February 06, 2004, 9:20 a.m.
Intelligence Quotient
The WMD debate.

By NR Editors

EDITOR'S NOTE: This editorial appears in the February 23, 2004, issue of National Review.

“It turns out we were all wrong" about Saddam Hussein's WMD, former chief weapons inspector David Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee. These blunt words, after months of failing to find such weapons, forced President Bush to call for a bipartisan commission to examine American intelligence operations.

Kay repudiated a central article of faith in the religion of conspiracy: that the administration, hot to topple Saddam, pressured intelligence analysts to give it the evidence it needed. Kay said he had "not come across a single one" who had been leaned on in that fashion. The intelligence community and the administration alike were, however, pressured by their own expectations. Saddam had possessed and used poison gas, and was determined to build other forms of WMD. He had been defying U.N. inspectors for four years. Therefore, it seemed likely that he had restocked his arsenal. The Bush administration believed it; so did the Clinton administration. So did Britain. So did the anti-war Left, including France and Germany. (One reason the peaceniks advanced for not invading Iraq was that Saddam would unleash his WMD.)

Expectations cut both ways. We presumed that Libya was too low-tech to have a serious nuclear program — until Colonel Qaddafi told us that he would abandon one that was more advanced than we had imagined. Intelligence agencies must be able to stretch their own paradigms, to cast a wide net. Clearly ours, which have enjoyed a long romance with technological data-gathering at the expense of human intelligence, need a shake-up.

But intelligence can never tell us everything. Leaders must understand the minds of their enemies, and the nature of the world they live in. Furtive, dictatorial, aggressive regimes with powerful grudges against the United States deserve our suspicion. When they are patrons of terror, they deserve our hostility. September 11 — which was accomplished not by WMD, but by box cutters — has raised the stakes immeasurably. Such countries as North Korea, Iran, Libya, and Saddam's Iraq must understand that they live on borrowed time. In many situations we will use diplomacy, as we have with North Korea and Libya. In others, we will wait on domestic developments, as in Iran. In still others, we will try isolation, as we did for many years with Iraq. But when the best intelligence we have, plus the nature of the beast, counsels force, then we must use it. We cannot wait, as Condi Rice once put it, until our smoking gun is Chicago.

The administration must not think, however, that everyone understands and accepts pre-emption in an age of terror. These are new presumptions for a world that we now understand to be dangerous. The case for them must be made, and defended. It must also be accompanied by an assurance to the public that the intelligence gathering that assists our leaders in analyzing the threats against us will be done in the most intelligent way possible. The administration's insistence, until the day before yesterday, that no mistakes had been made has not served it well.

*   *   *

YOU’RE NOT A SUBSCRIBER TO NATIONAL REVIEW? Sign up right now! It’s easy: Subscribe to National Review here, or to the digital version of the magazine here. You can even order a subscription as a gift: print or digital!