Sunday, February 01, 2004
The misleading Ms. Dowd
Op-Ed Columnist: The Mirror Has Two Faces: "Bush officials, awash in the vice president's Hobbesian gloom, deduced that Saddam would not hide if he had nothing to hide. Even after all their talk about a Bernard Lewis clash of civilizations and a battle of good versus evil, they still projected a Western mind-set on Saddam.
Ms. Rice argued that the U.S. was right to conclude that Saddam had W.M.D. and attack him because the dictator was not behaving rationally. But why did she think someone President Bush deemed 'a madman' would behave rationally?
Cheney & Company were so consumed with puffing the intelligence to try to connect Saddam with 9/11, Al Qaeda and nuclear material, they failed to challenge basic assumptions.
The closer the inspectors got to the truth that Iraq didn't have weapons, the more the Bush hawks asserted that only war would uncover weapons. Their threats to Saddam made him bluff that he had the weapons that they said he had."
...
"Besides, according to Dr. Kay, Saddam was both finagling and finagled. "Did he really think he had the stuff because scientists were scared to tell him he didn't?" wondered a G.O.P. foreign policy expert."
One, we had no idea how close the inspectors got to the truth, because they were never allowed full rights to inspect at their leisure; one should not forget how much Saddam tried to thwart them throughout the years, building up a very poor rapport with the international community.
Two, Ms. Dowd is assigning blame for thinking that Saddam was rational when he really wasn't. How could one proceed through the world assuming that everyone acted irrationally? We'd be back to Hobbes, always afraid of our neighbor. The fact that we know that most people act rationally is what allows us to get through the day without being paralyzed by fear. The US was making a judgment about Iraq that was logical at the time, that Saddam was acting in his own best interest. If we start to play the game "is he rational or irrational" an endless loop of second guessing will result. One has to make a decision, and there was ample evidence last year for Saddam's rationality. The CIA can be blamed for not having human intelligence assets in the Iraqi government who could get to the truth, but not blamed for making the assumptions it did based on the evidence at hand last year.
For years Saddam was called the ultimate brinksman, a sly politician, who had one misstep (Gulf War I). If the intelligence community made a failure in appraising Saddam to be more rational than he actually was, than the world press did as well.
Three, the critics of the war also made an error. Continued political and economic isolation of Iraq would have done nothing to convince a man who is irrational to open up to inspections. He would have kept ignoring the cries of his people, and simply built more palaces and continued to live out his paranoid, deranged, murderous rule. The only way to deal with someone who is irrational, psychotic, murderous, and does not respond to logical stimuli in this case is to apply force. Smoking the rat out of his hole revealed the truth; we would still be in the dark about Saddam if it wasn't for removing him from power and later capturing him.
Also, I remind Ms. Dowd that the Iraqi people are better off without Saddam, and that the war was based on more than WMD, even though that was the most publicized reason (VDH got the just nature of the war right).
Ms. Rice argued that the U.S. was right to conclude that Saddam had W.M.D. and attack him because the dictator was not behaving rationally. But why did she think someone President Bush deemed 'a madman' would behave rationally?
Cheney & Company were so consumed with puffing the intelligence to try to connect Saddam with 9/11, Al Qaeda and nuclear material, they failed to challenge basic assumptions.
The closer the inspectors got to the truth that Iraq didn't have weapons, the more the Bush hawks asserted that only war would uncover weapons. Their threats to Saddam made him bluff that he had the weapons that they said he had."
...
"Besides, according to Dr. Kay, Saddam was both finagling and finagled. "Did he really think he had the stuff because scientists were scared to tell him he didn't?" wondered a G.O.P. foreign policy expert."
One, we had no idea how close the inspectors got to the truth, because they were never allowed full rights to inspect at their leisure; one should not forget how much Saddam tried to thwart them throughout the years, building up a very poor rapport with the international community.
Two, Ms. Dowd is assigning blame for thinking that Saddam was rational when he really wasn't. How could one proceed through the world assuming that everyone acted irrationally? We'd be back to Hobbes, always afraid of our neighbor. The fact that we know that most people act rationally is what allows us to get through the day without being paralyzed by fear. The US was making a judgment about Iraq that was logical at the time, that Saddam was acting in his own best interest. If we start to play the game "is he rational or irrational" an endless loop of second guessing will result. One has to make a decision, and there was ample evidence last year for Saddam's rationality. The CIA can be blamed for not having human intelligence assets in the Iraqi government who could get to the truth, but not blamed for making the assumptions it did based on the evidence at hand last year.
For years Saddam was called the ultimate brinksman, a sly politician, who had one misstep (Gulf War I). If the intelligence community made a failure in appraising Saddam to be more rational than he actually was, than the world press did as well.
Three, the critics of the war also made an error. Continued political and economic isolation of Iraq would have done nothing to convince a man who is irrational to open up to inspections. He would have kept ignoring the cries of his people, and simply built more palaces and continued to live out his paranoid, deranged, murderous rule. The only way to deal with someone who is irrational, psychotic, murderous, and does not respond to logical stimuli in this case is to apply force. Smoking the rat out of his hole revealed the truth; we would still be in the dark about Saddam if it wasn't for removing him from power and later capturing him.
Also, I remind Ms. Dowd that the Iraqi people are better off without Saddam, and that the war was based on more than WMD, even though that was the most publicized reason (VDH got the just nature of the war right).
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