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theaustralian.com.au
Gideon Rose: Pre-emptive strike a one-off action
The Australian, February 3, 2004
LAST week David Kay, the Bush administration's recently resigned chief weapons inspector, declared that he now thinks Saddam Hussein did not possess significant quantities of weapons of mass destruction on the eve of the Iraq war. Kay's conclusion that he and other intelligence and national security professionals "were almost all wrong" about the status of Iraq's weapons programs over the past several years is deeply disturbing.
The facile and self-serving reactions to Kay's announcement by politicians and pundits across the political spectrum, however, are even more disturbing and demonstrate why the professionals are the worst people to listen to on these subjects - except for all the others.
"Going in (to Iraq)," Kay noted, "we expected to find large stocks of chemical and biological agents, weaponised, ready for use on the battlefield, as well as a fairly substantial nuclear program. We did not find that ... We have found program activities in those areas. We found a resurgent missile program. But the large stockpiles of actual weapons ... simply have not yet been found."
Western experts, it now appears, were misled by a combination of fragmentary evidence, Iraqi deceptions and their own logical but mistaken inferences. Only top Iraqi weapons scientists, and perhaps Hussein and his closest advisers, knew the full truth.
Even senior military leaders responsible for defending Baghdad, for example, thought their troops were equipped with chemical weapons -- not their own units, to be sure, but the ones to either side.
Given Hussein's past behaviour and continued stonewalling, it is understandable that knowledgeable outsiders were deeply suspicious about what devilry the Iraqis were concealing. And given how much Iraq stood to gain by coming clean -- and stood to lose by having its bluff called -- it is still unclear just what was going on in Hussein's demented mind.
As best anyone can tell, he seems to have been trying to deter his various foes without provoking them. As usual, he miscalculated and ended up provoking without deterring.
Yet it is the job of intelligence services to see through such deceptions and accurately assess the true nature of the threats confronting them, and given the importance of the question and the vast resources devoted to answering it, this is unquestionably one of the most excruciating intelligence failures in recent decades.
Through brutal retrospective self-scrutiny the intelligence community can salvage its credibility - but only by sacrificing its future authority. One can be forgiven for having arrived at mistaken conclusions honestly. But by the same token, others can also be forgiven for being sceptical the next time you cry wolf.
The reactions to Kay's findings from politicians and journalists, in contrast, show that self-scrutiny is the farthest thing from the minds of most people outside the national security establishment, regardless of what positions they took on the war.
Anti-war critics have seized on Kay's testimony to bash the Bush administration for its lies, while conveniently forgetting that even those opposing the war, such as the French and German governments, believed that Iraq possessed illicit WMD.
Indeed, the supposed dangers of Hussein using them in self-defence were often invoked as a reason to avoid the conflict.
The Bush administration and its defenders, meanwhile, first tried to ignore the significance of Kay's findings and are now trying to escape them.
The White House is thus grudgingly planning to agree to an inquiry into the CIA's handling of the WMD question. Its goal, however, is almost certainly less to find out what went wrong than to deflect attention from its own even more egregious errors -- such as its bogus attempt to link Iraq to the September 11 attacks and the "war on terror", its hyperbole about the immediacy of the Iraqi menace, and its unforgivable bungling of post-war planning.
However embarrassing such an inquiry is likely to be, the professionals are likely to have the last laugh, because the whole controversy is making clear to the public what insiders have known for a while: that the Bush administration radicals' self-proclaimed revolution in US foreign policy has already passed into the history books.
Unlike its predecessors and the wimps in the professional bureaucracies, we were told, this administration was not going to be content with appeasement, crisis management, or half measures. Instead of suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, it would take arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them.
"In an age where the enemies of civilisation openly and actively seek the world's most destructive technologies, the United States cannot remain idle while dangers gather," the President's October 2002 National Security Strategy declared.
The administration would thus "adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today's adversaries" and "act against emerging threats before they are fully formed".
The poster child for the Bush doctrine was the preventive war in Iraq, which the radicals claimed represented a danger so grave that traditional pretexts for going to war could, indeed had to be, dispensed with (something even the most hawkish of professionals disputed).
In retrospect, of course, the Iraqi threat looks much less dire and even the conservative pre-war assessments of it appear wildly off the mark. It now seems clear that the realist strategy of containing Hussein was working better than most people thought, and could have been sustained for a good while longer without incident.
This is good news in general, but death for a policy of preemption – which depends, as the National Security Strategy itself acknowledged, on "timely, accurate information" that can produce "a common assessment of the most dangerous threats."
The removal of Hussein was a blessing for Iraq, the US, and the world more generally. But thanks to the WMD screw-up, even more than the postwar troubles, the Iraq mission is also likely to be the first and last example of pre-emption in action.
Gideon Rose is managing editor of Foreign Affairs in New York. |
