Here's the inside-the-beltway perspective on yesterday's protests from Josh Marshall. While quite good on many issues, he's part of the elite urging us on to war without having any connection to it, in terms of having to fight, or having a loved one fight, or seeing the devastation we'll be wreaking firsthand:
I haven't had much time to catch up on the news today. But clearly these worldwide anti-war protests are a big deal. I'm not sure what they'll accomplish, however, beyond telling us what we already know: that the idea of an American invasion of Iraq is very unpopular around the world [and here, dude], and growing more so. We can debate whether this matters, whether 'they' are right [they are], whose fault it might be in the US [George Bush's], how 'we' should react [by bringing our troops home], and so forth. We can debate all that. But the underlying point seems undeniable. The protests aren't the evidence, just a symbol. Look at the polls in other countries. I'm sure he's thinking, "If only those millions would read Kenneth Pollack's book, they'd all be convinced that pre-emptive war is good."
jeebus, cut the guy a little slack; he just turned 34. im sure in a few years hell see his support for the war as a youthful indiscretion. and last time i checked, the us was part of the world, which is what i assume he was thinking at the time. hes not trying to discredit or disparage the protesters or the peace movement. hes just echoing what weve said, that its hard to gauge what impact the protests have.
tony blair seems to be the politician most greatly impacted at the moment as the vast majority of brits oppose the war as demonstrated by the number of protestors.
I realize the US is part of the world, but I'm not sure Marshall does, what with all his talk of "we" and "they." The only other way I can interpret those air-quoted words is that he's not sure whether to include himself in a movement consisting of substantial numbers of his own countrymen. I'm just using his waffling screed as another opportunity to say, like the stuck CD I am, that all the issues he says are debatable aren't, really. In view of the impressive scale of the demonstrations, "Maybe I've been an idiot on this subject" would have been vastly preferable to his "been there done that" tone.
Also, he seems to be implying that polls are evidence (of bad government policy?) and people out in the street merely symbols. I think it's the other way around.
Here is today's Slate opinion-sampling on the US invasion of Iraq, stripped of caveats and hot air. I broke it down into the two possible categories (War Party and Sane People), and added a new one (Wafflers).
War Party
Henry J. Aaron is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Jonathan Alter is a senior editor and columnist at Newsweek.
Mark Bowden is a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and the author of Black Hawk Down.
John H. McWhorter is an associate professor of linguistics at Berkeley and the author most recently of Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority.
Charles Murray is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. (I'm in favor, for the reasons that the administration argues.)
Peggy Noonan is the author of When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan.
Steven Rattner is a founder of the Quadrangle Group.
Sane People
Eric Alterman is a columnist for The Nation and authors a Weblog for MSNBC.com.
Eli Attie is the former chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore and a co-producer of The West Wing.
Nicholson Baker is the author most recently of A Box of Matches.
Paul Berman is the author of Terror and Liberalism, to be published in March.
Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history at Columbia University and the author most recently of Liberalism and Its Discontents.
William Broyles is former editor of Texas Monthly and Newsweek, a screenwriter (Apollo 13, Cast Away), and a Marine combat veteran of Vietnam.
Jason Epstein is former editorial director of Random House, the author of Book Business, and a contributor to the New York Review of Books.
Tom Geoghegan is a labor attorney and the author most recently of In America's Court: How a Civil Lawyer Who Likes To Settle Stumbled Into a Criminal Trial.
Mark Green is president of the New Democracy Project and was the elected citywide public advocate of New York City from 1994-2001 and the Democratic nominee for mayor in 2001.
Arianna Huffington is the author of Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of the American Prospect.
Spike Lee is the director most recently of 25th Hour. (Not in favor of war on Iraq. Bush is hoodwinking and bamboozling the American public.)
Heather Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of Are Cops Racist? How the War on the Police Harms Black Americans.
Charles Peters is the founding editor of the Washington Monthly.
Robert Reich is university professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis University and a national editor of the American Prospect. He was secretary of labor during the Clinton administration from 1993-97. He is also the author of several books, including, most recently, The Future of Success.
Sarah Vowell is a contributing editor for public radio's This American Life and the author of The Partly Cloudy Patriot.
Wafflers
Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor of the New Republic, a contributing editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. His latest book is The Here and Now. (Unless Saddam leaves Iraq, I vote for attack.)
