Fighting the Last War

Haven't read the new Ron Suskind book but the reviews stimulate me to a defense of the Bush administration. First, we should remember that our leaders, of any party, are just poor sods heir to all human ills. They learn from experience, meaning they fight the last war. This seems to be what they did in Iraq.

Remember the first Bush administration was severely embarassed by its failure to anticipate Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. Later, they discovered they didn't have a good picture of his WMD programs. And this was after 10 years worth of Republican leadership of the CIA.

So what happens when they come back into power. After 8 years of Democratic leadership of the CIA they can't trust it, even if they were inclined to. This explains Cheney's close scrutiny of CIA product, and the establishment of alternative channels for intelligence in DOD. It also explains why he worried about not knowing, and decided that even a low likelihood of danger (1 percent) justified action.

Then the Bushies fought a dandy little war in Afghanistan, which went much better than I expected and enabled them to laugh at the doubters who had started to emerge over the first 2-3 weeks of combat. (I started writing this yesterday, then saw this report this morning, which supports my argument.) Consequently they were over-confident in taking on Saddam. What Cheney and his team can justly be criticized for is not applying their logic across the board. Yes, the CIA and intelligence establishment couldn't be trusted to give a fully accurate assessment of the WMD danger. And one can argue for acting now to avert possible future danger (that's the form of the liberal position on global warming, after all). But similar logic would say that the intelligence establishment doesn't understand the dangers of a postwar Iraq, so the cautious position is not to break the pottery in the first place.