The Believer

I'm late coming to it, but I think Andrew is wrong about this:

I can still just about believe that Bush thought the WMD case was sound. I can't believe, given all that we now know, that Cheney did. He's too smart. The data he read, we now know, was far more equivocal than the data the public was provided with. He's not new at this. He probably never wanted to make the WMD argument anyway, put it in to appease the UN crowd, and certainly wasn't going to query its validity. We may never know, of course, because Cheney will have destroyed the evidence, but if I had to guess, I'd say it's obvious Cheney knew all along that the WMD line was a cover, not a real threat, but realized by the summer of 2003 that any hint of this leaking (even from a two-bit blowhard like Wilson) needed swift and brutal rebuttal. They were embarrassed enough by the WMD bust, but if it was revealed that they had ignored all the caveats beforehand, it could get really dicey.

Now I don't know Dick Cheney, obviously, and I don't claim any special knowledge of his motivations. But I do know some very smart (albeit junior) people inside the government who were looking at the same data Cheney was looking at in 2002 and 2003, and who drew exactly the same conclusion that his pre-invasion remarks suggest that he drew - namely, that Saddam's programs were probably more extensive, and more dangerous, than our intelligence suggested. That's the thing about equivocal evidence: People read it through the lens of their pre-existing biases, and the pre-Iraq War biases on the Right (and not only on the Right) were similar to the biases that led the Committee on the Present Danger to overestimate Soviet strength in the 1970s - specifically, a belief that dovish analysts elsewhere in the government were underestimating the capabilities of America's enemies. In both cases, highly intelligent people got things dramatically wrong, by reading into incomplete evidence and drawing unwarranted conclusions that dovetailed with their own political prejudices. In neither case, I think, do you need to assume duplicity to explain what happened. Cheney may have misled the public about how solid the intelligence was that led him to draw the conclusions he did - and I don't mean to defend such conduct - but I'm willing to bet that he believed those conclusions as strongly as Bush did, if not more strongly.

I would also note that the best explanation I've seen advanced for why Cheney circa 2001 was gung-ho for doing what Cheney circa 1992 thought was a bad idea - toppling Saddam and occupying Iraq - is the psychological impact of the mid-1990s revelations that pre-Gulf War Iraq was far closer to getting a nuclear weapon than anyone thought at the time. The fact that we had significantly underestimated Saddam's capacities in the past seems a more likely reason for Cheney's post-9/11 tendency to dramatically overestimate Saddam's capacities than the implausible motives Andrew imputes to the Veep: A willingness to agitate for an invasion on grounds he knew to be bogus, in the full knowledge that if the invasion came to pass he would be exposed as a liar.

Photo by Flickr user tswartz used under a Creative Commons license.

Comments

...but I'm willing to bet that he believed those conclusions as strongly as Bush did, if not more strongly.

I agree. I think Cheney et al sexed up (or manufactured) the evidence of Saddam's WMD lust because they, like lots of people in the dark days after 9/11/01, feared the worst about Iraq, and weren't about to let liberal pussies keep them from defending America from a Very Real Danger. It just doesn't compute that they'd go to war knowing they'd embarrassingly be proven wrong about their claims as soon as the dust had settled. If Cheney were as Machiavellian as some make him out to be, wouldn't he have managed to "plant" evidence of an Iraqi WMD program to cover his and Bush's butts?

Posted by Jasper | July 10, 2007 6:48 PM

Who cares what Cheney believed or not? The fact is he pushed this country into a needless and senseless war. Whether people misunderstood the Soviet threat is not really relevant because we did not end up attacking the Soviets. People, especially analysts, can and do reach different conclusions based on the same data. However there is a difference between thought and action. Much is expected from people in positions of great authority who make the decisions. Their actions must be based on irrefutable facts and hard evidence. Nowhere is this more important than the decision to go to war. War is not a strategy or a choice; war is hell and a last resort. People die, families are broken, homes destroyed, lives changed forever.

At the day’s end, the administration callously and stupidly led us into this senseless quagmire opposed by pretty much the whole world and a good section of the American public. And for what? It has achieved nothing and can be expected to achieve nothing. It has only made things worse. Leaders are judged by the decisions they make. That is not to say that good leaders cannot make wrong decisions, but at the days end the more important question is whether they exercised due care. Cheney and Bush both fail this standard by a huge margin

Posted by 2cynicalbyhalf | July 10, 2007 6:54 PM

"It just doesn't compute that they'd go to war knowing they'd embarrassingly be proven wrong about their claims as soon as the dust had settled."