Paul Glastris is editor in chief of the Washington Monthly. (Presuming that present trends continue—that Saddam does not back down, that Dick Cheney's unilateralist urgings are ignored, and that Colin Powell is allowed to continue to build as much international support as is possible—I favor an invasion sooner rather than later.)
Ben Karlin is co-executive producer of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. (Do I favor a U.S. invasion of Iraq? I am only in favor of war with Iraq if the entire affair takes place between the morning of February 21st and the evening of Sunday March 2nd. This is because The Daily Show will be on hiatus during this period, and, historically, massive loss of life has proven not conducive to producing a comedy news program. I would remind the president as he and his generals go about their plan that in a war, the first casualty is the ease of my job.)
I still haven't read Kenneth Pollack's book, but his NY Times op-ed today was less than impressive. They gave him oodles of space, this is was his big shot, and he blew it. He's not a very persuasive writer, but even allowing for that, his argument is a patchwork of speculation, "evidence" from Iraqi defectors (like, they're not gonna say Iraq's a threat?), and dark hints about classified material. It reads like the writing of an obsessed man. Remember, he's a former CIA analyst, employed by Brookings (which is now a right wing think tank), so he's just sitting in Washington pontificating like everybody else. I'd trust the argument of someone who'd actually been inside Iraq inspecting--ie Scott Ritter--much more than this guy. Does he convince me that we need a pre-emptive invasion, that will get tons of people killed and make New York a more dangerous place? Forget it.
i havent read the oped yet or the second part of tpm's interview. but the brookings as rightwing? i would call it dlc centerist.
I always thought so, too, but according to this (not so new) FAIR article it's been morphing under our noses.
They were discussing the Pollack piece at daily kos today. Obviously this is going to be the view from the left. Some of the comments are good too (and some not so good of course.) I think I get the gist of Pollack's argument now.
Re: Brookings being "centrist." Note that there's a Brookings higher-up in the War Party part of the Slate list I posted above.
I guess I get the gist of Pollack's arguments (Saddam is an undeterrable madman who wants to take over the whole Middle East), I just can't get worked up about it. As I've said before, no one in the Middle East is asking us to protect us from Saddam. If Israel is, then it's their problem to take care of.
The "view from the left" seems to be riddled with humanitarian interventionist assumptions. I can't get behind that kind of paternalistic line, either.
As I've mentioned, I find myself more in tune with the isolationist right than the left that thinks we're so good and noble we should be the world's cop--crossing sovereign borders and bombing to "fix" things in other countries--even when no one's asking us to! In response to the daily kos list, I offer Brendan O'Neill's 10 Wrong Reasons to Oppose the War with Iraq. I find this really refreshing.
Folks at the Carnegie Endowment were as impressed by Kenneth Pollack's op-ed piece as I was. Here's their (daily kos abbreviated) analysis of his house of cards. Of course, they're interventionist-short-of-war but they do a good job of pointing out Pollack's illogic.
I'm re-reading Nicholas Lehman's New Yorker piece from April 2002 about the Bush 1 "new world order" plan, which is now being implemented under Bush 2. Pollack is interviewed and comes off as a total war-obsessed loon. When I'm feeling fresher I'll type it all in here. He jabs his pen at maps and slaps his desk and says things like "You go in as hard as you can, as fast as you can. You get the enemy to divide his forces, by threatening him in two places at once." Smack. "Then you crush him." In Lehman's description he sounds like George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove. Too many grown up little boys playing army in Washington right now.
saw pollack the other night on charlie rose. i think your characterization is a little overstated except perhaps for the last line. he also said that he disagreed with bushco's rush to war. he considered the al qaida threat more pressing and would have pushed for more vigorous inspections for iraq in the nearterm. he was most concerned with iraqi nuclear capabilities which he did not think was an imminent threat.
