Tenet, and multi-phase risk evaluation

The former CIA Director, George Tenet is pitching his new CYA book, and one of his major pitch points is a 60 Minutes interview where the interviewer pounds pretty hard on the issue of the CIA estimate that there were chemical and biological weapons in Iraq and controlled by the Ba'athist regime.

Via the Carpetbagger Report is the quasi-serious pushback by Condoleeza Rice against the entire Tenet book and bureaucratic knife fighting with one very interesting quote.

RICE: The question was…how long were you going to wait [before launching a military confrontation with Iraq], given that it appeared that the situation was getting worse.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, looking back, do you think that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States?

RICE: I think that…uh…an imminent threat? Certainly Iraq posed a threat, and the question was, was it going to get worse over time, or was it going to get better?

The basic argument by both Tenet and Rice is that the intel was wrong and shit happens in an uncertain world where decisions are made based on imperfect projections and every now and then good faith estimates are disastrously wrong just due to normal variation. Whoopsie as accusations of bad faith are then bandied about.

A couple of years ago I had a pretty good argument with the Opinionated Bastard on a scenario where a Democratic senator could reasonably claim to have voted for the AUMF and coherently claim later opposition to the Iraq War. The basis of the claim is on informational uncertainty and risk re-evaluation.

If in the post-9-11 world previously tolerable risks that the US was running that the sanctions regime was not air tight and that sooner or later the sanctions would break down were deemed to be intolerable and the small but non-zero risk of active Iraqi ABC programs could not now be borne something had to be done. There was significant uncertainty in the spring and summer of 2002 as to the status of the ABC programs in Iraq, and SOMETHING HAD TO BE DONE. And the AUMF in conjunction with an approach to go to the UN for coercive inspections could have been that something. If the support for the AUMF was based on a desire to gain information and reduce uncertainty as to the status of the ABC programs of Saddam Hussein, then the vote is defensible if the voter quickly changed their mind.

The inspections combined with increased US and UK surveillance of Iraqi territory should have produced significant new information. And they did. The information was null information that to the best of the US, UK and UN knowledge the biggest threat in Iraq was minor book-keeping errors and some short range ballistic missiles that either were just within the allowable range limits or under unusual circumstances 10-15% over allowable limits. By mid-January one of three conclusions should have been drawn from the new information.

1) There was nothing there
2) US intelligence sucks
3) Saddam Hussein is a competent evil genius who is able to coordinate the movement of multiple large labs, thousands of artillery shells, millions of pounds of highly fragile precise machinery, thousands of individuals without being noticed despite being under some of the most intensive electronic and visual surveillance in the history of the world.

#1 and #2 are reasonably highly correlated and the available supporting evidence strongly supported some combination of the two. The uncertainty costs had been dramatically reduced so opposition to the war would be a coherent position for an AUMF yes-voter to have if this is the justification.

However Tenet, and Rice and Bush decided that #3 was the more likely answer or at least lied about this reasoning to the American public.