Stardate 20030713.1716

(Captain's log): In response to this article speculating about the possibility that the US may need to preemptively attack Iran and/or North Korea, Fredrik writes:

Excellent, thought-provoking essay!

Do you have any thoughts about how the current political climate (specifically, the Democrats' insistence that "BUSH LIED!" and that those purported lies were the reason we went to war in Iraq) affects Bush's ability to act?

That also came up in a letter from Mark and my response to it:

I wasn't sure whether or not to e-mail you because on the one hand, I wanted to reassure you that your work and writing was appreciated and would be dearly missed if gone (and by the way you shouldn't take those jerks carping about your linguistics thread to heard) on the other hand, I didn't want to be the one who administered the "backslap that killed you" in your deteriorated health. However, since you just published a brilliant article, I figured the backslap would be safe and that you still needed some encouragement.

I actually am beginning to feel better. For the first time since the end of May, I went out and had a meal in a restaurant and then sat in front of Starbucks and drank a cup of coffee while scribbling notes on a tablet. I actually managed to last a couple of hours before I started to cough badly; then I bought groceries and came home.

So I'm improving.

As brilliant and thought-provoking that analysis was, there were a few points I wanted to run buy you about it.

1) You mention that if Bush decided to attack Korea and it ended badly it could damage his odds of re-election, and that's true as far as it goes, but if he chooses not to attack and Korea does develop the weapon and the weapon kills an American city (either from a Korean missile or a terrorist suitcase) the same damage is done to Bush's re-electability. Not attacking does not guarantee his safety anymore than attacking.

It depends on the timing. If it happens after the 2004 election, it could be bad for the Republican party (and the nation and the world) but not for him unless he was somehow subject to impeachment proceedings as a result, which is exceedingly unlikely.

In a sense, that's the way that Clinton played it. By not responding adequately to the first WTC attack, or the attack on USS Cole, or the attacks on our embassies in Africa, he allowed and followed a sequence of events which encouraged al Qaeda and led to the 9/11 attacks. But the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon happened after he'd left office; they were bad for the nation, and bad for the Democrats, but not really bad for Clinton personally because he no longer had much to lose. (About the only effect on him is a loss of prestige, given how many people like me think that 9/11 could have been prevented if Clinton had reacted the way Bush did, and cleaned out the wasp nest in Afghanistan in 1993, or 1998, or 2000.)

Certainly the attacks in New York and Washington in September of 2001 didn't cost Clinton reelection in 1996, though they certainly contributed to the loss of majority by the Democrats in the Senate in 2002. (And of course, those attacks cost a lot of good people their lives.)

2) You rightly point out that the guess will be a SWAG, based on imperfect intelligence, and right now the media is saturated with stories pillorying the CIA and Bush for a 12-word sentence that wasn't even the central justification for the war, and almost no coverage of the evidence that Saddam-Al Quaeda link and the mobile labs that more than justify it in hindsight.

There appears to be significant controversy about those "mobile labs"; some claim that they had nothing to do with biological warfare. I consider the issue an open one; I don't think it's conclusive yet that they actually were bioweapons facilities, but equally I don't think it's been proved they were not.

This will very likely have a chilling effect on the amount of intelligence collected by the CIA, the amount the pass on to Bush, the amount he needs to make is guess, and the degree to which his guess will be supported by the American People, all of which I fear will increase rather than decrease the odds of making the correct decision.

I'm worried about that too. With the kind of hooraw going on now, there may be a tendency to paralysis. My only feeling of optimism in that regard is that Bush has so far shown a high degree of imperviousness to snarky criticism and peer pressure, so I don't think this kind of once-burned-twice-shy tendency will affect him to any great extent. However, it is likely to affect those feeding him information, which may well be a problem.

I feel pretty confident it won't affect the top circle of advisors either. It won't affect Rumsfeld or Rice, for instance, and it really won't affect Powell. (It is hard to see how it could make Powell any more anti-interventionist and anti-action than he already is.) But they can only work with what they're given, and some heads below that level may have to be knocked together in order to get a more clear idea of what's going on, so that Bush can make a good decision.

On the plus side, State is now thoroughly discredited, and so their advice (which inevitably will be to rely on post-national institutions like the UN and IAEA to deal with the threat) isn't going to be