Iraq - WMD Intelligence

The Democrats claim Bush manipulated the WMD intelligence and want a review. Be careful what you wish for.

I'm with Powerline on this one. Bring it on. Of course the Democrats have the media on their side and bloggers will have to stay on top of them.

There is a great deal to be said on this subject, and most of it is already in the public domain. The fact is that the intelligence agencies' official consensus estimate expressed a high level of confidence that Saddam possessed both chemical and biological weapons. The U.N. didn't disagree, contrary to popular assumptions and Hans Blix's revisionist history. As we have noted here before, the U.N.'s UNMOVIC reports emphasized the large quantities of banned materials for which Iraq had failed to account.

This is a big topic, as is the subject of Iraq's many connections with al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. In my opinion, we should take up the Democrats' challenge: most Americans know all too little about the threats posed by Saddam's Iraq. Let's talk about those threats from now until November 2006.

Here's a handy reference for you bloggers. Use it often, especially every time some lefty opens his mouth.

UPDATE

CQ weighs in.

• In July 2004, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a bipartisan 500-page report that found numerous failures of intelligence gathering and analysis. As for the Bush Administration's role, "The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction," (our emphasis).

• The Butler Report, published by the British in July 2004, similarly found no evidence of "deliberate distortion," although it too found much to criticize in the quality of prewar intelligence.

• The March 2005 Robb-Silberman report on WMD intelligence was equally categorical, finding "no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. . . .analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments. We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments."

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