Jumping To Conclusions

By now, I think it's pretty clear that the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs just aren't living up to the hype. There's some scattered stuff out there in Iraq, but we're not going to find the smoking gun we all thought was there. No warehouse filled with cannisters of sarin, no laboratory churning out smallpox, no stockpile of fissile material waiting to be loaded into the missiles. There may be some programs, some spare parts, a lot of plans and blueprints -- but not much in the way of ready-to-go NBC weapons systems.

So did President Bush lie when he itemized the Iraqi programs for us? He definitely overstated his level of certainty, but did he lie? Did he know that Iraq didn't have these things, and pretend that Iraq did, for domestic advantage? Or if he didn't know the truth, why not? How incompetent could our intelligence agencies be?

The most comprehensive explanation of these issues I've seen is in this month's Atlantic Monthly; Ken Pollack the former Clinton administration official who strongly supported the war, discusses at great length what we knew and why. And he makes a compelling case that in fact, Bush did not lie, except perhaps in exaggerating the confidence we should have had in the information available to us. Rather, the errors were the result of reasonable, but incorrect, assumptions by intelligence agencies, combined with a simple lack of useful data and the knowledge that they had repeatedly underestimated Saddam Hussein's progress towards these programs in the past.

It's a long piece, but it's good. Go read it.