Category Archives: WMD

Latest IraqSlogger: Chalabi’s back

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My lat­est for IraqS­log­ger is up, and there’s a howler of an op-ed in today’s _Wall Street Journal_. As I wrote for the Slogger:

Melik Kay­lan writes a fawn­ing piece on Ahmad Cha­l­abi for the _Wall Street Journal_’s op-ed page, call­ing him the “near­est thing Iraqis cur­rently pos­sess to a gen­uine walk-and-talk demo­c­ra­tic politi­cian.” For many Amer­i­cans, that may be hard to stom­ach, as the guy has been roundly crit­i­cized for ped­dling false WMD infor­ma­tion to eager lis­ten­ers at the Pen­ta­gon. (He once said, “As far as we’re con­cerned we’ve been entirely suc­cess­ful. That tyrant Sad­dam is gone and the Amer­i­cans are in Bagh­dad. What was said before is not impor­tant. … We are heroes in error.”) In Chalabi’s views, every­thing would have been hunky-dory in Bagh­dad if the Amer­i­cans had just let the Iraqis run the show, pre­sum­ably with him in charge. (Which was pretty much the plan until those med­dlin’ State Depart­ment kids showed up.) Fur­ther­more, with­out once men­tion­ing that Cha­l­abi is Shi’ite him­self, Kay­lan says Cha­l­abi rec­og­nizes the real­i­ties of Iraq and its eth­nic makeup, admit­ting that Shi’ites will be dom­i­nant. Well, other than Sunni insur­gents, does any­one really dis­pute that? Kay­lan seems to have been snook­ered by Cha­l­abi, who thrills Iraqis by wan­der­ing amongst the peo­ple. Admirable yes, but Cha­l­abi has almost zero sup­port in Iraq and per­haps the rea­son he’s able to walk and talk rel­a­tively safely in pub­lic is because no one takes him seri­ously anymore.

The quote from Cha­l­abi that I ref­er­ence can be found here, way back from Feb­ru­ary 2004.

This probably isn’t good…

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This has lit­tle to do with Iraq, but there are var­i­ous reports of a huge mush­room cloud fol­low­ing a tremen­dous explo­sion Thurs­day near North Korea’s bor­der with China in Ryang­gang province, a heav­ily mil­i­ta­rized area. Thurs­day was the anniver­sary of the found­ing of the North Korean state, so the time and size of the cloud (two to 2.5-miles in diam­e­ter) sug­gest it might be a nuclear test, and there were wor­ry­ing signs that the North was prepar­ing to test a bomb.
Well, on the sur­face it looks like they have, but let’s wait to see what radi­o­log­i­cal and seis­mic tests indicate.

Bloggers: Whitewash in the works

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There’s a fair amount of skep­ti­cism among well-known blog­gers about the Pres­i­den­tial Com­mis­sion to inves­ti­gate the intel­li­gence fail­ures in the lead-up to Oper­a­tion Iraqi Free­dom. I don’t have a lot to add myself, but I’d like to point out some good posts.
First of all, there’s the exec­u­tive order itself estab­lish­ing the com­mis­sion. Its mis­sion, in an excerpt from the order:

