If you were President?

Question

If you were President and recieved "bad intelligence" report, would you go forward, slow down, stop or simply "time out" until "true intelligence" report was confirmed? Who should take responsibilty for good or bad intelligence to keep it correct?

Point is any of "us" can make "bad" decisions. When the job you have determines the life of a country and you believe the "Buck Stops Here", that is when you do not accept, assume, or believe any report before you rely on hind site.

Answer 1

A President has to make decisions based on infomation he receives from others. If it is important he should have it verifed. If he makes a decision on inaccurate decisons he can stop or rethink his decision. He can tell the country that he was given wrong information and tell everyone he is only human and he can change his mind on new information. A good president needs to be flexible. It should not make him look bad if he admits he was wrong and found new infomation. The Cia or whoever should take respononsibilty of accurate infomation. The information should be verifed by a second source.

Answer 2

How is it that the intelligence would even remotely look faulty after several other countries and their heads of state had confirmed the intelligence that I had in front of me (and these other countries were both allies and enemies alike!) Look, something had to be done about Saddam....the Clinton's, many MANY democratic leaders elected by THE PEOPLE, the CIA-FBI-Israeli intelligence, Russian intelligence, British intelligence, they all supported and agreed that Saddam had WMD and nuclear weapons...would you rather Bush took a self-imposed time out and watch a mushroom cloud form over NYC? Come on man, educate yourself before you waste 5 points asking such a question!

Answer 3

Depends on the time table. If I have to act quickly, you go with what you have at hand. Casear in Gaul did not know that the two Gaelic armies that had him surrounded were not coordinating their attacks, so he entered battle assuming they were. His bad intelligence also overcounted the second army. He left is back exposed to the first army, and almost was crushed in the first day by a pincer. Three days later he emerged vctorious, but at great cost. His popularity with the Senate fell immensly.

There, a leader had bad intelligence that caused him to act in a preemptive way towards battle. Once commited to battle, he did not give quarter, but pressed for success. he came out good in the end, and as history shows, so will America.

Answer 4

You are right. If I did receive bad intellegence that someone is attacking the country I would probably go ahead and beat the crap out of them.

But the worse did already 911 I mean. That information received was Saddam was trying to aquire Nuclear stuff. Now if you were a president and you are fighting a country who attacked you would you literally reduce the capacity over there and attack another country which hates the person who attacked ya and that he would attack in the unspecified future?.

If you followed Valarie Plame's case her husband went to Africa and said there is no evidence that Saddam tried to buy Uranium. Now if you were a president and that someone says this to you and if his wife is a CIA agent and someone outs it don't you think it happened because you were too mad at the person for outing the truth? and that somene in your office is responsible?

And if you were a president would you say you won't comment on it??? A national security issue?

Answer 5

The problem with intelligence of this kind is that it is hard to determine what's right and what's wrong. You have to get other evidence that corroborates what you have. Intelligence agencies should be able to give a 'degree of confidence' with the information that would indicate how much supporting evidence they have found (and also how much evidence they have to the contrary.) Sort of like the evidence that is used at a trial - for a civil case, you have to have 'the preponderance of the evidence.' For a criminal trial, you have to have 'beyond a reasonable doubt.'

So if I were President, I would only act on intelligence that had a 75% degree of confidence. (Preponderance of the evidence.) I would send men to war only upon evidence that was beyond a reasonable doubt.

Answer 6

You're not going to believe this, but time doesn't stop for anyone. I know, I know...crazy, right?

So when you as a man are put in charge of protecting 300 million American citizens, you want to make sure to act as quickly as possible, right, especially when inaction is the worst possible solution?

As for the responsibility...intelligence is not a science. Use your head. If it were a science, then there probably would be no war.

Answer 7

I would not make major decisions based on bad intelligence, but rather direct that the investigation be done again. Of course, that takes time and even though I would want to be certain before taking action, there would be people that said I took too long to react.

Politics: Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Answer 8

If I were president I would not have attacked my own country in the first place and the intelligence reports, right or wrong, would not have brought us to war.

PLUS, if I were George W Bush, I'd commit suicide so I could be remembered for at least one act of decency.

Answer 9

In hindsight it is easy to say we had bad intelligence, but at the time, there was no way of knowing what was good and what was bad. In all fairness, plenty of Democrats also supported going to war with Iraq, so Bush is not the only one that was taken in by the bad intel. I think one of the things our country should be focusing on more, regardless of who becomes President in 08 is improving our intel, as it is sometimes all we have to go by.

Answer 10

As President, I will never act upon intelligence that I know to be "bad."