LYNSEY ADDARIO/CORBIS FOR TIME
Soldiers of the 25th Infantry rummage through a bombed-out house in Mosel looking for weapons
Posted on 06/01/2003 9:01:13 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Weapons of Mass Disappearance
The war in Iraq was based largely on intelligence about banned arms that still haven't been found. Was America's spy craft wrong — or manipulated?
LYNSEY ADDARIO/CORBIS FOR TIME Soldiers of the 25th Infantry rummage through a bombed-out house in Mosel looking for weapons |
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Sunday, Jun. 01, 2003
How do take your country to war when it doesn't really want to go? You could subcontract with another nation, fight on the sly and hope no one notices. But if you need a lot of troops to prevail and you would like to remind everyone in the neighborhood who's boss anyway, then what you need most is a good reason — something to stir up the folks back home.
As the U.S. prepared to go to war in Iraq last winter, the most compelling reason advanced by George W. Bush to justify a new kind of pre-emptive war was that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear, chemical and biological arms — weapons of mass destruction (wmd). "There's no doubt in my mind but that they currently have chemical and biological weapons," said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in January. "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons," said Vice President Dick Cheney in March. That Iraq might have WMD was never the only reason the Bush Administration wanted to topple Saddam. But it was the big reason, the casus belli, the public rationale peddled over and over to persuade a skeptical nation, suspicious allies and a hostile United Nations to get behind the controversial invasion. And while that sales pitch fell flat overseas, it worked better than expected at home: by late March, 77% of the public felt that invading U.S. troops would find WMD.
But eight weeks after the war's end, most of that confident intelligence has yet to pan out, and a growing number of experts think it never will. Current and former U.S. officials have begun to question whether the weapons will ever be found in anything like the quantities the U.S. suggested before the war — if found at all — and whether the U.S. gamed the intelligence to justify the invasion. For now, WMD seems to stand for weapons of mass disappearance. Smarting from the accusations that they had cooked the books, top U.S. officials fanned out late last week to say the hunt would go on and the weapons would eventually be found. CIA officials told TIME that they would produce a round of fresh evidence for increasingly wary lawmakers as early as next week. After dispatching dozens of G.I. patrols to some 300 suspected WMD sites in Iraq over the past two months, only to come up empty-handed, the Pentagon announced last week that it will shift from hunting for banned weapons to hunting for documents and people who might be able to say where banned weapons are — or were. But it is clear that the U.S. is running out of good leads. "We've been to virtually every ammunition supply point between the Kuwaiti border and Baghdad," Lieut. General James T. Conway, commander of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, said last week. "But they're simply not there."
Wherever they are, the missing weapons are beginning to cause trouble elsewhere. Overseas, British Prime Minister Tony Blair is under fire from critics for overstating the case for war. The accusations came at an awkward moment for Bush, as he began a seven-day diplomatic trip to smooth over relations in Europe and seek peace in the Middle East. Moreover, mistrust about the Iraqi intelligence was growing just as the Administration began to make a similar case against Iran. In order to defend the credibility of his agency, CIA Director George Tenet took the unusual step of issuing a statement last Friday dismissing suggestions that the CIA politicized its intelligence. "Our role is to call it like we see it, to tell policymakers what we know, what we don't know, what we think and what we base it on. That's the code we live by." Asked to translate, an intelligence official explained that if there was a breakdown on the Bush team, it wasn't at the agency. "There's one issue in terms of collecting and analyzing intelligence," he said. "Another issue is what policymakers do with that information. That's their prerogative."
One of the oldest secrets of the secret world is that intelligence work involves as much art as science. While it is difficult, dangerous and expensive to snoop on our enemies with satellite cameras, hidden bugs and old-fashioned dead drops, knowing what all that information really means is the true skill of intelligence work. The information is often so disparate and scattershot that it amounts to little without interpretation.
