September 11, Crisis Resolution

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"The U.S. War in Iraq: A Failure of
Intelligence or a Case of Selective Perception?"

Dennis Sandole
Prof. of Conflict Resolution and International Relations

To the Editor, New York Times:

To be sure, the world is better off without Saddam Hussein than with, but as to whether the U.S. is safer from terrorist attacks because of the war in Iraq remains to be seen.

What is clear, however, is that there is a convergence of views from former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill; the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; the U.S. Army War College; and now from the Bush Administration's own WMD investigator Dr. David Kay that:

• Bush wanted to go to war against Saddam Hussein months before 9/11.
• The case for WMD as a justification for the war was "systematically misrepresented."
• The war in Iraq is a diversion from the war on terrorism, overextending U.S. military resources. And
• "We were all wrong" about WMD in Iraq.

These conclusions, coupled with the resistance of the Bush Administration to extending the official 9/11 inquiry and to
launching an outside investigation into the question of WMD in Iraq, suggest a president who really does not want to know
because he would have gone to war against Saddam anyway, no matter what was or what was not found in Iraq (NYT editorials,
Feb. 1-3).

This is less a "failure of intelligence" than a case of ideologically driven "selective perception" that sees only what it wants to see.

And that is, to quote Dr. Kay, "most disturbing!"