Pacific Views

Were Democrats Just as Bad As Bush in Ignoring Intelligence?

Yesterday, I wrote about Paul Pillar's remarkable piece in this month's The National Interest. I've been looking at some of the other reactions to this piece and think that there is an eagerness to pile on Democrats and blame them just as much as the Bush administration for this horrid war.

Nope.

These two assessments were totally Bush's problem, and not a failure of the Democrats. I think that it is important to correct the record because it is my firm belief that we will never be able to fix the problems we are facing unless we really understand the bad judgement, errors and mistakes that were made and by whom. Saying the Democrats "knew" how bad the pre-war assessment for post-war Iraq was (just like Bush) and therefore are as culpable is wrong, and doesn't give us any insight in how we would prevent the problem in the future.

As I wrote in my piece, the new NIEs that Pillar wrote came out after the Congress had any further say in the matter.

Long after the October vote, the Intelligence community published two more critical National Intelligence Estimates in January 2003 that spoke to the bleak chance there was for creating a viable government and society in Iraq if the United States invaded.

You can read the declassified Senate Intelligence report which includes both these NIEs and see that they were both published in January 2003.

Yet, the overwhelming response from the blogosphere has been that the Democrats read these reports and didn't do anything to stop the war.

Like what? When these reports came out, the authorization had already been given to Bush. There were no more votes for Democrats to register. The Democratic Senate had been pushed aside in the toxic 2002 election and the rubber-stamp Republican Senate was in place.

Ron of the MiddleEarth blog (one of my favs) wrote about the two assessments:

But nobody was listening - yes that includes the Democrats.

I responded to his piece with this comment:

I'm not too happy with the Democrats, but I really think that this isn't exactly fair. Pillar's piece makes it clear that he initiated and produced these two NIEs in January 2003 when it was pretty clear no-one except the president was in the driving seat. By then the Democrats didn't have any more say about whether Bush would go to war. Personally, I think the only thing that might have stopped him then would have been the press, the Democratic leadership (think Bill Clinton), and a massive protest that shutdown the country by all of us that might have stopped Bush's war in January. I remember thinking that if the media had been better (and less rah-rah), if Blair had pulled back, if Powell had quit, if...., but damn, even the Pope came out against Bush and he still declared that he was going to go to war because God had given him this charge. I guess I don't see how the Democrats were any more culpable than the rest of us in those terrible days leading to a war that was most definitely a betrayal of our constitution, of our country and our world. And that doesn't begin to address the wrong we've done to the Iraqis.

Andrew Sullivan piled on as well.

We never got to see them, and they were only released in redacted form late last month. But before the Iraq war, two classified intelligence reports were issued at the formal request of the State Department - in addition to the much-maligned one about WMDs. Those other reports are damningly prescient. It's no surprise all parties in Washington have successfully kept them under wraps. Neither Democrats nor Republicans want the world to know that they were informed in almost excruciating detail of the chaos we now find ourselves mired in.

Gee, it's nice to blame the Democrats for suppressing these reports. But Andrew could have saved himself the embarrassment of being wrong just be being a more careful reader of Mr. Pillar's text. Here's what Paul Pillar said about the classified reports (emphasis mine).

After being kept under wraps (except for a few leaks) for over four years, the Senate committee quietly released redacted versions of those assessments on its website May 25, as Americans were beginning their Memorial Day holiday weekend.

...A second observation—bearing in mind how long it took for these assessments to be made public—is that evaluation of the intelligence community’s performance tends to be heavily politicized, with much criticism having more to do with agendas and interests of the critics than with anything the intelligence community does. The two assessments, which contained very little sensitive reporting, should have been far easier to declassify than the Top Secret estimate on weapons. Yet it has taken almost three more years, and a change in party control in Congress, to release them or any report based on them. (But give the Senate committee credit for even belatedly doing something that neither its House counterpart nor the executive branch did.)

As Paul Pillar noted, the infamous WMD NIE had been asked for by Senator Bob Graham because during the summer of 2002, he hadn't been hearing anything that indicated the Bush hysteria about Iraq was correct. You can listen to his take about this topic here. The prologue synopsis is (emphasis mine):

Host Ira Glass tells the story of a report by the U.S. intelligence community back in October that declared that the likelihood of Saddam Hussein using weapons of massive destruction was very low for the "foreseeable future" ... unless the U.S. were to launch a military attack on Iraq. In other words, the war to stop him from using weapons of mass destruction would probably cause the thing it was designed to prevent. Ira talks with Senator Bob Graham, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, who asked the intelligence community to do this risk assessment, and who was surprised it didn't have more effect on the public debate over the war. Before he and Ira get off the phone, the Senator asks Ira to please pose a few questions about the intelligence report to the Administration for him.

[Aside: it is well worth listening to this part of that show.]

Well after the October vote, Bob Graham was still trying to get the Bush administration to come straight about the evidence they had. Obviously, that didn't work well, because the Bush administration was more than happy to let the lies justify the war.

There was information before the October vote that should have given more people pause, and I do fault the Democrats who voted for that authorization for letting their fears and the hysteria of the moment betray their ability to make rational decisions. They definitely failed us then.

Yet, in the case of these assessments, Democrats were not as bad as the Bush administration. And knowing how well the Bush administration was at keeping Congress in the dark, before faulting the Democrats, it would be good to at least make sure someone in Congress was even informed that these NIEs existed before the investigation into the Intelligence failures in 2004. Because, we don't know that anyone besides the administration ever saw them before the war.

Posted by Mary at June 8, 2007 07:39 AM | Iraq | Technorati links |