Kay's Say and the CIA

David Kay’s exit interview was odd. In resigning as chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, he made news. “I don’t think they existed,” he said of the WMD supposedly stockpiled by Saddam Hussein. But this announcement came not in a Washington press conference but in a phone interview with a London-based news outlet (Reuters). Then he declined to answer phone calls and E-mails from the New York Times and talked to the London Telegraph instead.

Reuters said Kay “fired a parting shot at the Bush administration.” This wasn’t true and may have reflected the journalistic expectation (or hope) that Kay would slam the door on the way out. Reuters eliminated the “parting shot” from its copy a couple of hours later.

The right-leaning Telegraph, possibly with an opposite expectation, ran its story under a sensational headline: ‘Saddam’s WMD hidden in Syria, says Iraq survey chief’. Kay was quoted as saying that interviews with former Iraqi officials established that “a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam’s WMD program.” The story was tamer than the headline. Kay’s account grew tamer still when he got around to talking to U.S. media and the Senate: Whatever had been shipped to Syria (satellites and on-the-ground reports established “a constant stream of trucks, cars, rail traffic”) could not have amounted to much, since no significant, telltale evidence of production of weapons of mass destruction has been found anywhere in Iraq.

The first reports on Kay’s comments, based solely on the brief and thin Reuters dispatch, stuck to the simple failure to find WMD. But once Kay started adding qualifiers and nuances, the story seemed less damaging to the Bush administration and less helpful to the “Bush lied” constituency. The stark no-weapons reporting (Iraq illicit arms gone before war, inspector insists, said the first New York Times article) faded from certainty to the finding that the weapons “probably” were gone when the United States invaded. Kay is personally convinced that Iraq had no WMD, but he acknowledged a dwindling chance that such forbidden weapons might still be found.

Kay told National Public Radio that Saddam “had a large number of WMD program-related activities,” repeating the awkward phrase used in Kay’s interim report last October and repeated in President Bush’s State of the Union address. “So there was a WMD program. It was going ahead. It was rudimentary in many areas.” Later, he said that Iraq began retooling its nuclear weapons program in 2000 and 2001 but never got as far toward making a bomb as Iran and Libya. The Iraqis were working to develop biological weapons using the poison ricin “right up until” the invasion in March. Officers in the Republican Guard, he said, told interrogators that they believed other guard units had biological or chemical weapons. This might be interpreted as a small olive branch offered to the intelligence community -- maybe the CIA was picking up reports of beliefs, rather than hard facts, about the existence of WMD.

“Clearly, the intelligence that we went to war on was inaccurate, wrong,” Kay said, but he did not think intelligence reports had been deliberately distorted and said he had found no evidence that analysts had been pressured to shade their assessments in order to justify a war. His only political finger-pointing was toward the Carter administration (for its policy of relying so heavily on technological surveillance and downgrading the need for spies) and in the general direction of unnamed political or military leaders who allowed post-invasion looting to go on in Iraq, thus allowing the destruction of official papers about weapons.

Kay’s smooth and convincing testimony at his Senate hearing helps to discredit the theory that neoconservatives in the Bush administration conspired to manipulate intelligence reports. In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, Duke professor of political science Peter Feaver writes: “How could even the all-powerful neocons have manipulated the intelligence estimates of the Clinton administration, French intelligence, British intelligence, German intelligence, and all the other ‘coconspirators’ who concurred on the fundamentals of the Bush assessment?” Belief that Saddam had WMD was so universal that one blogger, Calpundit.com, launched a contest of sorts seeking the names of any serious analysts who publicly doubted the actual existence of WMD in Iraq before September of 2002, when the U.N. inspections resumed. The blogger and his readers identified two people who qualified: Russian President Vladimir Putin and former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter. The point here is unmissable. The huge consensus about WMD in Iraq was wrong, and the arrow is pointing toward the intelligence services.

To go to war over what looks to be a faulty premise is deeply disturbing, even if best-case scenarios come to pass, leading to a democracy in Iraq and a better chance for peace in the Middle East. Unfortunately, the "movie" isn't over yet and the end is still difficult to predict. But those eager to join the "Bush lied" camp need to confront the very obvious reality that almost no one, domestically or internationally, argued with the evidence that led us there. Clearly, this is a highly complex issue, absent the black and white analysis so many have given it.

Clearly, this is a highly complex issue, absent the black and white analysis so many have given it.

To me the issue isn't all that complex. The good guys are involved in a war on terror. I happen to think it's a fight to the death so there aren't any trophies for runner-up.

Saddam was one of the leading proponents as well as top leader and financier of terror in the world. He exported terror and revelled in it as well as his own noteriety. I believe Iraq would have been an excellent place to put an army if the question of WMD had never arisen. The common belief that he was striving for world dominance in WMD made the case just more compelling i.e. perhaps moved up the timetable.

Furthermore, the fact that so far no WMD have been found does little to alter the rest of Kay's story that Saddam was in the market in a large way. No one ever said nuclear missiles flying across the Atlantic were imminent. Bush said the good guys can't wait until they became imminent and in the hands of an insane monster. Many of us had similar thoughts when Bush Sr. pulled the reins over the Highway of Death a decade ago.

There is still a great deal of work to do before rogue nations find the cost much too high to appeal to terror to reach goals, although there is evidence one guy, one Moammar Gaddafi, has already concluded as much. If that's true, that may be a country that doesn't need to be invaded later at the cost of American lives.

For the life of me I can't see what the anti-Bush and anti-American crowd found appealing about Hussein. Since they want us to apologize to Hussein and reinstate him, I wish they would provide at least one reason for doing so. Perhaps they could also explain it to the Iraqi people.

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