One of my goals right now is to encourage real debate between liberals and conservatives. In order to do this, I feel that I have to make each side deal with some hard truths. One of those hard truths is that people in your party have problems and so I want to force people to criticize (or at least be willing to) people in their own party. The other, which will be the purpose of this post, is to help people understand that those on the other side of the spectrum are not mallicious or stupid, but have different (and possibly wrong) opinions about how the world does or should work.
This post will probably not make me any friends, and I would be crazy to think that anyone will actually believe me, but here it goes. Vice President Cheney, although very wrong about how the world should work, is not evil nor is he a liar (let me be clear, I am sure he has told lies - I am speficically talking about pre-war intelligence). The reason I bring this up is because I think it is very important that we start debating the reasons we went to war, under the assumption that those reasons were genuinely believed, in preparation for future debates and future conflicts.
First, let me start with some background. In 1992, after the first Gulf War, the Bush Sr. administration found that Saddam Hussein had a much more advanced weapons program than the CIA was aware of. In fact, he was at that time working towards acquiring a nuclear weapon. Those in the administration, including Cheney and Rumsfeld, were furious that the CIA was unaware of this. And this wasn't the first time the CIA had missed secret weapons programs (Israel, India, and Pakistan to name a few other examples).
This leads us to the present, and the current Iraq War. The Bush Jr. administration, lead in part by Cheney, went to war using some primary assumptions. Those assumptions were as follows:
1. Saddam Hussein is a threat to US security and containment will not work to deter that threat.
2. Invading Iraq will make us safer in the Global War on Terrorism.
3. It will be easy to establish a democracy in Iraq and therefore we don't need to plan for it.
I believe that the administration did believe these assumptions. Take assumption number one; based on the history I outlined, I think it is easy to see why someone would believe that Saddam was a threat, even if the CIA's analysis wasn't showing it. Believing this as he did, Vice President Cheney decided to mine the intelligence information on his own, not because he wanted to lie to the American people, but because he didn't trust the CIA. Even though he was wrong in his assumption, it would be wrong to think that he did this out of malice. The CIA has to analyze lots of information from many different sources who can all be saying contradictory things. Since their decisions can have a big impact on future conflicts, it is understandable that they would be cautious in their analysis. At the same time, I can understand why, based on history, that people would be frustrated with their caution.
I bet there are many people right now asking where I am going with this. Well, the reason I felt compelled to defend Cheney a little bit is because I think when we call him a liar, we walk away from important issues that need to be debated. I think we can easily show that each of their assumptions was wrong, and if we do we might be able to prevent them from using those assumptions again. Either way, we seriously need to debate these issues.
One very important issue is whether we trust the CIA's analysis, and related to that, how much funding do they need to do the type of analysis that we would trust. Conservatives do not trust the CIA, and this can be seen in some recent criticism about the Iranian weapons program. If we trust the CIA, we need to be ready to defend them.
Another issue is whether this made us safer in the Global War on Terrorism? I think it is obvious now, as it should have been then to people like Harry Ried, John Kerry, and John Edwards, that it wouldn't have made us safer. A war that is seen as illegitimate by the rest of the world, especially by the Middle East, will only create more terrorists. Also, Iraq was not as big of a threat for supporting terrorism as other countries were / are. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia and Sudan all have issues either supporting terrorism or preventing it from growing within their countries. Dealing with these issues would have made us much safer than invading Iraq, and we need to stress that more than anything right now.
Also, there is little doubt that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon. So as this debate heats up, we cannot fall back on the same old line about Cheney being a liar. The information about Iran is very clear, and when the next debate comes up, we need to be prepared to dicuss the merits of containment, sanctions, and whether we choose to support CIA analysis. Democrats need to start laying the groundwork for these issues, using Iraq as our starting point. If we can do this, we have a much better chance of shaping future foreign policy debates. If not, we risk allowing the Republicans to control foreign policy, which means accepting all of the consequences that entails.
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