Is it still too early to assess the justifiability of the Iraq war? Can we at least draw some provisional conclusions? There’s been a respectful waiting period among Bush’s loyal opposition in Congress, chastened perhaps by the overwhelming popular support for this war in the US. But — amid the continued failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — the right questions are beginning to be asked, not just by mainstream politicians, but by the mainstream media.

It would have been better if these institutions had raised these issues before the war, rather than after. For, while questions were being asked by some, they were not being asked by those who hold the most influence over public opinion in the US. Politicians, part herder and part herd, saw the cost of asking them rise too high once the snowballing war effort had reached a critical mass of popular support. The media, meanwhile, was stared down by an administration that was able to put its case in the starkest possible termsThere is media, and then there is Fox News, which started with the premise that the war is justified, and the truth be damned. That’s a text-book definition of propaganda.: “Iraq is dangerous to you. We can tell. Don’t you trust us?” Most Americans answered “yes, we trust you,” because the implications of not being able to trust the government on this matter were unpalatable to them. I certainly was willing to give Colin Powell the benefit of the doubt when he convincingly brought the administration’s case to the Security Council.

The pact became: The US government has incontrovertible but classified proof of ongoing biological and chemical weapons programsLet’s just not mention the forgeries that sustained the claims of a nuclear weapons program. and will furnish us retroactively with the evidence, as soon as it is able to secure the ground for inspectors. For the record, then, the pertinent questions now are: Was this case for war with Iraq overstated? If so, by whom — the CIA? Or the White House? Through incompetence, or by designYou can expect a parallel debate in the UK.?

And a bonus question we will have fun with in the blogosphere — those bloggers who claimed all the credit and influence for goading a country to war, will they also clamor for a share of the blame if there is blame due? Yes Andrew Sullivan, I am thinking of you. You were among the first and most vociferous in favor of bringing war to Iraq, and now you are setting the stage for claiming you were duped. On May 16, 2003, you wrote:

How to explain the lack of WMDs in Iraq? Were we lied to? Is our intelligence flawed? Were the weapons destroyed? […] [T]he bottom line of Lacey’s argument is that our intelligence caused Bush and Blair to commit extraordinary errors in front of the entire world. Where is the accountability for that?

But surely there is a special accountability for those who did the persuading, as opposed to those who were merely persuaded? From the very beginning, you pounced on each and every hint that the State Department might be wavering in its commitment to war. You pushed every story that maximized Iraq’s danger to others, and ridiculed those stories that minimized the danger. Media outlets that did question the justness of this war, like the BBC, you demonized. That is not a sophist being duped. That is an ideologue being biased.

Several commentators have pointed out that we can already conclude there was an overstated case for war. There simply were no nuclear, biological or chemical weapons (NBCs) primed for use in battle, nor large-scale ongoing NBC weapons programs, as promised by the US — these would have been impossible to miss. The question becomes: by how much was the case overstated? To answer that definitively, we will need several more months. But day after day it becomes more plausible that Saddam Hussein never restarted prohibited weapons production after the inspectors left in 1998, and that the NBCs he possessed from previous forays in the 80s degraded rapidly, as apparently these weapons do.

So far, the questions asked (by the New York Times, Andrew Sullivan, Democrat politicians and others) have hinted that the mistakes occurred at the intelligence gathering stage. But an extremely interesting piece by the well-sourced Josh Marshall in his Talking Points Memo now lays the blame at the door of the White House. Nut graf:

The story, again and again over the last eighteen months, has been of the intelligence bureaucracy generating estimates of Iraq’s capacities that are pretty much in line with what we’re now finding. Again and again, though, the political leaders sent them back to come up with better answers.

Combine this with the stunning (to me) ABC News report a month ago of a Bush administration source “leaking” that accusations involving Iraq and WMDs were a mere pretext for war, and you can make the case that the decision to go to war was not made reluctantly, from a critical appraisal of available intelligence, but out of ideological conviction that necessitated some shoehorning of reality.

What do I now think happened? Wolfowitz and his neocon pals had a window of opportunity after 9/11 to sell their pre-existing action plan to the White House. Their idea: to rid the world of threats to US interests through unilateral, pre-emptive wars, starting with Iraq. There were competing strategiesPowell favored multilateral action; others favored containment coupled to policies to alleviate the root causes of international terrorism, but the neocons won out through a concerted campaign that played to a president who by his own admittance doesn’t have the first clue about international affairs, and hence who is unable to appreciate such subtleties as just war theory“The principles of the justice of war are commonly held to be: having just cause, being declared by a proper authority, possessing right intention, having a reasonable chance of success, and the end being proportional to the means used.”.

Whereas most objections to the US-led war have revolved around there being a lack of right intention on the part of the US (the war is about oil, about lashing back, about Jewish world domination, about imperialism), we have here a better criticism of the war, one that does not require a global conspiracy; the US may even have had the right intent in wanting to get rid of Saddam HusseinThomas Aquinas on right intention: “True religion looks upon as peaceful those wars that are waged not for motives of aggrandizement, or cruelty, but with the object of securing peace, of punishing evil-doers, and of uplifting the good.”, but lacked a sufficiently just cause. Whether through wishful thinking or deliberate intent, a just cause was fabricated through exaggeration and paranoid induction from relatively inane intelligence information.

Because the question of evidence was always going to be a hurdle to cross after the flush of victory, I tend towards an explanation of this process that involves disastrous delegation: A president out of his depth buys the neocon agenda, makes his wishes known, and yes-men scramble to provide rationales. These in turn get re-appropriated by the President, who now utters them as truths. This process has happened at least once, when Bush accused Iraq of being in the final stages of manufacturing nuclear weapons, citing documents the White House now acknowledges were forgeries.

If this is what happened, and Iraq is found empty of NBCs, many people in the intelligence community and at the State Department will have to ask themselves whether they are willing to fall on their swords to protect the President from charges of gross incompetence. Don’t count on it.