Sec. 2. Mis­sion. (a) The Com­mis­sion is estab­lished for the pur­pose of advis­ing the Pres­i­dent in the dis­charge of his con­sti­tu­tional author­ity under Arti­cle II of the Con­sti­tu­tion to con­duct for­eign rela­tions, pro­tect national secu­rity, and com­mand the Armed Forces of the United States, in order to ensure the most effec­tive counter-proliferation capa­bil­i­ties of the United States and response to the Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001, ter­ror­ist attacks and the ongo­ing threat of ter­ror­ist activ­ity. The Com­mis­sion shall assess whether the Intel­li­gence Com­mu­nity is suf­fi­ciently autho­rized, orga­nized, equipped, trained, and resourced to iden­tify and warn in a timely man­ner of, and to sup­port United States Gov­ern­ment efforts to respond to, the devel­op­ment and trans­fer of knowl­edge, exper­tise, tech­nolo­gies, mate­ri­als, and resources asso­ci­ated with the pro­lif­er­a­tion of Weapons of Mass Destruc­tion, related means of deliv­ery, and other related threats of the 21st Cen­tury and their employ­ment by for­eign pow­ers (includ­ing ter­ror­ists, ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions, and pri­vate net­works, or other enti­ties or indi­vid­u­als). In doing so, the Com­mis­sion shall exam­ine the capa­bil­i­ties and chal­lenges of the Intel­li­gence Com­mu­nity to col­lect, process, ana­lyze, pro­duce, and dis­sem­i­nate infor­ma­tion con­cern­ing the capa­bil­i­ties, inten­tions, and activ­i­ties of such for­eign pow­ers relat­ing to the design, devel­op­ment, man­u­fac­ture, acqui­si­tion, pos­ses­sion, pro­lif­er­a­tion, trans­fer, test­ing, poten­tial or threat­ened use, or use of Weapons of Mass Destruc­tion, related means of deliv­ery, and other related threats of the 21st Cen­tury.
(b) With respect to that por­tion of its exam­i­na­tion under para­graph 2(a) of this order that relates to Iraq, the Com­mis­sion shall specif­i­cally exam­ine the Intel­li­gence Community’s intel­li­gence prior to the ini­ti­a­tion of Oper­a­tion Iraqi Free­dom and com­pare it with the find­ings of the Iraq Sur­vey Group and other rel­e­vant agen­cies or orga­ni­za­tions con­cern­ing the capa­bil­i­ties, inten­tions, and activ­i­ties of Iraq relat­ing to the design, devel­op­ment, man­u­fac­ture, acqui­si­tion, pos­ses­sion, pro­lif­er­a­tion, trans­fer, test­ing, poten­tial or threat­ened use, or use of Weapons of Mass Destruc­tion and related means of delivery.

Well! Looks like the ques­tions *I* want to see answered won’t be. The pri­mary ques­tion is not “What went wrong with our intel­li­gence analy­sis?” but instead should be, “Was this intel­li­gence mis­used?“
As Bill­mon says, the fix is in. Josh Mar­shall says so, too. Hes­iod over at Coun­ter­spin Cen­tral points out that Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, a mem­ber of the com­mis­sion, seems to have already made up his mind. And Atrios points out the Democ­rac­tic response to the appoint­ment of for­mer fed­eral appel­late judge Lau­rence Sil­ber­man, as co-chairman of the com­mis­sion.
Lots of good reading.

David Kay: We Was Wrong

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Oops! We were all wrong. Our bad.
That’s essen­tially what David Kay, for­mer chief weapons inspec­tor, said today when he tes­ti­fied before the Sen­ate Armed Ser­vices Com­mit­tee.

Let me begin by say­ing, we were almost all wrong, and I cer­tainly include myself here.
Sen. [Edward] Kennedy knows very directly. Sen­a­tor Kennedy and I talked on sev­eral occa­sions prior to the war that my view was that the best evi­dence that I had seen was that Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruc­tion.
I would also point out that many gov­ern­ments that chose not to sup­port this war — cer­tainly, the French pres­i­dent, [Jacques] Chirac, as I recall in April of last year, referred to Iraq’s pos­ses­sion of WMD.
The Ger­mans cer­tainly — the intel­li­gence ser­vice believed that there were WMD.
It turns out that we were all wrong, prob­a­bly in my judg­ment, and that is most disturbing.

