I45owl Wrote:WMD Owl Wrote:I know it will never come out in the next 50 years, but I would really like to know how we blew it on Iraq and WMD Intelligence.
Was the CIA fed disinformation that we bought hook, line, and sinker?
Did the WMD's go out of Iraq along with the estimated $1 billion in US currency and end up in Syria? And how much of this money was used to fund the insurgency? I can't understand why Saddam didn't take his money and run before the war when he had the chance.
Or did the Iranians set us up AGAIN???
I don't know what's that hard to figure out at this point. The US/UN and Iraq combined to destroy most of the WMD stockpiles that Iraq had. Iraq destroyed some as part of it's impertinence toward the inspection regime. Sadaam maintained ambiguity about whether or not he had WMD in order to control his population and his neighbors due to fear. He continued to be defiant toward the US/UN long after it made sense to most westerners because it would be a fatal sign of weakness for him to acquiesce. Given that any Iraqi that helped US intelligence would wind up dead along with the rest of their families, it's not hard to see how most intelligence agencies didn't have accurate information.
As for why the US used WMD as the sole justification for war, that's something that's much more complex. The short answer is that Baghdad was the shortest route home from Saudi Arabia, but it's more difficult to explain why that was never really discussed publicly.
First, I do not like the term WMD. Nuclear weapons are truly weapons of mass destruction. Biological and chemical weapons are scary, but they do not cause mass destruction. I think the WMD term was coined to create fear that could be used to generate support for certain actions. I prefer the older terminology, NBC (nuclear biological chemical) and will continue to use it.
Second, NBC weapons were never the sole justification for war. There was a long laundry list of justifications. The NBC justification may have resonated more than others, and for that reason gotten more political play, but it was never the sole justification. The first time I heard that fiction was from a news commentator a few days after the invasion. My thought at the time was, "That's not right. Someone from the Bush administration needs to get high behind setting that straight ASAP." But they never did. Either (1) they were so convinced that we would find NBC weapons that they didn't see a problem, or (2) they were too stupid to see the problem, or (3) they figured the American people were too stupid to figure out the problem. If there's another explanation I'd like to hear it, but clearly none of those reflects highly on the Bush administration.
Third, I think much of the intelligence we acted on was not our own. I think we were fed a lot by Israel, and this is a big reason why, in the aftermath, we've had a difficult time backing things up with hard intelligence. We never had the hard intel, just the Israeli analysis and interpretations. I think what was building up was something like what is now happening with Iran, with Israel threatening preemptive action to take out whatever they believed Saddam had. I think Bush or somebody in the administration got spooked by the possibilities and jumped the gun before we had finished things in Afghanistan. I think we'd have been better served to wait out things a bit longer and finish up in Afghanistan first. For one thing, we see how slowly the Iran situation is playing out. Iraq may have played out a bit more quickly, given that Saddam had demonstrated the ability durin the previous Gulf War to deliver scuds into Israel. For another thing, I'm not convinced that, even if Israel had acted, it would have been a bad thing. It would have meant that someone other than us was controlling the action, and if there's one thing a neocon can't stand, it's not being in control.
Fourth, I do believe that Saddam had some kind of NBC program ongoing and that he moved it out before we got there, but not to Syria. We did not find weapons in Iraq, but just as importantly we have never found evidence of destruction of significant numbers of NBC weapons. It would have been hard to destroy an inventory the size that Saddam is generally believed to have possessed without leaving much more of a trail than we have found. Earlier destructions by Saddam and the US/UN were minimal amounts that could easily have been arranged by Saddam as cover for what was actually going on. What circumstantial evidence we have found is more consistent with an ongoing program that was picked up and moved in a hurry than witn a program that was destroyed. I believe the weapons went to North Korea and were incorporated into their program. I believe this primarily because there are a number of contemporaneous and subsequent events that are consistent with that theory, but hard to explain otherwise.
What would I have done differently?
1. Going back at least to the Clinton administration, and IIRC to post-war GHWB, Saddam was clearly playing games with the inspectors. They would say, "We want to inspect locations A, B, C, and D." Saddam would reply, "You can visit A, B, and C, but not D." As long as you let that go, the inspections are meaningless. What you do is you inspect A, B, and C, and you vaporize D. At least as long as the no-fly zone was in effect, that should have been easy to do. Do that a few times, Saddam gets the message, the inspections become meaningful, and you avoid a lot that has followed.
2. In our fascination with satellites and electronic surveillance, we've let a lot of our human intelligence wither away. Without the ability to back up data with informers, we are much more vulnerable to bad intel. We need to get back into the humint business in a much bigger way.
3. In 2003 I would have told Israel to hold their horses until we got through with bin Laden and Afghanistan, and I'd have done all that I could to make that stick. If Israel had insisted on acting anyway, I'd have let them. If Israel had acted with respect to Iraq, I think there's a fair possibility that Iran would be less of a problem today. Certainly, by neutralizing Iran's two biggest enemies, we've freed them up to focus on the things that are now becoming problems.
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Friday Night's Debate
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