SHIELDS AND BROOKS
July 9, 2004

Political analysts syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks discuss the week's events including the Senate's release of a report critical of the CIA's prewar intelligence and Sen. John Kerry's choice of Sen. John Edwards for his vice presidential running mate.

 

Online NewsHour Special Reports: Investigating Prewar Intelligence Vote 2004 Profile: Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C. July 9, 2004: Update: Senate Panel Criticizes CIA for Incorrect Iraq Intelligence July 6, 2004: Mark Shields and David Brooks assess the Edwards pick. July 6, 2004: Reporters discuss Edwards, the candidate and the man. July 6, 2004: Update: Kerry Picks Edwards as His Running Mate March 3, 2004: Margaret Warner looks back at the Edwards campaign. More NewsHour coverage of White House and Political Wrap   News for Students: Lesson Plan: Bringing out the Vote     White House George W. Bush For President John Kerry for President	JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, the analysis of Shields and Brooks, they are with Ray Suarez. RAY SUAREZ: Of course that's syndicated columnist mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks. And as we have heard, senators from both parties agree that the decisions that were being made in the White House were being made on the basis of bad information. The campaign is intensifying. How is this going to play politically? DAVID BROOKS: Well, I'm not sure it will. I'm not sure this is a partisan issue. Many other countries got this wrong. Democratic and Republican administrations got this wrong. Obviously the fact that we went to war and one of the major pillars of that war was wrong is a big screw up. But the fact that the intelligence was wrong, this was not a political problem, it was an intelligence problem that was then fed to the president. If you sat there and read the NIE, the National Intelligence Estimate, and you were president of the United States, you would be in a panic after 9/11. The things that Bush said, the things that Cheney said were essentially the things that Clinton said, what Tom Daschle said, what they were saying in Germany, Italy, and everywhere else. So to me the story of this report, it serious, but it's not a partisan failure, it's a systemic failure of intelligence. RAY SUAREZ: Mark? MARK SHIELDS: I disagree. This is more than a tragedy, it's a disaster. The U.S. credibility is diminished badly, the United States standing in the world has eroded. Hatred in the Muslim world for the United States has increased dramatically, all as consequences of this war. And I have to say that -- I mean, the president and Mr. Rove have billed the president as a war president and when the president of the United States makes the most serious decision any chief executive can make to take a nation to war on faulty flawed and false information, it's inevitably an issue in that president's stewardship and leadership. And I don't think there's any way of avoiding that.
	A two-part report on CIA and admin response
	RAY SUAREZ: The report, Mark, is heavily crafted by the majority. MARK SHIELDS: Yes, it is. RAY SUAREZ: And there was an attempt to lay a lot of this at the door of the CIA and build some barriers between the CIA and the White House. Does this, as David suggests, exculpate the White House, make them a little bulletproof on this? MARK SHIELDS: No, David is right. I mean, others did agree with this. I mean, whether it was Tom Daschle or the Italians or the Germans or whoever it was, but they didn't make the decision to go to war. This was the president's decision, this was the president exhorting the nation to go to war. So I think what the majority did, the Senate majority led by Pat Roberts, and whom I happen to have great affection for, but they chose to divide this report into two sections, this concentrating on the CIA, the Democrats wanted, understandably, to have it done as an organic whole, and so you'd look at the report not only how they collected the information but then how they handled the information, or mishandled the information in this case. And the committee says we'll only come out with that second part later and Olympia Snowe said before -- Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, Republican -- said maybe before the election, Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan a lot more realistically said don't hold your breath because I think, there is an attempt, the CIA certainly is not, does not cover itself with glory, and is the dispenser of flawed and defective information. DAVID BROOKS: One of the things that strikes me is how little difference there is between people who are professional intelligence officials and the rest of us. The rest of us looked at Iraq, saw a guy who in 1991 was closer than we thought to getting nuclear weapons, saw a guy who seemed to be hiding something and we figured he's probably hiding something. What strikes me is that the intelligence agencies were little more sophisticated than the rest of us. And, in fact, if you go to the administration, I think if you talk to people within the administration, one of the things they tend to be more skeptical of the intelligence agency because of their histories. Dick Cheney had a long history with the intelligence agency and expressed skepticism toward how they reacted to the Russian economy, all sorts of things, during the Cold War. In today's report they mentioned that a lot of the things that were discussed in other committee reports that took place in the past were not addressed before 9/11, have not been addressed today and one of those reports they referenced was the Rumsfeld report from I think 1998. So Don Rumsfeld had an expert view to be skeptical about the intelligence agencies. So to me they understood the failures, they still acted, in part because of the assurances that came out of the community.
	How important is the war as a campaign issue?