I dunno, Ross & Jasper. They could have figured that (1) the fact of no WMD could be obscured for a while, (2) the American people wouldn't necessarily know or care, and (3) success in overthrowing Saddam would overwhelm the inconvenient fact of no WMD.

That theory looked pretty good in Nov. 2004, and plausible in the summer of 06.

As ever with the Bush administration, they're trying to insist that they're incompetent, rather than malevolent/mendacious. It's far from clear why the one is all that much awesomer for America than the other; or that they're not both.

Posted by Elvis Elvisberg | July 10, 2007 7:05 PM

But I do know some very smart (albeit junior) people inside the government who were looking at the same data Cheney was looking at in 2002 and 2003, and who drew exactly the same conclusion that his pre-invasion remarks suggest that he drew

I've heard this particular species of argument from your side several times before, deployed to other ends. In all seriousness, at least consider the possibility that the people you know are not that smart.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 10, 2007 8:10 PM

Thank you for this meausure of sanity. Of course Cheney simply believed what all the experts believed: that Saddam had WMD and was close to acquiring nuclear weapons. The intelligence expert Ken Pollok -- a centrist Democrat -- explained in several places, at length, that the intelligence community was unanimous on that point. See, e.g., here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1140548,00.html

Elsewhere, in a link I haven't been able to track down, Pollack said that intelligence analysts were "100 percent certain" that Iraq had WMD.

And yet people like Andrew Sullivan routinely claim that Bush and/or Cheney simply lied through their teeth, and hardly anyone but Ross bothers to disagree. Amazing.

Posted by Jim | July 10, 2007 8:27 PM

in 2002, there was some chance that this analysis was correct. By early 2003, only people who had pre-determined to go to war with Iraq (Cheney/Rumsfeld) felt this way. We had weapons inspectors in-country going everywhere that US intelligence sent them and they couldn't find one damn thing.

But by early 2003, we had staked too much face on regime change and mushroom clouds to back down.

By the time you're relying on British intelligence about yellowcake from Niger that your own intelligence has disproved and a couple of serial liars like Chalabi and Curveball, you gotta know, if you're honest with yourself, that you're grasping at straws.

This is not a complex story in the big picture. Senior administration officials were determined to overthrow Saddam, and they used all the tools in their power to persuade the American public to follow along. WMD was just one of the tools used to shape public opinion.

Posted by Francis | July 10, 2007 9:08 PM

Smart people who believed in Saddam's WMD believed in one thing--that there would be a miniscule amount in Iraq, post-invasion, enough to justify the invasion to the uninformed American public. That's it. No one believed that his weapons were anything but antiques, no one believed in the garbage about his nuclear program. The only real surprise (that Saddam had no WMD) was exposed with the results of the pre-war inspections.

The amazing thing is that I can remember the exact point at which WMD became the selling point for Iraq War--that was the Kissinger op-ed in the NYTimes, August 2002, where the venerable man himself said that the US would need to go to the UN, rather than go it alone. The next month, the WMD justification began in full, and all of the little hawks began to trumpet that POS.

Posted by Thomas | July 10, 2007 9:37 PM

This seems like a pretty good example of Grey's Law in action. The aphorism states:

"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

Posted by Matt Frost | July 11, 2007 10:44 AM

Why would Cheney care if he was exposed as a liar? He lies every day, even now. And if he was expecting a glorious victory for the people of Bushistan in Iraq, he wouldn't be expecting anyone to ask many questions in the afterglow of that victory. Or were they all lying about their expectation of a "cakewalk"?

Then there's also the fact that as we went to war the only "oversight" the compliant GOP Congress was offering was... well, none. Cheney had no expectation of being called to the carpet, ever. None of them did.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | July 11, 2007 11:13 AM

2 points of context (of which he raised one):

A. we vastly underestimated Hussein's program in the past.

B. we totally missed Pakistan's nuclear program (and that was only a couple years before the Iraq invasion).

that context changes everything.

Posted by Nathan | July 11, 2007 11:31 AM

In addition to Nathan's points, we also underestimated the risks posed by Afghanistan/al Qaeda. Ignoring the risk is the sort of policy that 2cynical would endorse, but some of us came to a different view after the events of one morning a few years ago--some of you may even remember that morning.

