For critics of last year’s war in Iraq, it is the gift that keeps on giving. The chronic failure of soldiers and searchers to locate sizeable stockpiles of biological, chemical or nuclear weaponry in Iraq ostensibly undercuts a central rationale for prosecuting the war. If we went to war over weapons of mass destruction, the plaint logically goes, where are all the weapons?
The Bush administration’s latest discomfort with this question follows the resignation of David Kay, who headed U.S. efforts to find unconventional weapons in Iraq. Kay exits asserting that by the time the war began, Saddam Hussein no longer possessed storehouses of banned weapons. Democrats in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail leaped on Kay’s pronouncements as proof that the Bush administration had not told the American people the truth–allegedly because officials from President George W. Bush on down were willing to say whatever was necessary to justify the war.
The administration has no one but itself to blame for this intense scrutiny over weapons that haven’t materialized. What searchers have uncovered in Iraq doesn’t square with the magnitude of the illicit armory U.S. officials described before the war. That spare fact isn’t the entire story–despite the critics’ belief that it is. But it does provoke two lines of inquiry:
First, how did the administration use what it did and didn’t know in making its case for war? Second, what have all of us, officials and citizens alike, learned from this episode that should guide us in future situations in which decision-makers must evaluate intelligence findings.
That some feel deceived by the administration’s unrequited predictions is understandable. Missing stockpiles aren’t stockpiles. Still, for those who, like presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), allege that the American people were purposely “misled” about weapons of mass destruction, David Kay is a most perilous standard-bearer. Taken together, his statements paint a disturbing picture–not only of what he didn’t find in Iraq, but of what he did.
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The pre-war Iraq that David Kay describes is a cacophony of bluster and deceit. It is a country in which weapons scientists convinced Saddam Hussein that he possessed more diabolical weapons than he did, and then diverted his money to other uses. It is a nation that had largely eliminated its illicit weapons stores in the 1990s. It’s a chaotic place where big quantities of unconventional weapons aren’t likely to exist today.
Yet Kay’s Iraq is also a menacing place. In an interview with The New York Times last weekend, Kay said Iraq had continued to make “test amounts” of chemical weapons and was working on improved methods of producing them. In biological laboratories, Iraqi scientists tried “right up until the end,” he said, to produce and weaponize ricin, an extremely lethal toxin. And since 2000, Hussein had reactivated his nuclear program–evidently to develop killer payloads for the similarly banned, longer-range ballistic missiles Iraq also was developing. In sum: “[W]e know that there was little control over Iraq’s weapons capabilities,” Kay said. “I think it shows that Iraq was a very dangerous place. The country had the technology, the ability to produce, and there were terrorist groups passing through the country–and no central control.”
Kay’s disclosures transform the debate over weapons to differences based on orders of magnitude. If Kay is correct, Iraq wasn’t maintaining weapons stockpiles–but was actively improving its capability to rebuild them. At some point, of course, an improving capability negates the need for a stockpile. The fact that no stores have been unearthed doesn’t, by itself, prove what level of threat Iraq did or didn’t pose–particularly if it was left undisturbed.
David Kay’s Iraq differs quantitatively–but not at all qualitatively–from the Iraq of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jacques Chirac. It was Clinton who warned in 1998 that if Hussein went unchallenged, “He will conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you he’ll use the arsenal.” As recently as last February, it was Chirac who told Time magazine: “There is a problem–the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq. The international community is … right in having decided Iraq should be disarmed.” Not contained, “disarmed.” Chirac didn’t dispute the existence of illicit arms, only how to render them inert.
Bush and his top aides, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, did raise the bidding. They implied that the threat posed by Iraq was imminent–although it appears none of them ever used that incendiary word. Bush explicitly rejected proof of imminence as a test in his State of the Union speech one year ago. “Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent,” he said. “Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike?”
