{"id":584,"date":"2004-10-29T00:49:47","date_gmt":"2004-10-29T00:49:47","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:52","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:52","slug":"leo_strauss_and_the_missing_wmd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=584","title":{"rendered":"Leo Strauss and the Missing WMD"},"content":{"rendered":"

Laura Rozen, whose blog ‘War and Piece<\/a>‘ I read regularly (and even agree with on occasion) has a column up at the Washington Monthly about the blindness of the neocons.<\/p>\n

It’s called ‘Con Tract<\/a>,’ and it lays the blame for the War in Iraq on … Leo Strauss.<\/p>\n

I know, you’re shocked.
\nIt stems from a community of academic\/policy guys from the University of Chicago.<\/p>\n

Shulsky and Schmitt [both U of C students] argue that such a belief system foolishly disregards the most important lesson from Strauss’s teachings: that the nature of the regime or government under analysis means everything in trying to predict its intentions. Rogue regimes and dictatorships, they argue, operate under totally different value systems and principles than do democracies like the United States. Tyrannies warp the very souls of those who live under and serve them. In fundamental ways, this makes subjects of tyrannies not like us. “Because of the importance of the regime, it would be foolish to expect to be able to deduce theories of political behavior that would be universal, i.e. that would apply to democracies and tyrannies alike,” Shulsky and Schmitt write.<\/p>\n

\nCentral to understanding the behavior of rogue regimes, Shulsky and Schmitt posit, is these regimes’ use of deception. Tyrannies are built on foundations of lies, and those who live under them must, for survival, speak in code, even when speaking the truth. The words and behavior of dictators and their henchmen, therefore, mask hidden meanings; they cannot be understood at face value. Rather than grasp this difference, they argue, conventional intelligence experts have adopted a flawed analytical strategy called mirror-imaging– “i.e., imagining that the country one is studying is fundamentally similar to one’s own and hence can be understood in the same terms.”<\/p>\n

\nShulsky and Schmitt have a point: Mirror-imaging is indeed a problem at the C.I.A. But nevertheless, much of their critique belabors a straw man. Mirror-imaging, though a real problem, is not a strategy which anyone at the C.I.A. or elsewhere in the intelligence community defends.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, from Rozen’s point of view, our mistaken impressions about Saddam were amplifications of thin facts because of the (to her) Straussian attitude that finds deceit because it is expected.<\/p>\n

The neocon policy intellectuals who came to power in the Bush administration were convinced that Saddam’s denials that he had reconstituted his nuclear or other WMD programs were an elaborate smokescreen. But unlike many other analysts, the neocons refused to be “fooled” by a general lack of hard evidence to this effect or that he had made alliances with Osama bin Laden. Instead, they imputed to stray bits of intelligence data–a reported meeting with a terrorist here, an aluminum tube there–an almost mystical significance, seeing each as evidence of Saddam’s boundless capacity for deceit.<\/p>\n

\nWere the neocons fooling themselves? Or were they aware of the thinness of the evidence but willing to use it deceitfully to convince the public–and perhaps the president himself–to support the invasion? The neocons’ harshest critics believe the latter. They note, for instance, that Shulsky’s Special Plans office was borne out of the same Pentagon department where Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith once set up the equally mysterious “Office of Strategic Influence,” to send out disinformation to the enemy. That enterprise was quickly dismantled once lawmakers got wind of the fact that such an office could also–perhaps inadvertently –disseminate disinformation to the American public. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rozen leaves one key factor out of this exercise which leads – me at least – to a far different conclusion.<\/p>\n

And that is the fact that the ‘Con’ we ought to be discussing isn’t the ‘con’ in con<\/i>servatism, but the one in con job<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Because, in the recent past, that just what was done to our intelligence agencies and diplomats. History, rather than philosophy might be a good discipline to study to see why the world was so sure Hussein had weapons.<\/p>\n

Let’s go to the record, and talk about the flat misses by the intelligence community and the cases where deliberate misrepresentation led us astray – particularly about proliferation of various kinds.<\/p>\n

Saddam himself<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Until 1995, Iraq denied having had any serious intention of building nuclear weapons, despite abundant evidence to the contrary uncovered by Action Team investigations. Then, after Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law and head of the Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, defected in August 1995, his revelations about the scope and intensity of the nuclear weapons program threatened the credibility of the government’s denial.<\/p>\n

\nIn response to Kamel’s defection, the Iraqi government produced the so-called “chicken farm documents.” Several days after Kamel fled to Jordan, senior UNSCOM and Action Team officials were taken to Kamel’s farm, where a half-million-page cache of documents was stashed in a shed. The documents shed light on extensive programs to develop and build weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

\nThe Iraqi government said it had not made a decision to manufacture nuclear weapons. The government said, in effect, that it had been duped–that Kamel had developed these programs without authorization and had hidden the incriminating evidence at his farm.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

or this<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The international community discovered after Iraq\u2019s defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf War that Iraq had a much more advanced nuclear weapons program than either the United States or the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had suspected. The IAEA was charged with undertaking inspections to ensure that Iraq complied with disarmament requirements mandated by UN Security Council Resolution 687, but the United Nations withdrew the inspectors in December 1998 after Iraq stopped cooperating with them. The agency, however, reported in 1999 that, based on the inspectors\u2019 work until that time, there was \u201cno indication that Iraq possesses nuclear weapons or any meaningful amounts of weapon-usable nuclear material, or that Iraq has retained any practical capability (facilities or hardware) for the production of such material.\u201d<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And it’s not just about Iraq. Korea cheated, as well. India’s decision was a surprise to us – as he Rozen article itself notes. Libya has a more advanced program than we knew about until Pakistan started cooperating with us.<\/p>\n

Given that less-than-stellar track record of compliance and certainty on our part, one thing that must be factored into the decisions made on the basis of incomplete information isn’t just the inherent philosophical bias of the decision-maker, but the facts as they are presented in recent history.<\/p>\n

Everyone on my side of the issue is vulnerable on the issue of WMD; we have to acknowledge that the failure to find them or demonstrate he had them is material.<\/p>\n

But it’s just silly to suggest that the suspicion was purely ideological, rather than practical.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Laura Rozen, whose blog ‘War and Piece‘ I read regularly (and even agree with on occasion) has a column up at the Washington Monthly about the blindness of the neocons. It’s called ‘Con Tract,’ and it lays the blame for the War in Iraq on … Leo Strauss. I know, you’re shocked. It stems from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/584\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}