The Kay Report and Interview

Here’s a couple of good takes on David Kay’s actual findings from Iraq. First, see Totten on what Kay actually said to Tom Brokaw:

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.

And then see Belmont Club’s take on the intelligence:

The liberal sneering at the American failure to find WMD stockpiles in Iraq is like making fun of a man who, having been tested for diabetes, receives a negative result but is told that what he really has is cancer. The US rightly feared that rogue states were developing weapons of mass destruction but did not have the breadth of imagination to conceive of the extraordinary web of cooperation between Pakistan, North Korea, European arms dealers and the Arabian states, who contributing according to their abilities, solved the problem of the atomic bomb. We went looking for an Iraqi bomb and found an international one.

The sneering class is already claiming that Kay says the WMD threat in Iraq was all hype and lying, but that’s not what he’s saying at all. It’s a fact that he didn’t find WMD stockpiles in Iraq, but it’s also a fact that he found all the ingredients of a weapons program that was in significant violation of th UN sanctions. Given the ineffectiveness of the CIA and the long run-up to the war thanks to French obstructionism, this is about all that what one would expect him to find. So you won’t be hearing me saying “Bush lied, and Kay said so.”