It was through that prism that a risk-averse administration viewed the incoming intelligence from Iraq. But intel wasn’t the only consideration: During the 1980s, Hussein freely used toxic weapons against Iraqi Kurds and during the Iran-Iraq war. During the 1990s, United Nations inspectors uncovered enormous stores of illicit weapons. Most important, intelligence reports offered the only fresh information available. Why? Because Hussein refused to obey 17 UN Security Council resolutions–including unequivocal orders to disclose the details of his weapons programs. But instead of cooperating fully with UN inspectors in 2002–a move that likely would have averted war–he subjected them to games of hide-and-seek even as U.S. and British forces massed on his border.
In testimony Wednesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Kay in essence faulted U.S. and European intelligence agencies for serving up bad data. What didn’t make the headlines were his companion comments on how often intelligence analysts err because it is difficult to discern other governments’ secrets.
What Kay didn’t say, but could have, is that there was nothing to stop the administration from being more skeptical in the absence of certainty. If, as Kay says, Hussein didn’t know the extent of his weapons programs, it appears that Bush and his top aides shared his plight. Yet the Americans apparently relied on several nations’ incomplete intelligence from a closed society to build an unambiguous argument rather than an even-handed assessment.
In short, the administration advanced its most provocative, least verifiable case for war when others would have sufficed. With his support for Palestinian and other terrorists, Hussein was a destabilizing force in the Middle East. His ballistic missiles program, which threatened such U.S. allies as Israel, Kuwait and Turkey, grossly violated the UN’s last-chance Resolution 1441–as did his refusal even to divulge the status of his weapons programs. Worse, with the UN failing to enforce its demands, Hussein freely perpetuated the genocidal slaughter of his people.
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For policymakers and citizens, one overarching lesson of this episode is that two of our most cherished imperatives may be incompatible.
First, we don’t want to launch a preventive war unless we know that a threat against us, or our allies, is imminent. Second, we don’t want to be suddenly confronted by dilemmas–or attacks–that we assumed wouldn’t materialize.
Exhibit A: North Korea. Ten years ago, the U.S. trusted that a policy of containment, with UN oversight, would keep Pyongyang from expanding its nuclear program. We now know the North Koreans were scheming to do just that. Today the world has no choice but to assume that country’s loopy regime possesses nukes. What administration would want to be asleep at the switch when Hussein announced that Iraq had achieved a similar state of invulnerability?
Exhibits B and C: Iran and Libya. Kay noted Wednesday that, prior to recent disclosures from both countries, other nations underestimated the extent of their nuclear programs. “There’s a long record here of being wrong,” Kay said. “There’s a good reason for it. . . . Certainly proliferation is a hard thing to track, particularly in countries that deny easy and free access and don’t have free and open societies.”
One largely ignored passage of Kay’s testimony Wednesday concerned his fears that rogue nations or groups could have milked Iraq for weapons stockpiles or expertise. “I consider that a bigger risk than the restart of his programs being successful. . . . [T]hat probably was a risk that, if we did avoid, we barely avoided.”
All of us desire the absolute certainty of weapons stockpiles–even as the man who says they probably no longer exist tells us they didn’t represent the greatest danger posed by Iraq.
Yet we don’t want our leaders to sift through evidence so indecisively that they miss the next Sept. 11. At the end of the day, policymakers have to act–or be willing to accept the consequences of their inaction. As Kay admonished Wednesday, the problem with evaluating how the intelligence community performs is that, “It all looks very clear in retrospect.”
All of which suggests three conclusions:
– The Bush administration may well have been too eager to believe in weapons stockpiles.
– Kay’s testimony convincingly rebuts accusations that the administration pressured analysts to hype the danger posed by Iraq.
– The exact dimensions of that danger are something we may never fully understand.
But was the danger imminent? If Bush, Rumsfeld and Powell haven’t used that word, one source has. His words: “It was reasonable to conclude that Iraq posed an imminent threat. What we learned during the inspection made Iraq a more dangerous place potentially than in fact we thought it was even before the war.”
That was David Kay, latter-day hero of those who allege that Americans were intentionally misled, speaking on National Public Radio.
