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Iraqi WMD: Myths and ... more
myths
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON
- The administration of United States President George W
Bush "systematically misrepresented" the threat posed by
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD), three
non-proliferation experts from a prominent think tank
charged on Thursday.
In a 107-page report,
Jessica Mathews, Joseph Cirincione and George Perkovich
of the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace called for the creation of an
independent commission to fully investigate what the US
intelligence community knew, or believed it knew, about
Iraq's WMD program from 1991 to 2003.
The probe
should also determine whether intelligence analyses were
tainted by foreign intelligence agencies or political
pressure, they added. "It is very likely that
intelligence officials were pressured by senior
administration officials to conform their threat
assessments to pre-existing policies," Cirincione told
reporters.
The Carnegie analysts also found "no
solid evidence" of a cooperative relationship between
the government of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein
and al-Qaeda, nor any evidence to support the claim that
Iraq would have transferred WMD to al-Qaeda under any
circumstances. "The notion that any government would
give its principal security assets to people it could
not control in order to achieve its own political aims
is highly dubious," they wrote.
In addition, the
report, titled "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications",
concluded that the United Nations inspection process,
which was aborted when the agency withdrew its
inspectors on the eve of the US-led invasion of Iraq
last March, "appears to have been much more successful
than recognized before the war".
The report, the
most comprehensive public analysis so far of the
administration's WMD claims and what has been found in
Iraq, will certainly heat up the simmering controversy
over whether Bush and his top aides might have
deliberately misled Congress and the public into going
to war.
While that controversy has cooled since
last month's capture of Saddam and a palpable rise in
the military's confidence that it can subdue the bloody
insurgency against the occupation, two congressional
committees are only now resuming their own probes of US
pre-war intelligence on WMD, which were interrupted by
the long Christmas recess.
The report also comes
amid new indications that the administration itself has
decided that its pre-war claims about Iraq's WMD were
wrong. The New York Times reported on Thursday that a
400-member military team has been quietly withdrawn from
the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group that has spent months
scouring Iraq at a cost of nearly US$1 billion for any
evidence of such weapons.
That report followed
another in mid-December that said ISG head David Kay had
told his superiors at the Central Intelligence Agency he
planned to leave as early as the end of January. Kay, a
former UN inspector who had long charged Saddam with
holding vast supplies of WMD, submitted an interim
report last October that no weapons had been found. "I
think it's pretty clear by now that they don't expect to
find anything at all," said one administration official.
The Carnegie report also comes on the heels of
the publication Wednesday of an extraordinarily lengthy
article by the Washington Post that concluded that
Iraq's WMD programs were effectively abandoned after the
1991 Gulf War. The article, which confirmed that Iraq
was developing new missile technology, was based on
interviews with the country's top weapons scientists and
mostly unnamed US and British investigators who went to
Iraq after the war.
The new report is likely to
be taken as the most serious blow yet to the
administration's credibility. Carnegie is the publisher
of the journal Foreign Policy, and, while its general
political orientation is slightly left of center, it has
long been studiously non-partisan, and also houses
right-wing figures, such as neo-conservative writer
Robert Kagan.
Carnegie president Mathews
travelled to Iraq last September as part of a
bi-partisan group of highly respected national security
analysts invited by the Pentagon to assess the situation
there.
The report, which is based on
declassified documents about Iraq from UN weapons
inspectors and the International Atomic Energy Agency,
reaches a similar conclusion regarding both WMD and the
missiles, but is much broader in scope. It concedes that
Iraq's WMD programs could have resumed and might have
posed a long-term threat that could not be ignored. But,
the authors wrote, "they did not pose an immediate
threat to the United States, to the region or to global
security".
Despite Vice President Dick Cheney's
insistence early last year that Iraq had reconstituted
its nuclear weapons program, the Carnegie report
concludes there was "no convincing evidence" that it had
done so, and that this should have been known to US
intelligence.
Similarly, with respect to
Baghdad's chemical weapons, US intelligence should have
known that all facilities for producing them had been
effectively destroyed and that existing stockpiles had
lost their potency already by 1991.
Uncertainties regarding Iraq's biological
weapons program were greater, the report concludes.
Dual-use equipment and facilities, however, made it
theoretically possible for some limited production of
both chemical and biological weapons to occur. As of the
beginning of 2002, according to the report, the
intelligence community appears to have overestimated the
chemical and biological weapons in Iraq, but had a
generally accurate picture of both the nuclear and
missile programmes.
But in 2002 the community
appears to have made a "dramatic shift" in its analyses.
The fact that this change coincided with the creation of
the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon - a
still-mysterious group of intelligence analysts and
consultants hired by prominent hawks to assess the
community's reporting - "suggests that the intelligence
community began to be unduly influenced by policymakers'
views some time in 2002", the report states.
But
beyond the failures of the intelligence community,
"administration officials systematically misrepresented
the threat from Iraq's WMD and ballistic missile
programs" in several ways, it adds. They treated the
three different kinds of WMD as a single threat when
they represented very different threats; insisted
without evidence that Saddam would give whatever WMD he
had to terrorists; and routinely omitted "caveats,
probabilities and expressions of uncertainty present in
intelligence assessments from [their] public
statements". In addition, the administration
misrepresented findings by UN inspectors "in ways that
turned threats from minor to dire".
The report
goes on to rebut a number of other administration
claims, arguing, for example, that the notion that
Saddam was not "deterrable" does not stand up to the
historical record, given his past reaction to
international pressure. The strategic implications of
the failure of US intelligence to provide accurate
information on Iraq, when there was no imminent threat,
should call into question the administration's new
national security doctrine of pre-emptive military
action, say the authors.
As applied in Iraq, the
"doctrine is actually a loose standard for preventive
war under the cloak of legitimate pre-emption", they
wrote, and should be rescinded.
In a brief
reaction, Secretary of State Colin Powell said he
remained "confident" of the claims he presented to the
UN Security Council last February. At the same time, he
stressed that they represented the views of the
intelligence community. "I was representing them," he
said. "It was information they had presented publicly,
and they stand behind it."
(Inter Press
Service)
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