PRE-EMPTIVE WARS BASED ON MURKY INTELLIGENCE
Exchange on the show Face the Nation between host Bob Shieffer of CBS News and Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of war and one of the main architects of the invasion of Iraq.


SHIEFFER: But have you found, at this point, any new connections to al Qaeda that you didn't know about?


WOLFOWITZ: Bob, this is in the hands, very capable hands of the CIA, led out there by David Kay and assisted by Keith
Dayton and major general...


SHIEFFER: But you'd know if we had, would you not?


WOLFOWITZ: You know, first of all, I wouldn't necessarily. I mean, we've encouraged them to dig in, to get their facts
straight, to cross-check things, not to send the first rumor up the chain and flying into Washington and people get
breathlessly excited about it. These things need to be checked carefully. [sic!!!]


SHIEFFER: But you know, obviously, the reason I'm asking this is because this is one of the justifications and, as you well
know, the line your critics are taking is that you went after Saddam because you couldn't find Osama bin Laden. How do
you respond to that?


WOLFOWITZ: Well, look, as -- if you go back to October, George Tenet's classified testimony to the Intelligence Committee
details what we thought we knew and what we didn't know about the links to terrorism. His public letter, which was
published in The New York Times, talks about a number of known links to al Qaeda. Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky.
Information about terrorism in inevitably murky because terrorists hide and because you get an awful lot of information that's
simply not true. But stop and think about what the 9/11 report is saying. It's saying we should have connected these murky dots ahead of time. Well, you can't have it both ways. If you wait until you have absolute certainty about terrorism, you're really saying
we'll wait until after the fact and deal with it, and I thought the lesson of September 11th is that approach doesn't work any
more. We can't deal with terrorism after the fact.

From: CBS News.com





I found this admission extremely disturbing. Not just that Mr. Wolfowitz admits to acting hastily on intelligence of questionable veracity, but that he sees nothing wrong with it as policy. Given the dubious new Bush doctrine of pre-emptive whatever-euphemism-they-want-to-use, it seems that this doctrine FUNDAMENTALLY DEPENDS on strong intelligence. If the president is going to be the self-annointed savoir of humanity and civilization, or whatever self-serving justification he wants to use, then he better make darn sure he's pre-empting on solid intelligence. If the president is going to send other people's sons and daughters into battle conquering another country, he better do so based on something very substantive.

I've yet to see any strong evidence that 9/11 could've been prevented. Sen. Bob Graham's criticism of the intelligence services' alleged lack of "creative" analysis is nothing more than the convenient hindsight of a candidate running for president who wants to criticize the incumbent.

Contrary to what to extremism promoted by Mr. Wolfowitz, the lesson of 9/11 and Iraq isn't that we should rush into wars based on "murky" foreign intelligence. The lesson is that we need better foreign intelligence.