There is an important distortion and a significant piece of misdirection that is now occurring with regard to David Kay's recent statements and the purported"intelligence failures" about Iraq's non-existent WMD threat. This editorial in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune captures the issue very accurately:

Kay paints a picture of Iraq falling apart from 1998 onward: Saddam Hussein was in la la land, writing bad novels even as the nation was on the eve of war. Corrupt Iraqi weapons scientists would go to Saddam with WMD schemes, get a big bankroll, then spend it on other things. Most of Iraq's WMD materials had been destroyed because Iraq believed U.N. weapons inspectors would find them and because they feared disclosures by Saddam's son-in-law following his defection in 1995.

The large question is why American and British intelligence didn't know these things. Kay says it was because intelligence officials grew complacent during the years of U.N. weapons inspections. They could evaluate a satellite image, then ask inspectors to check out anything suspicious. But when the inspectors left in 1998, there were few indigenous sources to fill the gap.

That sounds plausible, but there is more to the story. The Clinton administration was getting the same intelligence, yet it, reasonably, did not head off to the United Nations to warn that Iraq needed to be invaded yesterday. It wanted to take out Osama bin Laden; Saddam was a secondary concern.

That suggests someone in the Bush administration made an early decision to put the most dangerous possible spin on what Iraq intelligence was available. Information that was tentative became certain; equipment that might have numerous uses became certified WMD material; rumors became fact.

Recall what was happening at the U.N. Security Council prior to the war. France, Russia and Germany weren't denying that Saddam might pose a risk; they disputed that the risk was imminent; they disputed that war -- especially immediate war -- was the only alternative.

The Bush administration was having none of it; Saddam had 12 years to comply with U.N. demands and had not; years of inspections had failed. Iraq needed to be invaded.

Adopting that unyielding line was a political decision, not an intelligence judgment. It came from the neoconservatives in the administration and was pushed most actively by Vice President Dick Cheney.

He's still at it. ...

What the American people are hearing from Cheney now is just what the world heard from other prominent administration officials before the war. It's all wrong, and Cheney's responsibility for that can't be neatly off-loaded onto intelligence agency scapegoats.

This points to the deeper issue involved -- and it causes me to repeat again a warning sounded by Barbara Tuchman in The March of Folly, when she discusses the constellation of mistakes and beliefs that led to the Vietnam debacle (I recently noted this passage here):

For all their truths, the Fulbright hearings were not a prelude to action in the only way that could count, a vote against appropriations, so much as an intellectual exercise in examination of American policy. The issue of longest consequence, Executive war, was not formulated until after the hearings, in Fulbright's preface to a published version. Acquiescence in Executive war, he wrote, comes from the belief that the government possesses secret information that gives it special insight in determining policy. Not only was this questionable, but major policy decisions turn"not upon available facts but upon judgment," with which policy-makers are no better endowed than the intelligent citizen. Congress and citizens can judge"whether the massive deployment and destruction of their men and wealth seem to serve the overall interests as a nation."

Though he could bring out the major issues, Fulbright was a teacher, not a leader, unready himself to put his vote where it counted. When a month after the hearings the Senate authorized $4.8 billion in emergency funds for the war in Vietnam, the bill passed against only the two faithful negatives of Morse and Gruening. Fulbright voted with the majority.

The belief that government knows best was voiced just at this time by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who said on resumption of the bombing,"We ought to all support the President. He is the man who has all the information and knowledge of what we are up against." This is a comforting assumption that relieves people from taking a stand. It is usually invalid, especially in foreign affairs."Foreign policy decisions," concluded Gunnar Myrdal after two decades of study,"are in general much more influenced by irrational motives" than are domestic ones.

It is simply not true that the Bush administration's decision to go to war with Iraq was the result of"bad intelligence." In the most significant sense, that decision had nothing at all to do with the quality of the intelligence they were getting. The decision was one of policy -- a decision that depended"not upon available facts but upon judgment." As the Star-Tribune editorial points out, the Clinton administration had virtually the same intelligence -- yet came to a different conclusion altogether with regard to the proper course of action.

But this tactic serves an important purpose: it passes blame off to another party, and in effect lets the administration off the hook. The administration thus hopes to insulate itself from examination, criticism and accountability. It's as if the administration is saying:"The intelligence made us do it."

But the intelligence, whatever it was, didn't make them do anything. They had already decided what they wanted to do -- and the intelligence was almost irrelevant.

Remember Tuchman's warning -- and hold the Bush Administration fully accountable. The intelligence didn't matter in the end, they knew what they wanted to do, and they did it -- with a great deal of enthusiastic support. Hold them all responsible for the consequences, whatever they may be.

And keep Tuchman's words in mind, the next time the war whoops begin to rise. And at some point they will: it's only a question of time, and which country will be the next target.

(Cross-posted at The Light of Reason.)