Iraq's WMD's
<article edited to reflect discussion about Iraq's WMD
programs - see full article at link below>
Strategic Choices, Intelligence Challenges
Robert Hutchings
Chairman, National Intelligence Council
Woodrow Wilson School
Princeton University
01 December 2003
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Denial and Deception
The threats we worry about most come from adversaries who are practiced in denial and deception – that is, from closed, authoritarian systems that deny access to their weapons program and develop elaborate programs to deceive outside weapons inspectors as to what their activities really signify.>
We obviously faced this with respect to the Iraqi regime, which built D&D into its entire WMD program – and refined its D&D capacities over by a dozen years of international scrutiny.
In the NIE on Iraq WMD – about which I will say more shortly – we were aiming at a very difficult target.
Every Iraqi program had “dual-use” built in that provided a plausible cover story: this was the game of hide-and-seek that Iraq had been playing with UN inspectors since 1991.
And we are facing a similar situation now in North Korea. I wish that those who are second-guessing the Intelligence Community’s assessments of Iraq’s WMD program would look at a current issue like North Korea’s nuclear program and appreciate how hard it is.
We are applying the most sophisticated technical systems and best interpretive and analytic capabilities – and still can’t be sure.
This isn’t an intelligence “failure” in the making; this is just the way it is.
In the Q&A someone is likely to ask why the U.S. invaded Iraq but not North Korea, which already has nuclear weapons and arguably poses a greater threat. So let me launch a preemptive rhetorical strike: What makes you think North Korea has nuclear weapons? How do you know?>
That “knowledge” is in fact a judgment – one based on solid evidence and sound reasoning, but still a judgment, based on imperfect information.
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The Burden of Preemption
The doctrine of preemption imposes an extraordinarily high standard on the Intelligence Community. US intelligence will be measured by whether a case has been made that justifies and legitimates intervention.
We will be asked not merely to indict, but also to convict – and, through our covert action possibilities, to prosecute as well.
These functions obviously go well beyond what the Intelligence Community traditionally has been called on to perform.
Those putting together the Iraqi WMD estimate never conceived of their task as one of making a case for intervention. Intelligence is policy neutral. We do not propose, we do not oppose any particular course of action.
Moreover, candidates for “preemption” tend to be the hardest targets.
Intelligence judgments about them will be just that – judgments, based on evidence that will rarely be conclusive or incontrovertible.
Public Scrutiny: The Iraqi WMD Estimate
That brings me to the Iraqi WMD estimate and the extraordinary public scrutiny it has engendered. My deputy, Stuart Cohen, wrote a superb editorial in Friday’s Washington Post, so I won’t try to recapitulate all his arguments. Besides, he is true expert on the subject, having served on the first UN inspection team in Iraq a decade ago.
But let me offer a few additional points about that NIE, which has spawned a cottage industry of misinformation:
First, the judgments of that estimate were honestly arrived at. The estimate was published before I arrived, but I know the four National Intelligence Officers who put it together.
One is a Mormon bishop and one of the world’s leading experts on nuclear programs. Another is a PhD physicist from CalTech and head of the Denial and Deception board for the entire intelligence community. A third is retired Army general and graduate of West Point and with an MPA from the Kennedy School. The fourth is a politics PhD from Princeton and author of perhaps the best book on international terrorism.
Three of them were appointed NIOs during the Clinton administration. The fourth goes back long before – all the way back to Carter, I believe. They are not “political,” and they are absolutely incorruptible. If anyone ever told them to alter their judgments for political reasons, their response would be to dig in their heels even harder.
Second, the debate a year ago was never about intelligence. I took part in many such discussions right here in this auditorium as well as in other venues, and the debates were not about intelligence but about policy. There was broad agreement, within governments and outside, about Iraq’s WMD programs – based on UNSCOM and UNMOVIC, foreign intelligence, and US Government assessments made over three administrations.
I was just in Europe a few weeks ago and reconfirmed that the British, French, and Germans all held the same basic judgments that we did.
Third, there was a powerful body of evidence on programs and a compelling basis for judging that they had weapons. The fixation is now on the weapons, but the programs – the capacity of a regime that had actually used CW on ten separate occasions to weaponize large quantities on short notice – were arguably just as worrying.
Fourth, as to the weapons themselves, the amounts of CW we estimated Iraq to have had would fit in a backyard swimming pool or, at the upper limit of our estimate, in a small warehouse. A tremendously lethal arsenal of BW could of course be much smaller. And this in a country the size of California.
Fifth, as David Kay, head of the Iraqi Survey Group, has pointed out, there were ample opportunities before, during and after the war to hide or destroy evidence as well as weapons. We may never know definitively what Iraq had at the time the war began.
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odci.gov |
