227: Why We Fight
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Call me out of fashion, but I still believe that before we go to war with any country, we have to agree as a nation on how to pronounce its name. Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, Iraq. Let's get it together, people. You heard this story? Back in July, a Democratic senator on the Senate Intelligence Committee asked the nation's intelligence agencies for a report explaining just how much of a threat Saddam Hussein was. There are 13 different intelligence agencies in our country and they were saying different things. So Senator Bob Graham from Florida asked for a report which would look at all the data from all the agencies and come to one set of conclusions. If the Senate was going to have to vote on a war, it seemed important to have a clear sense of just how much danger Iraq posed or did not pose. He had to ask a few times. They got actually rather heated and took a long time, so long that by October, the senator accused the CAA of obstructionism for failing to get this information to the Senate, and then finally just a few days before the congressional vote on the war, he got his report. And when Senator Graham read this report and what it said, he thought it was so important that he asked the intelligence agencies to declassify some of its main conclusions so it could be released to the general public, which he says they agreed to do. But it seemed that what they had done is declassified those parts of the report which essentially supported the position that we ought to go to war with Iraq as a first priority. Other pieces of information and analysis which were in the report were not released. So we went back and asked for some of the other material, the stuff that did not necessarily support the case for war, to be declassified. And after a few days of wrangling, it finally was. What it said was this, and this is actually the part of the story that maybe you've heard if you pay close attention to the news, the intelligence community concluded that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat, that he probably would not use his weapons of mass destruction for the foreseeable future. There was actually the exact phrase they used, for the foreseeable future, unless we attacked and started to win a war against him, at which point he probably would use his weapons of mass destruction. When Saddam Hussein reaches the conclusion that all is lost, that he is in fact about to be removed from power, at that point he becomes the most dangerous. And that danger will be reflected in his use of weapons of mass destruction against invading troops on neighboring countries, and third, he would likely, 75%, or greater chance, form alliances with terrorist groups in order to initiate terrorist attacks against the American people here at home. In other words, if we're going to war to prevent Saddam Hussein from using his weapons of mass destruction, going to war will actually cause the very thing that we're starting the war to prevent. Now it's not like this story didn't get any play, it was in the paper for a day or two, there were reports on radio and television, but then after a couple of days it just kind of dropped off the radar. And at this point, for a politician or for a member of the press to bring it up, it's hard to bring it up without seeming like you're just out there on the fringe, like you're some kind of extremist, pinko, unpatriotic, like you're against the president, like you are picking a fight. In the weeks that followed that report coming out of, sometimes thought about it as I've
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