Abstract
Not long ago, in “A Necessary War?” (May/June Bulletin), I detailed the record of intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, showing that the record did not substantiate the extravagant claims then being made by a Bush administration attempting to gain support for war. My article was actually written in January, a full two months before the conflict erupted. Iraq fell in April, after a campaign of a little less than three weeks.
Today, three full months after the fall of Baghdad and the theoretical end of hostilities, the post-Saddam military occupation has met with resistance, with staged political gestures, and with economic sabotage, and has subjected a large portion of the population–which increasingly views the United States as an enemy, not a friend–to privation. The projected costs of the military occupation have doubled over prewar estimates; costs for rebuilding the country are also exceeding estimates, and most of what is being done today provides only for sustenance, not reconstruction. The list of Americans killed in combat in this supposedly peaceful occupation grows by one or two each day.
Amid rising frustration both in the United States and among the Iraqi populace, the question of the allegations about Iraq's possession of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons has exploded into major political controversy. In September 2002, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice invoked the threat that the “smoking gun” proving Iraq had weapons of mass destruction might be a mushroom cloud. Instead, what has mushroomed are questions about the administration's conduct–its claims regarding the Iraqi arsenal–in the months leading up to the war.
In the three months since the war, there have been inquiries into the reporting on Saddam Hussein's purported weapons of mass destruction by both the House and Senate intelligence committees and the armed services committee of the Senate. There is an internal inquiry in progress at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) by a panel of officers called back from retirement, and another by the agency's inspector general. A separate inquiry is probably under way by the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). But all those actions are classified, secret processes. On June 26, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists called for a public, open inquiry. California Cong. Henry Waxman and two dozen other House Democrats, as well as Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, have urged an investigation by a presidential commission similar to the body that is looking into the September 11 attacks. In general, the political sensitivity of this issue is growing, not diminishing.
Readers of the Bulletin may be excused if they lack the sense of frustration experienced by those who gleefully anticipated uncovering Saddam's weapons the morning after the battle ended. That frustration was powerfully augmented by the fact that the United States was prepared for the postwar weapons hunt. Though I used it in my earlier article to debunk the weapons claims, Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech before the United Nations on February 5 did demonstrate some of the depth of U.S. intelligence capabilities. Washington officials had extensive lists of probable weapons locations compiled from long observation with satellites, recent overhead photographs taken by U-2s supporting the U.N. weapons inspectors, reports by the U.N. inspectors themselves, knowledge of the places where Iraqi weapons facilities had for years been located, and the hunches of trained intelligence analysts.
Going into the war, Maj. Gen. James A. Marks was the senior planner in the hunt for Saddam's weapons. As Central Command's intelligence chief, Marks carefully orchestrated arrangements under which high-priority targets would be assayed by special forces, the regular military would keep an eye out for suspicious sites, and a large unit of technical specialists would follow up, investigating suspicious finds along with lists of targets compiled from U.S. and allied intelligence sources. Special units were provided by Task Force 20, an elite group of army and navy commandos.
They began infiltrating Iraq even before the invasion, meaning that if Saddam had had some chemicals or other unconventional weapons in the field ready for D-Day, the Americans were there to counter them, and also to prevent their evacuation. The technical specialists were with the Seventy-Fifth Exploitation Task Force, under the army's Col. Richard McPhee, who divided his force into four mobile exploitation teams that ranged all over the conquered portion of Iraq with prioritized inspection lists. Behind them, being organized by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), stood an even more ample mission unit called the Iraq Survey Team, programmed to eventually take over from the first-echelon units and conduct extensive investigations into every facet of Iraqi military technology, with Saddam's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons a high priority.
If anyone could find Saddam's secret weapons, these folks could. Moreover, what they were looking for is not so easy to hide. Finding good hiding places for a few shells of gas, canisters of precursor chemicals, or vials of germs is one thing, but the kind of weapons stockpiles and production base U.S. officials talked about before the war is something else. Where can you hide 5,000 centrifuges for uranium enrichment? How do you disguise the electric plants upon which they would have to draw? Rocket engine plants? The CIA knew where they were; Powell spoke of them at length at the United Nations. What about the nuclear plants? The Iraqi plants had never moved, had been bombed in the first Iraq war, and, as we reported previously, had been found abandoned by U.N. inspectors before George W. Bush's war.
