Washington — Well, here we are. Our military has just won a
smashing victory against a ghastly regime. It is a regime that
aided international terror, overtly by rewarding suicide bombers
and covertly by liaising with many of the West’s enemies. The
horrors perpetrated by the regime are on the front pages of all our
newspapers. Now the task is to rebuild a shattered country that has
at least as much right to a decent regime as did Germany in the
1940s and Japan, and more recently Kosovo and Bosnia. How goes
it?
Look at the other stories on the front pages. Along with the
stories of the Hussein tyranny’s torture, rape, mass graves, and
larceny come stories that Washington and London doctored
intelligence to justify war. The stories show once again the
media’s lack of proportion or for that matter memory. They also
show that so pathetic is the condition of many Democrats they will
exploit American foreign policy for their own partisan gain. On the
face of it, the stories that Washington and London doctored
intelligence estimates are preposterous. Who can believe that the
Bush Administration made false claims about Iraq’s possession of
weapons of mass destruction so that we might send in an army that
would inevitably find there were no weapons of mass destruction?
Who can believe that the Administration would confect a scheme that
was bound to be exposed?
Apparently Dr. Howard Dean believes it. So apparently do some of
the other born blanks now seeking the Democratic presidential
nomination. But then they also believe that President George W.
Bush is as stupid as they considered President Ronald Reagan to be.
Yes, Reagan too was accused of putting intelligence to political
purposes, namely to end the Cold War. So, Bush mobilized the nation
to send in an army to find weapons that he knew were not there.
Apparently Dr. Howard Dean believes that Bush expected the American
people not to care if the weapons were not discovered.
The campaigning Democrats underestimate not only the President
but also the American people. The story that he doctored
intelligence estimates is another of those news stories that we
call a Black Cat News Story. A Black Cat News Story is a shocking
revelation that crosses a politician’s path to jinx his career
forever. It is almost always a story without substance but that
through constant fortissimo repetition hexes the politician.
It is also a story that pleases partisan opposition. This one
puts me in mind of the horror stories confected after Pearl Harbor
to prove that President Roosevelt left the Pacific fleet vulnerable
to Japanese attack so that he could join the British in World War
II. Like the Black Cat News Story now being used against the Bush
Administration, historians found that it was without substance.
Nonetheless cranks still believe it, and those who believe
President Bush knowingly relied on false intelligence to send
hundreds of thousands of pilots, sailors and soldiers halfway
around the world on a false mission are cranks.
Intelligence estimates are rarely totally factual. They always
contain error. That is the nature of intelligence. We shall not
know what happened to Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction for a
long time. We do know that he had the grisly stuff and that he used
it on Iranians and on his own people. We have evidence right now
that he possessed contraband weaponry. The United Nations arms
inspectors even admit it. The burning question raised up now is
precisely what the American and British intelligence community
developed as unassailable fact. It is an ignorant question.
The distinguished British historian Paul Johnson avers that
intelligence information is always shaky. “One never gets to the
bottom of such estimates,” he tells me from his London library. “It
includes assertions and counter assertions” from one intelligence
bureaucracy to another. “Reading intelligence reports is like
reading a detective novel containing no final chapter. All you can
do is weigh intelligence reports and guess. You can never be
absolutely certain that the reports are completely sound.”
Of course, Johnson is right. Yet we certainly have enough
information even now to recognize that our overthrow of Hussein was
justified. All the cranks are achieving now is the discrediting of
a thoroughly admirable effort. The Bush Administration acted
properly with the support of a prudent citizenry. Prime Minister
Tony Blair, whose politics I generally oppose, acted heroically
without much support at home. He is the first politician I have
seen in years who carried out the dictates of his conscience to the
peril of his political career. His achievement will be honored by
history.
