Jonah G on pre-War Intelligence

Why the Bush administration is so reluctant to delve into the huge cache of documents retrieved from Iraq mystifies me. Now that it has begun, it seems almost certain that the information learned will bolster its rationale for action. Jonah Goldberg gives a nice column-length treatment of the issue:

But what these documents - as well as other after-action intelligence gathering - demonstrate is that given what he knew at the time, George W. Bush was right to invade Iraq. We now know that the CIA bureaucracy was simply wrong to insist that "secular" Iraq would never work with Islamist terrorist groups such as al Qaeda and Abu Sayyaf. We know that Iraq harbored and very likely supported Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the suspected bomb makers involved in the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.

According to the Pentagon's definitive postmortem on the invasion, some of which was leaked to the New York Times, even many Iraqi generals were stunned to discover that Hussein didn't have WMDs. Hussein practiced a strategy that one Republican Guard commander called "deterrence by doubt," in which he hoped to bluff the world into believing he had WMDs in order to deter Iran and keep his rep as an Arab strongman with serious mojo.

Read the whole thing.