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
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Gone But Not Forgotten: Making war and peace in the new post-Soviet world. [Hanson]
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It has been well over a decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet many, still caught up in past institutions and protocols of that bygone age, forget the degree to which the collapse of the Soviet Union is with us today and helps to frame almost all of our struggles since 9/11.
Our troubles with Europe are said to arise from differing views of the world order and an imbalance in military power. Yet these new tensions cannot truly be understood without the appreciation that there are no longer 300 Soviet divisions poised to plow through West Germany. With such a common threat, natural differences between Europe and the United States — from the positioning of Pershing tactical missiles on German soil to prevent Soviet nuclear intimidation, to continental criticism of the American role in Vietnam and Central America — always were aired within certain understood and relatively polite parameters of common history and interests.
America, after all, was appreciated for ending Hitler's rule — and immediately after for pledging its youth and national security in an effort at keeping a murderous totalitarianism out of a recovering Europe. With a common and deadly enemy nearby, Western Europeans had no utopian illusions that the United Nations, rather than NATO and America, could stop an aggressive Soviet premier should he choose to fire up his tanks. The idea that a German president would bark out anti-American invective at a mass rally would have been inconceivable 20 years ago. But now Herr Schroeder does so routinely — not because his people hate us or because we his deserve antipathy, but simply because he can.
In the shadow of the Soviet threat, Western European statesmen dared not disarm, but rather accepted the tragic reality that the world was a dangerous place and that deterrence — and not the bureaucrats of the Common Market — kept pretty awful people at a safe distance. With a Stalinist regime bloodied by the murder of 30 million of its own, and with World War II criminals of every stripe still lurking in its shadows, even hack lawyers in Brussels had no time to go after an American diplomat or general on bogus charges of genocide. Outnumbered three to one on the ground, a beleaguered Western Europe grudgingly invested in its own defense. Residents then accepted the bitter truth that the welfare state had gone about as far as it could — without its social expenditures taking away resources from the tanks, planes, and troops that alone could ensure its national survival.
Poor France. So long as the old bipolar world was engaged in high-stakes nuclear poker, its independent force de frappe gave it leverage with both East and West. Though without much conventional strength, the French nevertheless could warrant respect from the Soviet Union since, in theory, they had the power to take out Moscow. Despite having a pitiful conventional deterrent, France was nevertheless courted by the United States as a strategic bulwark against the rising nuclear arsenals of China and Russia.
No longer. In today's world, except along the Pakistani-Indian border and in North Korea, there are no real reasons for the club of nuclear powers to go to war with one another. Instead, deterrence against rogue regimes and terrorist enclaves — which cannot be nuked, or threatened with nukes — means deploying special operatives and costly conventional forces of which France is pitifully short. It can blow up the planet with its few hundred aging missiles, but it wouldn't have been able to deal with the menace of a rag-tag Taliban in Afghanistan even if al Qaeda had smoked the Louvre.
The demise of the Soviet Union also created this strange thing called "Old" and "New" Europe, as all of a sudden half a continent was transmogrified not merely from enemies to neutrals, but in fact to rather close friends. All those American characteristics that so bothered sophisticated Western Europeans — our deep distrust of socialism, our embrace of religion, our emphasis on free will and individualism, our very brashness — in fact endeared us to the newly liberated Eastern Europeans, who faulted us not from the left, for our knee-jerk anti-Communism, but rather from the right, on the grounds that we did not use force earlier to fight Stalinism in 1947, 1956, and 1968.
But nowhere is the ghost of the Soviet Union more evident than in the Middle East. And the changed circumstances involve much more than the end of tolerance for conniving right-wing despots looking to prevent commissars from controlling the world's oil supply. We have gained some flexibility — with perhaps more to come — from the idea that Russia is now itself a vast oil exporter and in some ways serves our interests in lessening the world's dependence on Gulf oil. Today's Russians want to sell more of their own petroleum, not take over that of others.
The Arabs fought four major wars against Israel — in 1947, 1956, 1967, and 1973 — but none since. Why? Have the leaders of Syria, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq come to their senses, and thus entertained kinder and gentler notions about the Jewish state? Or was it instead that there was no longer a nuclear Russia around to threaten the United States on about day four or five of such conflicts, warning us to call off the Israelis lest they park their own tanks in Cairo or Damascus?
