Clinton and Bush: Differing Responses to the Same Intelligence

What follows is my email response to Jonah Goldberg’s op-ed piece in the St. Louis Post- Dispatch, “Democrats’ Hypocrisy is Hurting America” though the response is intended for all those Bush apologists who defend Bush’s conduct by pointing to Clinton’s reliance upon the same intelligence about Hussein’s capacity to wage war.

What you failed to note or acknowledge is that what Clinton was advocating in response to the then-available intelligence was not war but more strenuous sanctions and inspections. Iraq, during the nineties, as a result of Bush I and Clinton, was isolated and largely impotent. The only people pushing a different viewpoint about Iraq's capacity were Iraqi ex-patriots like Chalabi and the authors of PNAC's 2000 paper, "Rebuilding America's Defenses" (Wolfowitz, Libby, Zackheim, the Kagens and Schmitt). Clinton, to his credit, did not succumb to these PNAC ideologues and their 1998 letter urging a more aggressive response to the then-available "intelligence" about Hussein's capacity to wage war and was certainly roundly criticized by PNAC and its followers (and, I suspect, by you, as well) for not acting. It is misleading (and does a great dis-service to the discussion about Bush' push to war) to simply point out that Clinton "believed" the intelligence about Hussein; the point is not what may have been known, but what was done about that intelligence and what both Presidents did with the information. Clinton, again, pushed for more sanctions and more inspections; Bush took the "intelligence" and ran with it, picking and choosing his way through the intelligence to make his case for war. There is no question that he and/or his advisors chose to ignore intelligence that undercut the initial assumptions. It was incumbent upon Mr. Bush to make absolutely certain that the intelligence he was acting on was accurate before he decided to throw so many lives into the meat-grinder that has become Iraq. That he didn't is nothing but arrogance and utter incompetence. With so many dead and wounded (Iraqi, American, British, Italian et al), I think we owe it to ourselves and to our allies to understand why we now find ourselves in this situation. If, as it appears, the reasons include mis-information and dis-information, Mr. Bush owes it to the dead and wounded to acknowledge his culpability.