Michael J. Totten has read the David Kay interview with Tom Brokaw and points out that the general perception of what Kay said is incomplete. One example:
TB: David, as you know, a lot of the president’s political critics are going to say, “This is clear evidence that he lied to the American people.”
DK: Well, Tom, if we do that, I think we’re really hurting ourselves. Clearly, the intelligence that we went to war on was inaccurate, wrong. We need to understand why that was. I think if anyone was abused by the intelligence it was the president of the United States rather than the other way around.
TB: The president described Iraq as a gathering threat–a gathering danger. Was that an accurate description?
DK: I think that’s a very accurate description.
TB: But an imminent threat to the United States?
DK: Tom, an imminent threat is a political judgment. It’s not a technical judgment. I think Baghdad was actually becoming more dangerous in the last two years than even we realized. Saddam was not controlling the society any longer. In the marketplace of terrorism and of WMD, Iraq well could have been that supplier if the war had not intervened.
Quite right. As I argued almost a year ago,
If we topple the Iraqi regime and no WMD are deployed against the US, we’ll never be able to prove that they WOULD have been used against the US.
