Long but excellent.
THE STRATFOR WEEKLY
14 July 2003
by Dr. George Friedman
WMD, Blame and Real Danger
Summary
The crisis du jour in Washington is a revelation that President
George W. Bush quoted from a forged letter about Iraq trying to
buy uranium from Niger in his State of the Union address.
Congress, as usual, is missing the point. Weapons of mass
destruction were not the primary reason Bush went to war in Iraq,
but he certainly thought they were there. Everyone thought they
were there. The critical issue is: Where are Saddam Hussein's
chemical weapons today? What the CIA did with the Niger letter is
of no real importance. What the CIA knows and doesn't know about
the current war in Iraq and whether guerrillas control chemical
or biological weapons is the critical issue that everyone is
avoiding.
Analysis
The United States -- or at least Washington -- has come down with
a full-blown case of the WMD flu. The trigger was the White House
admission that President George W. Bush quoted intelligence in
his State of the Union message that was based upon a forged
document. During the speech, Bush claimed British and U.S.
intelligence had information that Iraq had tried to purchase
uranium from Niger. The document upon which the statement was
based later was found to be a forgery.
On July 10, the White House -- via National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice -- blamed the incident on the CIA. The agency
had vetted and approved Bush's speech and had failed to detect
the forgery in time. CIA Director George Tenet fell on his sword
on July 11, accepting full responsibility. The Democrats in
Congress smelled blood and demanded a full investigation. Sen.
John McCain (R.-Ariz.) came out in favor of hearings, so they are
likely to commence -- at least in the Senate. What their outcome
will be, and whether they achieve anything, is another matter.
The issue here is not whether the CIA made a mistake about a
document. Stratfor sorts through mounds of information every day
trying to distinguish the real from the bogus; mistakes are
inevitable. To avoid a major mishap, an intelligence organization
must measure each piece of evidence against a net assessment. We
derive our net assessment from a huge volume of information and
inference that allows us to make a judgment based upon the weight
of a large sample of evidence -- a judgment in which no single
piece of information is decisive.
In the case of the Niger intelligence, the issue is not whether
the CIA screwed up in its analysis of a single document, but
whether its net assessment of Iraq was correct. If the net
assessment was incorrect, then it is important to discover why
the mistake occurred.
The first question is whether the CIA's net assessment included a
determination that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction
-- defined as chemical, biological and/or nuclear weapons. The
second question is how the CIA came to this conclusion. If it
determined that Iraq had WMD (and this is now a question), then
the issue is how the agency reached that conclusion. Whether
right or wrong is less important than whether the conclusion was
based on a sound intelligence process -- a sound intelligence
process can still make mistakes. Another possibility is that the
White House or Defense Department pressured the CIA to certify
that Iraq had WMD in order to justify the war.
Here is the first real set of issues. First and foremost: Did the
Bush administration go to war with Iraq because it feared Iraqi
WMD, or did it go to war with Iraq for other reasons and use the
WMD argument as public justification? This issue must frame the
debate over WMD and U.S. intelligence. Stratfor's view, since
early 2002, has been that the primary motivation for invading
Iraq had nothing to do with WMD. Even if Iraq had had no weapons
at all, the United States still would have invaded because of the
country's strategic position and for psychological reasons. For
reference, please see The Iraq Obsession and Iraq: Is Peace an
Option?
The U.S. administration chose not to express its true reasons for
going to war, believing such an admission would have undermined
the effectiveness of the strategy in the Islamic world. Saying
that the United States was going to attack Iraq in order to
intimidate other countries that were permitting al Qaeda to use
their territory would have made it difficult for some countries,
such as Saudi Arabia, to change their policies. Since it was not
possible to conduct one public diplomacy campaign in the Middle
East, another in the United States and yet another in Europe, the
administration chose a public justification for the war that did
not represent the real reasons, but that was expected to be
plausible, persuasive and -- above all else -- true.
This is the key. The Bush administration did not go into Iraq
because of WMD. To the extent that U.S. officials said that was
the primary reason, they were lying. However, they fully believed
that there were WMD in Iraq, which is why using that as
justification was so seductive. It was not simply the CIA's view
that Iraq had at least chemical weapons. Almost all other
intelligence agencies -- including French and Russian -- that
dealt with the matter also believed it was true. There was a net
assessment within the global intelligence community that Hussein
had chemical weapons and would have liked to develop nuclear
weapons. This net assessment was not based upon any one document.
It was based, among other things, on some very public
information:
* There is no doubt that Iraq had chemical weapons in the past:
Hussein used them on Iraqi citizens. If he did not destroy his
stockpile, then he still had them. At the very least, Hussein's
scientists knew how to make WMD and had the necessary facilities.
* Israel destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 because it
said it was close to developing nuclear weapons. Iraq had made a
large investment in nuclear technology. Surely Hussein did not
simply drop it after 1981.
* Several Iraqi scientists were known to be working on
biological weapons. Hussein controlled and protected these
scientists as though they were extremely valuable to the Iraqi
regime.
