Interesting Iraqi Documents in Qatar

I've been interested in Stephen Hayes' article in the Weekly Standard about all the papers sitting in Qatar that may shed some light on what Saddam was up to since the first Gulf War. Today, Aaron at Lifelike Pundits did a post on the documents. Republicans are wondering why the administration isn't using these documents to bolster their justification for the war. The left seems to figure that the fact they're not either means Stephen Hayes doesn't know what he's talking about, or that the documents are forged to help Bush (the first comment on Aaron's post said something like, "They're waiting for the ink to dry."

I placed a comment on his post, and liked my comment so much that I decided to post it:

Why isn't the administration exploiting this possible PR coup? According to Stephen Hayes: "I have been told countless times by officials of the executive branch that there is no need to reargue the case for war, that what matters now is winning on the ground, that our intelligence professionals don't have time to review history, so occupied are they with current intelligence about current threats. I'm sympathetic to at least part of that thinking; it's hard to insist in the face of new and evolving threats that intelligence analysts should spend their precious time evaluating the past." [emphasis is mine]

In other words, they have their eye on the ball.

What's so difficult about pulling these documents together and making an argument? Again, Hayes: "It's not an easy job. Some of the documents are forged. Others are hard to read after being damaged by fire, or the water used to extinguish those fires, in the days and weeks after the U.S. invasion. Making the job even more difficult is the fact that many of these documents have come from larger sets of documents that never made it to Doha. We know that the Iraqi regime in the run-up to war systematically destroyed what it considered the most incriminating evidence of its misdeeds. So our analysts are essentially looking at isolated pieces of a much larger puzzle without knowing whether they will ever have the remaining pieces.

"The document collection effort in Iraq was haphazard, to say the least. No comprehensive guidance was ever provided to soldiers and intelligence officials on what exactly they should collect. This lack of direction meant that in many cases unit commanders made decisions about what to gather and what to discard. When David Kay ran the Iraq Survey Group searching for weapons of mass destruction, he instructed his team to ignore anything not directly related to the regime's WMD efforts. As a consequence, documents describing the regime's training and financing of terrorists were labeled "No Intelligence Value" and often discarded, according to two sources."

Sounds like a difficult task to me, and one that probably won't get huge attention until after the war is won.

The fact is, if you've read the report by the Iraq Survey Group, you don't need to see all of this to know that whether or not he had WMD at the moment, Saddam had every intention of having them again. Either the guy was dangerous, or he wasn't. Either he broke all those UN resolutions, including the cease-fire, or he didn't. Either he was in league with terrorists, or he wasn't. Perhaps most importantly, either Islamofacists were emboldened by our dithering with Iraq and weak reaction to previous terror attacks, or they weren't. Before the war, there was vast agreement that the former was true in all those statements. That was the justification then, and it stands today.