Tenet speaks at Georgetown and Bush on Meet the Press

Aside from the Democratic Presidential Primaries, the big news was the Bush appearance on Meet the Press and CIA Director Tenet's speech on the intelligence estimates prior to the Iraq war and how that did and did not match up with what has been found thus far.

I caught most of the Bush interview on the rebroadcast on CNBC. It was okay. But nature, it was a defensive stance he had to take. They have essentially been a punching bag for the Democrats and the media is only too happy to report the sound bites that put the Bush Administration on the defensive. The interview was a chance to make the case unfiltered. But I have to wonder, how many Americans actually watch Meet the Press? What most people will get is the sound bites from the interview.

Bush's responses on the WMD issues were largely what I would have expected. Taken together with what I read in the full text of the Tenet speech it was a reasoned and reasonable defense.

I clipped the Tenet speech transcript and pasted it into MS Word and found the speech was 5358 words long. Suffice to say the news media and administration critics highlighted this passage:

Let me be clear: Analysts differed on several important aspects of these programs and those debates were spelled out in the estimate. They never said there was an imminent threat.

30 words.

If you have an interest in foreign affairs, definitely read the full transcript and you will find things are a bit more nuanced than the headlines which focus on those 30 words.

I've selected a few passages to whet your appetite. The boldface emphasis are my own.

To understand a difficult topic like Iraq takes patience and care. Unfortunately, you rarely hear a patient, careful or thoughtful discussion of intelligence these days. But these times demand it because the alternative -- politicized, haphazard evaluation, without the benefit of time and facts -- may well result in an intelligence community that is damaged and a country that is more at risk.

Before talking about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, I want to set the stage with a few words about intelligence collection and analysis, how they actually happen in a real world. This context is completely missing from the current debate.

By definition, intelligence deals with the unclear, the unknown, the deliberately hidden. What the enemies of the United States hope to deny we work to reveal.

The critics just say, "Bush lied" (some pundits say this) or "they misled the American people" (politicians running for office don't tend to say other politicians lied). In their minds, the discussion is over.

Tenet knows better. It must be frustrating to those in the business to see critics distill all their efforts into such simplistic evaluations. His speech is given a minute or two in the evening news and there is almost no discussion of the context of his remark within the speech and the nature of the task they have.

I think it is amazing we live in a country where the top intelligence official can publicly talk about his work. He can talk about how in some ways they got it right and in some ways they got it wrong.

He laid out how they approached the challenge of figuring out what is going on in Iraq.

How did we reach our conclusions? We had three streams of information; none perfect, but each important.

First, Iraq's history. Everyone knew that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons in the 1980s and 1990s.
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To conclude before the war that Saddam had no interest in rebuilding his weapons of mass destruction programs, we would have had to ignore his long and brutal history of using them.

Our second stream of information was that the United Nations could not and Saddam would not account for all the weapons the Iraqis had: tons of chemical weapons precursors, hundreds of artillery shells and bombs filled with chemical or biological agents.
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To conclude before the war that Saddam had destroyed his existing weapons, we would have had to ignore what the United Nations and allied intelligence said they could not verify.

The third stream of information came after the U.N. inspectors left Iraq in 1998. We gathered intelligence through human agents, satellite photos and communications intercepts. Other foreign intelligence services were clearly focused on Iraq and assisted in the effort.

And to come to conclusions before the war other than those we reached, we would have had to ignore all the intelligence gathered from multiple sources after 1998.

Did these strands of information weave into a perfect picture? Could they answer every question? No, far from it. But taken together, this information provided a solid basis on which to estimate whether Iraq did or did not have weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them.

It is important to underline the word "estimate," because not everything we analyze can be known to a standard of absolute proof.

Too many think reality is like James Bond movies and television dramas where the information is so certain. It just isn't that way. Tenet explained what the intelligence community is working from: fragmentary data, historic trends and inside sources whose reliability and motives are sketchy. They can never be totally certain. But critics seem to think they have x-ray vision to see what is going on. It is rarely that simple.

Tenet then goes point-by-point on the major issues on the table.

Let's start with missile and other delivery systems for weapons of mass destruction.
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My provisional bottom line on missiles: We were generally on target.

Let me turn to unmanned aerial vehicles. The estimate said that Iraq had been developing an unmanned aerial vehicle probably intended to deliver biological warfare agents.
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My provisional bottom line today: We detected the development of prohibited and undeclared unmanned aerial vehicles. But the jury is still out on whether Iraq intended to use its newer, smaller unmanned aerial vehicle to deliver biological weapons.

