Fragmenta Philosophica

I want to see this

I wish that a "moderator" of the primary debates between
the Democrats would have asked/said something along these lines:

"Mr. __ you've been highly critical of the Bush administration's going to
war in Iraq - the timing, the manner, the rationale, etc.; is that correct?"

"Yes"

"Then clearly you're very unhappy at the prospect of becoming President and
having to deal with Tony Blair, who supported the President's actions and
was in effect a 'co-sponsor' of them?"

"........"

WMD:MIA? V

Recently I've been puzzling over the implications of David Kay's statement to the Telegraph, which I mentioned in my previous post in this series.

I've been baffled that more hasn't been made of the possibility of WMD materiel going to Syria. So far as I know, the issue has hardly even been raised in other interviews Kay has given over the last week. To add to my puzzlement, the question was addressed in passing in a rather long article at the tail end of last week, from the NYT- which seemingly gives a rather different take:

"Dr. Kay said there was also no conclusive evidence that Iraq had moved any unconventional weapons to Syria, as some Bush administration officials have suggested. He said there had been persistent reports from Iraqis saying they or someone they knew had see cargo being moved across the border, but there is no proof that such movements involved weapons materials."

I'll always prefer a direct, unabridged quotation to a paraphrase. Consider again Kay's reported statement to the Telegraph:

"We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons," [David Kay] said. "But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD programme. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved."

Is this a difference - at first blush apparently quite striking - a bit like the proverbial glass being half-full vs. half-empty? For, considering what in logic is called the "convertability"of propositions, all "Iraqi Officials" (Telegraph) are indeed "Iraqis" (NYT), though the converse isn't the case; all "components of Saddam's WMD programme" (Telegraph) would indeed qualify as "cargo" (NYT), though the converse isn't the case. By implication, an "issue that needs to be resolved" (Telegraph) is one for which there isn't yet "conclusive evidence" or "proof" (NYT), though again the converse isn't the case.

Even if the locution "know from" in the Telegraph quotation is taken somewhat loosely, as equivalent to "believe based on," then the upshot is that Kay there speaks as if the reports are, at the very least, quite plausible; otherwise they couldn't possibly entail a "major issue" (on any understanding of that expression). That view is not conveyed in the NYT paraphrase - and isn't addressed any further in the remainder of the article in which it appears.

A factor which might make us suspicious of the Telegraph is that the piece is very short, centering around this - and only this - matter, which gives the appearance that Kay views the question of materiel going to Syria as occupying a more important (or "focal") point in his overall assessment than is actually the case. This would appear to be borne out by this issue not being addressed in subsequent interviews with Kay - if it were "major issue" arising from Kay's analysis of the situation in Iraq (= central concern, something at the top of the list of questions), surely he would bring it up more frequently, even if interviewers didn't ask him about it directly. In the language of logical analysis, we might think that the Telegraph's presentation commits the fallacy of accent (as in "over-accentuation").

Yet, if the remarks Kay made to the NYT reporter - the basis of the paraphrase- were roughly equivalent to what he said to the Telegraph, then the NYT piece surely de-emphasized Kay's view of the matter, even if it isn't one of the main deliverances/concerns from his investigation. This too would entail a fallacy of accent (here, "under-accentuation"). The NYT piece would then be "technically true," but quite misleading - giving us the "parts" without the whole (significance).

After a good deal of (fruitless) investigation, I found another source of Kay holding forth at some length on the matter of Syria: in the depths of his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, this past Wednesday, January 28. The entire testimony is available for viewing (Real Player) at the excellent CSPAN. One might have thought that, surely, if the matter didn't come up during this hearing, it couldn't possibly be a "major issue" (unless the matter had come up in the immediately prior, classified hearing with the Senate Intelligence Committee, and for some reason had been deemed too "politically sensitive" to amplify in a public discussion).

So far as I know, there is no transcript available of Kay's testimony, so in the interests of time I will have to do exactly what made me cautious about the NYT piece: paraphrase. Perhaps this can be mitigated by the fact that anyone interested in the issue can check my synopsis against the source; the issue is brought up by Senator Ben Nelson (D - Nebraska), and begins at approximate 2 hrs 12 minutes into the testimony.

My impression is that Kay's response to Nelson almost splits the difference between the Telegraph and the NYT.

He says that it's not just possible, but "probable" that WMD-related materials went to Syria pre-conflict, but again emphasizes that there's no certainty as to what exactly was transported, and in any event he doesn't believe the contents consisted of large stockpiles (his reasoning, by implication from his earlier testimony, and mentioned directly in this connection, is that stockpiles would have had to have been produced, and such production would have left an industrial footprint; but there was no such footprint; that they could have been holdovers from much earlier stocks is militated against by unearthed documentation of clandestine Iraqi destruction of those stocks in the mid-nineties).

