Before the recent Iraq war, everyone knew that Iraq had a serious stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.
Conservative hawks knew it. Tony Blair’s government in Britain proclaimed it. Even prominent Democrats and skeptical arms-control experts more or less bought the idea.
Two months after coalition troops took over Iraq, the vast stockpile that everyone knew existed is nowhere to be found–not so much as a drop of sarin or a spore of anthrax. Even if some hidden stashes turn up, it’s clear that the prewar depiction of Iraq as one big storage bin for banned weapons was way off target.
How could so many experts have been so wrong? And why did most politicians, journalists and ordinary citizens believe an overblown assessment of Iraqi capabilities that now appears to have been based on questionable evidence?
That gullibility may be more troubling, in the long run, than the simmering scandal over whether the Bush administration distorted weapons intelligence to make its case for war. Even if Iraq did not possess chemical, biological or nuclear weapons that posed an imminent threat, rogue states such as North Korea may already have them. How to judge reliably the evidence of such threats could be the greatest foreign policy challenge of the next few decades.
One of the first steps will be to rebuild neutral, trustworthy fact-finding groups–including the much-derided United Nations inspection teams. Without them, there may be no hope of deciphering our government’s often exaggerated weapons warnings.
The Bush administration’s claims about Iraq’s weapons were always seen as dubious by some former weapons inspectors–and by many countries opposed to the war. A major reason was the unshakable certainty of the administration’s assertions about Iraq’s stockpiles. The actual evidence was never all that solid, experts say; much of it rested on inferences, assumptions based on Iraq’s past behavior and shaky claims made by defectors with agendas.
None of those concerns made it into Vice President Dick Cheney’s Aug. 23 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville, at the start of the administration’s campaign to win support for war.
“Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction,” Cheney said.
Sure, it sounded good. But in practice, the experts who monitor other countries’ weapons development almost never get that kind of certainty, said David Albright, a former inspector with the International Atomic Energy Agency and president of the Institute for Science and International Security.
“It’s very difficult to find [weapons of mass destruction] in countries that want to hide them,” Albright said. “They’re not in facilities with big flags on top that say, `Secret Nuclear Site.’ Therefore I think we must distrust leaders when they say, `We know this without a doubt.'”
Making the leap from ambiguity to airtight confidence was always especially difficult with Iraq.
One of the strongest pieces of evidence in the administration’s case against Iraq was Hussein’s failure to account for thousands of liters of botulinum toxin, anthrax, and other biological and chemical agents that records from the early 1990s showed had once been in the country. President Bush described the discrepancies at length in his January State of the Union speech.
But even here, some experts challenged the inference that Iraq still possessed the weapons. In March, Newsweek reported that Hussein Kamel, the former director of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs, told Western intelligence that he had ordered all of Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons destroyed after the first gulf war. Kamel was killed in 1995 when he returned to Iraq.
Many independent analysts still thought the weight of evidence suggested that Iraq retained those weapons.
“The Iraqis were a bit like the Nazis–they kept very precise records of their weapons programs,” said Jonathan Tucker, a former UN inspector in Iraq and a visiting fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace. “To claim that they couldn’t account for all this material seemed on its face implausible.”
Unknowns not acknowledged
The problem was that coalition officials never acknowledged the real unknowns in their case, Tucker said. And they never laid out the conflicting evidence for their strongest claims.
The skepticism about Iraq’s weapons in many intelligence assessments seems never to have sunk in with the administration–or the bipartisan pro-war faction in Congress.
According to a report last week by The Washington Post, the CIA had evidence early last year that documents purporting to show sales of uranium ore to Iraq from Niger were probably bogus. Nonetheless, the allegation made its way into Bush’s State of the Union speech in January. A study by UN inspectors quickly determined that the documents were forged.
“I think [the Bush administration] accepted things at face value that weren’t even true, and it embarrassed the country,” Albright said. “In the end, the U.S. looks kind of idiotic.”
Why did political leaders and journalists in a position to know better display so little skepticism about Iraq’s weapons?
It was always easy to believe the worst about Iraq under Hussein. Many Democrats also were determined to bolster their homeland security credentials by taking a hard line on Iraq. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) staked out a position nearly to the right of the Bush administration.
“Growing stockpiles of Iraqi weapons, toxins and delivery systems have accumulated,” Lieberman said on the Senate floor Sept. 13.
Administration officials on the defensive about the failure to find any weapons also have said recently that many news stories supported their claim that Iraq retained dangerous weapons and was working on nuclear arms.
But that’s a weak and circular defense. Many of the news accounts in The New York Times, for example, cited Bush administration officials as their main source.
In a front page story published Sept. 8, just as Bush was beginning his final confrontation with Hussein, the Times cited “Bush administration officials” as saying that Iraq “has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb.”
One unidentified Iraqi who said he had worked on chemical weapons told the reporters, “All of Iraq is one large storage facility.”
The article repeated the arguments of administration officials who believed that “Washington dare not wait until analysts have found hard evidence that Mr. Hussein has acquired a nuclear weapon. The first sign of a `smoking gun,’ they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.”
Yet that claim did not match the beliefs of many independent analysts and foreign intelligence agencies.
Lacking ‘trustworthy data’
“Fears are one thing, hard facts are another,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said last October. “Russia does not have in its possession any trustworthy data that supports the existence of nuclear weapons or any other weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and we have not received any such information from our partners yet. This fact also has been supported by information sent by the CIA to the U.S. Congress.”
So far, U.S. searchers have found no sign that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program.
A more thorough public discussion of the doubts about Iraq’s weapons might have prevented some of the administration’s current embarrassment. Perhaps political leaders believed that the American public could not digest an argument for war in anything but simple, declarative terms.
“We feel a real debate on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq never took place,” Albright said. “It’s the responsibility of leadership to convey difficult information with the proper caveats.”
But if the U.S. is serious about stopping North Korea and other nations that still pose a real threat with nuclear and other unconventional weapons, we will have to live with uncertainty. Sometimes military force will not be a realistic alternative–any war with North Korea likely would devastate South Korea. In such cases, the only cure for uncertainty may be a strong inspection regime, preferably led by a neutral group such as the United Nations.
“That would be the best possible outcome here, if inspections are given a new lease on life,” Jonathan Tucker said. “In many situations, such as North Korea, inspections are really the best approach, because there’s no military option.”
If that’s true, the leadership in the White House and in Congress may have to find a new vocabulary. Mere insinuation and bluster will be of no use the next time we need to prove that a smoking gun exists.
