Thursday, March 09, 2006

If not American society as a whole, the Democrats for sure demand clairvoyance from this president. They say that because we didn't find WMD stockpiles in Iraq, he lied in saying they were there. But since when has lying been defined as affirming something as true you believed at the time was true, but later discovered might not have been? Democrats have also condemned Bush for failing to anticipate, with certainty, all the consequences of removing Saddam, including the intramural sectarian strife -- which has been exaggerated by the antiwar media.

Never mind that no one could possibly have known for sure what would happen if we removed Saddam. We still can't be sure today. But President Bush, being in office at the time, had to make the hard decisions without the luxury of the hindsight lenses with which he is now being judged by his exacting, armchair detractors.

Even if he could have foreknown a measure of chaos would ensue in the wake of the vacuum created by deposing Saddam, he most likely would still have decided to attack Iraq, because he reasonably believed, based on the best available information, that Saddam posed a threat to our national security.

The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Paul R. Pillar, who was the national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, acknowledges the U.S. intelligence agencies' mistakes in concluding that Hussein's government possessed weapons of mass destruction. But he said those misjudgments did not drive the administration's decision to invade.

"Official intelligence on Iraqi weapons programs was flawed, but even with its flaws, it was not what led to the war," Pillar wrote in the upcoming issue of the journal Foreign Affairs. Instead, he asserted, the administration "went to war without requesting -- and evidently without being influenced by -- any strategic-level intelligence assessments on any aspect of Iraq."

"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.

Pillar's critique is one of the most severe indictments of White House actions by a former Bush official since Richard C. Clarke, a former National Security Council staff member, went public with his criticism of the administration's handling of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and its failure to deal with the terrorist threat beforehand.

It is also the first time that such a senior intelligence officer has so directly and publicly condemned the administration's handling of intelligence.

The judges did award Fredo a 9.0, 9.2, and a 9.1 for this feat of contortion:

But since when has lying been defined as affirming something as true you believed at the time was true, but later discovered might not have been?