The Red Pill

By Christopher S. Bond
10/21/2003


On Oct. 12, 2003 you carried a commentary by former Sen. Thomas F. Eagleton, "Slant, Slant and More Slant," referring to the positions of President George W. Bush.

I must note that if one believes intelligence was slanted with respect to Iraq, it was slanted during the previous administration as well. Based on intelligence he received, President Bill Clinton on Feb. 17, 1998, said, "If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program."

A day later his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, said, "Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face."

Sen. Eagleton and I would agree that the state of our Intelligence prior to Sept. 11, 2001, was not as good as it should be. That is why I have taken a position on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and hope to help strengthen our system. Clearly, one of the great voids we had was in human intelligence. I believe that that resulted from the actions of the Senate's Church Committee in the 1970s, and the previous administration in the 1990s.

Our Senate Intelligence Committee is conducting a very thorough review of documents and extensive interviews of participants to find out what the shortcomings were in our intelligence gathering and how we can improve them. If there is any indication that members of this administration tried to influence or change intelligence estimates, I assure you that will be made public. Our hope, however, is that we can, going forward, do a much better job gathering and analyzing intelligence from all sources.

Sen. Eagleton and I differ on the interpretation of the report from David Kay, the head of the Iraq Survey Group. In his report Kay said, "We have discovered dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002." He stated, "The discovery of these deliberate concealment efforts have come about both through the admissions of Iraqi scientists and officials concerning information they deliberately withheld and through physical evidence of equipment and activities that [the survey group] has discovered that should have been declared to the U.N."

Kay went on to explain that because of the deliberate concealment and destruction of evidence, it was very difficult to locate weapons of mass destruction. Saddam's new emphasis on concealment we should find deeply troubling, not acquitting.

The Eagleton column also made references to "the preemptive war" and the "imminent threat." We should be perfectly clear that President Bush stated specifically that we could not wait until the threat became imminent; we had to move against terrorism before the terrorists launched a strike.

On the issue of preventing terrorists attacks, I agree with Presidents Clinton and Bush that we have to move before the terrorists act. The threat of after-the-fact retributive justice is just not an effective way to deter suicide bombers or deliverers of weapons of mass destruction. I believe it is preferable that we fight the war on terrorism in Baghdad rather than in Boston, or Bolivar or Ballwin, Missouri.

Sen. Christopher S. Bond, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Missouri.