Francis forgets, as many do, that the inspectors weren't there to find weapons, but to find evidence that Iraq had complied with its obligations to disarm, as required by UN Security Council resolutions.

Posted by Thomas | July 11, 2007 12:05 PM

Elsewhere, in a link I haven't been able to track down, Pollack said that intelligence analysts were "100 percent certain" that Iraq had WMD.

Jim, the problem with that is that Pollack was lying. It was *not* true that *all* intel analysts had this "100% certainty" -- especially not after Blix et al. had traipsed up and down Mesopotamia and hadn't found jack.

As Blix wondered in his book, how could there be this *absolute* certainty of the existence of these WMD, when *no one* knew where they actually were?

Also, don't repeat the fallacy of treating all "WMD" alike. No one in the U.S. had any direct risk from Saddam developing chemical weapons to kill more Kurds or Iranians. The war was sold on the "mushroom cloud."

Posted by Anderson | July 11, 2007 12:11 PM

if I recall correctly, the US was not the only govt that thought Saddam had worrying levels of chem and bio weapons, and possibly the making of a nukes program. I seem to recall a German intel estimate the Saddam was a few years away from a nuke.

and one of the big points made by the anti war side here was the perils of invading Iraq, as Saddam would inevitably unleash his chem and bio weapons on our troops (who were outfitted with the protective gear in that event) or Israel.

for ex, from the American Prospect, in May 2002 - "The truth is that nobody knows exactly where Saddam keeps his arsenal of biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, and he's had ample time to hide it since he ejected U.N. weapons inspectors in 1998... The problem is exacerbated by Hussein's paranoia; he has indicated repeatedly that if he ever feels his back against the wall, if he ever loses touch with the Republican Guard, or if there is ever an invasion of any sort, his missile officers should push all the buttons. The buttons, of course, will launch dirty bombs -- loaded with aflotoxin, seran gas, anthrax, and other poisons -- against Israel, rather that the ordinary scuds he fired during the Gulf War.
" http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=coup_demand

It is indictment enough that we went to war on faulty intel. The focus should be on improving the intel, not holding witch trials.

Posted by chris | July 11, 2007 1:17 PM

Anderson writes: "Also, don't repeat the fallacy of treating all "WMD" alike. No one in the U.S. had any direct risk from Saddam developing chemical weapons to kill more Kurds or Iranians. The war was sold on the "mushroom cloud.""

Of course it was. And let's not forget that Cheney STILL pushes the Al Qaeda/Saddam connection and that the administration is still lying every single day about Al Qaeda's role in the violence in Iraq. It's an administration absolutely addicted to lying. Why on Earth should we give them the benefit of the doubt about past lies when they continue to push lie after lie out now?

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | July 11, 2007 1:21 PM

chris writes: "It is indictment enough that we went to war on faulty intel. The focus should be on improving the intel, not holding witch trials."

Unfortunately the intel isn't the problem. The problem is that the people in charge at the moment simply can't be trusted.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | July 11, 2007 1:24 PM

Grey's Law:
"Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

Matt Frost's Law:

Any sufficiently advanced malice is indistinguishable from boorishness..

Posted by Peter Leavitt | July 11, 2007 1:46 PM

It's been reported in books like "Fiasco" and "The Assassin's Gate" that the military teams in charge of securing suspected WMD sites were treated like neglected step-children. They couldn't get resources they thought they needed, and they couldn't get anyone to prioritize the list of 600 or so suspected WMD sites. It seems to me that if the administration had been sincere in their concerns about WMD, then they would have had their hair on fire about getting to and securing the top WMD sites.

Is the reporting in those books wrong or am I misunderstanding something?

Posted by Charles Grant | July 11, 2007 1:51 PM

I don't understand why so much ink and so many pixels are wasted on discussions of whether or not Cheney and Bush BELIEVED the WMD justification. That's not the question. The question is why couldn't we wait for a few months, while the arms inspectors finished their job?

The decision to go to war in Iraq was made in 2002 (some say 9/12 2001), when we started building up troops in the area. By early 2003, we had no choice -- you can't leave 100,000+ troops sitting in tents in the summer heat of the Middle East, awaiting orders for October.

The goal of the war was to cement Bush's re-election. No other matter was pushing the decision. It worked.

