January 14, 2004

Unilateral Howard and an Issue to Run On

It looks like Dr. Duck's standard for going to war are as warped as that of the Clinton administration. Going to war in Iraq on behalf of U.S. security interests is wrong and immoral, but going to war in Bosnia, a place of little U.S. concern is correct and right even if done unilaterally.

Hooray or USA Today for countering the standard Dean campaign rhetoric of an "imminent threat" with what President Bush actually said. A commenter linked to a Daniel Drezner debate over Iraq War rhetoric. He concluded that while the term "imminent threat" wasn't used the Bush administration made comments implying that that was exacty what Iraq had become. To the Deaniacs, unless the WMD were cocked and loaded or given to a terrorist group there was so significant threat to the U.S. That's quite different than this administrations approach. I quote from the 2002 National Security Strategy:

We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and friends. Our response must take full advantage of strengthened alliances, the establishment of new partnerships with former adversaries, innovation in the use of military forces, modern technologies, including the development of an effective missile defense system, and increased emphasis on intelligence collection and analysis.

Drezner concludes that the administration expanded the the definition of "imminent threat." So, both sides of this rhetorical argument have something to stand on. The President didn't use the word "imminent," and the anti-warriors can argue that that's what he implied. How about this: I'll stop claiming the anti-warriors are perpetuating a lie if they stop claiming Bush said Iraq was an imminent threat? The debate over a word doesn't change my opinion of the correctness of the Iraq War. Iraq as an imminent threat wasn't my reason for advocating war. It was the fact that Saddam's Iraq had ties to terrorists (Abu Nidal and possibly low-level contact with al-Qaeda), used chemical weapons in the past, and attempted to assassinate President George H. W. Bush. Eugene Volokh's blackmail scenerio deals with nuclear weapons, which Saddam didn't have, but it could still happen with chemical or biological weapons. The threat was there, and war was, unfortunately, the best way to deal with it.

Dean and the anti-warriors would be on much firmer ground if they argued that the intelligence system failed. It failed to prevent the Sep. 11th attacks and not (it can be argued) they failed to properly assess Saddam's WMD capabilities. However, by critiquing the intelligence system they have to indict other nations besides the U.S. During the war debate no nation, including France, stood up and claimed Saddam didn't have WMD. The argument wasn't if he had them or not, but how to deal with him. Last August, Francis Fukuyama wrote:

The inability to locate these weapons is vastly more consequential to American credibility than the fact that the White House staff failed to vet 16 words in a single speech. The missing weapons reflect a much more fundamental institutional intelligence failure.

The source of this failure does not lie in the political agenda of this administration. The Bush people are right in saying that their estimates of WMD stockpiles were no different from the conclusions of the Clinton administration. And the latter would say, if asked, that their assessment was drawn from Unscom, the U.N. weapons inspectors who operated in Iraq from 1991-98. The intelligence failure is thus ultimately traceable to Unscom, and deeply embedded in an intelligence process that in the 1990s was biased toward overestimation of threats.

Calling for a systematic analysis and reforming of the intelligence community would be a proactive issue for Dean to campaign on. I just don't see him taking that up because it wouldn't fit well with the Bush-hating of his devoted followers.

"Dean Urged Clinton to Take Unilateral Action in Bosnia"

[I've linked this post to OTB's Beltway Jam]