Both Kurtz at TPM and Yglesias are putting out a slightly more credible version of “Bush lied, they died” about pre-war Iraq intel. Frankly, neither one of them has put sufficient thought into the issue of the nature of pre-war intelligence, and the result is an unfortunate insistence that anyone who was concerned about Iraqi WMD was either a deceitful Bushie or a simpleminded dupe. That isn’t fair, and it is a divisive way to address the policy issue in a way that ensures no useful lessons come of it.

I’d like to urge folks to think through what standards should be applied to inherently ambiguous information. Here is what we knew in 2002:

(1) Saddam had a WMD program in the early 1990s.
(2) Saddam had not fully cooperated with weapons inspectors from 1991-1998.
(3) Inspectors had been expelled from the country from 1998 to 2002.
(4) When the inspectors returns, they found no evidence of a WMD program.
(5) Saddam was either unable or unwilling to provide a full accounting of what had happened to the program.

There are two competing evidentiary standards here:

(1) Traditionally, proliferators need to prove they have dismantled with a full accounting. Think of South Africa’s nuclear program. Or currently Libya.
(2) Traditionally, states seeking to justify the use of force have had to meet a high standard for their justifications.

But the thing is… neither standard was met. The case for war was that Saddam had not proven his innocence. That violates our expectations at some level, but to the extent that our expectations are conditioned by domestic judicial standards they may not be relevant. It is a hard issue, not an easy one. And that fact that Bush has not or cannot adequately reflect upon it doesn’t actually resolve the underlying issue, which is what do you do about potential threats based on ambiguous evidence.?I am now of the mind that you need to meet the higher evidentiary standard when considering the use of force, but I am not wholly convinced. Would I want to apply the “certainty” standard to a potential strike on bin Laden? I don’t know.

Finally, we can talk about cherry picking all we want. But then you need to address the Bob Gallucci/David Kay issue. These guys were inspectors as well. They knew the intel. They’d been on the ground. They thought Saddam had a program and stockpiles. Do we just want to dismiss them as dupes? Because we certainly can’t call them Bushie ideologues.