Posted on 04/09/2005 2:05:54 PM PDT by F14 Pilot
The conclusions of last week's report by the U.S. presidential commission assessing the intelligence failures of the Iraq war make clear that the United States dramatically overestimated Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction capabilities. American intelligence, said the commission, led by Judge Laurence Silberman and former Sen. Chuck Robb, was "dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction." Critics of Bush administration's foreign policy at home and abroad may hope that this extraordinary verdict will limit future U.S. military operations against other rogue regimes, given the risk of a similar, costly mistake.
In fact, America's misreading of Iraq's weapons capabilities is part of a long line of strategic failures by great powers over the past century to assess accurately threats to their security. Throughout this period, however, leaders have been far more likely to <1>understate threats than to overstate them, even as threats openly grew and flourished. Intelligence alone has rarely made a decisive difference in identifying and defining the key threats, because they formed in plain sight — whether Germany in the 1930s, the Soviet Union after 1945, Saddam's Iraq until 2003, or the mullahs' Iran today.
At base, threats to international peace and security emanate from aggressive, authoritarian regimes that oppress their people and overtly threaten their neighbors — as did Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam, for all their differences, and as do the leaders of North Korea, Iran, and Syria today. We don't need perfect intelligence to know that.
It is not simply power but how a malevolent regime seeks to use it that matters. Democratic France is no danger to America despite its nuclear arsenal; Saddam's Iraq, by its very nature, was a danger with or without WMD.
BAD INTELLIGENCE LEADS TO FALSE COMFORT What we don't know about a secretive, hostile regime is often cause for greater alarm: Hitler's secret nuclear weapons program and Iraq's advanced nuclear program before the first Gulf War were only exposed after their defeat. Similarly, if we knew more today about the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs, or Syria's sponsorship of the terrorist group Hezbollah, we would almost certainly view those countries as more dangerous, not less. The West should not be lulled by the Iraq intelligence failure into a benign view of dangers gathering in full view.
Bad intelligence is more likely to induce false comfort than due diligence. Even as it harshly criticized American intelligence assessments of pre-war Iraq, the Silberman-Robb commission also found that the United States had underestimated al Qaeda's efforts to procure radiological and biological weapons during the same period. Better intelligence is indeed a vital requirement for American decision-makers in today's dangerous world, as the commission says — to the extent that it is obtainable. But even good intelligence does not guarantee a more effective response to threat: By the late 1990s, the Clinton Administration possessed detailed knowledge of al Qaeda's efforts to train a terrorist army and target the American homeland, yet it did not act decisively.
THE LESSONS OF THE PAST This is all in keeping with the historical trend. The greatest strategic surprises of the previous century have come from an underestimation of enemy capabilities and intentions. Poor intelligence may have compounded the problem, but it was rarely the problem. What has mattered most is a leader's determination to confront an obvious threat — which is why history will judge President Bush kindly on Iraq.
British statesmen refused to make a firm security commitment to France before World War I, and thereby deter German aggression, because they were not convinced that Germany meant war. But they did not need to know the German army's secret mobilization schedule to understand that a rising, militaristic Germany aspiring for hegemony in Europe was a grave danger. The problem was not one of intelligence, but of judgment.
Despite Winston Churchill's lonely warnings, Neville Chamberlain and his cabinet refused to increase the tiny British defense budget in the face of rising Nazi power until 1936, fatally undermining Britain's ability to deter German aggression, while France found false comfort in its fortified Maginot Line. But British and French leaders did not need to know where or when Hitler would attack to understand that a totalitarian, powerful Germany seeking its place in the sun would have to be contained by force.
The United States was taken aback by the bold Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. But U.S. leaders in 1941 did not need intelligence on Japanese carrier movements in the Pacific to grasp that Japan's stated goal of dominating Asia would harm American security, and that Japan's militaristic leaders would logically seek to use force to break the grip of a U.S. oil embargo they had said they could not tolerate.
American leaders anticipated neither North Korea's invasion of South Korea in 1950 nor China's decision to go to war to protect the regime in Pyongyang. In retrospect, Harry Truman and Dean Acheson should have taken Kim Il-Sung at his word when he repeatedly threatened to reunite Korea by force in the late 1940s, and they should have paid more attention to China's warnings that it would not tolerate the presence of an American army on its border as MacArthur's forces pushed north to the Yalu. .
No one expected Saddam Hussein's brazen invasion of Kuwait in 1990. But Saddam had telegraphed his intentions by calling Kuwait a province of Iraq and asking the U.S. ambassador how America would respond to an Iraqi move against its neighbor.
Americans were tragically unprepared for the September 11, 2001, attacks. But al Qaeda had been warning for years that it would bring terror to the heart of America, and had actually attacked U.S. targets at home and abroad throughout the 1990s.