He noted that many of the persons who would have been involved in conveyance of such items to Syria were members of the Intelligence Service, who have either disappeared, or been killed. Perhaps in this same connection, he noted that not all of the Iraqi scientists in U.S. custody were talking, for fear of prosecution for war crimes for their past misdeeds.

He expressed a quixotic desire to be able to take an investigation to Syria, but noted that such would not be practicable.

In all, he apparently connected the question of Syria to the larger lacuna of "ambiguity" which he believes will probably forever temper our conclusions about the extent of Iraq's WMD-related misdeeds. In light of the fact that much WMD-related documentation was intentionally destroyed - owing to the failure of U.S. troops, on Apri 9, 2003, to secure control over key physical assets - as well as the other factors mentioned above, he thinks that there will likely be permanent unanswered questions.

To sum up my impression: "WMD-related stuff probably went to Syria, but we don't know exactly what; it would be good to pursue the matter further, but we can't; since we're focusing on what we can establish at least somewhat definitively, this one will most likely have to be filed under 'intriguing and unresolvable'."

Could "major issue," then, be an accurate shorthand for this view? Like so many locutions, the expression is fraught with ambiguity. If we mean "a major matter of interest, in principle" I think the answer is "yes." If we mean "something that we expect to get anywhere with, and hence is a focal point of our investigations and related public statements" the answer is "no."

WMD:MIA? IV

The plot thickens (or remains muddled)?

According to this brief piece in the Telegraph:

"We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons," [David Kay] said. "But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD programme. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved."

This is consonant with earlier remarks by Kay, which I quoted here.

I have collected together some other resources related to this matter which I shall try to collate, and include in an upcoming post. For now, note a counter-argument:

'A Syrian official last night said: "These allegations have been raised many times in the past by Israeli officials, which proves that they are false." ' [!!]

Update: Excerpts of remarks by Kay from an NPR interview - no mention of materiel gonig to Syria, but some other interesting and important matters are considered. Kay has long struck me as a thoughtful individual and assiduous investigator, and his comments here reinforce that impression.

WMD:MIA? III

Perhaps the time is nigh to declare that "we were wrong." According to this short piece occasioned by the resignation of David Kay as head of the ISG:

'"I don't think they existed," Kay told Reuters in a telephone interview. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s," he said.'

I look forward to hearing more of what Kay has to say; especially as to how the cleansing of WMD-related documentation and violence towards informants factor into the mix. And, an aspect of the debate is whether weapons produced before the Gulf War had been hidden away, too.

I can only assume that Kay is satisfied as to a resolving of the "appearances" about which I spoke in my earlier, related posts - that is, harmonizing, and now being able to explain alternatively, the picture drawn from pre-war estimates.

Not heartening news, in any event.

Update: a BBC piece on the same.
Update: a few more quotations from Kay in this Haartez piece

Iran and 9.11?

It will be very interesting to see if this story has any traction.

Huh? II

From this BBC profile of George W. Bush, in light of the State of the Union address:

"George W Bush feels that he has the policies and abilities to serve a second presidential term. He has, rightly or wrongly, taken decisions."

Imagine that!

WMD:MIA? II

On Cnn's "News night with Aaron Brown" last night (January 16), at twenty-five past the hour, there was a segment on "WMD Claims," in which, I believe, David Ensor reported that multiple witnesses who had provided information on WMD programs to the ISG were attacked and murdered, or seriously injured, "almost immediately afterwards" (paraphrasing).

It was one of those maddening reports that was rich in "attributed assertion" - no specifics were given, no individuals interviewed. In fact, I don't recall any sense of time being noted; viz., whether these incidents occurred "recently," or had occurred over the last months with some of the details just now coming to light. Strangely, during a quite exhaustive search of the CNN site (10:30am, PST), I was unable to find any article or "blurb" correlated with the news segment.

In any event, the segment dovetails with - is it a quasi-exfoliation of? - a statement David Kay made regarding his interim report, in terms of the occluding factors in conducting investigations in Iraq at present:

"The environment in Iraq remains far from permissive for our activities, with many Iraqis that we talk to reporting threats and overt acts of intimidation and our own personnel being the subject of threats and attacks. In September alone we have had three attacks on ISG facilities or teams: The ISG base in Irbil was bombed and four staff injured, two very seriously; a two person team had their vehicle blocked by gunmen and only escaped by firing back through their own windshield; and on Wednesday, 24 September, the ISG Headquarters in Baghdad again was subject to mortar attack. "

Kay addressed the matter of attacks in an interview with Fox's Tony Snow, subsequent to Kay's interim statement to Congress:

"SNOW: Now, a lot of these scientists — you talk about one scientist being assassinated the same day he talked to your people.

KAY: Yes.

