Presidential dilemmas.(on the right)(Iraq War)

SEN. JAY ROCKEFELLER, an intelligent and resourceful liberal, was made to listen to part of a statement he made in 2002. In that statement he spoke of the alarming developments within Iraq, of Saddam Hussein attempting an acquisition of weapons of mass destruction.

"You want to revise and amend those words, Senator?" Wolf Blitzer asked him on CNN.

"Of course. I mean, I was dead flat wrong.... I'm on the Intelligence Committee, and as soon as we did our report on weapons of mass destruction, I realized that I had just been living off this information, this false information. And I went down to the floor of the Senate and I said, Look, I'm wrong. I would never vote for a war knowing what I know now."

Okay.

Two questions arise from this experience. The first is: Should Bush have urged a military operation against Saddam on evidence which proved to be either wrong or insubstantial; sometimes, both? The second is: How do we account for the terrible misestimations of our intelligence services? We learned only recently that we are spending $44 billion a year to gather intelligence. It's always wrong to assume that there is a correlation between the money spent and productivity, but what reason is there to be confident that critical personnel in CIA and in DoD will go on other than to receive Presidential Medals of Freedom?

But of course there is an overarching irresolution here. If we agree with Senator Rockefeller that we ought not to have gone to war, we are still left with the fact that we did go to war. This imposes on the president a running responsibility to vitalize the argument for going to war. One presidential critic over the weekend objected that an entire year had gone by since Bush had said anything substantial in the matter of the Iraq war: Why does he not bring us up to date on it regularly?

There is only the obvious answer to that question: What would he say? One supposes that no national leader, in wartime, ...