Let me turn to the nuclear issue.
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My provisional bottom line today: Saddam did not have a nuclear weapon, he still wanted one, and Iraq intended to reconstitute a nuclear program at some point.

We have not yet found clear evidence that the dual-use items Iraq sought were for nuclear reconstitution. We do not yet know if any reconstitution efforts had begun. But we may have overestimated the progress Saddam was making.

Let me turn to biological weapons.
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My provisional bottom line today: Iraq intended to develop biological weapons. Clearly, research and development work was under way that would have permitted a rapid shift to agent production if seed stocks were available. But we do not yet know if production took place. And just as clearly, we have not yet found biological weapons.

Before I leave the biological weapons story, an important fact that you must consider: For years the U.N. searched unsuccessfully for Saddam's biological weapons program. His son-in-law, Hussein Kamil, who controlled the hidden program, defected and only then was the world able to confirm that Iraq indeed had an active and dangerous biological weapons program.

Indeed, history matters when dealing with these complicated problems. While many of us want instant answers, the search for biological weapons in Iraq will take time and it will take patience.

Let me now turn to chemical weapons.
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My provisional bottom line today: Saddam had the intent and capability to quickly convert civilian industry to chemical weapons production. However, we have not yet found the weapons we expected.

Honest. Right down the line he tells it as they saw it. On some things they got it right. On others, they over-estimated. On some, they aren't sure.

Among the questions that we as a community must ask are: Did the history of our work, Saddam's deception and denial, his lack of compliance with the international community and all that we know about this regime cause us to minimize or ignore alternative scenarios?

Did the fact that we missed how close Saddam came to acquiring a nuclear weapon in the early 1990s cause us to overestimate his nuclear or other programs in 2002?

Did we carefully consider the absence of information flowing from a repressive and intimidating regime, and would it have made any difference in our bottom-line judgments?

Did we clearly tell policy makers what we knew, what we didn't know, what was not clear and identify the gaps in our knowledge?

In Tenet's words, I would say provisionally the answer to those questions he raised are: yes, and that is not unreasonable; yes, and to make matters worse now, we find out Libya was farther along than intelligence indicated; yes, when a government terrorizes its citizens, intelligence data is going to be sketchy out of fear; yes, the CIA gives their best data and the elected officials in the legislative branch and the President make the policy choices.

Imagine you are the President of the United States and you see these sketchy intelligence reports. Do you give Hussein the benefit of the doubt?

I don't know the answer to this question with absolute certainty but if you pulled out an atlas and started naming countries and asked the CIA director about whether they are developing nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, what would he say?

My guess his answer would mostly be no and he would elaborate with the following: (1) they would rather spend money developing the country for the benefit of its citizens (2) the government is corrupt and would rather use that kind of money to line their own pockets, buy fancy cars and furniture for their palaces (3) that nation is too poor to even think about getting NBCs.

Hussein and the Baathists were not like any other government who would wreck their own countries, they took their ambitions and evil ideas to a different level. Are administration critics saying, we should have trusted to hope that Hussein was going to play nice?

UPDATE: Noonan weighs in on the interview. Excerpt:

The Big Russ interview will not be a big political story in terms of Bush supporters suddenly turning away from their man. But it will be a big political story in terms of the punditocracy and of news producers, who in general don't like Mr. Bush anyway. Pundits will characterize this interview, and press their characterization on history. They will compare it to Teddy Kennedy floundering around with Roger Mudd in 1980 in the interview that helped do in his presidential campaign. News producers will pick Mr. Bush's sleepiest moments to repeat, and will feed their anchors questions for tomorrow morning: "Why did Bush do badly, do you think?"

So Mr. Bush will have a few bad days of bad reviews ahead of him.
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Democratic candidates tend to love the game of politics, and Republican candidates often don't. Democrats, because they admire government and seek to be part of it, are inclined to think the truth of life is in policy. How could they not then be engaged by policy talk, and its talking points?

Republicans think politics is something you have to do and that policy is something you have to have to move things forward in line with a philosophy. They like philosophy. But they are bored by policy and hate having to memorize talking points.

Speeches are the vehicle for philosophy. Interviews are the vehicle of policy. Mr. Kerry does talking points and can't give an interesting speech. Mr. Bush can't do talking points and gives speeches full of thought and assertion.