Posted by BobN | July 11, 2007 2:08 PM

Forgive me, but wasn't he one of the whole crowd advocating "draining the swamp" from Day One? WMD or not? Surely Syria wasn't suspected of having WMD and they were to be "drained" as well.

Posted by Eric | July 11, 2007 2:12 PM

Of course Cheney was 100% sure... based on his post-9/11 maxim that you have to treat a 1% chance the same as a 90% chance.

It's one thing to believe the intelligence. It's quite another to launch a war of choice, sell it as cheap and fast, and fire Shinseki and anyone else who suggests maybe it won't be so cheap or so fast.

Posted by Derek Scruggs | July 11, 2007 2:42 PM

It doesn't matter to me what Cheney and Bush's motivations were, duplicitous or not. They simply turned out to be wrong and should be held accountable for that. (Or, at least, they should have in 2004). So should all politicians, Republican or Democrat, who voted for or supported this war. These people are not my friends. I feel no need to give them the benefit of the doubt, or to try to figure out what they were thinking. They advocated a monumental action based on what turned out to be incorrect assumptions. A now lives are being lost and our foreign policy is in tatters. None of them deserve further support.

Posted by ajp | July 11, 2007 2:49 PM

it is gratifying to read perhaps 4 comments here and the original post that are not beholden to the "they all lied" meme, which does nothing to advance an accurate history of the events; nor does it address the serious issue at the heart of this, which is how can our intelligence services be so wrong so often? The point of the post, and I think the correct one, is that Cheney expected our intelligence to be wrong, but wrong in understating the problem, as it had been before. What is deliberately forgotten now is that Blix himself stated repeatedly, to the UN, that Saddam was not granting the inspectors the access they required in order to verify that he was not lying.That is why the business about waiting a few more months was meaningless.

Posted by arthurize | July 11, 2007 2:52 PM

BobN, how effective were the inspections before the US and coalition troops were on the border? At least you were good enough to answer your own question, even if you don't see that.

ajp, do you have the same standards for inaction as for action? That is, do you hold those who missed the opportunity to attack Afghanistan to eliminate or mitigate the al Qaeda threat in the late 90s to the same standard (no need for benefit of the doubt, they were just wrong, and need to be held accountable for the lives lost)? (We could even narrow it down to the time when Atta was present in Afghanistan in late 1999: why was nothing done?) Why would one have different standards for action vs. inaction?

Posted by Thomas | July 11, 2007 2:58 PM

Douthat takes the lighter, kinder view of Cheney's motives and beliefs, Sullivan the darker, harsher view.

It may be relevant to observe that Sullivan doesn't dispute that Cheney sincerely believes there exist the most compelling of reasons to do whatever's necessary to combat the Islamist menace, and that that menace in Cheney's eyes looms very large. To him it is possessed of the same proportions or greater than the Soviet menace of 1945-90 and the German before it. Sullivan only disputes that that Cheney believed the WMD story, the lowest common denominator all members of the administration could agree upon and could present to the public with good hope to persuade them to support the second war.

Cheney generally himself takes a very dark view of the world, and is persuaded unbridled executive power extending to the use of torture is essential to defeat the enemy. Whether he persuaded himself of the truth of the WMD story or saw its flimsiness, it would to foolish and naive for us citizens to believe that he holds any principles that would lead him to hesitate for a moment to peddle to us the public whatever story serves best to persuade us to support a strike at the enemy where he lives. The man who has embraced the necessity of torture of suspects surely embraces lies to a public so many of whom in his view are ill-informed and guileless dupes of the enemy.

Posted by Freud | July 11, 2007 3:14 PM

Look, as Francis pointed out above, we'd pretty much ascertained through Blix et al. before the invasion that there weren't WMDs. (Thomas: "Smart people who believed in Saddam's WMD...": there's no such person after a certain point in the runup to the invasion, when it became clear that Saddam didn't have them, and deep sources available only to the intelligence community who'd asserted this were confirmed.) Whatever Cheney believed regarding WMDs prior to the inspections didn't matter after the inspections. Furthermore, Cheney's supposed belief in real Iraqi WMDs is contra-indicated by the administration's need to manufacture evidence of, oh, the drones that were going to attack us, the centrifuge tubes, the mobile bio-weapons labs, etc. So...this is a stupid argument following a pointless blogpost, and many of you are jumping through hoops to deny the obvious.