Pollack, who is trim, quick, and crisp, is obviously a man who has given a briefing or two in his day. When I went to see him at his office in Washington, with a little encouragement he got out from behind his desk and walked over to his office wall, where three maps of the Middle East were hanging. "The only way to do it is with a full scale invasion," he said, using a pen as a pointer. "We're talking about two grand corps, two to three hundred thousand people all together. The population is here, in the Tigris-Euphrates valley." He pointed to the area between Baghdad and Basra. "Ideally, you'd have the Saudis on board." He pointed to the Prince Sultan airbase, near Riyadh. "You could make Kuwait the base, but it's much easier in Saudi. You need to take western Iraq and southern Iraq"--pointing again--"because otherwise they'll fire Scuds at Israel and at the Saudi oil fields. You probably want to prevent Iraq from blowing up its own oil fields, so troops have to occupy them. And you need troops to guard the Kurds in northern Iraq." Point, point. "You go in as hard as you can, as fast as you can." He slapped his hand on the top of his desk. "You get the enemy to divide his forces, by threatening him in two places at once." His hand hit the desk again, hard. "Then you crush him." Smack.
Nicholas Lehman, "The Next World Order," The New Yorker, April 1, 2002
I just noticed that I'd put the cringe-inducing Paul Berman under the "Sane People" column in Slate's pre-war roll-call. Re-reading what he wrote, I'd probably move him to the "Waffler" category. What the hell was he saying?
I do not favor an invasion of Iraq solely for the purpose of disarming the regime. If disarmament is the goal, there is no reason we shouldn't keep up a pressure short of invasion. I would favor an invasion for a larger purpose, though, which is this: to begin a roll-back of the several tendencies and political movements that add up to Muslim totalitarianism. I would favor an invasion whose purpose was to foment a liberal revolution in the Middle East. Unfortunately, Bush has not spoken of such a thing. He has not tried to summon the support of liberal revolutionaries from the Muslim world, or from any other part of the world. He will probably stage his invasion, anyway. I will protest against it, but not because I want him to withdraw the troops or to do less. I will protest because I want him to do more. In our present terrible predicament, a liberal revolution is our best hope—the best hope for ourselves, and the best hope for the Arab world.
Once it was clear we'd "won," he joined the War Party in earnest.
Kenneth Pollack, the CIA analyst that convinced Josh Marshall and lot of other lefties that we needed to "take out" Saddam Hussein because of WMDs, is now admitting he was a fucking idiot. Here's an NPR interview that Joe Conason points to in Salon Proprietary, I mean Premium, today:
[STEVE] INSKEEP: I really appreciate you agreeing to talk to us especially since -- I do want to put you on the spot a little bit. I want to know if the news from Iraq or maybe the lack of news from Iraq about weapons of mass destruction has changed your opinion about anything.
Mr. POLLACK: Yes and no. Probably not as much as I think you'd suspect. [He never explains why.] At first, what you may remember from my book was I'd never thought that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States. [I just wanted to see bombs go boom and planes go *roar* ACK ACK ACK ACK!]
INSKEEP: That's right.
Mr. POLLACK: I felt that it was a much more distant threat. And the real threat that I felt from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program was the potential for Iraq to eventually develop nuclear weapons. Now I did believe that the Iraqis probably had some weaponized [chemical and biological] agents in the country, somewhere that they probably did have some ballistic missiles. [Probably. Maybe. Possibly. You know.]
INSKEEP: U.S. officials did suggest that Iraqi military units were ready to use chemical or biological weapons, that chemical weapons had been distributed to front-line troops and that sort of thing. That does seem to have turned out not to be true at least.
Mr. POLLACK: Right, that's absolutely the case. And, you know, here's one where, you know, I think that, you know, my expectation was off base. [Translation: I'm a fucking idiot, and my bad judgment helped get a lot of people killed.]
INSKEEP: On another point, which is the most crucial point to you, about nuclear weapons. You told us last November when you came on this program that you believed there was a consensus among American, British, French, German and Israeli intelligence that Saddam Hussein had everything he needed to develop nuclear weapons. I suppose some people would question now whether all of the components for a nuclear program could really be hidden that well, whether they could have disappeared.
Mr. POLLACK: Yeah, I mean, you're now getting beyond my area of expertise, Steven. I try very hard not to talk about things I don't know. I mean, the point that I made on your show was a true point. That was the consensus of opinion among the intelligence community. It was hearing things like that that brought me to the conclusion that, you know, 'Boy, if this is the case, we've got to do something about this guy.' I think, you know, that is exactly the kind of thing that we're going to need to go back and look hard at the evidence that we were getting and those various intelligence services who were making those claims, I think, are going to need to go back and re-examine the methods they used. As I said, that was not me making that claim; that was me parroting the claims of so-called experts. [There you have it.]