The global net assessment was that Iraq had chemical weapons and
could create biological weapons if motivated to do so, and had a
program for developing nuclear weapons but wasn't there yet. This
net assessment was non-speculative. It wasn't even based on
secret intelligence. It simply assumed that the Iraqi regime had
not destroyed the weapons it had. If that was true, then Hussein
had chemical weapons at least.
Hussein's behavior from the beginning of the inspection process
supported this net assessment. If he did not have weapons of mass
destruction, then he would have had no reason to act as he did.
For example, he would have had no reason to forbid his scientists
from speaking to U.N. inspectors outside the country. All they
would have done was confirm that there were no weapons. Hussein
would have had no reason to complicate the physical inspection
process if there was nothing to find. And finally, when he
produced the massive document on Iraqi weapons, he could have
included a video showing the destruction of chemical weapons. Put
simply, if he really didn't have WMD of any sort, then Hussein's
behavior from November to March 2003 could only be described as
bizarre and self-destructive. Even if he thought that the United
States would attack regardless of whether he had WMD, Hussein had
every reason to disprove the allegations if he could in order to
complicate the diplomatic and domestic difficulties of the U.S.
administration. Either Hussein was insane or he had weapons of
mass destruction.
This seems to be the current argument: the United States
justified its invasion of Iraq based on Iraqi WMD. U.S. forces
have found no WMD inside the country. Therefore, either the CIA
made a mistake or the administration lied. The administration
tried to shift the blame to the CIA, under this logic. The
Democrats hope to demonstrate that the CIA did not lie, but
instead that the administration deliberately misrepresented the
intelligence and pressured the CIA to change its story.
There is another way to look at what happened. The United States
had multiple reasons for going to war with Iraq. The least
important was WMD, but it chose to use that excuse because it
required the least effort to make. The administration would have
gone to war with Iraq regardless of WMD, but it believed, based
on reasonable evidence, that there were WMD. In other words, the
Bush administration did not tell the whole truth about its
motives for invading Iraq, but it did believe that there were WMD
in the country.
The congressional investigation will probe what the
administration knew and when they knew it, in typical, tedious
Washington style. But they will miss the real story, which is far
more complex than the one presented. The administration hid its
motives for invading Iraq but did expect to find WMD there. From
the administration's point of view, the complexity of its motives
never would have become an issue had a single round of chemical
weapons been found. Either the administration set itself up for a
fall, or it is as surprised as anyone that no WMD have been
found.
Misleading the U.S. public about foreign policy is hardly novel.
Numerous books chronicle how former President John F. Kennedy cut
a secret deal with the Soviets over Cuba. In the deal, the United
States promised to withdraw its missiles from Turkey as long as
the Soviets kept it secret from the public. Franklin D. Roosevelt
was drawing up war plans with the British while publicly
declaring that he had no intention of getting involved in World
War II. Dwight Eisenhower lied about the U-2 incident, claiming
it was a weather plane that had gone off course -- 2,000 miles
off course! As far as lies go, Bush's was pretty tame. Unlike
Roosevelt, he never lied about wanting to go to war. Unlike
Kennedy, he never hid a secret deal. And unlike Eisenhower, he
never denied the U-2s were where they were supposed to be. The
most he can be accused of is lying about his reason for war.
Even that was unnecessary -- if he knew it was a lie. But there
is every reason to believe from the evidence that Bush believed,
as did most intelligence agencies around the world, that Hussein
had WMD. Everything Hussein did after November simply confirmed
this belief.
The question, therefore, is what happened to the weapons? There
are three possible explanations:
1. They never existed
2. Hussein destroyed them but didn't tell anybody.
3. They still exist.
Sherlock Holmes said that when the impossible is eliminated, then
whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. We are
in that situation now. It is impossible to believe Iraqi WMD
never existed because it is an absolute fact that Hussein used
chemical weapons on Iraqis. It is equally difficult to believe
that he would have destroyed them without at least inviting
former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix to the party. What
could Hussein possibly gain from destroying them in secret? It
makes no sense. Why did he behave as he did if he had no weapons?
We find it impossible to believe that Hussein once had WMD but
destroyed them in secret.
Therefore, the extraordinarily improbable must be true: Iraqi WMD
still exist. There is, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
notwithstanding, a guerrilla war under way in Iraq. It appears
Hussein is alive, possibly somewhere in Iraq. Chemical and
biological weapons never have been used in a guerrilla war. That
does not mean that they would not make excellent weapons used
against U.S. troops. Chemical and biological weapons do not
require huge containers. The bunkers that were built around Iraq
over the years, not all of them identified by U.S. intelligence,
could be hiding not only Hussein and his staff, but also the
missing WMD.
Congress is about to begin an investigation into a forgery about
Niger uranium, WMD and the rest. Congress is missing the point.
The issue is not whether the administration invented the story of
WMD. It is also not whether the administration went to war over
WMD. The real issue is where the WMD went and why the CIA doesn't
have a definitive answer to that. The WMD issue as Congress if
framing it is about as interesting as finding out when Kennedy
really knew about Cuban missiles and what secret deals he really
made. It is interesting, but not relevant. The urgent issue is:
Where are Iraq's weapons of mass destruction |
