 trillion. MIC's hard currency allocations in 2002 amounted to approximately $364 million. MIC sponsorship of technical research projects at Iraqi universities skyrocketed from about 40 projects in 1997 to 3,200 in 2002. MIC workforce expanded by fifty percent in three years, from 42,000 employees in 1999 to 63,000 in 2002.

And as Robbins explains in his article,

Then there was the very well-chronicled systematic deception campaign that U.N. inspectors encountered every time they went into Iraq. In more than one case inspectors would pull up to a site and be halted; surveillance would pick up vehicles being loaded in the back and hurrying away; inspectors would then be allowed in. What was being carted away so quickly? If nothing was there, what was going on?

Now let's assume that Iraq, the model country, never wanted to develop WMDs and that all the evidence of WMD programs in the Duelfer report was mere coincidence (just like Iran truly just wants nuclear reactors for peaceful energy purposes).

Would this mean that the reasons for going to war with Iraq were wrong? Only to someone who never read the Iraq War Resolution passed by Congress. The resolution clearly says we went to war with Iraq for the following reasons: Iraq's failure to honor its cease-fire after the Gulf War, its failure to end support for international terrorism, its development of WMD programs and WMDs, its efforts to thwart UN weapons inspectors, its clear threat to the Middle East, its capability and willingness to use WMDs against its own citizens, its harboring of members of Al Qaeda, and its determination to harm U.S. citizens and U.S. interests.

So...next time someone says that the Iraq War was wrong because we didn't find stockpiles of WMDs (though the NY Times has recently castigated the Administration for not securing WMD sites), let's hope he knows how to read.

*Update*
Bill Roggio also has a good discussion of the report. He notes that "the Commission puts to rest one of the most pervasive memes about the Iraq War: Bush Lied and Manipulated the Intelligence to Go to War."

The Commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. As we discuss in detail in the body of our report, analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments. We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments.

Unfortunately, only the statements that reflect negatively on the Administration will be pointed out by the MSM, so sadly, this argument still won't go away.