Iraq's weapons of mass destruction: A case of intelligence following policy1

1 The author is grateful to two anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Abstract

In the second half of 2002, US intelligence was catching up with policy on Iraq, and doing so in circumstances where the Bush administration's stake in this policy had become extraordinarily high. The intelligence community succumbed, and glossed over the fact that it had too few ‘dots’ to make confident judgments on WMD in Iraq.

1 The author is grateful to two anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

1 The author is grateful to two anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

2 George J. Tenet, address at Georgetown University, (5 February 2004), reprinted as ‘Tenet Defends Assessment of Iraqi Weapons’, New York Times, (5 February 2004).

3 Quoted in Kirk Semple, ‘Ex-inspector Calls for Inquiry on Pre-war Intelligence’, New York Times, (28 January 2004).

4 Walter Pincus, ‘No Breakthrough in Iraq WMD Search’, Washington Post, (30 March 2004). The Iraq Survey Group's final report delivered on 30 September 2004 can be found at <http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/iraq_wmd_2004/>.

5 For a closer look at this issue see Joseph Cirincione, Jessica T. Matthews and George Perkovich, ‘WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, (January 2004); John Prados, ‘Iraq: A Necessary War?’, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, (May/June 2003), pp. 26–33.

6 Parliamentary Joint Committee on ASIO, ASIS and DSD, Intelligence on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction, Canberra, (December 2003), p. 46.

7 Summarized in Parliamentary Joint Committee on ASIO, ASIS and DSD, Intelligence on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction, Appendix D, pp. 109–121.

8 Full text available at <http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm>.

9 Full text available at <http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/iraq/libact>.

10 See Kenneth M. Pollack, ‘Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong’, Atlantic Online, (January/February 2004) Available at <http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/01/pollack.htm> and ‘Weapons of Misperception’, an interview with Kenneth M. Pollack in The Atlantic, (13 January 2004).

11 According to Woodward, Bush was convinced by 17 September that Iraq had been involved in September 11 but decided to defer an attack until the US had evidence of this involvement. See Bob Woodward, Bush at War, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), p. 99. Clarke recalls being tasked by the President on 12 September to review the intelligence record for any evidence of Iraqi involvement in the attacks. See Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies, (New York: Free Press, 2004), pp. 32–3.

12 The full transcript of this informal press conference appeared in the Washington Post, (26 November 2001).

13 It is significant, however, that the political leadership declined to make this clear and in fact continued to make elliptical references that supported this early presumption. United States opinion polls in 2004 continued to suggest that a majority of Americans believed that Saddam had been involved in the attacks on September 11.

14 Dana Milbank, ‘White House Didn't Gain CIA Nod for Claim on Iraqi Strikes’, Washington Post, (20 July 2003).

15 Text available at <http://www,globalsecurity.org/intell/library/reports/2002/nie_iraq_october2002.htm>.

16 ‘Written Statement from CIA Director Tenet’, Washington Post, (8 August 2003).

17 James Risen, David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker, ‘In Sketchy Data, White House Sought Clues to Gauge Threat’, New York Times, (20 July 2003).

18 Risen et al., ‘In Sketchy Data’.

19 On 16 February 2002, the President authorized the CIA to prepare to assist an eventual military operation to oust Saddam, including the conduct of operations inside Iraq. Pursuant to this authorization, a CIA team entered Iraq in July 2002, with the primary purpose of recruiting a network of informants. See William Hamilton, ‘Bush Began to Plan War Three Months after 9/11’, Washington Post, (17 April 2004).

20 Since this article was submitted for publication, these ‘professional lapses’ have been documented in graphic detail in the ‘Report of the US Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq’, Select Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate, Washington, (7 July 2004).

21 Seymour M. Hersh, ‘Selective Intelligence’, New Yorker, (12 May 2003).

22 Walter Pincus, ‘CIA Alters Policy after Iraq Lapses’, Washington Post, (12 February 2004).

23 James Risen, ‘Ex-inspector Says CIA Missed Disarray in Iraq's Arms Program’, New York Times, (26 January 2004).

24 ‘Tenet Defends Assessment of Iraqi Weapons’, New York Times, (5 February 2004).

