New York City television is currently blanketed with wall-to-wall coverage of the 9/11 commission hearings, which are taking place today in Manhattan. Seeing these images again of the attack on the World Trade Center, listening to a re-creation of the time-line of the events as they unfolded ... well. It's still painful, especially for those of us who lost colleagues, friends, and neighbors. Kudos to the commission chair, Tom Kean, for asking for a moment of silence. All the more reason, today, to continue our discussion of the nature of the current Iraq war, which, in my view, has little to do with the Al Qaeda attack on the United States.

Replying to an essay,"Lesser Evils," written by Michael Ignatieff, Irfan Khawaja asks:"Do We Have to Get Our Hands Dirty to Win the War on Terrorism? And What Does that Mean Exactly?" Khawaja, who is currently participating in a provocative discussion with Gene Healy and Keith Halderman, raises some troubling issues about ends and means, while defending the view that there is and should be no trade-off between"liberty" and"security."

Khawaja, however, is disturbed by those who use"imminent threat" as a litmus test for military action. He thinks that"imminence" remains either undefined or too loosely defined. He writes:

One difficulty here is that it’s not clear that the concept of imminence can consistently be applied before an event as opposed to after it. It is much easier to say that something was imminent than to say that it is—a serious liability for a concept with the strategic importance that “imminence” has now come to acquire.

The issue of"imminence" is, indeed, an epistemic one. That's why the accuracy and reliability of intelligence and the effectiveness of the intelligence community are so crucially important to our assessment of any risk as a clear and present danger to the lives and liberties of American citizens. In the context of Iraq, the US had to assess the probable existence of weapons of mass destruction, the ability of Hussein's regime to deliver such weapons in a first-strike against"US interests" (something that is, in this day and age, far more difficult to define than the doctrine of"imminence"), and the ties between Hussein's regime and other groups or states that have targeted US interests in the past, specifically the ties (or lack thereof) between Hussein and Al Qaeda.

Part of that assessment would have included Hussein's own testimony, which, as Khawaja argues, could not be trusted. While I agree that Hussein was a"liar" and a"serial miscalculator," as Khawaja observes, one thing seems certain: He put a high priority on his own survival, and boasted that because he survived the first Gulf War, he was actually the victor. It is for that reason that containment under threat of assured destruction works, even with the most irrational of people. Josef Stalin was, by all measures, a paranoid liar, and a more prolific murderer than Hussein, but he was"rational" enough to know that a strike against the US would have been met with massive and catastrophic retaliation.

In the end, however, the US did not have to rely on the rationality or believability of Hussein's claims; it needed to evaluate, as Gene Healy has done, Hussein's track record and the countervailing interests at work in the region, to assess the threat level. Considering the testimony of a parade of disgruntled former Bush administration employees, who have argued that the neoconservative policy-makers were hell-bent on going to war in Iraq, knowing full well that there was no connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attack, one must wonder if claims of"imminent threat" or"grave and gathering threat" were a mere cover for a predetermined course of action.

The US government had information at its disposal, in the days leading up to the invasion, which undermined its own case for invasion. But the administration chose not to place any priority on that information, selecting only those claims that bolstered its favored conclusions, in order to justify the commitment of tens of thousands of US troops to this nation-building folly. Even Colin Powell has said that the intelligence, which drew from Iraqi defectors who had a political agenda of their own, was"inaccurate and wrong and, in some cases, deliberately misleading."

Tragically, the US government disregarded accurate information or acted on misleading information in the Iraq war, while it ignored or failed to coordinate lots of information about explicit warnings that might have prevented the September 11th attack. That attack represents one of the greatest failures of government—to preserve, protect, and defend—in US history.