And interpretation has long been the speciality of the hard-liners who fill so many key foreign-policy posts in the Bush Administration. Unlike his father, who ran the CIA briefly in the mid-'70s and prided himself on revitalizing an embattled spy corps, George W. Bush dotted his foreign-policy team with people who have waged a private war with the CIA for years, men who are disdainful of the way the agency gathers secrets — and what it makes of them. Working mainly out of the Pentagon, the hard-liners have long believed that America's spy agency was a complacent captive of the two parties' internationalist wings, too wary and risk averse, too reliant on gadgets and too slow to see enemies poised to strike.
Two Bush aides in particular, Rumsfeld and his Pentagon deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, have a long record of questioning the assumptions, methods and conclusions of the cia. Wolfowitz was a member of the famous B Team, created in the mid-'70s by the cia, then headed by Bush's father, to double-check the work of the cia's line analysts about the military strength of the Soviet Union. Filled with many hard-liners who now work in the younger Bush's Administration, the B Team was spoiling back then for bigger defense budgets and a more aggressive foreign policy. It found many of the cia's conclusions about the Soviet Union softheaded and naive. Its final report helped launch the Reagan-era defense buildup of the 1980s. Rumsfeld also chaired a bipartisan commission in 1998 set up by Congress to assess the pace of rogue states' missile efforts, which concluded that the cia wouldn't be able to gather intelligence quickly enough to meet the unseen threats posed by Iran, Iraq and North Korea. That dire prediction — reinforced by a North Korean missile launch a month later — turbocharged the nation's push to build a $100 billion missile shield, now under construction.
The hard-liners' staunch beliefs were powerfully bolstered after 9/11; they quickly concluded that the CIA failed to anticipate the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. And they were not reassured by the CIA's performance after 9/11 either. By last fall, Rumsfeld had grown so impatient with the CIA's equivocal explanations of the Iraq problem that he set up his own mini-CIA at the Pentagon called the Office of Special Plans. It was hatched and designed, as a former U.S. official puts it, to get "the intelligence he wanted."
Several current and former military officers who saw all the relevant data through this spring charge that the Pentagon took the raw data from the CIA and consistently overinterpreted the threat posed by Iraq's stockpiles. "There was a predisposition in this Administration to assume the worst about Saddam," a senior military officer told Time. This official, recently retired, was deeply involved in planning the war with Iraq but left the service after concluding that the U.S. was going to war based on bum intelligence. "They were inclined to see and interpret evidence a particular way to support a very deeply held conviction," the officer says. "I just think they felt there needed to be some sort of rallying point for the American people. I think they said it sincerely, but I also think that at the end of the day, we'll find out their interpretations of the intelligence were wrong." Another official, an Army intelligence officer, singled out Rumsfeld for massaging the facts. "Rumsfeld was deeply, almost pathologically distorting the intelligence," says the officer. Rumsfeld told a radio audience last week that the "war was not waged under any false pretense." And an aide flat-out rejects the idea that intelligence was hyped to support the invasion. "We'd disagree very strongly with that," said Victoria Clarke, the chief Pentagon spokeswoman.
Over the past two weeks, TIME has interviewed several dozen current and former intelligence officials and experts at the Pentagon and cia and on Capitol Hill to try to understand how the public version of the intelligence got so far ahead of the evidence. The reporting suggests that from the start the process was more deductive than empirical. According to these officials, three factors were at work:
But if the Bush team overreached, one nagging question is, Why? A defense expert who has spent 20 years watching Republicans argue about foreign policy from the inside believes the hard-liners' agenda isn't about Iraq or even oil. It's simply that the most zealous defenders of America's role in the world are congenitally disposed to overreact to every threat — which leads them to read too much into the intelligence. "They came in with a world view, and they looked for things to fit into it," says Lawrence Korb, who served in the Reagan Pentagon and now works at the Council on Foreign Relations. "If you hadn't had 9/11, they would be doing the same things to China."