25 Jones's article of 4 February 2004 is available at <http:/argument.independent.co.uk/low>.

26 As far as the author is aware, there has been no indication that Australia also received such ‘special intelligence’.

27 Risen, ‘Ex-inspector Says CIA Missed Disarray’.

29 Cited in Bob Drogin, ‘Concern Grows over Weapon Hunt’, Los Angeles Times, (27 April 2003).

28 Judith Miller, ‘A Chronicle of Confusion in the Hunt for Hussein's Weapons’, New York Times, (20 July 2003).

30 One report by an Indian analyst suggests that some of this material was transferred from Syria to Pakistan with the assistance of Dr A. Q. Khan. See B. Raman, ‘A.Q. Khan Shifted Iraq's WMD to Pakistan?’ South Asia Analysis Group, Paper No. 916, (7 February 2004).

31 Judith Miller, ‘Illicit Arms Kept till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert’, New York Times, (21 April 2003).

32 Risen, ‘Ex-inspector Says CIA Missed Disarray’.

33 Marion Wilkenson, ‘Vilified Weapon Inspectors May Have Got It Right’, Sydney Morning Herald, (1 May 2003).

34 Pollack, ‘Spies Lies, and Weapons’.

35 David E. Sanger, ‘Iraqi Says Hussein Planned to Revive the Nuclear Program Dismantled in 1991’, New York Times, (27 April 2003).

36 Clarke, Against All Enemies, p. 268.

37 Remarks by the President at the 2002 Graduation Exercise of the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, I June 2002, text available at <http//www.gov/news/releases/2002/06/print/20020601-3.html>. For a more formal presentation of the same thesis see President George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, available at <www.whitehouse.gov>.

38 The origins of and outlook for the Bush Administration's strategic vision on global governance has been the subject of intense debate. As a starting point, see Joseph S. Nye, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); John Lewis Gaddis, ‘A Grand Strategy of Transformation’, Foreign Policy, (November/December 2002), pp. 50–57; Edward Rhodes, ‘The Imperial Logic of Bush's Liberal Agenda’, Survival, (Spring 2003), pp. 131–154; Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, (New York: Vintage Books, 2004).

39 The contention that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons programme rested heavily on aluminium tubes similar to those used to enrich uranium and on alleged negotiations to import processed natural uranium from Niger. The credibility of this evidence was never high, and it was steadily eroded by tests and investigations over the course of 2002 and the early weeks of 2003. Nevertheless, both contentions were kept alive up to the time of the invasion. The best account of the saga surrounding the aluminium tubes can be found in David Barstow, William J. Broad and Jeff Gerth, ‘How the White House Embraced Disputed Arms Intelligence’, New York Times, (3 October 2004).

40 Paul Wolfowitz, interview with Sam Tannenhaus, Vanity Fair, (9 May 2003), <www.defenselink.mil/cgi-bin/dlprint.cgi>.

41 Lawrence Freedman, ‘War in Iraq: Selling the Threat’, Survival, (Summer 2004), pp. 7–49.

42 John MacGaffin, former deputy director for operations at the CIA, cited in Gordon Corera, ‘Radical Reform Required in US Intelligence Community’, Jane's Intelligence Review, (April 2004), p. 44.

43 Australia enjoys a genuinely close intelligence relationship with the US, symbolized in the joint management and operation of the facility at Pine Gap, one of the ‘crown jewels’ of technical intelligence gathering. What this means is that the Australian government is likely to have had a strong sense of the turmoil in the US intelligence community in the lead-up to Iraq, and of its complex interactions with the policy and political communities in Washington. If this was not the case, if Australia too was hoodwinked, one suspects the government would have been more concerned to find out why. How this special insight shaped the government's management of Australia's position on Iraq could be a very interesting story, if and when it becomes possible to tell it.