The point is only reinforced by a look at what American specialists did find on the ground in Iraq. There were a handful of instances–not the hundreds or thousands that one might expect from a suite of unconventional weapons deployed in the hands of combat troops–where vials of suspect fluid or powder were uncovered. There was one incident where barrels of suspect chemicals were found. There were two trailers suspected of being used to produce biological weapons. The purpose of the trailers is still in dispute, but they contained no trace of biological residues. The barrels apparently held pesticide. No one now claims that any of the vials found contained any weapon of mass destruction at all. The heads of most of the Iraqi programs were among the Iraqi leaders and scientists who surrendered or were captured after the fighting. None of them appears to have said anything other than that the weapons programs were nonexistent, just as they had claimed before the U.S. invasion.
“We'd like to go to a country NOT under threat of U.S. attack for having a nuclear weapons program.”
As for nuclear weapons, looters may have carried off radioactive waste that will contaminate them (U.S. combat forces did not bother to post guards to secure the facilities as they rushed to reach Baghdad), but these facilities would not have adequately stored a bomb, much less produced one. Inspection teams found sites abandoned and decayed, not merely looted. One scientist stepped forward to reveal centrifuge design plans and equipment buried since 1991 in a barrel in his backyard, clearly the stuff of prototypes, indicating that Iraqi uranium separation efforts by this method were, as indicated in my earlier article, in their infancy.
In all, the Americans' findings were thin enough that the Seventy-Fifth Exploitation Task Force began to replace the experts on its mobile teams who specialized in weapons of mass destruction with people who worked on other issues. The teams' efforts were reoriented, and some have now been withdrawn. Specialists have visited more than 200 sites–about half of those on the U.S. intelligence master list of 578 suspicious installations, including all the priority targets–without discovering anything of note except the disputed trailers. The Iraqis said those trailers were used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons, and indeed they had some fittings consistent with that use. They lacked certain equipment (like incubators) necessary for the production of biological weapons.
State Department analysts have differed with the CIA, which put out a report on May 28 claiming that the trailers had to be weapons facilities. The administration itself has been suspiciously silent lately on this supposedly important discovery. As of late June, some 83 additional “flash” visits to sites suggested by evidence found during other inspections or interrogations had been made. Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton has since arrived in Iraq with the first personnel of the fresh, 1,300-strong Iraq Survey Group under the direction of the DIA.
What has emerged since the fall of Baghdad is an increasingly troubling record of questionable postwar discoveries being played for spin, as prewar assertions on the scale of the alleged Iraqi threat continue to unravel. It has now been officially confirmed by both the CIA and the White House that the State Department intelligence unit, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, dissented when the October 2002 national intelligence estimate included bogus claims as to alleged Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium ore in Niger. The proof that the claims were bogus was already in the system, and the CIA acted to prevent the claim being made in a presidential speech in Cincinnati on October 7. The same claim, already knocked down, was nonetheless included in the president's 2003 State of the Union address. When the CIA objected to its inclusion, the intelligence was attributed to British sources. That CIA director George Tenet has accepted responsibility for not ensuring Bush's speech was free of inaccuracies does not mean the errors were innocent, as the White House would like Americans to believe.
There is now mounting evidence that staff aides to Vice President Dick Cheney pressured intelligence authorities to package evidence the way they wanted it, and Cheney's national security people may have made common cause with a special unit formed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as well. As Greg Thielmann, an analyst now retired from the State Department's intelligence unit, put it, “This administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude: ‘We know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those answers.’” Subsequent leaks have revealed that Rumsfeld's own official intelligence arm, the DIA, reported in its handbook on the Iraqi target that it found no concrete evidence of the specific facilities Saddam was supposedly using to manufacture his weapons of mass destruction. Rumsfeld has minimized that revelation. The defense secretary, who once said the evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction in his hands was “bulletproof,” is now claiming he was only talking about an Iraqi effort to “reconstitute” weapons “programs.” As I wrote in the May/June Bulletin, a desire to reconstitute the programs was as much as the publicly released intelligence reports ever claimed until 2001. After that, the pressure was on from administration higher-ups to make more extravagant claims.
Meanwhile, one may reasonably ask whether the existence of putative “weapons programs” sustained the claim that Saddam Hussein was a current and major national security threat to the United States, and whether that in turn justified the conduct of aggressive war. This is not, as Condoleezza Rice and George Bush have now repeatedly flapped, “revisionist history.” The real revisionists are Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, and all those in the administration who now deny the statements they made then.