by CKR
David Kay has a nice op-ed in the Washington Post today. Its title is "Let's Not Make the Same Mistakes Again."
Kay, when he started out on his mission to evaluate the WMD situation in Iraq, was generally felt to be Bush's guy, someone who could be depended on to find that the WMD were buried in unknown locations or shipped to Syria. Or programs anyway. But he found that the UN inspections of the early nineties and sanctions destroyed the stockpiles and severely curtailed the programs, along with the confusion and mendacity of Saddam Hussein's own scientists. Charles Duelfer, another company man, confirmed those findings.
Now Kay is seeing the same things the rest of us are and getting the same feeling of deja vu. He offers five suggestions to the administration. All are good, but I particularly like number four:
Fourth, understand that overheated rhetoric from policymakers and senior administration officials, unsupported by evidence that can stand international scrutiny, undermines the ability of the United State to halt Iran's nuclear activities. Having gone to the Security Council on the basis of flawed evidence to "prove" Iraq's WMD activities, it only invites derision to cite unsubstantiated exile reports to "prove" that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
I suspect that someone in the administration (a speechwriter? Cheney? Bush? Rice?) thinks that they are following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan's "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" But that was a moment of drama, before the undeniable evidence itself, not saber-rattling on the basis of hearsay from self-interested parties.
Presumably the special forces teams rumored to be in Iran will help to assess the threat. But will anyone tell us what they find? And will hard information be overridden by the need to save face after all those threats?