Another view

By The Orlando Sentinel - 06/12/2008

Last week’s report from the Senate Intelligence Committee lends weight to the now-familiar accusation that the Bush administration misled Americans in making the case for war with Iraq. Comparing the administration’s public statements with U.S. intelligence, it shows a pattern among the president and his top appointees of hyping the threat from Iraq in the run-up to the invasion.

But the report — endorsed by the committee’s eight Democrats, but only two of its seven Republicans — doesn’t settle the politically charged debate over the right course for U.S. policy in Iraq now, more than five years into the war. That’s a separate question that weighs the costs of continuing U.S. involvement with the consequences of a withdrawal.

Instead, the report is a lesson — for lawmakers, but also the press and the American people — to ask more questions when presented with a case for war. Some congressional Democrats made the same kind of statements leading up to the invasion for which the report faults the administration.

An earlier committee report from 2004 documented serious errors in intelligence gathering and analysis by U.S. spy agencies before the war. But that report didn’t address what the administration did with the intelligence.

The latest report, which did, concludes that the administration used the intelligence selectively, relying in some cases on assessments that supported its claims about threats from Iraq while downplaying or ignoring contradictory views.

The administration’s claims about Iraq’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs were generally supported by the intelligence available at the time, though they didn’t reflect uncertainty or dissent from some spy agencies, according to the report. But other claims weren’t supported, including those about ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and Iraq’s plans to attack the United States with chemical and biological weapons using drone aircraft.

Releasing the report now, in the middle of an election year, obviously makes a political impact. But the report might have been released years ago had it not been for opposition to undertaking it from Republicans who controlled the committee until 2007.

Members of both parties in Congress have admitted they relied on briefings from the administration on prewar intelligence instead of reading it themselves. Perhaps if they had, they’d have been more skeptical of the need for war, and the administration would’ve been more hesitant to push for it.

The intelligence committee’s chairman, Democrat Jay Rockefeller, declared that both the committee’s reports on pre-war intelligence “are about holding the government accountable and making sure these mistakes never happen again.” Let’s hope so.

— The Orlando Sentinel