SNOW: Somebody else was shot six times. They're still subject to considerable intimidation?

KAY: They certainly are, and they report that to us every day. And that's why I guess I have great admiration for those who are talking to us. They're talking to us not for rewards; they're talking to us in the face of active threats against them for collaborating with us.

SNOW: Why can't you protect them?

KAY: Well, you know, we could take everyone out of the country, but realize in Iraq you're talking about extended families. We are taking steps to try to protect them, but we're never perfect at that. "

In the same interview, the matter of WMD smuggling was addresssed:

"SNOW: In speaking to reporters the other day, you also said that you were examining the possible cross-border transportation of arms into Syria, Jordan and Iran. Now, the Jordanian government has said, absolutely not true. Do you still think it's possible that arms could have made their way into Jordan?

KAY: Well, we're still examining what moved where. We have multiple reports from Iraqis of moving material. We do know that documents were taken to Jordan, because we're engaged in negotiations with someone who is in Jordan to recover those documents. I have no personal knowledge that weapons were moved into Jordan.

SNOW: Does this person in Jordan have any official relationship with the government, or is this a private citizen?

KAY: Oh, absolutely no official relationship with the government. He fled there, and he's there solely on his personal basis.

SNOW: How about Syria? I've heard talk of convoys making their way out of Iraq into Syria in the weeks before the war. What have you heard?

KAY: We've heard the same reports. Actually, we have probably more specific evidence on that, on dates, times...

SNOW: I would suspect you know more than I do on that.

KAY: ... and routes taken. The difficulty we have is proving what was in the convoys, and that's where we're stymied right now. "

What does this all mean - that is to say, what is the significance of violent intimidation, and claims of covert movement of weapons? From this remove, it's tough to know, though surely the pre-war picture is kept alive; particularly in regards to the attacks, it's as if "someone" in Iraq doesn't want certain information to become known to the ISG, or otherwise come to light.

For now, those who aim to proceed circumspectly on this question will have to heed the counsel of patience.

Picking up a gauntlet

In an interesting colloquium of sorts over at Slate.com - Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War - Fred Kaplan insinuates a "gotcha" question: if, as this story avers, documents found on Saddam's person at his time of capture indicate that he cautioned his fellow-insurrectionists against working with "foreign jihadists," doesn't that invalidate the pre-war concern that Saddam would've made common-cause with those types and, say, provided them with WMD-related materiel?

In a word: No.

The context makes for the decisive difference. Pre-war, after all, Saddam was the potentate of Iraq. As such, he was in a position to "manage" any cooperation he might undertake with foreign agents/proxies. It's easy to imagine scenarios under which such cross-pollination could be undertaken without any threat to his rule (e.g., the possibly apocryphal tale of a meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent). Under the conditions of a quasi-"stable" rule, Saddam could set the terms of any alliances.

With Saddam dethroned, on the run and the conditions of his "counter-insurgency" fragile (to say the least), it would've been folly indeed to cooperate readily with foreign Islamist types. Together, they might win battles - but Saddam would surely stand to lose "the war." Under the changed conditions, they wouldn't have evidently similar longer-term interests: Saddam's interest, to the extent that he was a "rational" actor, would be somehow to restore himself to power, not provide a leg up for the true-believing jihadists.

The moral: as conditions change, so will the desirability of specific alliances .

WMD:MIA?

'When will George W. Bush say, "We were wrong on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction"?' asks David Corn.

That question can either mean: when will Bush be in possession of sufficient information to judge rightly that "we were wrong"?
Or
Since we know that "we" were wrong, when will Bush fess up?

The Bush Administration's pre-war claims could be broadly put thus: Iraq is in possession of WMD; Iraq (recently) had been maintaining programs to develop and manufacture WMD; it's inconceivable that Saddam wouldn't pursue WMD - hence inspections would never neutralize his appetite for them.

That weapons can't be found doesn't mean that they're not there, but hidden; it doesn't entail that they weren't there, but were moved or destroyed. But to persist in believing these scenarios, one would have to possess some corroborating evidence to believe as much, or not have resolved outstanding questions and issues from pre-war intelligence (and other) assessments. This points to an issue which those who are keen to pounce on the current picture from Iraq illicitly ignore. It may be that the pre-war beliefs were wildly mistaken. But, that the evidence seemed so solid is reason in itself to proceed very cautiously, in order to "reconcile" the appearances. In other words, there are authentic unresolved questions which have to be addressed and harmonized with realities on the ground.

Simplifying, as things now stand, there is a troubling antinomy:

On the one hand, pre-war a broad consensus held that Iraq possessed, and was in some non-trivial way "pursuing," WMD. This can hardly be over-emphasized - this view wasn't simply an "intuition" or a "nagging suspicion," but was based on mulitple events, sources, and factors, mutually complementary and cross-corroborative. That is to say, it's not for naught that these beliefs were strongly held.

