Biological warfare agents like anthrax have a shelf-life of a few months under ideal conditions. CW agents like Sarin is useless after three years. The quantities of agents we expected to find, that were cited by the President, Vice President, Sec. State, Sec. Defense and all their underlings for a year, never existed. Any BW or CW made in the 1980s was useless sludge long before the inspectors left in 1998. Iraq made no new WMD after the 1991 Gulf War.
It is not difficult to understand why Saddam wanted to keep up the appearance and latent capability of a program; to deter a US attack. It is the same reason North Korea accelerated the appearance--and possibly the reality--of its nuclear weapons program after Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech.
Saddam's bluff obviously failed, but it is incumbent on intelligence agencies to avoid worse case scenarios, which is what they were doing. They straight-lined Iraqi WMD capability from the late 1980s forward, excluding what inspectors found and destroyed, assuming that if Iraq was at point "X" in 1993, they must be at "X+10" by 2003.
This is not a trivial issue; we went to war using it as justification for some ideological fever about imposing democracy on Iraq. Intelligence analysts are paid (and God knows encouraged) to take a few disparate facts and weave an interesting story. Unless their logic is clear, their methodology sound, and appropriately caveated, their analysis is no more reliable than "out-of-the-box" thinking. But it is definitely is more career enhancing, until after the war when you find out it was "almost completely wrong." |
