Tenent

In statistics you often hear the story of a teacher asking students to take a sample within the 95% confidence interval and having 19 out of 20 students get an answer that is within the interval. The teacher goes to the one who got an answer outside the interval and tries to find out what he did wrong. But it is the teacher that has it wrong. A 95% confidence interval implies that one of the students should get something outside the interval, i.e., should get it wrong.

Why is the starting point the assumption that we got it wrong on WMD? It is true that the expected stockpiles have not been found. Even this is not determinative since we know that in the past the Iraqi regime has burried entire fighter craft (in spite of the fact that this renders them permanently useless) and during the Gluf war sent a large part of its airforce to Iran, a nation it spent almost a decade at war with.

But assuming that Sadaam's story is true, that he destroyed them, neglected to tell the UN even though it would have allowed him to qruadruple his national income, and decided to obstruct the inspections on general principle. That still is no warrent for saying that the administration came to the wrong conclusion about WMD intellegence. The fact that there is no stockpile found in the end doesn't prove that the decision to go to war in the belief that they were there is wrong any more than the fact that an attack doesn't end up occurring in New York means that the decision to increase security on the assumption that one is coming is the wrong decision. It is besides the point what the actual end information is. The point of criticising someone's decision is that they drew the wrong conclusions from the information they had. It is no rebuke to a statistician's art that his projection turns out to be untrue. The only criticism that carries any weight is one that tells us what model we should have made our projection with instead.

In the case of the WMD intellegence a critic, particularly one like Kerry who had access to virtually all the information that the President had, must not only point out that the conclusion Bush reached turns out to have been untrue, he must show how he would have reasoned differently from the same evidence. This is of course the one thing we do not hear from Kerry. That is because the facts as they are on record would lead almost anyone to conclude that the stock piles existed (as indeed, Sadaam's own generals did--usually when we have the same information that the enemy's top generals have we would call that a success). More importantly, they lead John Kerry to conclude they did:

"I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force-- if necessary-- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security." Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct. 9, 2002.

Of course there is always the possibility that Bush misrepresented some piece of evidence that lead Kerry to come to that now apparently erroneous conclusion but so far we haven't heard it. We are unlikely to. It would be one thing for Bush to convince people of the existence of these weapons if they had come to the conclusion since he took office, but since almost every major figure in the Democratic party is on record as being convinced of the existence of Iraq's WMD--alonge with every major foreign intellegence service--since the Clinton administration it is going to be hard to pin it on Bush.