I heard that interview driving back from Texas. I wonder if Pollack's offering refunds on his book.
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Here's the inside-the-beltway perspective on yesterday's protests from Josh Marshall. While quite good on many issues, he's part of the elite urging us on to war without having any connection to it, in terms of having to fight, or having a loved one fight, or seeing the devastation we'll be wreaking firsthand:
I'm sure he's thinking, "If only those millions would read Kenneth Pollack's book, they'd all be convinced that pre-emptive war is good."
- tom moody 2-16-2003 8:43 pm
jeebus, cut the guy a little slack; he just turned 34. im sure in a few years hell see his support for the war as a youthful indiscretion. and last time i checked, the us was part of the world, which is what i assume he was thinking at the time. hes not trying to discredit or disparage the protesters or the peace movement. hes just echoing what weve said, that its hard to gauge what impact the protests have.
tony blair seems to be the politician most greatly impacted at the moment as the vast majority of brits oppose the war as demonstrated by the number of protestors.
- dave 2-17-2003 12:48 am
I realize the US is part of the world, but I'm not sure Marshall does, what with all his talk of "we" and "they." The only other way I can interpret those air-quoted words is that he's not sure whether to include himself in a movement consisting of substantial numbers of his own countrymen. I'm just using his waffling screed as another opportunity to say, like the stuck CD I am, that all the issues he says are debatable aren't, really. In view of the impressive scale of the demonstrations, "Maybe I've been an idiot on this subject" would have been vastly preferable to his "been there done that" tone.
Also, he seems to be implying that polls are evidence (of bad government policy?) and people out in the street merely symbols. I think it's the other way around.
- tom moody 2-17-2003 1:48 am
Here is today's Slate opinion-sampling on the US invasion of Iraq, stripped of caveats and hot air. I broke it down into the two possible categories (War Party and Sane People), and added a new one (Wafflers).
War Party
Henry J. Aaron is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Jonathan Alter is a senior editor and columnist at Newsweek.
Mark Bowden is a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and the author of Black Hawk Down.
John H. McWhorter is an associate professor of linguistics at Berkeley and the author most recently of Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority.
Charles Murray is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. (I'm in favor, for the reasons that the administration argues.)
Peggy Noonan is the author of When Character Was King: A Story of Ronald Reagan.
Steven Rattner is a founder of the Quadrangle Group.
Sane People
Eric Alterman is a columnist for The Nation and authors a Weblog for MSNBC.com.
Eli Attie is the former chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore and a co-producer of The West Wing.
Nicholson Baker is the author most recently of A Box of Matches.
Paul Berman is the author of Terror and Liberalism, to be published in March.
Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history at Columbia University and the author most recently of Liberalism and Its Discontents.
William Broyles is former editor of Texas Monthly and Newsweek, a screenwriter (Apollo 13, Cast Away), and a Marine combat veteran of Vietnam.
Jason Epstein is former editorial director of Random House, the author of Book Business, and a contributor to the New York Review of Books.
Tom Geoghegan is a labor attorney and the author most recently of In America's Court: How a Civil Lawyer Who Likes To Settle Stumbled Into a Criminal Trial.
Mark Green is president of the New Democracy Project and was the elected citywide public advocate of New York City from 1994-2001 and the Democratic nominee for mayor in 2001.
Arianna Huffington is the author of Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of the American Prospect.
Spike Lee is the director most recently of 25th Hour. (Not in favor of war on Iraq. Bush is hoodwinking and bamboozling the American public.)
Heather Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of Are Cops Racist? How the War on the Police Harms Black Americans.
Charles Peters is the founding editor of the Washington Monthly.
Robert Reich is university professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis University and a national editor of the American Prospect. He was secretary of labor during the Clinton administration from 1993-97. He is also the author of several books, including, most recently, The Future of Success.
Sarah Vowell is a contributing editor for public radio's This American Life and the author of The Partly Cloudy Patriot.
Wafflers
Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor of the New Republic, a contributing editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. His latest book is The Here and Now. (Unless Saddam leaves Iraq, I vote for attack.)