ONE DOESN'T NEED PERFECT INTELLIGENCE TO JUDGE In the light of history, the lesson of the Iraq intelligence failure is that comprehensive intelligence, while utterly desirable, is not the first requirement for judging threats. The nature of a potential aggressor's regime, its ability to threaten its neighbors, and its stated intentions are far more accurate indicators of the danger it poses than are classified assessments of its weapons stocks, its troop movements, or its leaders' psychology. In retrospect, this has been true of aggressors across the past century, from Kaiser Wilhelm II to Saddam Hussein.
After all, Saddam's weapons, real or imagined, were deemed a threat before the war — by the Clinton and Bush administrations, by Democrats and Republicans, by the U.N. Security Council, and by many European governments — only because they were believed to be in the hands of a dictator who had used them against his people and a foreign army, had systematically defied international arms inspections, had repeatedly attacked his neighbors, had defined himself as an enemy of the Western democracies, and had stated clearly his intentions to reorder the Middle East by force, beginning with the annihilation of Israel. These were intolerable threats, regardless of whether Saddam could actually use WMDs to back his posturing. The danger sprung from the character of his rule. The greater risk lay in waiting, not acting.
History shows that threats to great democracies flourish in plain sight, and that the known character and declared intentions of a hostile dictatorship are better guides to action than the scant intelligence that is often available. What is most needed is not simply better information — always unlikely, given that threats emanate from closed societies — but the will of leaders to make hard choices when faced with gathering danger of the kind now plainly visible in North Korea, Iran, and Syria.
Even in the absence of full intelligence, the threat these countries pose to their people, regional order, and Western interests is no mystery. And what we do not know about their weapons programs and support for terrorist organizations should make us more worried, not less, given each regime's authoritarian nature, capabilities, and expressed intentions. After all, North Korea's promise to turn Japan and America's bases there into a "sea of fire," and Iran's and Syria's pledges to destroy Israel, are not secret.
TODAY'S THREATS, LIKE YESTERDAY'S, ARE IN PLAIN Sight The nature and ambitions of North Korea's Stalinist regime were evident during the first nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula in 1993-4. It was a policy of accommodation then, when North Korea did not possess the ability to deliver the few nuclear weapons it may have had, that led predictably to today's crisis, when Pyongyang's capabilities are far more advanced.
Iran sits on a sea of oil, rendering Iranian claims that it needs nuclear power for civilian energy uses spurious; anyway, Iran's leaders have said clearly for a long time that they believe they have the right to develop nuclear weapons. Whether those weapons will come on line next month or next year matters less than the common knowledge that Iran's nuclear program is highly advanced and deeply destabilizing, and that, as with North Korea, failure to resolve the problem will only make it worse.
For years, Syria's minority regime has repressed its people, occupied Lebanon, and sponsored Hezbollah, which former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham calls the most dangerous terrorist organization on earth. We do not need technical knowledge of every Iranian weapons shipment through Syria to the terrorist training camps in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley to know that decoupling Damascus from Tehran and Hezbollah is an urgent requirement for the security of the region and the prospects for peace in the Middle East.
The story of the 20th century, from the rise of German power to the rise of Al Qaeda, is of well-intentioned leaders who did not act against evident danger soon enough. That they should have known better is a tribute to their judgment, not incomplete intelligence. The Iraq intelligence failure should not obscure history's broader lessons.
— Daniel C. Twining is a Fulbright Scholar at Oxford University, a consultant to the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and a former foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain. These are his personal views.
This no WMD crap kills me. One has to believe that Saddam possesed enough and only enough chemicals to wipe out the Kurds and was too damn stupid to make any more! Meanwhile Palestinians are constructing crude WMD with pesticides.
Well it should not kill you because they had no ready to use stock piles of WMD as was claimed. All reports endorsed by Bush said so. It is up to you to accept fact this and move on.
The regime had WMD. The cache described by the UN was small enough to be hidden in a single semi truck. Now we can't find it so, gee, it must have never existed in the first place? Bull. We know he had them, we just don't know what he did with them.
So then why did the UN have inspectors in the first place?
It'as strange that it wasn't that long ago that Saddam's own people were saying that it all went over the hill to Syria for safe keeping. Just like all the new hardware that they have been uncovering buried in the desert.
Nothing to prove your claim was uncovered in the sand - nothing went to Syria.
The UN inspectors did their job and destroyed the WMD long before we invaded. When we invaded we doubted this but that was Saddam's fault for his resistance and our own intelligence failure's fault in trusting biased and bad intel sources.
UN inspectors were there only to make sure the stockpiles were destroyed, they did not destroy them themselves. So a barrel of camel crap marked anthrax was incinerated and the inspectors checked it off
No - you wish it was so - every report from American investigations concluded what I wrote to be the actual scenario.
