Unqualified Offerings

Stephen F. Hayes has a new piece in the Weekly Standard about stuff people have told him:

THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.

Despite Hayes’ history as the guy the Bush Administration leaks the stuff too dodgy even for Judith Miller, the article is probably not entirely wrong. The section on Saddam’s long flirtation with Islamist rhetoric is a useful corrective to the glib characterization of Saddam’s regime as “determinedly secular.” Like politicians, despotic and otherwise, all over the world, Saddam was happy to play the Old Tyme Religion card if it would improve his hold on power.

All that said. You can get a lot from this article by reading it against the grain.

* Hayes hasn’t seen any documents himself.
* Hayes quotes contacts whining about how the documents might be “cherry-picked” with no sense of irony - Hayes’ sources could easily be cherry-picking too.
* Once again the most specific documentation Hayes provides is of Iraqi misfeasance in the 1980s. But the question before us was and remains, “Did it make sense for the United States to spend the 1990s trying to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime by (what passes for) subtrefuge, and then launch a massive war to oust him and remake Iraq’s government in 2003.
* Hayes’ sources note in passing that the two-million or so “exploitable” documents that may contain proof of all sorts of villainy have mostly not been processed because of a shortage of trained linguists. Maybe, just maybe, this tells on our competence to run that part of the world.
* The usual pity party about what the evil media that swallowed every Pentagon fairy story from 2002-2004 might do in the way of willfully mischaracterizing these stunning finds if the government were to put them out there where people (trained linguists or otherwise) could see them.
* There are two droll paragraphs in a row:

Most of the 50,000 translated documents relate directly to weapons of mass destruction programs and scientists, since David Kay and his Iraq Survey Group–who were among the first to analyze the finds–considered those items top priority. “At first, if it wasn’t WMD, it wasn’t translated. It wasn’t exploited,” says a former military intelligence officer who worked on the documents in Iraq.

And we saw how that turned out. The FMIO continues:

“We had boxloads of Iraqi Intelligence records–their names, their jobs, all sorts of detailed information,” says the former military intelligence officer. “In an insurgency, wouldn’t that have been helpful?”

Do you think this inattention may have had anything to do with the fact that the Administration spent the early months after the document finds insisting that there was no insurgency?

Saddam Hussein’s was one of the planet’s most unsavory regimes. Hayes seems to confuse thinking that it was stupid and wrong to conquer Iraq militarily with thinking that Saddam was some kind of Arab Jacques Chirac. There’s undoubtedly a lot to learn from the documentary record his regime left behind. But there’s not a lot of trust to spare for what Hayes’ sources have to say about that documentary record.