MILITARY INTELLIGENCE

Glenn Reynolds has a call to arms with a "pre-war carnival." I must state for the record that I am not a military expert, I am more of a "armchair general," who understands the importance of the battle of ideas.

Yesterday I went to the city of Gothenburg for a business meeting. Close to the "Kopparmärra" ("copper horse") statue of Charles IX of Sweden, a bunch of useful idiots were demonstrating against the "American occupation" of Iraq... Luckily the anti-war crowd has become smaller and smaller as time has elapsed since the attack against Iraq. It is now 977 days since "Uncle Sam Tour" paid a visit to Iraq. [Editor's note: For you who are interested in a pro-war stance, read my post, MARTIN: THE SOLO PROTEST WARRIOR.]

So, how is the war on terror going? I have mixed feeling about the situation. I don't really care if Saddam Hussein had WMD at the time of the attack, or not. America has the moral right to attack whichever country it thinks is a threat to the United States of America and its allies. Talking about weapons of mass destruction, Barak of Information Regarding Israel's Security has an interesting post (Strong Evidence There Were WMDs in Iraq) on this topic. However, I think it would have been much better to take care of the HQ of terrorism, i.e., Iran, in the first place. The nuclear threat must be taken seriously.

Here is an excerpt from Daniel Benjamin's (author of The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right) article, Making bad connections.

There is also a through-the-looking glass quality to the discussion of who-had-what-intelligence-when, since evidence suggests that the administration decided to go to war well before Congress began debating the issue and long before congressional leaders requested the National Intelligence Estimate.

The evidence includes comments that former Bush administration official Richard Haass made to the New Yorker in which he recounts meeting with Rice in July 2002 -- more than eight months before the war started. Haass, who was then director of policy planning in the State Department, said Rice told him not to bother discussing the wisdom of confronting Iraq because, as she said, "that decision's been made. Don't waste your breath."

If that decision had been made, it was done, as far as we know, before any comprehensive intelligence evaluation about Iraq was compiled. It is even possible that the decision had been made considerably earlier. (MercuryNews.com, 11/20/05.)