It’s taken US 30 years and now that we look at it, we really did win Nam.

It might take a few years for WMD to be validated.

There are between 20-40 binary shells found. We have a few hundred thousand tons to go thru yet.

Another point: If you read today’s delicious comparison of Sen. Rockefeller’s previous speeches with his talk circuit pronouncements made by Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard online, you come away convinced that the Senate Intelligence Committee was absolutely persuaded Saddam had to go.

A question one must ask oneself regarding the Rock’s dramatic about-face is this: How different is the information the Senate Intelligence Committee receives from that which the president receives? Based upon the lame daily security briefings that have been made public from the summer of 2001, I would submit the president’s intel is not some Star Chamber of supercomputed, huminted, fully vetted omniscience, but something ranging from speculation to publicly accepted fact attached to analysis. So how is it that, if Bush and Rockefeller were in lockstep before, on the basis of the same information, why are they supposedly divergent now? Partisan politics, perhaps. Naw!

I put it to the Bush Lied!&#8482 crowd: What information did the president have that the Senate Intelligence Committee didn’t?

Yes.

However, we do have W asking Tenet are you sure?

Tenet said slam dunk.

Time to recycle Torchy quotes and what he did in the 80s.

It’s interesting that we’re talking about the importance of consulting source documents here, and you want to send us all to read another pundit. I read Sullivan every day, and I enjoy his anlysis, so I read what you quote. It’s clear to me that AS hasn’t read the source document and is basing that entirely on Rockefeller/Roberts appearances on the Sunday Chat shows and on various “mainstream” press stories. Roger linked to Dan Danrling’s long, detailed summary of the entire report, which he has read. I think that’s a bit more relevant. The substance of the actual report, from these first hand reports as opposed to the way it’s mostly being reported by the NYT/WaPo/NBC/ABC/CBS, and most especially by Senator Rockefellar et al is:

1. Joseph Wilson is a liar and a fraud.

2. Any iteration of the BUSH LIED!!!!!/16 words meme is incorrect.

3. There was no political pressure of any kind by by anyone in the administration to manipulate intelligence data to fit a certain conclusion, despite the fact that Senator Rockefellar is stil trying to assert precisely the opposite propostiion.

4. The question of ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime, while still something that one could plausibly have a variety of opinions about, is not nearly as clear-cut as war opponents maintain.

5. Richard Clarke’s assertion that Saddam Hussein had not attempted an act of terrorism against the US since the 1993 assassination attempt on President George HW Bush is incorrect.

So, it seems to that the major news of the weekend, according to those who have actually read this report, is that the report demolishes several key articles of faith in the anti-war mythology, yet you direct us to this one Andrew Sullivan quote. Strange.

Excellent point! The MSM/LL/whatever the heck it is wants no part of any intelligence activity. They don’t want us to have spies or even associate with that “criminal element” or eavesdrop or take pictures from space. They have taken every opporunity to pare down and sanitize US intelligence capabilities and mock, as an obvious oxymoron, “Military Intelligence”. Yet when intelligence proves to be something less than perfectly accurate, they are the first to yell “Gotcha! How could you make a mistake like this!?!? See, toldya, let’s defund it some more!”

What is the history, I believe dating from the 80s, on hamstringing the intelligence community?

I believe there is complicity, at the least, from Congress, and from prior administrations, on making sure that we did not have an effective intelligence capability.

Anyone see any coverage on that subject?

I suppose its not particularly good guest etiquette to use Roger’s site to respond to Sullivan’s claims, but since you entered them into the thread I’ll pretend it’s OK.

“So if we had had accurate intelligence, the war would not have taken place. I reiterate: I’m still glad we fought it. But this remains one of the biggest government screw-ups in recent history…

How is one supposed to parse that mess? Is he saying “right war, wrong reasons”? As others have pointed out, the Iraqi WMD case was just ONE of a long list of reasons. John Moore has listed out twenty or so and just over the past few weeks this site has had numerous discussions.

What was the magnitude of this “biggest government screwups in recent history”? So far, the evidence suggests that about the only thing the intelligence assessment got wildly wrong was the “stockpiles” part of the WMD argument. That rougue states supported terrorists and that there was an “underground” nuclear weapons technology black market are now quite clear. That the states involved in that black market were quite willing to aid and abet terrorists is also quite clear. The use of “proxies” by at least some of those states is also clear. That terrorist enabling states (the most milquetoast euphemism I could come up with) are neck deep in WMD programs is now clear. A few short months ago all this was mere speculattion.

As for the “biggest” part of Andrew’s assertion, it just doesn’t seem to hold water – even when considering only foreign affairs. What is “recent history?” I consider the Sovient Union “recent history”. Our intelligence community got the analysis of their economic and military capabilities all wrong – on a monumental scale. In retrospect was the decision to support the fight against the Russians in Afghanistan a success or a screwup? If we hadn’t supplied their opponents would they have wound up pacifying Afghanistan and would there ever have been a Taliban to harbor AQ while they made their trial and error preparations to attack us on our own soil?