The U.S. does appear to have one solid argument on its side: those mysterious mobile biowarfare labs. The cia shared its findings with reporters last week about two tractor-trailer trucks seized in Iraq that it claims were designed for the production of biological weapons. The agency published a nine-page white paper on its website about the mobile labs — allegations that are very similar to charges made by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his U.N. speech on Feb. 5. President Bush pointed to the trucks last week as the best evidence yet that the intelligence wasn't overheated. And en route to Europe, Powell ventured to the back of Air Force One and explained to reporters a bit more about how the U.S. learned of the vans' purpose. "We didn't just make them up one night. Those were eyewitness accounts of people who had worked in the program and knew it was going on, multiple accounts." Powell sarcastically dismissed alternative explanations: "'Oh, it was a hydrogen-making thing for balloons.' No. There's no question in my mind what it was designed for." But even Powell acknowledged that there were no signs of pathogens in the trucks. Top U.S. officials believe the missing weapons are so well hidden that it will take months or perhaps years to find them — an explanation that has the added virtue of giving them a lot more time. G.I.s have searched only about a third of the 900 suspected sites across the Iraqi countryside. Even the Administration's positions are in flux. Saddam, according to Rumsfeld, could have destroyed the weapons right before the war or even moved them out of the country. "I don't know the answer," Rumsfeld said last week, "and I suspect we'll find out a lot more information as we go along and keep interrogating people."
After a war, the victors always write the history, and that means they can rewrite the war's causes. Even without wmd, the mass graves discovered in Iraq prove that Saddam was a despot worthy of toppling. For many — including some in the Administration — that did not seem a sufficient reason to launch the last war. But until the missing weapons are found, it could be a long time before an American President will be able to rely on his interpretation of intelligence data to launch another war.
-- REPORTED BY PERRY BACON JR., TIMOTHY J. BURGER, JAMES CARNEY, JOHN F. DICKERSON AND MARK THOMPSON/WASHINGTON AND J.F.O. MCALLISTER/LONDON
Suppose you learn that in the days just prior to the war Saddam's regime either destroyed the WMDs (e.g. dumped them into the river), hid them somewhere, or smuggled them into another country such as Syria. Would you still feel this way? We can't find Saddam, either. Would you conclude, using the same "logic," that therefore someone lied to you about his existence, or manipulated or conned you into thinking that he existed?
The Washington Post and George Will and the NYT, among others, regularly reported Saddam killed approximately 5,000 of his own people each month. We kill approx. 1,800 civilians in collateral damage to free these people from this barbarian. It takes great ignorance to claim this administration will have the blood of innocent Iraqis on its hands.
The people with blood on their hands are the appeasers who allowed it to happen for so long - included in that is the UN of course and their oil for food program, and the left who never met a dictator they didn't like.
This is indeed a good question, especially since the likelihood of the inspectors finding anything was quite evidently nil.
Maybe Saddam was hiding something else.
Prior to the war, I had no doubt that WMDs would be found - in fact, I fully expected them to get utilized during the war itself. At the very least, I would not imagine that intelligence would be fabricated that could be so easily disproven. The fact of the matter, however, is that the prewar WMD thesis is strictly defunct. There's simply no way to pretend otherwise at this juncture.. (Whether there will be genuine political ramifications is another question altogether, and I'm doubtful there would be for various reasons.)
Whatever the case, here's a concise summary of the prewar thesis as described elsewhere:
Saddam Hussein had extensive, active, advanced, clandestine chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. UN inspectors couldn't find WMDs because they were inept, or corrupt, or because Saddam played the shell game so masterfully. US intelligence pinpointed dozens of high-value target sites, hundreds of intermediate-value sites and thousands of low-value sites. Chemical and perhaps biological weapons were deployed to commanders in the field, who had orders to use them against invading Coalition forces. Special Forces teams were dropping in to secure and neutralize high-value sites in advance of the ground assault, with high-tech analytic Mobile Exploitation Teams (MET's) close on their heels.
Anyone who would claim that this was not the public impression created in the buildup to war is a dissembler, IMHO; anyone who can now seriously suggest that anything remotely resembling that scenario could have been the case needs to check in with their nearest reality, ASAP...
These were the allegations as I distinctly recall them: 15,000 to 30,000 chemical munitions; thousands of tons of weaponized chemical arms; hundreds of gallons of biological agents; a reconstituted nuclear program with procurement of uranium & missile cores; a fleet of remote-guided WMD drones; dozens of mobile biochem laboratories; dozens of Scud missile delivery systems.