Posted by Reader | July 11, 2007 3:55 PM

Reader, Blix said he could not find any WMDs. But given the circs of the search (recall the cat and mouse with Iraqi scientists?), and the surprises after the Gulf War, very few people took that as definitive. certainly the Dems who voted for war did not, and even people opposed to war argued for more time for inspections - not that the inspections done to date had erased all doubt.

fwiw I'm not concerned with defending Bush et al. My concern rather is that we'll draw the wrong lesson from this mess, and that next time (and there will be a next time) we will make the opposite mistake and assume the best only to have the worst result.

Posted by chris | July 11, 2007 4:23 PM

Chris, well said. It is absolutely not true that Blix certified before the invasion that there were no such weapons--in fact, Blix himself, like David Kay (speaking only of inspectors)was convinced that he did have them.That is why the current revisionism will in the long run prove worthless, and possibly harmful, because it misstates the facts.
It is of course obvious to the point of cliche that the administration is responsible in the event that they restarted hostilities with Iraq on the basis of faulty intelligence (it is equally obvious that a number of wars have also been initiated on that basis). Of course, had the intelligence been wrong the other way, and they failed to act, they would stand convicted of malfeasance as well.It seems to me that a much more valid criticism can be leveled against decisions made after the war began; but that lacks the appeal, to some, of the "Bush and Cheney lied us into war" believers.

Posted by arthurize | July 11, 2007 4:58 PM

What is deliberately forgotten now is that Blix himself stated repeatedly, to the UN, that Saddam was not granting the inspectors the access they required in order to verify that he was not lying.That is why the business about waiting a few more months was meaningless.

The problem is that was Blix from the previous inspection attempts.

In the final inspections Blix reported complete access, even without prior notice.

Posted by Davebo | July 11, 2007 5:05 PM

I don't think that's so. See transcript of Blix's remarks Jan.27, 2003 www.cnn.com/2003/US/01/27/sprj.irq.transcript.blix/index.html

I don't dispute that Blix wanted to continue.But he was clear in stating that Iraq was not cooperating fully and that they could not/would not prove that they had disarmed.

Posted by arthurize | July 11, 2007 5:57 PM

You're overlooking the obvious, Mr. Douthat: the Neocons WERE absolutely confident that Iraq could be very easily reformed, democratized and pro-Americanized, and that the public would therefore forgive any little white lies the Administration had told us to initiate that highly successful war in the first place. Cheney and Rummy seem to have been less interested in actually reforming Iraq, but their comments indicate that THEY were confident that throwing that particular Crappy Little Country Up Against The Wall would scare the hell out of our remaining Moslem enemies. Wrong again.

As for the extent to which they genuinely believed their exaggerated estimates of Saddam's WMDs: we are still left with the fact (as Sullivan, along with multitudes of others, has pointed out) that the Pentagon made virtually NO attempt to guard even the biggest and most probable WMD depots that we had identified in Iraq. Now, either this indicates that the Administration actually knew that it was greatly overestimating the real danger from the WMDs, or else it confirms that they were so cretinously, isnanely overconfident that the war would be a Cakewalk that they figured the Grateful Citizens of Iraq would do all the depot-guarding for us. Either way, it is not much to their credit, to put it mildly.

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | July 11, 2007 8:29 PM

So... if Cheney and company were convinced that there was solid and ample evidence that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program, then why the need to exagerate and manufacture key pieces of the evidence trail?

Remember the case of the HR bureaucrat placed in charge of compiling the Energy Department's findings regarding the aluminum tubes? Thomas Ryder contradicted the department's senior scientists, produced the answer that Bush/Cheney were looking for, then received a $20K bonus and scurried away once the damage was done.

From TPM:

“So Spencer Abraham taps a friend for a position for which he seems to have no qualifications whatsoever. Then that friend overrules his technical experts to greenlight a finding that Iraq is building nuclear weapons. Then Abraham gives him a big bonus for outstanding performance -- performance so outstanding that he doesn't keep him on in the job.”

Posted by Mark | July 11, 2007 11:29 PM

Thomas: Yes, same standard for all of them. Blame to Clinton for not taking out OBL and his network earlier. Blame to Bush for ignoring the CIA's warnings in the summer of 2001. Blame to Bush and Cheney for misreading and/or spinning the WMD intelligence. Credit to the first person who does something right when it comes to Islamic terrorism.

Posted by ajp | July 12, 2007 6:07 PM