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Jewish World Review April 1, 2005 / 21 Adar II, 5765 The WMD scandal that wasn't By Rich Lowry
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The commission studying the intelligence failures that produced
disastrously flawed estimates of Iraq's weapons-of-mass-destruction
capabilities has finally produced its report, and it's devastating.
Not just for U.S. intelligence, which is portrayed as hapless and
bungling, but for Bush critics who have vested so much in the
argument that Bush officials pressured intelligence agencies to
support the case for war.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is the epitome of this
school of thought. The very morning the report was released she
wrote that "political pressure was the father of conveniently
botched intelligence," and fingered Dick Cheney as the lead culprit.
Cut to Page 50 of the WMD report: "The Commission found no evidence
of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's
prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons programs."
Bush critics have focused on the erroneous intelligence around
Iraq's nuclear capabilities. Suddenly — or so the conspiracy theory
goes — the CIA and others began to say what President Bush wanted
to hear about Saddam Hussein and nukes in 2002. But the crucial
shift away from the belief that Saddam had no active nuclear program
came in early 2001, back when Bush was essentially maintaining
President Clinton's Iraq policy. That's when we learned that Saddam
was attempting to acquire aluminum tubes that could be used for
conventional rockets, or — much worse — for gas centrifuges for
enriching uranium.
Various intelligence agencies disagree about the purpose of the
tubes. The CIA and others argued that they were for uranium
enrichment and that, therefore, Saddam was reconstituting his
nuclear program. The Department of Energy thought the tubes were
unlikely to be used in centrifuges. But even it concluded from other
evidence that Saddam had a renewed nuclear program. Only the State
Department dissented from the conclusion in the notorious October
2002 National Intelligence Estimate that Baghdad had a program, but
cautiously: "[the evidence] indicates, at most, a limited Iraqi
nuclear reconstitution effort."
On biological weapons (BW), there was a shift from saying that
Iraq might have bio weapons to concluding that it definitely did.
The dark influence of Cheney? No. The change began in 2000, when
President Clinton was still in office. It was based on information
from a (totally dishonest, as it turns out) source code-named
Curveball. That year, the National Intelligence Estimate was updated
to say: "New information suggests that Baghdad has expanded its
offensive BW program by establishing a large-scale, redundant and
concealed BW agent production capability."
If there was a fundamental problem in how policy-makers and
intelligence officials interacted, it was that policy-makers, again
and again, were not made aware of the thinness and questionable
reliability of much of the information about Iraq. In other words,
intelligence agencies poorly served Bush, Cheney and the rest of the
hawks, not the other way around.
On the one hand, it is understandable that the intel was so
fouled up. We assumed that Saddam had the worst intentions. If he
wasn't cooperating with the United Nations, he must have been
developing something nasty. The report, over and over, says that
these assumptions — crucial to all the analysis — had "a powerful
air of common sense" and were "not unreasonable." On the other hand,
there were so many frank factual errors and sloppy practices in all
this that former CIA head George Tenet should have his recently
awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom revoked.
In its recommendations, the WMD commission makes some nods
toward decentralization. This after Congress rushed to "reform"
intelligence last year by centralizing it. If we undo that reform
and pass another, will intelligence be doubly effective because it
will have been "reformed" twice? Bureaucratic shuffling is beside
the point. What is most important — and the WMD report usefully
emphasizes this — is that we get more agents on the ground and that
the people running U.S. intelligence be more imaginative and
risk-taking.
That's not easy. Would that the problem really were just getting
Dick Cheney to butt out.
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© 2005 King Features Syndicate |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