Paul Glastris is editor in chief of the Washington Monthly. (Presuming that present trends continue—that Saddam does not back down, that Dick Cheney's unilateralist urgings are ignored, and that Colin Powell is allowed to continue to build as much international support as is possible—I favor an invasion sooner rather than later.)
Ben Karlin is co-executive producer of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. (Do I favor a U.S. invasion of Iraq? I am only in favor of war with Iraq if the entire affair takes place between the morning of February 21st and the evening of Sunday March 2nd. This is because The Daily Show will be on hiatus during this period, and, historically, massive loss of life has proven not conducive to producing a comedy news program. I would remind the president as he and his generals go about their plan that in a war, the first casualty is the ease of my job.)
- tom moody 2-20-2003 6:48 am
I still haven't read Kenneth Pollack's book, but his NY Times op-ed today was less than impressive. They gave him oodles of space, this is was his big shot, and he blew it. He's not a very persuasive writer, but even allowing for that, his argument is a patchwork of speculation, "evidence" from Iraqi defectors (like, they're not gonna say Iraq's a threat?), and dark hints about classified material. It reads like the writing of an obsessed man. Remember, he's a former CIA analyst, employed by Brookings (which is now a right wing think tank), so he's just sitting in Washington pontificating like everybody else. I'd trust the argument of someone who'd actually been inside Iraq inspecting--ie Scott Ritter--much more than this guy. Does he convince me that we need a pre-emptive invasion, that will get tons of people killed and make New York a more dangerous place? Forget it.
- tom moody 2-22-2003 1:08 am
i havent read the oped yet or the second part of tpm's interview. but the brookings as rightwing? i would call it dlc centerist.
- dave 2-22-2003 1:29 am
I always thought so, too, but according to this (not so new) FAIR article it's been morphing under our noses.
- tom moody 2-22-2003 2:19 am
They were discussing the Pollack piece at daily kos today. Obviously this is going to be the view from the left. Some of the comments are good too (and some not so good of course.) I think I get the gist of Pollack's argument now.
- jim 2-22-2003 3:19 am
Re: Brookings being "centrist." Note that there's a Brookings higher-up in the War Party part of the Slate list I posted above.
I guess I get the gist of Pollack's arguments (Saddam is an undeterrable madman who wants to take over the whole Middle East), I just can't get worked up about it. As I've said before, no one in the Middle East is asking us to protect us from Saddam. If Israel is, then it's their problem to take care of.
The "view from the left" seems to be riddled with humanitarian interventionist assumptions. I can't get behind that kind of paternalistic line, either.
As I've mentioned, I find myself more in tune with the isolationist right than the left that thinks we're so good and noble we should be the world's cop--crossing sovereign borders and bombing to "fix" things in other countries--even when no one's asking us to! In response to the daily kos list, I offer Brendan O'Neill's 10 Wrong Reasons to Oppose the War with Iraq. I find this really refreshing.
- tom moody 2-22-2003 10:19 pm
Folks at the Carnegie Endowment were as impressed by Kenneth Pollack's op-ed piece as I was. Here's their (daily kos abbreviated) analysis of his house of cards. Of course, they're interventionist-short-of-war but they do a good job of pointing out Pollack's illogic.
I'm re-reading Nicholas Lehman's New Yorker piece from April 2002 about the Bush 1 "new world order" plan, which is now being implemented under Bush 2. Pollack is interviewed and comes off as a total war-obsessed loon. When I'm feeling fresher I'll type it all in here. He jabs his pen at maps and slaps his desk and says things like "You go in as hard as you can, as fast as you can. You get the enemy to divide his forces, by threatening him in two places at once." Smack. "Then you crush him." In Lehman's description he sounds like George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove. Too many grown up little boys playing army in Washington right now.
- tom moody 2-24-2003 10:55 am
saw pollack the other night on charlie rose. i think your characterization is a little overstated except perhaps for the last line. he also said that he disagreed with bushco's rush to war. he considered the al qaida threat more pressing and would have pushed for more vigorous inspections for iraq in the nearterm. he was most concerned with iraqi nuclear capabilities which he did not think was an imminent threat.