Link to ANY report backing up what your talking about?
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Published on Monday, March 28, 2005 by the Associated Press
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Missiles, Microbes Missing in Iraq
U.N. Outsiders See Only 'Sliver of Mess,' Arms Chief Says Stolen Parts May Help Bomb Building Elsewhere |
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by Charles J. Hanley
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Dozens of ballistic missiles are missing in Iraq. Vials of dangerous microbes are unaccounted for. Sensitive sites, once under U.N. seal, stand gutted, their arms-making gear hauled off by looters, or by arms-makers. All the world now knows that Iraq had no threatening weapons of mass destruction programs. But two years after U.S. teams began their futile hunt, Iraq has something else: a landscape of ruined military plants, unanswered questions and loose ends — some potentially lethal, a review of official reporting shows. Chief U.N. arms inspector Demetrius Perricos said outsiders are seeing only a "sliver" of the mess inside Iraq. Satellite images, he said, indicate at least 90 sites in the old Iraqi military-industrial complex have been pillaged. U.S. teams paint a similar picture: "There is nothing but a concrete slab at locations where once stood plants or laboratories," the Iraq Survey Group said in its final report. The report from inside Iraq, 986 pages thick, is often thin on relevant hard information and silent in critically important areas. Just days after it was issued last fall, for example, news leaked that tonnes of high-grade explosives had been looted a year earlier from the Iraqi complex at Al Qaqaa. It was a potential boon to Iraq's car bombers, but the U.S. document did not report this dangerous loss. Similarly, the main body of the U.S. report discusses Iraq's Samoud 2s, but doesn't note that many of these ballistic missiles haven't been found. Only via an annex table does the report disclose that as many as 36 Samouds may be unaccounted for in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion. Seventy-five of the liquid-fuelled missiles were destroyed under U.N. oversight before the war, because they too often exceeded the 150-kilometre range allowed for Iraqi missiles under the 12-year-old U.N. inspection regime. After the U.N. inspectors were evacuated on the eve of the U.S. invasion, they lost track of the remaining missiles. The Iraq Survey Group, which ended its arms hunt in December, says a complete accounting of the Samouds "may not be possible due to various factors." Besides the Samouds, up to 34 Fatah missiles — a similar but solid-fuelled weapon — are also unaccounted for. And more than 600 missile engines may be missing; the U.S. document simply doesn't report their status. Perricos, in an interview at his New York headquarters, expressed concern about the missiles. "If they have been destroyed, somebody should know they've been destroyed or not. Have they gone somewhere?" he asked. The worry is not that Iraqi insurgents might field the missiles, he said, but that advanced Samoud or Fatah parts might secretly boost missile-building programs elsewhere in the region or beyond. "The engines can easily be sold for a lot of money for the insurgency," he said. Asked about gaps in Iraq Survey Group reporting — specifically the silence on the Al Qaqaa explosives — a CIA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, replied: "Our focus and goal was to find WMD, not conventional explosives." Led by CIA special adviser Charles Duelfer, the Iraq Survey Group discredited Bush administration claims of an Iraqi WMD threat by determining that Baghdad's programs to build nuclear, chemical and biological weapons were shut down in 1991 under U.N. inspection. But Samouds and Fatahs are only the biggest items on the "unaccounted-for" list. The smallest are bits of bacterial growth for biological weapons. The Iraqis said this bioweapons material was destroyed years ago, but not all is documented. Inspectors simply don't know whether vials of seed stock — including deadly anthrax and botulinum A bacteria — may have been used to nurture more batches that are unaccounted for. The U.S. arms hunters' findings further cloud the picture on another item with a dead-end paperwork trail: 155-millimetre mustard-gas shells. At least 13,000 shells filled with mustard were destroyed under U.N. supervision in the 1990s, but 550 were never found although Iraqis told U.N. inspectors they were destroyed in a fire. Now the U.S. teams say an imprisoned Iraqi official told them a Special Republican Guard unit retained the chemical rounds, and Iraq was about to declare them to U.N. inspectors when the Americans invaded. © 2005 The Associated Press ### |
Good one. The popular idea may be rooted in sand.
Oh so Bush is a lackey of the UN? Enjoy your fantasy.
I asked for a link stating that the UN DESTROYED weapons. I gave you a link that showed that they supervised thier destuction! Bush BTW didn't bend to the UN report, Bush cowed to his own intelligence report from the CIA and Congress knowing he couldn't win this fight! He cut his losses and that was that! That does not change the fact that the weapons were there, otherwise why would the UN send in inspectors to find what was supposedly not there? Why insist that Iraq conform to UN 1441 idf they had no weapons? Why did Saddam refuse to let inspectors into restricted sites that were on the UN list? Like everyone else, I believe the Wmds were hussled into Syria!
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