	RAY SUAREZ: Is the impact of the report blunted, Mark, by the fact that both John Kerry and John Edwards voted to authorize the president to use force in Iraq? MARK SHIELDS: Yes. I really do, I mean, I think what you have, Ray, is you have the president of the United States made a case for preemptive war, and that case was based upon a clear and present danger, that's the moral premise that has to underline a preemptive war. And that rested on chemical and biological and nuclear weapons, and a capacity and a willingness on the part of Iraq and Saddam Hussein to administer great punishment and damage to the United States of America. None of those things were present. I mean, that is really, I mean, I'm sorry, this is a Democrat or Republican, this is just such a failure of leadership, and that's what it is. You know, Harry Truman does come into play at some point, the buck does stop somewhere and this was the president's call. DAVID BROOKS: I would halfway agree with that. I think it's not going to be this big partisan issue, but it is going to be a huge influence on American foreign policy from now on. We now have a running sore of our intelligence community that can't seem to do its job. We had this failure; we had the 9/11 failure. I spent last week interviewing four senior members of the administration directly in charge of what's going on in Iraq and they've all made it clear that we have very little information about the insurgents, whether there are 5,000 or 20,000, what motivates them, how they're organized. We have a huge intelligence failure right there. And so how do you conduct a foreign policy when your access to information is extremely limited and you can't trust the information you think you have? That's not a partisan problem, but it's a huge national problem. RAY SUAREZ: Does this put the war squarely in the center of the campaign, as now both tickets seem to be complete and the election season is well and truly under way, they were both out on the road this week? DAVID BROOKS: If you ask voters what issues are you going to vote on, the war actually comes in fourth. Nonetheless, I think the war is the issue. If you ask voters who you're going to vote for and do you think the war was worth it, that aligns up pretty perfectly. That leads me to think the war is the deciding issue. RAY SUAREZ: Mark? MARK SHIELDS: I agree. I really do. I think it defines George Bush's presidency, and, you know, that the war in the final analysis will be, I think, the centerpiece of this election and the determining factor.
	How different is John Kerry from George Bush?
	RAY SUAREZ: But where does that leave John Kerry, if he's trying to make the counter case and a lot of critics have pointed out that his, and David has said many times in the past couple weeks, that his position is not all that different from George Bush's, does he have any more ammunition than he had before this report was issued? MARK SHIELDS: His position, his position, I guess the case that Kerry has to make or has made, is that Bush has come to his position. I mean, you know, the idea that the president of the United States would be reposing all hope in a man named Brahimi who happens to be a GS-14 at the United Nations, would have been unthinkable six months or a year or whatever ago, that the president is, you know, is now belatedly coming to the point of collective and bilateral and multilateral action. But no, I think, I don't think there's any question, John Kerry has made a calculated political decision to get right up to George Bush's left shoulder on the question of Iraq, and so that there isn't daylight between them, so he can't be accused of being soft on terrorism, and, see, I think the people of the United States have made the case and made the decision already, and the Wall Street Journal and NBC polled people who haven't decided, the 11 percent, is overwhelming, they've made a decision, the decision is they don't want George Bush reelected. They have not made the decision that John Kerry is an acceptable leader, and I think that's exactly where Kerry is trying to be reassuring. It's being a little cute. I agree with it because if things really go to hell, which they started to do this week again in Iraq, with Americans being killed in multiples, then there could be some traction to the Ralph Nader position of let's get the hell out of there. DAVID BROOKS: I just want to underline this point: it doesn't matter who wins. The foreign policy is going to be affected by this, whether it's Kerry or Bush or Ralph Nader. How are we going to act against a future Milosevic; how are we going to act against North Korea or Iran or I don't care who it is, genocide, well, genocide you know about -- but anything that requires some intelligence, how are we going to be able to trust ourselves, how are our allies going to be able to trust ourselves? It seems to me, if there's ever a time when you get Bill Clinton together with Bob Dole and have some huge bipartisan commission to get some trustworthy intelligence, to move us another step forward out of this morass, this is the moment where both sides can trust some intelligence process; without that it doesn't matter what kind of military we have. If don't have the information, you just can't use it.
	Dick Cheney vs. John Edwards
	RAY SUAREZ: Well, this week and, interestingly, in the shadow of this report, is also a lot of speculation about the lineup, the match-up between Vice President Cheney and Sen. John Edwards. Are these discreet things that get compartmentalized or do people picking up their Sunday paper see these as kind of juxtaposed, you know, Cheney on the one hand with his long resume, but on the other hand being one of the midwives to this policy that was based on the flawed information? DAVID BROOKS: Well, totally, to me they're totally different, here you have something serious, substantive, a real report. If you looked at the Kerry-Edwards unveiling, it was all atmospherics, it was lovey-dovey, it was like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, touching and feeling; I was sort of insulted for John Edwards the way this was rolled out. This man is a serious man with serious policy views. He was treated like the charming little bride who has to make everybody feel good to stand there and look pretty. I think, you know, this was a very effective rollout politically, but it treated him simply as atmospherics, as style, as not somebody bringing anything intellectual to the ticket at all. MARK SHIELDS: I think John Edwards' record and message played remarkably well with the week's events domestically, if you think about it, Ray. This is a man who does talk about two Americas, he talks about the powerful and the privileged not playing by the same rules or governed by the same rules and laws that everybody else is and that that's wrong. And the week that he announces or is announced we have the conviction of John Rigas at Adelphia Cable and we have the indictment of Ken Lay at Enron: Two glaring examples of just such behavior, or misbehavior. I thought it went exceptionally well, I thought the Democrats had three exceptional days, the secret weapons in this campaign turned out to be Jack, 4 years old, and Emma, 6 years old, and John Edwards may be the only political candidate in American history who has had two families by the same wife, and that just gave an energy, and I thought John Kerry looked ten years younger by Wednesday than he had on Monday. RAY SUAREZ: Well, Mark and David, thanks a lot.

REGIONS TOPICS RECENT PROGRAMS ABOUT US FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS / FEEDS:

Support the kind of journalism done by the NewsHour...Become a member of your local PBS station.
PBS Online Privacy Policy Copyright ©1996- MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. All Rights Reserved.