Knowing What You Don’t Know, and How You Know It

This week pundits asked several Democratic lawmakers who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, “If you knew then what you know now (about intelligence failures regarding Saddam’s WMD programs), would you have voted the same way?”

Where to begin to parse?

This week pundits asked several Democratic lawmakers who voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq, “If you knew then what you know now (about intelligence failures regarding Saddam’s WMD programs), would you have voted the same way?”

Where to begin to parse?

“If YOU knew … ” Is the presumption that the Democrat knew something the President DIDN’T know? Or that the President DID know and made a case knowingly based on faulty intelligence? But if the President knew, would he have made the same case the same way? Or would he have made any case at all? If we all knew what we didn’t know, well, then we’d all know it. And then why would anyone be voting to find it out through military intervention?

Syntax aside, you should by now be seeing the problem with looking back at a vote, or at the months before 9-11, or at the battle at Cold Harbor and trying to discern what anyone w/c/should have done under some unknowable other circumstance.

If what we didn’t know then is enormously distressing (more about that later), what we actually DID know is instructive.

• Iraq used chemical weapons against cities in Iran and Kurdish civilians prior to Desert Storm in 1991, and used poison gas against the Marsh Arabs after the war.
• Iraq had quantities of chemical agents and an active nuclear program prior to 1991. The UN offered Iraq a cease-fire under the condition that all non-conventional programs be disclosed to UN inspectors. The clear meaning of “cease fire” is that if the conditions for its maintenance are not observed, firing commences again.
• IAEA assessments are notoriously unreliable indicators of the status of nuclear programs – in Iraq (post 1991) the IAEA was off by a factor of years. [Since them, we’ve discovered they missed their guess on Libya, North Korea and Iran.]
• Saddam did not cooperate with inspectors at any stage. The largest cache of illicit weapons was found through defectors AFTER the UN was prepared to say it had inspected thoroughly and found everything.
• In 1998, UNSCOM left Iraq for the last time, reporting that large quantities of illicit materials remained in the country.
• In 2002, the UN Security Council passed its 17th resolution demanding that Saddam turn the material over to UNMOVIC or prove that it was not there, NOT creating a mandate for UNMOVIC to hunt for it.
• Saddam continued to stymie the inspectors and threw the UN 12,000 pages of useless documents to wade through, the paper equivalent of a single-digit salute.

Only AFTER the invasion and only BECAUSE of the invasion, is it possible to know what we did not know. How and why this was the case is a matter for future reports.