Senate Intelligence Committee Report

Bill Bennett was lamenting this morning the fact that the intelligence failures surrounding the WMD's (and I might add the post war estimates) might have the pernicious effect of raising the bar so high that we'll never be able to act until its to late to do so.

But I suspect this may not be so. There are two reasons for this. One is that I'm not floored by the intelligence failures. Knowing too well the history of war, serious intelligence failures are a dime a dozen. They are a subset of Clauswitzian friction. Another group of humans is trying to defeat our efforts, in this case hiding their secrets, and so to a great extent our efforts are cancled by theirs. Some things are easier to detect, and so we'll be right more often than wrong. A secret weapons program, however, is the type of thing that we'll be wrong about more often than not. For example, we had no idea of the Japanese warplane development through the 30's until the end of the war when we discovered the prototypes of quite advanced designs. Keep in mind that we had broken several Japanese codes and that the Second World War is generally a war characterized by intelligence successes. Had they been working on gas or biological weapons it would have been as much a surprise as our own atomic weapons had been to the Japanese.

Another point to be made here is that the extent of our intelligence failures is over-estimated. Perhaps the most famous example is the sixteen words Bush included in his State of the Union Speech in early 2003. Lord Butler's report (officially out in two days) is previewed in the Financial Times (registration required) this way: "People with knowledge of the report said Lord Butler has concluded that this claim was reasonable and consistent with the intelligence." As we look over the paperwork in Bagdad, we find that we over-estimated some threats and under-estimated others. Anyone whose tried anyting as simple as vacationing with a family of four will acknowledge that this is pretty much par for the course. While its true that we have a vast, expensive intelligence service, never forget that on the other side are people endevoring to keep their secrets secret.

The second point is the one made by John Podhoretz in his Post column. And that is that no one relied only on the WMD argument, and so the role of the intelligence failures are only a leg to one part of the argument. Consider, you want to drive to a friend's wedding, but encounter unexpected highway construction. Had you known about the contruction you still would have gone to the wedding, you just would have altered your decision making about whether or not to drive. As Podhoretz writes, "Those who supported the war, in overwhelming numbers, believed there were multiple justifications for it." For those who opposed, the WMD arguments were not persuasive as a cause of war when they accepted the arguments as true.

So the problem of the intelligence failures is one of methods, not one of justifications. We must seek to improve intelligence not in order to justify the next action, but to save lives and speed up the process. This is not to say that the intelligence failures didn't cost some supporters or won't raise the bar a bit the next time the intelligence is examined closely, but that this is a shift on the margins. The next case that needs to be made in the war on terror will find most of the same supporters and most of the same opponants.