A friend e-mails:

I’m halfway through Feith’s War and Decision, which came out last week. Perhaps because conservatives and liberals alike seem to want to put the Rumsfeld Pentagon behind them, the book has not received quite the attention that it deserves. That’s too bad, because this is by far the most balanced, detailed, and lucid account of this story that’s come out yet. Addressing the CIA’s assessments that WMD stockpiles existed in Iraq, Feith writes: “In its review of such prewar intelligence failures, the Silberman-Robb Commission criticized the CIA, and the intelligence community in general, for flawed tradecraft. Those failings raise the question of whether policy officials were skeptical enough about the intelligence–whether we challenged the CIA vigorously enough–and if not, why not. The errors created an enormous credibility problem for the United States, because Administration officials, for reasons we’ll explore further, chose to make the stockpiles–and the intelligence about the stockpiles–parts of the case for war. “The decision to feature the CIA’s badly crafted assessments of Iraqi WMD stockpiles this way was unfortunate, because the existence of those stockpiles was not a cornerstone of our rationale for going to war. But the differences between the actual strategic rationale for the action against Saddam and the public presentation were not lies or misrepresentations. They reflected mistakes in judgment about how best to focus the presentation both at the United Nations (whose support we sought for resolutions approving action against Saddam) and the American people. By presenting the case for the war poorly, the administration hurt more than its own credibility; it jeopardized the success of the war effort itself. “This error by the Administration was more than a mere public relations problem. When leaders decide that war is necessary, communicating their reasoning–showing “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind,” as Thomas Jefferson put it–is a critical element of strategy and statecraft. The Administration’s public statements were the basis on which the American people and their representatives in Congress supported the war. The flaws in that presentation inevitably affect the public’s willingness to continue to support the war, at times when patience is required and confidence in victory is shaken.”
There is much to say about this passage, but I will focus on one thing. The new threat environment — which is dominated by uncertainty — raises novel and difficult problems at the border of intel and policy that have yet to be resolved. Before the Iraq war, the CIA — in all good faith — crossed too far into policy. It made judgments about what the intel meant that should have been left to policy-makers. The CIA cannot be a Supreme Court of Threat Assessment. But notice that in Feith’s account, it was the administration, not the CIA, that committed the critical errors of judgment. He makes the crucial point that regardless what the intel was saying about WMD stockpiles, those stockpiles were not the strategic reason for war. The true rationale for war arose from Saddam’s history, from the nature of his regime, and from uncertainty about his current dispositions. In the light of what everyone already knew, even the most fragmentary and uncertain indications of WMD activity and support for terrorism were distant warnings that something much worse than September 11 could be around the corner. If Saddam couldn’t provide transparency, we had a serious problem.
In Disarming Iraq (2004) chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix writes:
“At that time, no one — the UN inspectors and myself included–could guarantee that Iraq was without weapons of mass destruction. Could it have been argued that this uncertainty was intolerable and required elimination by armed action? It could, but I think it unlikely that such an argument would have been endorsed by the legislatures of the U.S. and U.K., let along the UN Security Council. Presumably it was an awareness of this circumstance that led the U.S. and U.K. governments to claim certainty that the weapons existed.” Yet “intolerable uncertainty” was an essential part of the Administration’s internal rationale for war, and it was essential to figure out how to communicate that in the case for war. As Blix rightly senses, this was a difficult argument to make. But if we have neither the strategic depth that we had in the 1930s nor the reliable containment-and-deterrence architecture of the Cold War, then what are we supposed to do? Hope that dangers against which we have no defense will just go away on their own, as a result of “diplomacy?” What should our national security strategy be?
Feith makes the first intellectually serious attempt to explain how the government tried to answer that question in the years after 9/11.