Screwups abound. Some of them seem like darned good ideas at the time the decisions were made. You pays your money and you takes your chances and then, somewhere in the future, you pay more money to repair whatever portion of whatever you did went some way other than planned.

Has keeping the UN alive all these years, or more specifically providing the muscle to enable UNSCAM been a small, medium, large or XXXL screwup?

Was ending the first gulf war after 100 hours on the ground a success or a screwup?

Andrew is overwrought in referring to this particular “screwup” as one of the biggest in recent history. And you are misguided if you accept his assertion.

“…It has made future pre-emption based on intelligence close to impossible. And President Bush is ultimately responsible for this.”

The case for pre-emptive war seems vindicated. I fail to see how any other conclusion is even possible.

Bush had to make a decision to act, or not, with the information available to him. That Saddam had to go had been discussed and decided in the affirmative several times. But action had not been taken to achieve this goal. He could have rejected that as a US policy goal, but given that terrorists had decided it was time to strike, massively, against us was a new wrinkle in the equation (a predictable one, in retrospect, but a new one for this president to deal with).

How well the war has been run is open to investigation and discussion. Historians will argue their cases for years to come. The early returns, for those of us who analyze such things, are astonishingly positive. Really, back when Afghanistan was getting under way those who knew me as a “history whacko” would ask if I thought we could win and how long it would take and a what cost. I thought we could win, it would take at least 2 or 3 years, and it would be very ugly, not only in terms of how many US troops were killed and wounded, but I couldn’t fathom how it it could be won without getting somewhere close to Grozny-like slaughtering of Afghanis. The “wild-eyed, best case, it can’t possibly go better than this fantasy” I held for Iraq was 6-8 weeks to invest Baghdad, somewhere around 2,000 US troops killed and several 10′s of thousands of Iraqis killed. Baghdad itself, I wrongly guessed, would be a 3-6 month effort with another thousand or two US troops killed and even more 10′s of thousands of Iraqis.

I had no idea that we could reach the point we’ve reached as soon, and with as few lives taken and lost, as we have – and I was among the most wild-eyed optimists. I had equally “history whacko” friends who had much more pessimistic assessments. Discounting the “we’re gonna get our clocks cleaned” crowd, the general concensus among those I know who follow history and have some understanding of military actions we were in for an incredibly difficult and long fight.

And, all that said, when will the MSM/LL segment of society EVER admit they got anything wrong? They just won’t. Its as if they’ve taken on the pose of the weather forecasting segment of their industry. “Yeah, we botched yesterday’s forecast but here’s the information you need to dress and plan for today!” I

There still would have been enough votes for the war and the war was NOT based on stockpiles of WMD alone. The war was based on the future threat Saddam would pose in light of the crumbling sanctions. The onus was on Saddam to comply with the UN Resolutions, not on us to prove he had stockpiles.

If you are going to start quoting Sullivan, you better go back and read the umpteen other reasons we went to war that he so eloquently defended until he got all sore about Bush’s support for the FMA.

All this talk about years of credibility destroyed, no more preemptive war, etc. is just hooey. Saddam was a uniquely dangerous tyrant with a dossier of misdeeds miles long. And why would Bush be responsible? Why not, say, George Tenet?

If anything, our extraordinary military success in Iraq will embolden future presidents to do the hard work on the ground that Bill Clinton refused to do with his antiseptic bombing campaign in Kosovo.

Den Beste has an interesting comparison of the MM/LL/Moonbat crowd with Mugtada’s “army” (basically that both are picking the wrong “flag” and have decided to make their Big Stand on hopelessly indefensible “terrain”)

I watched some of the Rockefeller positioning of the report (until he started cycling back to the top of his talking points for the third time). The refrain here is that that even though not one (of ~200?) intelligence analyst seems to make any claim they were pressured to change their anlysis or reports or recommendations in any way and that they seem to all say that they did NOT change their analysis, that nevertheless there was a “climate” of pressure (which the analysts, of course, resisted), that there were no end of caveats a whatifs and yeahbuts scattered throughout the intelligence analysis (which everyone from both sides of the isle swept aside or ignored because they were, after all, echos from the losing arguments) and there was some email where somebody said decisions had been made (well, the old phrase “the buck stops here” essentially means that somebody has to make a decision rather than just argue points back and forth) and there was no point trying to present a different analysis (i.e, those points have already been filed in the “losing arguments” tray) and, in hindsight the administration (and Senate Intelligence Committee) should have just kept chewing on data until all feelings of any need to act had passed and events proved the arguments one way or another.

And, of course, they were already setting up the catfight over a new CIA director and/or new intelligence bureaucracy.