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Integrity, ethics and flawed
intelligence
By Daniel Smith
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in
Focus)
On June 6, Randy
Cohen, the New York Times' resident ethicist, appeared
on CNN's NewsNight, where he and host Aaron Brown began
talking about ethics and integrity in the conduct of
public business and in the statements and actions of
public figures. Near the end of the time allotted for
the discussion, Brown mentioned weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) in Iraq. Cohen replied in part, "I
think this is the big ethical story of the week: Many
people are asserting ... that the president lied about
[WMD] in order to get our country into a war."
In fact, with each passing day, it is becoming
more painfully obvious that the main categorical
accusations against the regime of Saddam Hussein used by
President George W Bush and other senior administration
officials to justify the war on Iraq simply are
unsupported by facts on the ground. And because the
rhetoric in the run-up to war appealed to the world to
recognize the US action within a religious-based
paradigm - labeling the war as a moral undertaking, and
stating that "our cause is just" - it raises for Cohen
the question of the necessity of integrity in the public
arena. It should also be a question for everyone in the
body politic.
After five weeks of looking and a
number of false starts, no extant chemical or biological
weapons have been found in post-war Iraq. Nor have any
precursor agents been discovered. Yet Saddam's
possession of these weapons and the imminent threat
these purportedly posed to the Persian Gulf region, to
US troops in the gulf, and even to the US homeland,
constituted the administration's chief reason why war
was necessary and just. Moreover, Washington hawks, who
have little use for the United Nations, then declared
that the "fact" that they knew Saddam possessed these
weapons also proved the irrelevance of the UN and the
ineffective nature of UN weapons inspections and
verification measures.
A second (albeit a bit
late) rationale designed to touch an emotional chord in
the public memory centered on asserting that Saddam
harbored and worked with al-Qaeda operatives and was
involved in planning the September 11 attacks. Again,
the claims became unequivocal, and, in line with the
Bush doctrine that harboring or working with terrorists
is a hostile act, preventive war by the US was and still
is declared to be a "just cause".
Lacking
on-the-ground substantiation of either primary
justification, the administration has tried two tacks
simultaneously, with a third in reserve. One is to mount
a continuing staunch offense, as Bush has done,
regarding these rationales in the hope that at some
point in time, something will turn up - ideally a
smoking gun. The administration insists that US forces
simply need more time, something that in March it would
not give the UN inspectors but now demands as it pours
1,400 new searchers into Iraq. This tack keeps faith
with hardline conservative supporters of the military
remedy who saw the war as the only solution for what
they deemed an extant threat to the US. Thus, despite
media revelations that the intelligence community,
including senior analysts, were divided over the
evidence of Saddam's WMD presented by the administration
(eg, aluminum tubes and mobile biological labs), the
spin remains.
The second tack - moving to the
forefront the despicable humanitarian and human rights
record of the Iraqi regime - is both a holding action
and a ploy to win over the more liberal elements of the
public who are traditionally concerned about these
issues. Ironically, the administration runs a palpable
risk here of calling attention to incipient violations
of its responsibilities as an occupying power. To date,
the flow of food, provision of clean water,
implementation of basic sanitary measures, availability
of health care, provision of a reliable electricity
supply to cities and towns that were electrified prior
to the war, and physical security are all at
unacceptable levels. Despite White House and Central
Command assurances that life is improving and is better
for ordinary Iraqis with Saddam gone, their right to
control their own affairs is too slow in coming.
This in turn is fueling a backlash against
Western forces and administrators. The backlash is not
taking the form of open, widespread rebellion. After
all, the US has the heavy weapons. But it is manifesting
itself in growing non-cooperation with the occupying
authority. It is then but a short step to passive
support of surviving Ba'ath, Special Republican Guard or
Saddam's clan elements willing to carry out attacks on
Westerners, and eventually an increase in attacks by
Iraqis who have become disillusioned with heavy-handed
liberation-cum-occupation by US military forces and
civilian administrators.
The back-up tack is the
assertion that "the road to Jerusalem runs through
Baghdad". This sought to conflate two separate policy
problems through repeated public pronouncements to the
effect that removing Saddam would be the key that
unlocked peace in the Middle East and the gulf. (Such
contorted reasoning in the face of the known support by
Syria and Iran of violent groups operating in Palestine,
if done purposefully, raises the question of integrity
in trying to resolve this dispute.) Indeed, as recently
as June 3 at the Sharm el-Sheikh summit with Arab heads
of state just before meeting with the Palestinian and
Israeli prime ministers, Bush reiterated the linkage:
"There's a hopeful direction to recent events in the
Middle East. In Iraq, a tyrant in support of terror has
been removed. Reform is taking hold in many societies
that are eager to join in the progress and prosperity of
our times ... The leaders here today recognize the
importance of representative, democratic institutions to
fulfilling the hopes of the Iraqi and Palestinian
people."
