The Iraq Syndrome

President Bush claims that a Middle Eastern enemy state is consorting with and giving weapons to terrorists. He says it is developing weapons of mass destruction.

But wait. When some in his Administration make the mistake of tying these actions to the highest levels of the Iranian government, President Bush takes a step back. He says, no, while he is sure that a major power in Iran, the Quds Force, is supplying Shiite militias terrorizing Sunnis in Iraq, he is not certain that Iran's top leaders have sanctioned this.

While the provided facts are similar to the case for war against Iraq -- hazy claims about weapons systems and capabilities along with background briefings aimed at putting Administration claims in the press and swaying politicians and diplomats -- the President is not moving forward on Iran the same way he did with Iraq.

And that, my friends, is what the Washington Post is calling the "Iraq Syndrome", a hesitancy to take intelligence at face value and run with it. A "Baghdad briefer" who goes too far in saying that shaped charges in Iran were put there by Supreme Leader Khamenei is slapped down.

Before the war in Iraq, an important aspect of Bush Administration thinking was that intelligence was insufficient, action was necessary, and that policymakers had to assemble what information they could from the avalanche of data often available from intelligence services.

Now, skepticism of intelligence is leavened with a healthy dose of public skepticism toward policymakers, in particular, toward non-professional high-level ideologues. While international relations and politics students are taught about the decision-making model of the Cuban Missile Crisis (usually with the slant that President Kennedy's actions were near-ideal), there is one major way that crises 50 years ago differ from those of today -- they were often conducted in secret or near-secret conditions.

Today, the case for intervention is made to the public because without public support any war will falter. Experience has taught us that politicians making decisions about war and peace without public input will lead us into disaster. That was part of the Vietnam Syndrome. The skepticism the public shows to the case made to it for war and those promoting war are primary symptoms of the Iraq Syndrome.

Well, if it took a war to get us to this amount of skepticism, that really is sad. But at least we give a case for war a hard, skeptical look, with reality rather than transformation in mind, we will be better off in the future than we are today.