Surely the absence of such a nuclear patron explains the present reluctance of conventional states to attack Israel. Tel-Aviv's neighbors accept that there is nothing between their own aggression and a humiliating defeat except their own degree of military prowess — or rather lack of it. Mr. Arafat and his clique can deal with Mr. Sharon or Mr. Bush — or nobody. Quite literally, in the post-Cold War tumult, there is no one else left in the region with whom to barter and banter.
We forget that there is an entire generation of Arab dictators and terrorists — from Arafat to Saddam Hussein — who were trained or welcomed in Moscow, and who predicated their policies on the idea that Soviet intelligence, Soviet weapons, Soviet money, and Soviet opposition to America could provide them a degree of security otherwise unwarranted by their own resources or ability. The first Gulf War would never have occurred had Saddam Hussein convinced his tottering patron Mr. Gorbachev to do the usual Russian thing of threatening us with nuclear-tipped missiles — or had the Iraqis waited until 1995 or so, to acquire through an indigenous nuclear program what they had lost with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In that context alone should we understand the race by Middle Eastern tyrants and despots to acquire weapons of mass destruction. WMD is a polite name for some sort of surrogate Soviet nuclear deterrent, [of the sort used] to coerce or blackmail the United States from acting freely to promote the establishment of democratic government and freedom and the removal of terrorist enclaves.
A liar like "Baghdad Bob" — Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the so-called Baathist "information" minister — did not learn his craft reading the Arabian Nights, or from the braggadocio and tribal mythmaking of the Arab coffeehouse. No, he was a product of the Baathist police apparatus — and thus indirectly of Soviet-style disinformation protocols, according to which lies in service of a criminal state were not really lies at all. If the West shudders at the state-controlled untruth in the Arab world, it should remember that the closer a state's former ties with the Soviet Union — whether it be Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Palestine Authority, or Libya — the greater propensity it displays for censorship, fabrication, and an intrusive Big Brother.
Perhaps the biggest change is in the nature of terrorism itself. Gone are most Russian and Eastern European money and training for hijackers and assassins. The Czech or Bulgarian police are more likely to round up killers than to subsidize them as they did in the past. Polish commandos help Americans fight terrorists rather than helping terrorists to fight Americans. Berlin is not a haven for spies with Middle Eastern operations, but is rather undergoing a massive construction to return it to its former status as Europe's premier capital. In short, the playing field of the terrorist has shrunk considerably, as a fourth of the planet has suddenly done an about-face and joined in to stop rather than foster killers.
Our own defense capability reflects these new opportunities. That we may soon move 80,000 military personnel out of Germany would have been impossible in the Cold War. With such new flexibility, should Turkey or Saudi Arabia forbid use of their bases, why should we be paying material and political capital for runways and hangars in the first place when we cannot use them? Suddenly the old paradigm — that we had to scheme with rightists to gain their soil to corner the Soviet Union — no longer matters; instead the renter, not the landlord, now holds the greater hand, as we craft our armed forces to be more mobile, flexible, and independent from blackmail or coercion, from "friends" and neutrals alike.
That we are refitting some of our nuclear submarines with conventional cruise missiles to take out terrorists, rather than to strike Soviet cities, is also the kind of new thinking that has in it an ominous message for rogue states once protected under the old Soviet nuclear umbrella. If the free world has now doubled or tripled in size, so have American military resources, to focus on a diminishing terrorist stronghold. We fought so well in Afghanistan and Iraq in part precisely because we now have the freedom to devote our efforts to unconventional warfare without worrying that we are shorting our heavy armor and tactical aircraft — once so critical to stopping a Soviet assault in Europe. Ten thousand Special Forces may not have kept the Russians from blasting into Germany, but they were invaluable in Afghanistan and Kurdistan. Lumbering B-52s might have been blown out of the skies by Soviet Migs, but they rained fire and ruin on the Taliban with impunity.
With the demise of the Soviet Union perished also the idea of spreading Marxism by force across the globe. Our enemies could always bring in the Russians if we proved too demanding of reform; cynical neutrals could play us off against them to gain aid or attention. In the world's impoverished and desolate expanses, naïve dreamers and psychopathic killers alike could always justify their quasi-allegiance to Stalinism on the grounds that a coercive socialism was closer to brotherhood than wide-open American capitalism.
