… what were we fightin’ for?

The United States may stumble upon something it can claim was part of the Hussein regime’s biological and chemical weapons program, but it turns out that the great intelligence Dubya & Co. told us they had about Hussein’s WMD was a bunch of half-baked nonsense.

That’s the conclusion I draw, anyway, from Seymour Hersh’s excellent New Yorker story, “Selective intelligence.” Rummy didn’t like what the CIA was telling him — or more to the point, not telling him — so he started his own intelligence operation within the Defense Department.

As Hersh himself admits in an interview, there’s no reason the CIA should have a monopoly on intelligence-gathering duties. But this group had some strange ideas about how to do intelligence — namely, that their analysis shouldn’t be constrained by mere known facts.

Hersh puts it this way in the interview:

The Pentagon group’s idea was, essentially: Let’s just assume that there is a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq, and let’s assume that they have made weapons of mass destruction, and that they’re still actively pursuing nuclear weapons and have generated thousands of tons of chemical and biological weapons and not destroyed them.

Having made that leap of faith, let’s then look at the intelligence the C.I.A. has assembled with fresh eyes and see what we can see. As one person I spoke to told me, they wanted to believe it was there and, by God, they found it.

The Pentagon intelligence group — the Office of Special Plans — also made extensive use of the testimony of Iraqi defectors, which alone is not a bad thing. Defectors of course could be useful in providing tips leading to actual evidence. But the Pentagon group just took the defectors’ word about all sorts of crazy things that have turned out not to be true, such as one Iraqi engineer’s claim that WMD labs were hidden under Iraqi hospitals.

Worse yet, many of the defectors were directly supplied to the Special Plans Office by the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group with obvious political motives that calls into question the caliber of the intelligence they helped gather. Ahmad Chalibi, INC chief muckety-muck, is now a leading candidate for installation by the United States as Iraq’s new benevolent leader.

Of course, now top Dubya administration sources admit that the WMD argument was mostly for show. The real reason why the United States wanted to oust Hussein was to throw its weight around in the Middle East.

My view all along was that even if Hussein’s regime did possess WMD it did not present an undeterrable threat to the United States. And on that basis, there was no compelling reason for intervention that was not greatly outweighed by all the risks of war, yes, but also an unending occupation/nation-building mission as likely to spur even more resentment and hatred among the Mideast lunatic fringe as transform Baghdad into a shining city on a hill.

What can be said? The war was spun. The intelligence for the war was spun. Dubya & Co. think they’re doing God’s work and God don’t mind a little fibbin’ if that’s what it takes to get the job done. Maybe they are. I’m glad Hussein’s out of power. I hope we can give Iraq some semblance of a free country before we get out.

I hope dearly against hope for all of that because it chills me to think of what’s to be feared.