Except Ledeen, who puts it exactly as I have argued since the fall of 2003. Ledeen writes:
The report says, over and over, that the assessment that Saddam had an active WMD program, and that there were significant quantities of WMDs, was “dead wrong.” But we don’t know that. Indeed, we can not possibly know it. All we know, at the moment, is that we didn’t find any, and the current wisdom has it that we didn’t find them because they weren’t there in the first place.
To which one must ask: Were all the intelligence services of the world “dead wrong”? Were the others as bad as we were? Did Brits, French, Germans, Russians, Israelis, Italians, Egyptians, Jordanians, and Spaniards, to name a few, all come to the same wrong conclusion? What are the odds on that? Why should anyone believe that? Aging readers of NRO may recall that, months before the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom, I wrote that WMDs were being smuggled to Iran and Syria. Others, including people on the ground, have said the same or similar things. On what basis are those hypotheses dismissed?
They are dismissed by constant reference to the Iraq Survey Group. Without putting too fine an edge on it, the ISG comes from the same intelligence community that the commission savages for hundreds of pages. Why should this particular group’s findings (actually non-findings) be taken as canonical? It makes no sense to me.
I don’t think it would have weakened the commission’s critique one iota to have said, “We do not know whether Saddam actually had these things. We only know that none has been found. If there were none, it is one kind of intelligence failure. If there were WMDs but don’t seem to be there now, it’s another kind of failure. Either way, we failed.”
Never mind that what we did find was damning enough and that it is clear Saddam would have had nukes and whatever else he wanted in time.
But the fact is, is it really more reasonable to think that every intelligence agency got this wrong? After all, there are competing reasons for why we missed the lack of nukes. One is that Saddam pretended he had them to maintain deterrence against Iran and inspire fear. The other is that all his scientists pretended they had them to keep funding coming. So which is it? Who was deceiving us?
Or are we deceiving ourselves? I still think we must have patience before we render our final judgment.
