The Reality of Saddam’s Threat: The U.S. could not have delayed dealing with Saddam Hussein.

National Review ^ | June 13, 2004 | David B. Rivkin, Jr. & Lee A. Casey

[drb9]

On Friday, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its "Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Pre-war Intelligence Assessment on Iraq." Although this report concluded that the Bush administration did not seek to "coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities," thereby decisively rebutting the oft-invoked charge that the administration had pushed the intelligence community to find a threat from Iraq, the president's opponents have been busy spinning the report's conclusions as evidence that Saddam Hussein simply posed no meaningful threat to the United States. They now assert that Saddam's Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), was so weak in conventional military forces that it presented no threat even to some of its smaller neighbors, and that, overall, the regime could have been safely contained for years to come.

Emboldened by the report, the Democrat political establishment, including presidential candidate John Kerry, and his recently announced running mate John Edwards, have now broadened their attacks on the president's Iraq policy. Having spent months arguing that the problem was not with the fact that the United States effected a regime change in Iraq, but rather with how the administration went about it — not enough international support and insufficient planning for the postwar period have been Kerry's favorite allegations — now they have begun to claim that the whole enterprise was flawed.

These arguments are fundamentally wrong. They both underestimate the threat posed to the United States by Iraq's WMD programs, erroneously equating the absence of WMD stockpiles at a particular point in time with the absence of a WMD threat, and trivialize other aspects of the unique strategic challenge of Saddam Hussein. They also ignore compelling evidence that the international sanctions regime was collapsing and that the real strategic choice facing the United States was not between a regime change and containment, but between a regime change and Saddam Hussein's continuation in power, free from any meaningful constraints. More generally, the critics apparent belief that there is such a thing as perfect intelligence, and that the United States should not use force against a dangerous foe until and unless such perfect intelligence has been secured, is both historically unfounded and a prescription for a strategic disaster.

[drb9]

An excellent analysis.

[tentmaker]

Read this - it nails the issues.

[drb9]

Indeed. Of course, the popular, liberal press doesn't cover it from this angle. They're off looking for something to append the suffix -gate to.