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Thursday,
February 05, 2004
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Bush
not to blame for CIA
Faulty
intelligence cause of Iraq fiasco
Patrick Jennings is a junior economics major from
Melbourne, Fla.
It
almost happened. I almost let the Democrats brainwash
me. I was oh so close to believing that the Bush administration
set up a huge conspiracy to attack Iraq, knowing for certain
that there were no weapons of mass destruction.
I started from the position that the intelligence was
faulty and David Kay’s testimony brought me back
there last week. Bush acted on intelligence that said
Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. He acted with
the knowledge that Saddam had deep ties to terrorism,
even if they weren’t necessarily to al Qaeda.
The Democratic primary candidates have been acting on
20/20 hindsight. Iraq was pointing an unloaded gun in
our general direction, and they’re mad that we shot
at them first. Of course, as long as it still gets a crowd
to cheer and gets you a sound bite on CNN, they’ll
keep harping on the issue.
It didn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination
to believe that Saddam had WMDs. We know Saddam had them
before. And, to paraphrase Hans Blix, these weapons aren’t
like marmalade, you keep track of where they are. Saddam
didn’t show that he destroyed them. He wouldn’t
let the UN commission look for them freely. You don’t
have to be a CIA operative to know that sounds suspicious.
OK, so if Bush is justified in going to war, and basing
that decision on WMD, why is he reluctant to form a committee
to probe the intelligence community? It’s a simple
reason and it leads into the real problem from Kay’s
testimony.
The CIA and its associates messed up. I’d rather
use a more colorful word to describe it, but this is a
family newspaper. There’s no reliable way for the
president to double-check what the international intelligence
community finds. He and the American people have to trust
them in, literally, matters of life and death. A mistake
this large destroys their credibility. And when the president
starts insinuating that he no longer trusts the intelligence,
the people will quickly follow suit.
Bush is trying to salvage some remnant of the legitimacy
the CIA once had. He’s saying through actions that
not much is wrong. He’s not covering his own mistakes,
but he’s committing an entirely independent transgression.
The CIA was formed at the beginning of the cold war. Its
goal was to keep track of the USSR and her underlings.
This involved a central target with a supposed central
mission. The cold war is over, and the new threat is a
diffuse enemy with no central organization. But things
in Washington have momentum, and the CIA is no different.
There’s a commitment to doing things the way they
were done before, regardless of whether the methods are
best or not.
They missed the two World Trade Center attacks. They missed
the two embassy bombings in Africa. They missed the attack
on the USS Cole.
Obviously, something has to change.
You can only hope that the bipartisan (and it will definitely
be bipartisan) commission investigating the intelligence
community can guilt them into doing their jobs.
If not, well, I’ll at least have another topic to
write a column on. |
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