Stardate 20021118.0107

(Captain's log): Alasdair writes:

It is commonly acknowledged that America has, (by far), the most superior military in the world. Their capabilities are unrivalled, and they can go anywhere and do anything that they want to. In your current analysis on the war with Iraq, I have no doubts that the military might will succeed, but I am more concerned with the quality of the intelligence gathering system. In order to demonstrate that Saddam is in material breach, it will be required (for the rest of the world's sake) to show that he is stockpiling WMD. But I have my doubts that 100 weapons inspectors can find anything of substance in the short period of time that they have to report back to the UNSC (60 days). Unless we have advance information regarding secret sites, I doubt that the inspectors will turn up anything. Put simply, I don't have confidence in our intelligence agencies. This is true for domestic intelligence (FBI and NSA) as well as the CIA. How did we ever get to a situation where the military can be so strong while the intelligence community look so weak?

It is the nature of the intelligence community that you as an outsider can't really tell how strong it is. By its nature it conceals what it knows, and hides its accomplishments. What it might gain in prestige by publicizing such things it would more than lose as its enemies figured out its sources of information and plugged the leaks.

By its nature, its major mistakes often become obvious. But if there have been several such, that doesn't necessarily prove that they're weak. It is never possible to have perfect intelligence about an enemy; intelligence success has to be considered "zero based", and an enemy surprise isn't so much a failure as it is an indication of less than perfection. Even if the enemy does spring some surprises on us which become public, we may not know how many intelligence successes took place in the shadows where you and I cannot see.

Eventually, for instance, the US will suffer another terrorist attack; and when it does the intelligence community will be roasted in the press for not having prevented it. But how many attacks have they discovered and thwarted in the last year? We may not know for decades, and they can't tell us.

But I'm afraid that I don't agree that it will be necessary for us to convince the rest of the world of a breach, when the time comes. In part that's because I don't think there's really any good reason to try, and in part it's because we could never succeed, no matter how good our intelligence agencies are.

I don't consider the weapons inspectors to be relevant. The material breach will be at the 30-day point when Iraq files a report with the UN denying that it has chemical weapons, and it won't be up to Blix and crew to actually prove the contrary. At that point, our intelligence agencies will provide to our politicians information they think can be revealed which will at least represent a plausible case. (I expect it to rely heavily on the testimony of refugee Iraqi scientists and expatriate Iraqi generals and other high ranking military defectors.)

No matter what they provide, the case they'll make won't satisfy everyone, and indeed no matter how much they reveal it would never be enough. There will be people who will claim that we hadn't actually proved a "material breach" irrespective of what information is produced, and since Iraq said it has no weapons and we didn't really prove otherwise then we really shouldn't attack and why don't we really try loving the man instead? Hugs, not bombs. No blood for oil. Nuke the whales.

Ultimately the only thing you can do with such people is to ignore them. Their objections have only as much power as we give them; if we act over their objections then they don't matter.

In the long run the only really conclusive proof, which would actually have been adequate to convince everyone, will be found after we've taken control in Iraq and can actually do the kind of inspecting which is really capable of finding what is there, which is to say at the point of a gun barrel. But that won't be done by a tiny multinational force of a hundred UN inspectors, it will be done by thousands of American and British agents, both civilian and military, backed up by the threat of our infantry in the nation under martial law, and they'll look everywhere and have access to everything and no one there will by that point be making any kind of serious attempt any longer to conceal anything.

And we'll find a lot of things, and it will be more than enough to retroactively make the case.

It's important not to let your opponents set the rules for the game; it permits them to move the goalposts. When you say we'll need to convince the rest of the world, you've given them a victory because they can use that against you. If we have to convince them, then they can impede us by refusing to be convinced.

Those who oppose war will set the standard for proof of a "material breach" as high as they possibly can, because in reality they don't care about proof. What they care about is preventing war (because it's not good for children and other living things), and the only hope they have of preventing this one, as it now stands, is to try to claim when the time comes that Iraq isn't actually in "material breach". Thus Iraq won't be, and there will never be sufficient proof to the contrary to satisfy them.

We'll never satisfy them, and we shouldn't even try because we a