The nine-member panel led by Republican Laurence Silberman, a retired federal appeals court judge, and Democrat Charles Robb, a former Senator from Virginia, is expected to issue its report on weapons of mass destruction next week. It's unclear how much of the report, which may run into the hundreds of pages, will be available to the public.
"I think questions had to be answered as to why we were so wrong," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a member of the commission. "We needed to have recommendations as to how to prevent something like this from ever happening again."
The commission also is highly critical of the agencies' performance on Iran, North Korea and Libya, individuals familiar with its findings said on condition of anonymity.
I've long been on board for figuring out why our intelligence was apparently so wrong on Iraq. We thought Iraq had chemical weapons on the eve of war, as did virtually everybody else too, I should add. We still don't know if North Korea has a nuke although in the run up to the Iraq War, critics of dealing with Saddam claimed North Korea would have multiple warheads by summer 2003 as we dithered in Iraq. And we never did know about Libya. And is Iran 3 months or three years from the bomb? I'm really amused by the idea that we still don't know exactly what Iran and North Korea are doing. So many Iraq War opponents tried to feign toughness by claiming they really supported action against more imminent threats than Iraq. But the intel on Iran and North Korea will take a hit, too, in the report. Oh, and there's that Pakistan and India thing from several years ago--oops, missed those, too.
So we have a lot to work on. I do want to know why we apparently missed the Iraq situation. Though I am not convinced that Iraq's WMD weren't scrubbed in the long telegraphed punch we delivered.
But I think a lot of the commentary misses a major point. Is the lesson from this that we shouldn't do anything when we think an odious regime is pursuing nuclear or other unconventional weapons? Are we still on that silly "imminent" standard where we have to have a clear picture of somebody turning a wrench on an obvious bomb and then we bomb the offending threat as they fuel up the missiles? Is our solution going to be strengthening our ability to make a prosecutor's case against the offending regime?
Look, it is easy for a sovereign nation to hide its activities and keep the evidence ambiguous enough to prevent a clear picture from emerging until it is too late to do anything about the offending nation going nuclear. Even with inspectors crawling over Iraq and intelligence agencies from around the world looking at Iraq, we never knew that there were no chemical weapons in firing condition as the Coalition went into Iraq.
Our only option is to forget about trying to establish clear proof of nuclear guilt and focus on the regimes. Your country is a collection of nutballs that make aggressive statements and you appear to be pursuing nuclear technology, missiles, and other weapons? Then your regime should be history and we will work for that result. We won't take the chance that you will get something that makes your threats real.
Good enough for government work, as they say. It's the regimes, stupid. Change them.
