Consistent with the way he and his team misled the public about the need to go to war against Iraq, Bush has appointed a cover-up commission to deflect criticism of his prewar conduct.
But it's important for people to keep in mind the reasons it's important to clean up the malfunctions that made such a thing possible. The current Business Week has a good editorial on how the WMD fiasco has damaged the US: "Rethinking Preemptive War" (02/16/04 issue). It observes that although the overthrow of Saddam and the chance for a better government are good things, "the nation didn't go to war to save Iraqis but to protect Americans."
This failure of intelligence [on "weapons of mass destruction"] is devastating. It undermines the Bush Administration's doctrine of preemption. Without good intelligence, it's impossible to know what threats are real and imminent and what action should be taken. This intelligence failure is made worse by the suspicion that information was slanted for or by Pentagon and White House policymakers to support a preconceived decision for war.
Actually, we know from information publicly available now that the Pentagon, the White House and the Vice President's office did indeed slant information badly to promote the war they wanted.
But the point is well taken. Credibility of intelligence is vital: for policymakers, for the American public, for our ability to persuade allies to support us on particular actions. That's doubly and triply true for a policy of preventive war - apart from all the other pragmatic, ethical and legal problems with it.
But more than a failure of intelligence is involved. The Iraq War was a failure of policy. It was the bad policy - the determination to go to war with Iraq despite more dangerous threats to the US - that led to the worst failures of intelligence, i.e., the cherry-picking of raw, unreliable intelligence information by the Office of the Vice President and the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans.
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