The Red Pill

A 'Miranda' Warning for Saddam?
BY ROBERT L. BARTLEY
Monday, July 14, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

"It's time to tell the truth," the Democratic National Committee urges in an Internet ad, complaining about something President Bush said about uranium. Yes, this is the same DNC headed by Clinton apologist Terry McAuliffe; you'd think the president proclaimed, "I did not have sex with that yellowcake."

But nothing so exciting; the ad is merely carping about the now-famous 16 words in the president's State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The White House now says this statement should not have been included; CIA Director George Tenet has said his agency erred in vetting the speech, and Democrats and other malcontents are in full cry about the president lying to build his case for war.

Now, those 16 words were entirely accurate in the sense that the British government had reached and publicized that conclusion. The media flogging the story might be more careful to tell us, too, that the British government maintains the same position today. The prime minister's official spokesman stood by the original report as recently as Friday, after remarking earlier in the week that he was "surprised that journalists had not yet picked up on what we had been saying consistently about this matter."

In testimony to a parliamentary committee on June 27 and consistently since, the British government has maintained that it reached this conclusion from "intelligence reporting from more than one source" and independent of documents that proved to be forged. It also believes it knows more than Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who debunked the allegations after the CIA sent him to Niger to investigate back in February 2002.

British intelligence has not revealed its sources, so unease naturally remains. Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee proclaimed the uranium report "very odd indeed," even while rejecting accusations of political interference and generally concluding that "Ministers did not mislead Parliament." In the end, the uranium issue seems to concern disagreement among intelligence analysts, in this case British ones and CIA ones.

Such controversies are pretty much routine after any war. The congressional hearings over the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack ran 39 volumes, for example, and the Ford administration formally chartered a "Team B" to second-guess estimates of the Soviet military build-up. Generally the losing side within the intelligence community will wrap itself in "professionalism" and charge "political interference." This is under way both in the U.S. and in the U.K., with Greg Thielmann, a retired State Department intelligence officer, joining Mr. Wilson on this side of the Atlantic.
The invocation of "professionalism," though, raises the issue of when was the last time the intelligence professionals got anything right. The professionals failed to foresee September 11, though terrorists had already attacked the same building once. They failed to warn in a persuasive way about Muslim terrorism, though I suspect that here the Clinton administration will have much to answer for. They failed to foresee the collapse of the Communist empire, though Ronald Reagan predicted it at least four times.

Intelligence professionals are entitled to our sympathy, I hasten to add, since their job is to sift for clues in inherently ambiguous signals. We shouldn't expect too much of them, and they shouldn't be surprised if policy makers decide for themselves what the signals mean.

Especially so since it frequently turns out that disagreements are above the professionals' pay grade. Mr. Thielmann, for example, concludes that "Iraq posed no imminent threat to either its neighbors or to the United States." Interesting word, "imminent." It also appears in the DNC ad and increasingly in press commentary.

The word does appear once in the president's State of the Union. To wit, "Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent." He rejected this: "Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option." The whole thrust of the policy of pre-emption, after all, is that in a world of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer wait until a threat is imminent. A madman like Saddam heading a nation-state is itself an intolerable threat.

This conclusion is of course subject to debate, but it is a matter for presidents, not intelligence "professionals." As Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has tried to point out above the din, September 11 changed the American view of what threat is tolerable; hence decisions to call Saddam to account at the U.N. and to go to war if necessary. The war resolution passed the Senate by 77-23 and 29-21 among Democrats. The ayes included Senators Kerry, Lieberman, Edwards, Daschle, Dodd and Clinton. For that matter, the policy of regime change was signed into law by President William Jefferson Clinton with the Iraqi Liberation Act back in 1998.

It's a mystery, too, what policy the malcontents would urge instead. The complaint seems to be that President Bush didn't read Saddam his Miranda rights. Does Howard Dean want to apply to international affairs Justice Cardozo's famous observation that since the constable has blundered the criminal should go free? If the president got the uranium report wrong, should we invite Saddam Hussein to come out of hiding and resume his murderous rule? And if not, what's all the fuss about anyway?
Yes, there is some thread of an issue, since by its nature intelligence is never perfect. But more fundamentally, the uranium issue is the latest in a series of desperate efforts by critics to impugn the president's success in Iraq. As the British might say, this is very odd indeed. Usually, intelligence controversies are over who is to blame for failure; this time it seems to be about discrediting victory.