Jerry Brito

Not so wrong after all

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After the quick toppling of Saddam Hussein, I thought many of my predictions about the war had been wrong. But the National Intelligence Estimate document that the White House released on Friday as another lame excuse for its State of the Union speech debacle, might prove some of us right and backfire on Bush.

My sliver of the antiwar camp made, inter alia, three assertions: 1) That Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat to the United States. 2) That he wouldn’t just turn over the WMD he had spent so much time and money to acquire to the nutjobs at Al Qaeda. For one thing, AQ and Hussein didn’t like each other. For another, the offensive use of Iraqi WMD against the U.S. would surely mean annihilation for Hussein, and people with cults of personality like him don’t usually have deathwishes. 3) That what would make him want to use his WMD, or give it to AQ, would be putting him in a position were he knew he was a goner anyway.

So, The Washington Post reports today that while the President was making speeches saying Iraq might give AQ WMD,

the U.S. intelligence community judged that possibility to be unlikely. In fact, the NIE, which began circulating Oct. 2, shows the intelligence services were much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his government was collapsing after a military attack by the United States.

“Saddam, if sufficiently desperate, might decide that only an organization such as al Qaeda, . . . already engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the United States, could perpetrate the type of terrorist attack that he would hope to conduct,” one key judgment of the estimate said.

That the administration had this assessment and chose to go in anyway, putting American lives on the line, rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors. Plus, the threat isn’t gone. As the Post piece hints, we can’t find Hussein, we can’t find the WMD. Hmmm. Makes you think.

Sadly, the antiwar folks may not have been wrong and we may yet see an attack with Iraqi WMD. If it happens, let’s hope the hawks don’t say, “I told you so.”

Jul 21, 2003 | Comments