America's intelligence wars: asking the wrong question

The damning findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee report in Washington on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction highlight larger political failures, says Charles Peña.

On 7 July 2004, The United States Senate Intelligence Committee issued a scathing report of the CIA’s pre–war assessments of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). According to the committee, claims made by the CIA that Saddam Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons and was working to acquire nuclear weapons were either wrong or based on false or misleading analysis.

The committee’s vice–chairman, Senator Jay Rockefeller, said: “We in Congress would not have authorized that war ... with 75 votes, if we knew what we know now.” Rockefeller blames the CIA’s “bad information” for the decision to go to war in Iraq. The chairman, Senator Pat Roberts, similarly feels that the administration and congress were victims of “flawed” intelligence. But blaming the CIA reveals that he and other members of Congress were seduced by the administration’s flawed logic for war more than being misled by bad intelligence.

CIA estimates of Iraqi stockpiles of WMDs now appear to be wildly off the mark. Its citation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as a potential threat to the US homeland is a good example of wild overstatement. But, in fairness to the intelligence community, much of what was in the CIA’s October 2002 report (“Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs”) was not markedly different from a series of intelligence estimates dating back several years.

Then, Iraq was thought to have the ability to produce chemical and biological weapons as a result of its legitimate civilian chemical and biological industries, such as pesticide and vaccine production; and to be pursuing a nuclear weapons program but was finding it hard to acquire sufficient nuclear fissile material – material that Iraq could not produce indigenously.

It’s also important to note that the CIA’s report is not unequivocal. For example, even the contentious claim that aluminum tubes “could be used in a centrifuge enrichment program” was qualified: “some [analysts] believe that these tubes are probably intended for conventional weapons programs.”

Deterring dictatorship

It is important to understand what the CIA got wrong and make the necessary fixes. But the more important problem was not the CIA’s fault. Rather, this lay with the US administration’s decision to go to war, and the willingness of Congress blindly to accept the administration’s assertion that Iraq’s WMD constituted a grave threat to America.

The presumption – wrong both before the war and now – was that if Iraq had WMD, mere possession of those weapons was sufficient justification for war. What too few people were willing to ask prior to the war was: if Iraq possessed WMD, how did possession of those weapons – in the most extreme case, of a nuclear weapon – constitute such a dire threat to the United States that preemptive military action was an absolute necessity? In other words, why couldn’t Iraq be deterred from attacking the United States?

After all, the former Soviet Union, with thousands of warheads, was deterred from attacking the United States; China, with tens of warheads, is deterred. And another rogue state named as a member of the “axis of evil,” North Korea, with only a handful of nuclear bombs, is apparently deterred. So why did the administration believe that Iraq was an exception?

There is no history of Iraq or any other “rogue state” using WMD against an adversary capable of inflicting unacceptable retaliatory damage. Saddam was prepared to use chemical weapons against helpless Kurdish villages and Iranian infantry in the 1980s; but he did not use those weapons against the United States or Israel in the 1991 Gulf war. All the evidence suggests that Saddam was deterred because of the threat of a possible nuclear response that would spell certain annihilation of his regime.

Ultimately, the administration’s case rested on an unproven assertion: that Saddam Hussein would give WMD to terrorists who would attack the United States. According to President Bush: “In the world after September the 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take.” It’s true that terrorists are – by definition – undeterrable. But conflating rogue states and terrorists into a single threat is a mistake.

There is no evidence that Saddam Hussein gave chemical or biological weapons to the Palestinian terrorist groups he supported to use against Israel, a country he hated as much as the United States. And while Hussein and Osama bin Laden share a hatred of America, ideological differences actually created disincentives for Saddam to become an ally of al–Qaida , let alone give the group WMD. Despite known contacts dating back a decade between al–Qaida and Iraq, bin Laden viewed Hussein as an apostate Muslim ruler.

In brief, the continuing focus on the existence of WMD and the CIA’s inability to “get it right” about Iraq is an evasion; blaming the intelligence community is as erroneous as the CIA’s assessments of Iraq’s WMD itself. Congress voted to support the Iraq war not because of bad information, but because it was unwilling to ask the right questions about how Iraq – even with WMD – was an undeterrable threat to the United States.

The real lesson of the saga of US intelligence and Iraq is: if you don’t ask the right questions, you never get the right answers, regardless of the quality of the information. When former UN weapons inspector and head of the U.S.–led Iraq Survey Group David Kay said “we were all wrong” he couldn’t have been more right – but like everyone else, he didn’t know what he was wrong about.