Q&A: Pre-war Intelligence 'Failures'
Published: January 13, 2004
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From the Council on Foreign Relations, January 13, 2003
George Perkovich, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a co-author of a new report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD), says that administration officials used U.S. intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs to justify war even though the information was not as clear cut as they claimed. He says that a new, independent commission should be established to look into the intelligence "failures" on Iraq's WMD.
Perkovich, an expert on nonproliferation issues, wrote the report, "WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications," with Jessica T. Matthews and Joseph Cirincione, both of the Carnegie Endowment. He was interviewed on January 12, 2004, by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor of cfr.org.
Why do you think the United States launched a war against Iraq?
In our report, we actually looked at what the president said in his key speeches leading up to the war, such as the speeches to the American people, to Congress, and to the United Nations. What the speeches said to the American people and to the international community was that weapons of mass destruction existed and so did the possibility that those weapons could be handed to terrorists, i.e., al Qaeda, and that those were the reasons we were going to war. Now, after the fact, we have other rationales being emphasized more strongly [such as, that the world is safer with Saddam Hussein gone]. They were always there, especially among pundits and others, but the president's words prior to the war focused on the grave threat [posed] by the combination of weapons of mass destruction and terrorists.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said in a book and interviews that President Bush wanted to go to war against Iraq well before 9/11 and that 9/11 then became a rationale for doing so. Did your report get into that?
Our report literally looks at words that were produced by the intelligence community, the various intelligence assessments, what administration officials said, and then what United Nations agencies had said prior to the war, and what they found afterwards. All of that, when you look at it, is consistent with Secretary O'Neill's view in the sense that there's a pattern whereby administration officials' statements go well beyond what the intelligence said in terms of the specificity of the threat from Iraq. One way to look at that, but we don't do this in the report, is to say that it appears as if people knew what they wanted the outcome to be and were looking for any kind of scintilla of evidence they could find to back the policy that they had already determined. That's the essence of what O'Neill was saying. We don't go into that, but we provide raw material for people to make their own judgments.
On the question of WMD, nobody has found any such weapons in Iraq and many people doubt they'll ever be found. Is that your conclusion too?
We don't know. We called in the beginning for ongoing inspections, and I think the inspections should be completed so we could find out if there are any weapons. In fact, there was a report that some chemical weapons shells from the Iran-Iraq war were found by a Danish group [on January 9]. That may turn out to be true, so we would not preclude that such weapons [might be found]--but again, that was the whole point of the inspections that the war terminated.
What was your assessment of how well the U.N. inspectors did in Iraq?
One of the things we found was that [chief U.S. weapons investigator] David Kay, in his initial report last October, suggests that the inspections, starting with UNSCOM [the original U.N. inspection agency in Iraq sent in after the 1991 Gulf War], had worked formidably, and that the sanctions regime and other measures to isolate and keep a magnifying glass on Iraq had really worked. So one of the things we call for is a post-action commission to look at the whole process of inspection and say, "Well, what part of inspections worked the best, what part was least relevant?" This may be a case where nonproliferation was actually working. We have other problems out there in the world we are going to worry about, whether it is Iran, North Korea, Libya, or others to come. We ought to find out what works and what doesn't.
The president's September 2002 U.N. speech called on the Security Council to authorize inspections in Iraq, but when the inspectors made their initial reports in early 2003, they were slammed by the administration. That's led me to believe that war was inevitable, because it looked as if the administration wasn't taking the inspectors seriously. Is that your conclusion too?
As you know in the report, we try to systematically document what the inspectors--prior to 1998, when they were first removed--had found and what they were finding when they went back in late 2002. You hit it on the head. On March 7, 2003, Mohammed ElBaradei [the head of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency], said, "There is no indication of resumed nuclear activities [in Iraq], nor any indication of nuclear related prohibited activities at any inspected sites." [Two week after that] the inspectors would be pulled out and the war would begin. We now know [ElBaradei] was right. The inspectors were getting it right. They were in the process of doing their work. The U-2 flights [to aid the inspections] had just begun when we pulled the plug on the whole thing. |
