To learn lessons from history, including recent history, it's essential to get the history right. That's why, in order to understand what to do about the mullahs' regime in Iran, it's worth revisiting the debate over the intelligence in Iraq.
For large swathes of the mainstream media, the debate is over. In their view, George W. Bush misled the nation about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, his officials manipulated the intelligence and cherry-picked items that supported their views and there was an "intelligence failure" on the issue of whether Iraq had WMD programs.
But all these points are false. Bush accurately reported what the intelligence agencies, not just our own but those of other countries, reported. Neither Bush nor his leading officials manipulated the intelligence, according to both the bipartisan report of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the bipartisan Silberman-Robb Commission on intelligence. And the so-called "intelligence failure," I would argue, was not a failure at all -- and if the conclusions of the intelligence agencies were wrong (and remember that we don't know for sure whether Saddam spirited WMDs out of the country), that only reflected the inherent limits on the intelligence craft.
In the end, we shouldn't need to make a prosecutor's case against nutball regimes. Act like a dangerous nut, talk like a dangerous nut, and we should treat you like a dangerous nut without needing a formal guilty verdict with trial rules. A dangerous nut is a dangerous nut regardless of whether he has the means at the moment to act on the nuttery. In time, such dangerous nuts will get the means to make their words real.
Saddam acted like a dangerous nut. We rightly took him down.
The mullah regime in Iran is nutworthy as well. We must destroy the regime without worrying that we may not have an airtight case to take to court. The stakes are too high.
