EDITORIAL
Defending the war isn't getting easier

Testifying on Capitol Hill this week, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld maintained, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, that the president made good use of good intelligence in deciding to make war on Iraq.

"It was," he said, "the consensus of the intelligence community, and of successive administrations of both political parties, and of the Congress, that reviewed the same intelligence, and much of the international community, I might add, that Saddam Hussein was pursuing weapons of mass destruction."

A close look at this sentence suggests that the intelligence Bush received was "the same intelligence" that the Clinton administration saw — or should we say "same old intelligence"?

Clinton's response to this "same intelligence," you will recall, was a policy of no-fly zones, sanctions and clandestine attempts at regime change through support for Iraqi dissidents and emigres — far from perfect, but far from a pre-emptive war.

Many members of Congress and certainly the French, Russians, Germans and Chinese, given "the same intelligence," opposed Bush's war.

As CIA Director George Tenet put it in a speech yesterday, intelligence analysts "never said there was an imminent threat. Rather, they painted an objective assessment for our policy-makers of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programs that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests."

The CIA was confirming, in other words, what we had long known about Iraq. What Tenet is not confirming is the Bush administration's representations that Saddam's behavior somehow spiked, creating a crisis and the need for a war.

Asked about a September 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency assessment that "there is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons," Rumsfeld said, "I'm sure I never saw that piece of intelligence."

Rumsfeld's calm, avuncular style sometimes masks disturbing lapses of logic. He acknowledged that the search for illegal weapons so far "has not proven" that Saddam had them. "But it also has not proven the opposite."

We were told that Bush attacked Iraq because there was no doubt that such weapons existed. Now Rumsfeld seems to say that the only way to have prevented the war was to prove the president wrong.