DAVID KAY REDUX
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James Joyner | Tuesday, January 27, 2004 |
Michael J. Totten has read the David Kay interview with Tom Brokaw and points out that the general perception of what Kay said is incomplete. One example:
TB: David, as you know, a lot of the president’s political critics are going to say, “This is clear evidence that he lied to the American people.”DK: Well, Tom, if we do that, I think we’re really hurting ourselves. Clearly, the intelligence that we went to war on was inaccurate, wrong. We need to understand why that was. I think if anyone was abused by the intelligence it was the president of the United States rather than the other way around.
TB: The president described Iraq as a gathering threat–a gathering danger. Was that an accurate description?
DK: I think that’s a very accurate description.
TB: But an imminent threat to the United States?
DK: Tom, an imminent threat is a political judgment. It’s not a technical judgment. I think Baghdad was actually becoming more dangerous in the last two years than even we realized. Saddam was not controlling the society any longer. In the marketplace of terrorism and of WMD, Iraq well could have been that supplier if the war had not intervened.
Quite right. As I argued almost a year ago,
If we topple the Iraqi regime and no WMD are deployed against the US, we’ll never be able to prove that they WOULD have been used against the US.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia.
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http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/
this makes sense to me.
It's difficult to argue that something would have been used if its very existence during the period in question is so much in doubt
Good stuff, James. Kay also made the same case this past weekend on NPR.
Jane: True. But the fears were perfectly sound. We know he had chemical and biological weapons as early as the 1980s, since he actually used them against both Iran and the Kurds. We know he had a nuclear program that the Israelis took out at Osirik in 1981(?) and another one we found after Desert Storm. He threw UN inspectors out in the 1990s and did nothing to establish what happened to his stockpiles a year ago when the inspectors were allowed back in.
http://www.pejmanesque.com/archives/005666.html
excellent response
Apparently, there was an interview on the today show today with Matt Lauer where Kay said that the president was right to go to war, and that the entire world basically had the same intelligence and thought that Iraq had WMDs. But no one guessed that Saddam was getting jobbed by his scientists.
It would be good to find a transcript of this. I heard it on Rush Limbaugh today while trying to navigate icy roads.
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