WMD/Bad intelligence, but more

[jamiroguy1]

WMD/Bad intelligence, but more

Published 01/28/2004

Now unburdened of his official duties, David Kay has also unburdened his mind. The resigned head of the American search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq offers this short, pithy conclusion: They don't exist; Iraq got rid of them in the 1990s. Iraq did maintain an interest in the poison ricin, in missiles and in nuclear weapons. But its nuclear program wasn't nearly as advanced as Libya's or Iran's, both of which were rudimentary.

Thus evaporates the central justification for going to war with Iraq: that its WMD stockpiles and programs posed an imminent threat to the United States and the world.

Kay paints a picture of Iraq falling apart from 1998 onward: Saddam Hussein was in la la land, writing bad novels even as the nation was on the eve of war. Corrupt Iraqi weapons scientists would go to Saddam with WMD schemes, get a big bankroll, then spend it on other things. Most of Iraq's WMD materials had been destroyed because Iraq believed U.N. weapons inspectors would find them and because they feared disclosures by Saddam's son-in-law following his defection in 1995.

The large question is why American and British intelligence didn't know these things. Kay says it was because intelligence officials grew complacent during the years of U.N. weapons inspections. They could evaluate a satellite image, then ask inspectors to check out anything suspicious. But when the inspectors left in 1998, there were few indigenous sources to fill the gap.

That sounds plausible, but there is more to the story. The Clinton administration was getting the same intelligence, yet it, reasonably, did not head off to the United Nations to warn that Iraq needed to be invaded yesterday. It wanted to take out Osama bin Laden; Saddam was a secondary concern.

That suggests someone in the Bush administration made an early decision to put the most dangerous possible spin on what Iraq intelligence was available. Information that was tentative became certain; equipment that might have numerous uses became certified WMD material; rumors became fact.

Recall what was happening at the U.N. Security Council prior to the war. France, Russia and Germany weren't denying that Saddam might pose a risk; they disputed that the risk was imminent; they disputed that war -- especially immediate war -- was the only alternative.

The Bush administration was having none of it; Saddam had 12 years to comply with U.N. demands and had not; years of inspections had failed. Iraq needed to be invaded.

Adopting that unyielding line was a political decision, not an intelligence judgment. It came from the neoconservatives in the administration and was pushed most actively by Vice President Dick Cheney.

He's still at it. Last week, Cheney continued to assert that the United States had discovered two mobile biological weapons labs. That is simply false. Ask Kay; he'll tell you the two mobile trailers were just what the Iraqis said they were: hydrogen generators for weather balloons.

Cheney also continues to spread the tale that "there's overwhelming evidence there was a connection between Al-Qaida and the Iraqi government." That, too, is false. There is no such evidence, as Secretary of State Colin Powell and others have acknowledged.

What the American people are hearing from Cheney now is just what the world heard from other prominent administration officials before the war. It's all wrong, and Cheney's responsibility for that can't be neatly off-loaded onto intelligence agency scapegoats.

Link to article (click here)