Islamist fascism entertains neither these utopian pretenses nor the air of shared struggle that trumps racial, religious, or geographical boundaries. If you are female or gay, your correct politics don't really matter. If you are Christian or non-Middle Eastern, too bad. If you are addicted to Western freedom or consumerism, you might as well save the trouble and go straight to Hell now. So Khomeinism or al Qaedism is not Soviet-enhanced Marxism: It lacks not merely the resources of a vast continent at its call, but also an ideology that misleads and confuses with false promises of social justice. With the Islamofascists you get what you see — a return to the 13th century and all its darkness.
What do such new realities portend in our current struggle? We must remember that much of our frustrations with our European allies can be attributed to the absence of a global rogue nation that could destroy Europe with a flip of a switch, and that their pique with us is not predicated on what we do or say but, rather, on the changing global realities.
And if we are exasperated with Cold War institutions like the U.N. and NATO, it is precisely because they are paradigms of a bygone age that have remained fossilized rather than evolving to meet the challenges of a new era. So in most cases, the United States is at last in a singular position to promote freedom and democracy without either cynicism or the Realpolitik that today's elected socialist will be tomorrow's Soviet puppet. It is becoming quite a different world — and one, thank God, that at least a few in our government have sized up pretty well.
In short, for the first time in a half-century, Ronald Reagan's threat to terrorists and their supporters that "you can run but not hide" is at last true. The world of al Qaeda is shrinking as we speak — and there is no person or force left that can bail any of them out from the doom that awaits them all.
1 posted on 05/30/2003 8:42 AM PDT by aculeus
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The benefit of a doubt may have applied before the war, but no longer. We're talking about real evidence now. So far, the evidence supports Saddam, not Bush. Prove otherwise. I'll settle for just, say, a few dozen viable chemicallly or biologically loaded artillery shells even if it's not the tens of thousands of shells and rockets and thousands of tons of chemicals and hundreds and hundreds of gallons of biological agents I was led to believe Saddam had in order to get my support for the war.I don't like being lied to. By anyone, Saddam, Bush, Blair, or anyone. If the lie was deliberate it is heinous to me. If told honestly because the teller was deceived, it needs to be admitted and addressed as such.
This whole d*mn war thing is starting to look like a plot from Twenty Four that didn't have Jack Bauer in it.
Given the meetings between AQ and Iraq before 9/11, the selling of some WMD is a likelihood. We'll know soon enough.
Right, and he refused to honor those responsibilities and President Bush and Prime Minister Blair HAD TO ASSUME that he still had them!
If I knew I'd be killed if I refused to accept the search, the answer is YOU BET.
It would have been so easy for Saddam, if innocent, to say "come on in and inspect anywhere, anytime". He didn't do that because he knew he had to get rid of stuff before we started the real deal (war) and hoped to make gobs of $$ by selling the stuff and get out of dodge.
I find that rather incredible!
Politicians sometimes lie as do intelligence agencies, media people etc. It's a given.
But when not ONE person at the UN stood up and said Saddam didn't currently have a WMD Program, doesn't that say something to you? When not one book has been written saying Saddam doesn't have a WMD program, doesn't that say something to you? These people have gone over there and seen and taken pictures of and documented what they say/write about.
Do you honestly believe it's impossible the stuff was dumped/sold/transferred in the six months or more leading up to war? When billions of dollars are made selling illegal weapons of all kinds across the globe, why can't you believe these weapons were sold too?
Or so we've been told.
When I suspect that I've been lied to about one thing, I start getting suspicious about everything else from that source. I start critically examining the source for proof of it's truthfulness before I accept it. If if know for sure that I've been lied to, I tend to disbelieve everything coming from the liar since there's a good chance the truths are just a part of a larger lie; something to give it the credibility to deceive me. I find many, many situations where everyone involved is a liar about some part of it
You will stretch anything to substantiate your opinion, won't you?
"President Bush and Prime Minister Blair HAD TO ASSUME that he still had them!" -- Ernest_at_the_Beach
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