Where is all this extensive panoply of prohibited, unconventional armament? Where are all the scientists & engineers & military personnel & just random facility workers that put them together and maintained them? Where are the research & production facilities themselves? Did all this just vanish into the desert? Somewhere? Somehow?
If you want my personal opinion, our intelligence services - and by extension Bush and Blair - were misled by the Iraqi opposition groups. I remarked several times prior the war that these were the people least credible in their claims about the Ba'athist regime and Iraqi sentiments. They had a vested interest in encouraging the war which would see them returned into the locus of power in Iraq and they played their cards to the hilt. Evidently, they found a receptive audience willing to accept whatever casus belli they fortuitously provided.
Trumped up 'intelligence' from Iraqi dissidents is what the evidence at this juncture mainly points toward and that the Iraqis had indeed abandoned their WMD programs appears the inescapable conclusion, in my view. I have no problem if I'm eventually proven incorrect in this assessment. We shall see. This issue needs to get confronted on FR sooner or later because it's not going to just go away...
So you don't believe Saddam had WMD, I gather. Have you ever seen a History Channel show in this matter? Have you ever read ONE book about Iraq since Saddam took control? Have you read about the tens of thousands of his own citizens he killed with WMD?
Any right thinking person know he had them. Human rights organizations have documented it. The History Channel will show film footage of it. Authors have written about it and seen the results of WMD usage, seen the production camps for WMD, taken pictures of it. Educate yourself a little - read ONE book, watch ONE History Channel show about this and then come back on this forum and try with a straight face to say you don't believe he had them. Please.
Exactly. Not even France, Germany, or Russia disputed whether Saddam had these weapons. Moreover, no sane person could dispute that Saddam was perfectly willing to use these weapons against his enemies and that he actively worked with and supported terrorist organizations (his regime was itself a terrorist organization as well). Bush put the world on notice on September 20, 2001 that the days of these terrorists organizations, and the regimes who support them, are numbered.
Pure, unadulterated blarney.
"All the dithering around for months gave Saddam ample time to transfer them to another nation or sell them to terrorists." -- Peach
I honestly believe that he terminated his program in the mid 90's since he was too closely watched to do anything significant.
I know that Saddam was a bad guy. In that he was not unusual. The Ruandan civil war killed 800,000 human beings in 100 days (8,000/day) in 1994-95 and we ignored the issue. Why? Could it be that there was no oil at stake?
What about Cuba, Zimbabwe, China, North Korea, etc., all evil governments. Should we do a regime change war for each of them?
It is not the business of the US government to risk our soldiers lives and spend gobs of our money to slay every dragon in the world. Our business should be limited to protecting ourselves, and knowing what we are doing when we act. In fact, we have made our terror risk HIGHER by this war since we took no WMD's out of circulation and angered many people, who are now aching to sign up with Al Queda or similar organizations.
Unless you believe every show, every film clip of footage, all the hundreds of books about the subject are full of lies, then you can't possibly believe what you are saying.
He's used WMD on his own people many times starting in the 80's. Judith Miller's book reports approx. 2 million people were killed by Saddam using WMD in the 80's alone.
It's hardly worth discussing this matter with people who haven't tried to HONESTLY educate themselves about the subject.
I think that we might consider another theory. He was playing a game with his neighbors. He wanted them to worry that he did have WMDs so they would not attack him. Any comments on this theory?
What do you watch on television anyway - cartoons?
The other countries you named with human rights violations have not stated publicly they wish to bring down the United States. They haven't repeatedly attacked this country. Are you forgetting how many times the US has been targeted by AQ?
There is every possibility that Saddam Hussein stopped his WMD program after the UN left in 1998. Why then didn't he invite them back last year, with FULL ACCESS, as he saw a quarter of a million troops gathering on his border and knew he didn't have the military to stay in power?
Everyone believes Saddam had WMD at one time, since that acronym includes not only nukes but also chemical and biological weapons. He may even still have them somewhere, but if the US armed forces with control of the entire country and with leading Iraqi weapon scientists in custody cannot find them, I feel pretty confident a bunch of inspectors led by Hans Blix wouldn't find them either.
Do you always jump to conclusions?
Which is what we are doing!
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