Much that was claimed and predicted in the period before the war in Iraq has turned out to be wrong. The forecasts of political upheaval across the Arab world, the anxieties about high American and British casualties, and the fears about the destruction of oil wells turned out to have been as mistaken as the assumptions that Iraqi troops would switch sides, or that large stocks of chemical and biological weapons would swiftly be found, or that Iraqi gratitude would make everything easy after military victory.
This is surely no surprise. It is what happens when decisions are taken, and argued over, as they usually are, on the basis both of incomplete information and of pre-existing tendencies to favor one course of action or another. So even has been the balance of miscalculation between opponents and supporters of the war, in fact, that most have agreed on what amounts to an informal amnesty as far as their own erroneous positions before the conflict are concerned.
But that amnesty manifestly does not apply to the American and British governments, and the hunt in both countries for evidence that intelligence was exaggerated by our leaders has become the principal means through which the argument about the rightness or wrongness of the war is being continued.
Governments bear far more responsibility for getting things wrong or for persuading others into a mistaken view than do people in think tanks, universities, or in newspapers and broadcasting. Yet, even as distortion of the intelligence evidence is at the center of this argument, there is something distorted about the argument itself. It does not seem to connect with what people knew, or thought they knew, and with what they were mainly in dispute about before the war.
As the conflict came closer, there was no great division between people who believed that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein represented an immediate threat to Western countries and those who did not. There was a consensus along the political spectrum that the Iraqi regime almost certainly possessed some rather limited biological and chemical capacity and might just conceivably have a radiological weapon or two. That consensus was summed up by Tom Friedman, the popular American columnist and war supporter, who wrote just before it began that "Saddam Hussein has neither the intention nor the capacity to threaten America and is easily deterred if he does."
True, both the American and British governments tried to give the impression that Saddam had serious stocks of unconventional weapons and might be trying to restart his nuclear program. But, as Friedman and others implied, that was because the real justifications for war could not be presented to a public conditioned to believe that war is only an acceptable risk if a clear and present danger can be demonstrated.
So we had the spectacle of the arguments being conducted on two distinct levels. One involved disputable claims about the extent of Saddam's weapons holdings, probably wholly specious claims about his connections with al-Qaeda, and questions to do with the role of inspectors and the UN. The other involved forecasts of the threat that Saddam might present if left alone, and, even more difficult to assess, calculations that his removal from power would change the Middle East in ways which would weaken the forces of Islamic extremism in the region and therefore the terrorist threat to the US and Europe. Present on both levels of argument was the humanitarian case for military action, but that was not the primary focus of either discussion.
Neither the British nor the American peoples, let alone the French or the Germans, would go to war on the basis of this second set of arguments. They were too vague, too intuitive, too liable to be proved spectacularly mistaken, and too unlike the normal arguments for war. But they would, or they might, on the first.
A degree of fraudulence was thus involved from the start in keeping, in public, mainly to one level of the argument when the real issues were perceived by many in our governments and by most of their opponents to be on the other. That would be so even if the 45-minute claim had never made it into a British dossier or the quest for Niger uranium had never been included in the State of the Union address.
Yet it is also fair to say that the two governments are genuinely astonished that they have found no weapons in Iraq, as are the two invading armies. The surprise extends to the intelligence services, whose line all along has been "not much" rather than "nothing at all."
The answer to this puzzle will emerge in time, probably in part through the discovery of some remnant stocks. But it is possible to speculate that in this, as in so much else, Saddam was his own worst enemy. So important to him was his image among his own people, and in the region, as a man capable of outwitting the Anglo-Saxons and hanging on to his weaponry, that he may have chosen to carry on with his obstructive maneuvers long after he had anything much to hide. How else to explain, for example, the insistence, at a very late stage, that interviews with Iraqi scientists be tape recorded, or the ban on their being interviewed abroad?
In the first half of the 1990s, Saddam tried to bluff to cover his continued possession of the weapons, and it may be that, in the second half, he bluffed to cover his loss of them. This is British Prime Minister Tony Blair's real argument in defense of his pre-war position -- that Saddam acted "as if" he had weapons -- but he cannot apparently bring himself to put it. If our intelligence services were not good enough to penetrate such a second bluff, then that is as legitimate a subject of inquiry as the question of whether US President George W. Bush and Blair pumped up the intelligence advice they were getting. They could hardly have done so if the agencies had committed themselves to the view that Saddam's arms cupboard was completely bare.
That some of the public was misled by this juggling between two levels is undoubtedly true. Easily misled, one might reflect, when a recent Washington Post poll shows that 24 percent of Americans believe that chemical and biological weapons were actually used in the war. But the more informed and responsible public, among whom can be included our legislators, were well aware of the dual nature of the argument, and of the problems for democratic discussion which that dualism raised. The British and American inquiries into the possible misuse of intelligence should be conducted, if they are to be honest, with a proper attention to those problems, which deserve an equal and a related scrutiny.
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