No one was pres­sured, he said, to come up with evi­dence that wasn’t there. “Never — not in a sin­gle case — was the expla­na­tion, ‘I was pres­sured to do this,’” he said. “The expla­na­tion was very often, ‘The lim­ited data we had led one to rea­son­ably con­clude this. I now see that there’s another expla­na­tion for it.’”
And Iraq was in vio­la­tion of some aspects of “UNSCR 1441″:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/000085.php#000085, which required Iraq to make a full dis­clo­sure of its uncon­ven­tional weapons and pro­grams.
One vio­la­tion included the dis­cov­ery of dozens of rock­ets capa­ble of car­ry­ing chem­i­cal war­heads and of fly­ing far­ther than allowed by the United Nations. “There was no evi­dence the war­heads them­selves had ever been filled” with chem­i­cals, but the rock­ets should have been reported to U.N. inspec­tors and destroyed, Kay said.
OK. Most of the West’s intel­li­gence ser­vices were wrong. No doubt about that. For the record, “I thought Sad­dam had chems and bios, too.”:http://www.back-to-iraq.com/archives/000112.php#000112 But — and this was prob­a­bly the think­ing of the French and the Ger­mans — _what remained of the weapons and pro­grams didn’t war­rant going to war._ Sad­dam was con­tained, his strik­ing power was laugh­able. He wasn’t going to hook up with al Qaeda.
Kevin Drumm over at Calpun­dit has assem­bled a col­lec­tion of state­ments from peo­ple who weighed on on the WMD issue before the war. Some of them include:
For­mer British For­eign Sec­re­tary Robin Cook in his March 2003 res­ig­na­tion speech:

Iraq prob­a­bly has no weapons of mass destruc­tion in the com­monly under­stood sense of that term — namely, a cred­i­ble device capa­ble of being deliv­ered against strate­gic city tar­gets. It prob­a­bly does still have bio­log­i­cal tox­ins and bat­tle­field chem­i­cal muni­tions. But it has had them since the 1980s when the US sold Sad­dam the anthrax agents and the then British gov­ern­ment built his chem­i­cal and muni­tions factories.

As Kevin notes, the assump­tion is that Sad­dam had the WMD, but that they weren’t very dangerous.

Aus­tralian Intel­li­gence offi­cer Andrew Wilkie in March 2003:

Iraq’s weapons of mass destruc­tion pro­gram is, I believe, gen­uinely con­tained. There is no doubt they have chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal weapons, but their pro­gram now is dis­jointed and lim­ited. It’s not a national WMD pro­gram like they used to have.

Again, the WMDs are there, just not much of a threat.
And so on, with the most skep­ti­cal voice com­ing from Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin say­ing in Octo­ber 2002 that it’s unlikely that any weapons exist, but even so, the Rus­sians worry that they might.
So every­one thought they were there, but only the Bush admin­is­tra­tion thought they were an immi­nent exis­ten­tial threat to the United States. (And for those who said the White House never said Iraq was an “immi­nent threat” because they didn’t utter the _actual words_ “immi­nent threat,” I roll my eyes at you. Just read this col­lec­tion of state­ments from mem­bers of the admin­is­tra­tion.)
The ques­tion that we have it answer is why did every­one else think Iraq was man­age­able while Wash­ing­ton didn’t? Sept. 11? Greed for Oil? Strate­gic posi­tion­ing in a new Great Game? Per­sonal grudges? Man­i­fest des­tiny in the sands of Ara­bia? I think it’s all of those and more. The Bush admin­is­tra­tion believed the worst about Iraq not because they had to but because they wanted to. For all of those rea­sons and goals, Iraq had to become the num­ber one tar­get. Was it a legit­i­mate one? In hind­sight, obvi­ously it appears no. At the time, I and oth­ers smarter than me argued that it wasn’t worth going to war over it. That the threat wasn’t immi­nent, that Iraq wasn’t worth the blood and trea­sure that would be paid.
The Cen­ter for Amer­i­can Progress has put up a dev­as­tat­ing cri­tique of the White House’s will­ful igno­rance regard­ing Iraq’s weapons. David Kay is, at best, play­ing the loyal sol­dier with this “faulty intel­li­gence” meme. “A review of the facts,” the Cen­ter says, “shows the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity repeat­edly warned the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion about the weak­ness of its case, but was cir­cum­vented, over­ruled, and ignored.“