- dave 2-26-2003 9:58 pm
Pollack, who is trim, quick, and crisp, is obviously a man who has given a briefing or two in his day. When I went to see him at his office in Washington, with a little encouragement he got out from behind his desk and walked over to his office wall, where three maps of the Middle East were hanging. "The only way to do it is with a full scale invasion," he said, using a pen as a pointer. "We're talking about two grand corps, two to three hundred thousand people all together. The population is here, in the Tigris-Euphrates valley." He pointed to the area between Baghdad and Basra. "Ideally, you'd have the Saudis on board." He pointed to the Prince Sultan airbase, near Riyadh. "You could make Kuwait the base, but it's much easier in Saudi. You need to take western Iraq and southern Iraq"--pointing again--"because otherwise they'll fire Scuds at Israel and at the Saudi oil fields. You probably want to prevent Iraq from blowing up its own oil fields, so troops have to occupy them. And you need troops to guard the Kurds in northern Iraq." Point, point. "You go in as hard as you can, as fast as you can." He slapped his hand on the top of his desk. "You get the enemy to divide his forces, by threatening him in two places at once." His hand hit the desk again, hard. "Then you crush him." Smack.
Nicholas Lehman, "The Next World Order," The New Yorker, April 1, 2002
- tom moody 2-26-2003 10:24 pm
I just noticed that I'd put the cringe-inducing Paul Berman under the "Sane People" column in Slate's pre-war roll-call. Re-reading what he wrote, I'd probably move him to the "Waffler" category. What the hell was he saying?
Once it was clear we'd "won," he joined the War Party in earnest.
- tom moody 4-12-2003 7:42 pm
Kenneth Pollack, the CIA analyst that convinced Josh Marshall and lot of other lefties that we needed to "take out" Saddam Hussein because of WMDs, is now admitting he was a fucking idiot. Here's an NPR interview that Joe Conason points to in Salon Proprietary, I mean Premium, today:
[STEVE] INSKEEP: I really appreciate you agreeing to talk to us especially since -- I do want to put you on the spot a little bit. I want to know if the news from Iraq or maybe the lack of news from Iraq about weapons of mass destruction has changed your opinion about anything.
Mr. POLLACK: Yes and no. Probably not as much as I think you'd suspect. [He never explains why.] At first, what you may remember from my book was I'd never thought that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States. [I just wanted to see bombs go boom and planes go *roar* ACK ACK ACK ACK!]
INSKEEP: That's right.
Mr. POLLACK: I felt that it was a much more distant threat. And the real threat that I felt from Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program was the potential for Iraq to eventually develop nuclear weapons. Now I did believe that the Iraqis probably had some weaponized [chemical and biological] agents in the country, somewhere that they probably did have some ballistic missiles. [Probably. Maybe. Possibly. You know.]
INSKEEP: U.S. officials did suggest that Iraqi military units were ready to use chemical or biological weapons, that chemical weapons had been distributed to front-line troops and that sort of thing. That does seem to have turned out not to be true at least.
Mr. POLLACK: Right, that's absolutely the case. And, you know, here's one where, you know, I think that, you know, my expectation was off base. [Translation: I'm a fucking idiot, and my bad judgment helped get a lot of people killed.]
INSKEEP: On another point, which is the most crucial point to you, about nuclear weapons. You told us last November when you came on this program that you believed there was a consensus among American, British, French, German and Israeli intelligence that Saddam Hussein had everything he needed to develop nuclear weapons. I suppose some people would question now whether all of the components for a nuclear program could really be hidden that well, whether they could have disappeared.
Mr. POLLACK: Yeah, I mean, you're now getting beyond my area of expertise, Steven. I try very hard not to talk about things I don't know. I mean, the point that I made on your show was a true point. That was the consensus of opinion among the intelligence community. It was hearing things like that that brought me to the conclusion that, you know, 'Boy, if this is the case, we've got to do something about this guy.' I think, you know, that is exactly the kind of thing that we're going to need to go back and look hard at the evidence that we were getting and those various intelligence services who were making those claims, I think, are going to need to go back and re-examine the methods they used. As I said, that was not me making that claim; that was me parroting the claims of so-called experts. [There you have it.]
- tom moody 5-27-2003 11:51 pm
I heard that interview driving back from Texas. I wonder if Pollack's offering refunds on his book.
- jimlouis 5-28-2003 3:23 pm