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COMMENTARY
January 31, 2004
Intelligence failure
It can now be said with reasonable assurance that Saddam Hussein did not have any significant stocks of nuclear biological or chemical weaponry when the United States and allies invaded Iraq. Huge puzzles remain about the disposal of what he was known to have before he kicked U.N. weapons inspectors out in 1998. But what David Kay's 1400-man U.S. Iraq Survey Group has found would cast doubt even on the theory that dangerous materials were exported to Syria or elsewhere. Mr. Kay's retirement from his post last week and appearance before a U.S. Senate committee and TV talk hosts this week has provided the occasion for a provisional reckoning of the issue. The whole truth has yet to emerge but its shape is now discernible. And what seems to have happened is far more ludicrous than anyone on any side of the controversy ever anticipated (except partially Lee Harris in an Internet column last Sept. 9th). For -- wait for it -- Saddam himself did not know he lacked weapons of mass destruction. The analyses of documents interrogations and searches conducted by Mr. Kay's teams paint the most extraordinary picture of a regime that had self-compressed into a general state of paranoid psychosis around the same key year of 1998 and functioned like an unstaffed mental asylum. Saddam put himself personally in charge of all the weapons programmes and trusting no one except the people running them for him allowed them to pocket huge amounts of oil money for projects that never bore any fruit. Copious hypothetical plans were drawn up and again and again the Kay teams found the paper equivalent of a "smoking gun" only to be unable to pair it with real-life evidence. That was because Saddam's weapons programmes -- except for some progress in illicit missile-making -- existed only on paper. The result was every senior person in Saddam's regime sincerely believed that while he did not himself have access to "WMD" almost everyone else had. Indeed as the invasion progressed many captured officers in the Iraqi Army and Republican Guard declared that chemical or biological weapons had been deployed to the commanders on either side of them but not to themselves. And it seems that Saddam himself actually ordered the deployment of the WMD he did not have as the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division marched north from Kuwait. It was a shell game all right but the pea had been lost. Western intelligence reports are therefore easy to explain for they depended entirely on intercepted communications easily-misinterpreted satellite pictures and the reports of Iraqi defectors. All these sources tended to confirm that the Iraqi regime was trying to hide big things; none could guess it was trying to hide big things that didn't exist. For even if Saddam had the fondest inkling what was up he would still not have come clean with Hans Blix or George Bush for he needed to maintain the illusion of being lethally armed in order to keep his own people scared into submission to aggrandize himself as leader of the Arab world and in his own strange little mind to persuade the U.S. and Britain that he could inflict too many casualties to make a war against him worth having. Strange but true. Having myself been convinced (as also Mr. Kay was convinced until quite recently as also almost every pacifist was convinced who warned that an Iraq war would lead directly to Armageddon) -- that Saddam had what he and we thought he had I'm in a position to show a little sympathy to the Western intelligence agencies who made the same mistake. They had no agents in position within the regime and they will take a lot of criticism for that failure from people including me. But to be fair even if they had had a few agents on the inside they would probably have come to the same mistaken conclusions: for no such hypothetical agents would have been in a position to see the whole picture. It would have taken a reckless as well as ingenious leap to bet a million lives on the proposition that Saddam was not in reality seriously armed and dangerous (and could have been pushed over with a fraction of the force). For think it through and you immediately see that the Iraqi defectors were not trying to mislead anyone either. Many had heard very plausible stories and some had actually worked in the paper part of the WMD programmes. The intercepted communications likewise tended to confirm that much was happening. And the experience of the past especially in the years 1991 through 1995 was of an Iraq which then did have real and fairly impressive weapons programmes was in fact concealing them did in fact get caught repeatedly and did in fact own up only when it was caught. Unnoticed to the gliberal media in North America Mr. Kay's reports have cleared the Bush administration of the charge of "sexing up" threat assessments in the same way Lord Hutton's inquiry into the suicide of David Kelly have cleared Tony Blair. It is clear as day after both inquiries that the respective governments acted sincerely upon intelligence assessments that were as disturbing as they were wrong. Moreover they could only be proved wrong because of the invasion of Iraq. Had that not taken place Mr. Kay's massive search for the truth under every discoverable desk and rock would have been impossible. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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