Like humanitarian and human rights
issues, this tack as justification for the Iraq war will
quickly weaken, even if Bush tries to keep it in focus
for other reasons, such as burnishing his credentials as
a man of peace. Too much about Palestine is outside of
the administration's power to manipulate. Hamas' refusal
to continue talks with Palestinian Prime Minister
Mahmoud Abbas about a ceasefire and halting suicide
bombings, the continuing attacks (dubbed as "targeted
killings") by Israeli helicopters, and the destruction
of a civilian bus in central Jerusalem by a suicide
bomber, all coming days after the summit sessions in the
Middle East, are ample proof of how rapidly events on
the ground can confound White House intentions,
pronouncements, and interpretations.
As it tries
to maneuver beyond questions of intelligence, integrity
and public ethics, the administration and its adherents
risk getting themselves further and further tied into
knots. On one hand, they insist that the intelligence on
which the case for war was justified was accurate, was
supported by defectors, and built a cumulative case over
the 1990s. At the same time, they acknowledge a loss of
direct, first-hand, in-country access to information
sources between December 1998 and November 2002, when UN
inspectors returned to Iraq. During the period when no
inspectors were present, information was coming in part
from Iraqi defectors, many of whom were under the aegis
of the main Kurdish factions or other groups in the
Iraqi National Congress, or rival organizations. But
while the administration seemed to accept this
information uncritically and even examined reports to
find evidence supporting its contentions about Saddam's
malevolent acts, it insists that the denials by its two
star al-Qaeda prisoners of a relationship with Saddam
cannot be accepted at face value because prisoners have
agendas - as if defectors never do.
Moreover, in
insisting the intelligence process was sound and the
substance accurate, the administration leaves itself
open to a charge of either (1) Lying, via omission of
the caveats and cautions in the intelligence reports, in
what it said to and withheld from the US public and the
world in justifying the attack on Iraq; or (2) A coverup
if it now knows that the intelligence about Saddam
possessing actual WMD was wrong. That is as much as to
say that in the run-up to war there was such continuing
incompetence in the assessments as to constitute an
intelligence failure of the first order, for which heads
should roll. As it is, administration and Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials now suggest that
caveats and doubts voiced within the CIA about the
reliability of reports on Iraqi efforts to obtain
uranium never reached decisionmakers.
In this
regard, in a June 6 interview with the BBC, chief UN
arms inspector Hans Blix said, "We went to a great many
sites that were given to us by [US and UK] intelligence,
and only in three cases did we find anything - and they
did not relate to weapons of mass destruction. That
shook me a bit, I must admit. I was impressed by that
because we had been told that they would give the best
intelligence they had. So I thought: 'My God, if this is
the best intelligence they had and we find nothing, what
about the rest'?" This was confirmed by UN Secretary
General Kofi Annan at the end of a June 11 working lunch
with US Secretary of State Colin Powell. Responding to a
reporter's query about US intelligence made available to
UN inspectors, Annan said, "On the question of the
quality of the intelligence or its being hyped,
obviously, material intelligence was given to the
inspectors who used it in Iraq. We know the result. It
didn't get very much."
The administration's
defensive hedging and shift in nuances and
qualifications - from "possessing WMD" to having
"precursors" and "equipment" to concealing "documents"
and retaining "programs" and "know-how" that would allow
for reconstituting WMD if and when sanctions were lifted
and inspectors were not present - may serve to reduce
questioning among the US public. But these maneuvers
will not have that effect abroad, as British Prime
Minister Tony Blair's dilemma attests. And even this
line of defense could falter if a Republican Congress
holds public hearings about a Republican president who
took the nation into a war for which the toll now stands
at almost 170 US dead, with monetary costs of tens of
billions of dollars, and for which more lives and money
will be lost in continuing post-war occupation.
As Randy Cohen asked, "If you are so wrong about
all three causes, then I wonder if you can honorably
hold - continue to hold - your office?" It seems like a
fair question, and an ethical one, for everyone in the
country to ask and keep asking, particularly in light of
the 2004 elections.
Dan Smith dan@fcnl.org is a
military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus, a
retired US army colonel and a senior fellow on military
affairs at the Friends Committee on National
Legislation.
(Posted with permission from
Foreign Policy
in Focus)
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