[N.B. This post was never finished or published at the time it was written.]
So.
It looks increasnigly unlikely that there are, or have been since the late 90s, substantial stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons in Iraq. It also looks like the combination of sanctions, intermittent inspections, and general brouhaha around Iraq during the 90s led him to spend more money on palaces than plutonium.
Everyone is chattering about arms inspector David Kay and his recent openness to making statements, now that he’s resigned from that post. The general money shot being touted:
U.S. intelligence agencies need to explain why their research indicated Iraq possessed banned weapons before the American-led invasion, says the outgoing top U.S. inspector, who now believes Saddam Hussein had no such arms.
“I don’t think they exist,” David Kay said Sunday. “The fact that we found so far the weapons do not exist – we’ve got to deal with that difference and understand why.”
Less being chattered about are some other Kay conclusions:
“It’s an issue of the capabilities of one’s intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information,” Kay said. Asked whether President Bush owed the nation an explanation for the gap between his warnings and Kay’s findings, Kay said: “I actually think the intelligence community owes the president, rather than the president owing the American people.”
The CIA would not comment Sunday on Kay’s remarks, although one intelligence official pointed out that Kay himself had predicted last year that his search would turn up banned weapons.
Kay said his predictions were not “coming back to haunt me in the sense that I am embarrassed. They are coming back to haunt me in the sense of ‘Why could we all be so wrong?'”
By “all,” he means pretty much everyone. From US intelligence, to British, to French and Germand and Russian, to what the UN inspection teams were saying, back in 2002, there was a very strong likelihood that there was a lot going on in Iraq — unaccounted-for stockpiles of weapons, mysterious programs hinted at by defectors — that was deeply troubling and potentially disastrous. Those beliefs had been part of formal US policy regarding Iraq for far longer than just the Bush administration, and extended in some opposition quarters long after Bush took office.
The issue at the time, then, was not whether Iraq was a danger — or whether it would be a danger in six months or six years — but the best way to deal with that danger effectively and quickly.
The choices seemed to be three. The first choice was to continue the sanctions regime in some way. Between massive kickbacks and scooping off of the benefits before they ever reached the Iraqi people, the sanctions and the “Oil for Palaces” program do seem, in retrospect, to have kept the lid on ongoing WMD programs. But recall that there was increasing pressure to drop the sanctions — primarily by countries that longed to do business in Iraq (France and Russia leading the pack), abetted by human rights groups who noted the impoverishment they were causing the Iraqi people. It seems unlikely that sanctions woudl have continued for much longer in even their weakened state, and there’s every indication that the Iraqi government was simply waiting for the sanctions to be lifted to reconstitute further programs and production of WMDs.
The second choice was for Iraq to prove it was clean. The long cat-and-mouse that prolonged those sanctions for a dozen years stemmed from Iraqi — meaning Saddam’s — unwillingness to do so. Perhaps Saddam didn’t want to be seen as weak, allowing inspectors all over his country to dig up the dirt, prostrate while the Arab world he wanted to be Saladin to looked on and chuckled. Maybe he didn’t want inspectors to see other things going on in the country, the child prisons, rape rooms, and mass graves. Maybe he really thought there were programs going on, his advisors desperate for their boss not to find out that, um, hey, all that money that was covertly earmarked for WMD programs had really been spent on parties and shipped off to Swiss bank accounts, and all those status reports about great things a-coming were simply liable-to-get-you-shredded scams.
In any case, Iraq’s continued instransigence and game-playing, posturing while holding out for the sanctions to be lifted, made this option ultimately unviable. One must seriously ask whether, had the US-led coalition not raised the stakes, and not actually invaded, whether a sanctions regime would still be in place, or broad inspections would have happened by today.
The last option — backed by intelligence and forced through Iraq’s perceived, ongoing, and increasing threat — was war.
We’ve learned a lot about Iraq since then. We’ve learned the hellish nature of the Baghdad regime. We’ve learned about previously unknown (alongside previously known) ties to terrorism. We’ve learned about long-distance missle programs. We’ve learned some of what was going on — and not going on — behind the scenes with Iraq’s previous weapons programs and stockpiles.
And we’ve learned that — probably — there are no mass installations of proto-nukes, or vats of bio-weapons, or tanks of nerve agents and other chemical weapons. Maybe some leak into the desert, thence into the Tigris or Euphrates a decade from now will give lie to that conclusion. Things can stay buried in Iraq for a long time; munition caches from the Gulf War in the early 80s have been found by Coalition forces.
Kay has made it clear that his conclusions are far from a binary “They had WMD/They didn’t” proposition, though that makes for less satisfactory sound bites.
But on Sunday, Kay reiterated his conclusion that Saddam had “a large number of WMD program-related activities.” And, he said, Iraq’s leaders had intended to continue those activities. “There were scientists and engineers working on developing weapons or weapons concepts that they had not moved into actual production,” Kay said. “But in some areas, for example producing mustard gas, they knew all the answers, they had done it in the past, and it was a relatively simple thing to go from where they were to starting to produce it.”
The Iraqis had not decided to begin producing such weapons at the time of the invasion, he concluded.
Kay also said chaos in postwar Iraq made it impossible to know with certainty whether Iraq had had banned weapons. And, he said, there is ample evidence that Iraq was moving a steady stream of goods shipments to Syria, but it is difficult to determine whether the cargoes included weapons, in part because Syria has refused to cooperate in this part of the weapons investigation.
Kay’s gone into more detail elsewhere on the Syria issue:
In an exclusive interview with The Telegraph, Dr Kay, who last week resigned as head of the Iraq Survey Group, said that he had uncovered evidence that unspecified materials had been moved to Syria shortly before last year’s war to overthrow Saddam.
“We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons,” he said. “But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam’s WMD programme. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved.”
And Kay himself says that, based on what intelligence was reporting:
And in the shadowing effect of 9/11, it seems to me that you recalculate what risk based on the intelligence that existed. I think it was reasonable to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat. Now that you know reality on the ground, as opposed to what you estimated before, you may reach a different conclusion — although I must say I actually think Iraq, 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 all said, I think going to war was the right decision, based on what was known. I think it’s also important (as some other folks have noted) that the Bush administration stop holding out hope for WMD stockpiles to turn up. That both discredits their position and makes it seem like WMD stockpiles were the only reason to go to war. It doesn’t mean apologizing for the war; in fact, what it means is figuring out what actually went wrong with the intelligence information that both presidents and congressfolk in this country (and governments abroad) relied upon to make these sorts of life-and-death decisions.
Sure, admitting that there were intelligence failures will give ammo to folks who — whether perpetually or just lately — opposed the Iraq war. But failing to do so does so as well, among both allies and enemies.
Bob Keeshan has