  • In 2001 and before, intel­li­gence agen­cies noted that Sad­dam Hus­sein was effec­tively con­tained after the Gulf War. In fact, for­mer weapons inspec­tor David Kay now admits that the pre­vi­ous pol­icy of con­tain­ment – includ­ing the 1998 bomb­ing of Iraq – destroyed any remain­ing infra­struc­ture of poten­tial WMD programs.
  • Through­out 2002, the CIA, DIA, Depart­ment of Energy and United Nations all warned the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion that its selec­tive use of intel­li­gence was paint­ing a weak WMD case. Those warn­ings were repeat­edly ignored.
  • Instead of lis­ten­ing to the repeated warn­ings from the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity, intel­li­gence offi­cials say the White House instead pres­sured them to con­form their reports to fit a pre-determined pol­icy. Mean­while, more evi­dence from inter­na­tional insti­tu­tions poured in that the White House’s claims were not well-grounded.

(Thanks to Hes­iod over at Coun­ter­spin Cen­tral for tip­ping me off on this time­line.)
Amer­i­cans will for­give pres­i­dents their hon­est mis­takes. But dis­hon­est state­ments backed up by will­ful igno­rance and an “I’m not lis­ten­ing, la-la-la-la-la!” atti­tude should never be tol­er­ated or for­given.
Bush lied. You know the rest.

WMDs still MIA

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Well, the great Iraqi WMD Hunt of 2003 appears to be wind­ing down. The Asso­ci­ated Press reports:

Weapons-hunters are spend­ing more time on base, intel­li­gence experts have been reas­signed to work on the coun­terin­sur­gency, and the man lead­ing a search for chem­i­cal, bio­log­i­cal and nuclear weapons is think­ing of bow­ing out.

The con­ven­tional wis­dom is that no one in the elec­torate cares any­more. Saddam’s been caught! “The war’s going great!”:http://gallup.com/poll/releases/pr031219.asp
But they should care, because — and this will come as no sur­prise, but I have to say it — this war was fought using the Amer­i­can people’s tax money and their sons and daugh­ters. Since March 20, 548 troops from Coali­tion coun­tries “have died”:http://lunaville.org/warcasualties/Summary.aspx, at the aver­age rate of 1.6 a day.
Cit­i­zens should care because they were lied to. There’s really no polite way to say it, but the White House lied about the threat of Saddam’s WMDs to get the Amer­i­can peo­ple to sup­port the war. And it worked. Now, $87 bil­lion and almost 550 dead sol­diers later, the hunt is almost played out.
“It’s prob­a­bly time to call it quits,” said Hans Blix, the for­mer chief U.N. weapons inspec­tor, whose teams were given one-third the time the United States has spent look­ing for weapons.
“The U.S. and the U.K. are so wed­ded to the idea that the Iraqis were hid­ing things that they are not will­ing to explore the pos­si­bil­ity that they’re wrong,” Blix said.
If there’s any­thing good that came out of the cam­paign of mass decep­tion, I’d like to think that the Amer­i­can peo­ple won’t be fooled twice. Per­haps that real­iza­tion hit Karl Rove, too, and may be another rea­son Wash­ing­ton and Lon­don chose to believe Col. Muam­mar al-Qadhafi when he said he would give up his WMDs and allow UN inspec­tors in. Because the White House couldn’t cry wolf twice, Qad­hafi is now a man the West can do busi­ness with instead of a lyin’, theivin’, treach­er­ous dic­ta­tor, like Sad­dam Hus­sein.
But per­haps my faith in the com­mon sense of the Amer­i­can peo­ple is mis­placed. I mean, accord­ing to a recent Gallup poll, “53 per­cent of Amer­i­cans think Sad­dam Hus­sein was per­son­ally involved in the 9/11 attacks”:http://gallup.com/poll/releases/pr031219.asp, _up_ 10 points from a sim­i­lar poll take in Sep­tem­ber.
The Amer­i­can peo­ple were lied to — they should be angry. Instead, they’re still will­ingly believ­ing lies.