On the other hand, according to an exhaustive article by Barton Gellman in the Washington Post (upon which Corn relies) no WMD have been found, no secret programs or developed infrastructure have been found, and there is apparently a broad consistency in testimony from interviewees supporting a picture of no WMD to speak of for years - whether extant weapons, or production facilities.

Were it not for the corroborating testimony of Iraqi scientists and personnel reported by Gellman, it might be more plausible to persist in adverting to "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence." Yet it would be just as wrongheaded to give a proverbial shrug of the shoulders and conclude in blanket fashion, "well, we must have been markedly wrong, pure and simple." A competent investigator has to tow a fine line between not letting the pre-judgments "explain away" the current picture, nor give up the pre-judgments wholesale owing to the view on the ground at present.

Because of the broad unanimity and apparent probative power of pre-war assessments, it's by no means a mark of desperation or pig-headedness to speculate as to clandestine destruction or cross-border shipments of the WMD. Factors listed by David Kay in his interim report keep the antinomy alive. Kay and his team claimed to find evidence that:

"Deliberate dispersal and destruction of material and documentation related to weapons programs began pre-conflict and ran trans-to-post conflict"

"Post-OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom] looting destroyed or dispersed important and easily collectable material and forensic evidence concerning Iraq's WMD program. As the report covers in detail, significant elements of this looting were carried out in a systematic and deliberate manner, with the clear aim of concealing pre-OIF activities of Saddam's regime"

"Some WMD personnel crossed borders in the pre/trans conflict period and may have taken evidence and even weapons-related materials with them;"

If we can trust these findings, we're brought back to the quip that if Saddam's regime had nothing to hide, an awful lot of trouble was taken to hide it. These factors, so far, are consistent with, and suggestive of, the pre-war picture.

It's interesting to note that Corn says in his article, "None of these claims [made by the Bush administration] have come close to panning out. And it's not because--as some Bush-backers have suggested--Saddam Hussein was so good at hiding the stuff or because he managed to ship his arsenal to Syria before US troops came knocking." Yet he does not develop this assertion in the body of his article, nor is it addressed in Gellman's Post article (though Gellmann does state, in an online chat subsequent to his article, that he's unaware of any evidence to support these rumors; this chat is a useful addendum to the main article). Corn may think the speculation a mere ruse, but that could only be the case to someone who had failed to take the unanimity and strength of pre-war estimates seriously - we might call it "the fallacy of premature abjuration"!

Hence, if we take Corn's initial question in the precise sense parsed above -- when (i.e., in light of what) should we say we were wrong? -- the answer is: when it's reasonable to do so. Pace Corn, the time has certainly not come - and an upshot of recasting the question is the realization that we may never be able to answer it definitively (like Kant viewed his own antinomies). This will be troubling indeed, but it's a possibility that has to be reckoned with.

And a word about mistaken assertions. One that Corn cites is from Dick Cheney: ""there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction...that he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." It is wrong to represent facts "now" as somehow invalidating this statement. The statement, strictly speaking, was discernibly false at its moment of utterance - any statement the denial of which does not entail a contradiction is capable of doubt. Of course it was "doubtful" in some sense, from the get-go, that Iraq had WMD (along the lines of pre-war beliefs). Cheney's statement was a venial over-statement, common in politics; what he surely meant was "we are assured that ..." I often despair of the incautious/unattenuated statements of politicians, but it's worth considering how opponents of any decisive action in Iraq would have responded to more precise, "parsimonious" statements. Any sign of "doubt" would be the proverbial thin end of the wedge.

A wider aim of war critics, in seizing on the "side" of the antinomy favorable to them, is to show the war to be "fraudulent." But this ignores the prudential matter of deliberation in terms of what is legitimately believed at the time an action is undertaken, vs. ex post facto. For a very interesting discussion of relevance to this issue (testing and resolving suspicions), see No Weapons, No Matter. We Called Saddam's Bluff by Michael Schrage.

Update: I have added a related post.

January 14, 2004 | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Huh?

A strange statement from this article:

"Blair, Bush's closest ally in the war and the subsequent occupation of Iraq, has indicated he would quit if it was proven that he lied over Kelly. "

Since surely Blair knows whether he lied or not, presumably the author of the article means that if it is concluded by the Hutton inquiry that Blair dissembled, then he will resign - not because such necessarily "proves" that he did, but rather owing to the consequent loss of public trust.

Or is Blair unsure whether he lied, and looks forward to finding out whether he actually did?!

Or are we really to believe that if -- and only if -- the investigation finds him out, then Blair will grudgingly be on his way?

Or is this a heretofore unobserved sinister side of Blair, in which he says, in effect, "when donkey's fly"?!!

January 12, 2004 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack