August 5, 2003
COMMENTARY
The Real Intelligence Failure?
By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
The media has been focusing obsessively on the relatively minor issue of how an incorrect assertion about Iraq's nuclear ambitions got into the president's State of the Union speech. In doing so, it has missed the much larger issue, which is that of Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction. The inability to locate these weapons is vastly more consequential to American credibility than the fact that the White House staff failed to vet 16 words in a single speech. The missing weapons reflect a much more fundamental institutional intelligence failure.
The source of this failure does not lie in the political agenda of this administration. The Bush people are right in saying that their estimates of WMD stockpiles were no different from the conclusions of the Clinton administration. And the latter would say, if asked, that their assessment was drawn from Unscom, the U.N. weapons inspectors who operated in Iraq from 1991-98. The intelligence failure is thus ultimately traceable to Unscom, and deeply embedded in an intelligence process that in the 1990s was biased toward overestimation of threats.
I begin with a presumption that the coming weeks and months will not reveal a cache of chemical, biological, or nuclear materials buried somewhere deep in the desert. The reason is simple: After three months in which the U.S. has had every conceivable opportunity to threaten, bribe, and cajole Iraqi scientists involved in the WMD program to reveal their whereabouts, not a single one has done so. On the contrary, they have all stuck to the official line from before the war, that these weapons once existed but were disposed of sometime after the first U.N. inspectors arrived back in 1991. We have to confront the possibility that they are telling the truth.
Why then did Unscom and the U.S. intelligence community believe so firmly that the weapons programs continued big time long after 1991? It was because there was plenty of evidence indicating that the Iraqis were lying, in the form of documents, communications intercepts, defector reports, and other types of suspicious behavior. But this evidence may have been the product of a deeper deceit, and its importance overestimated by everybody.
We know for sure that the Iraqis had very ambitious chemical, biological, and nuclear programs in the '80s. They used chemical weapons against the Kurds and Iranians, and evidently had more potent stocks of VX and sarin ready for use. The U.S. was surprised with the extent of these programs, including their progress on nuclear weapons, when they were revealed by Unscom after the first Gulf War. Unscom, backed by the implicit threat of U.S. power, was able to destroy many of these weapons and evidently motivated the Iraqis to get rid of others it didn't find. After that point, with Iraq under U.N. sanctions, Saddam Hussein likely ordered that the programs be reconstituted, and some desultory efforts were made along these lines. But the extent of this reconstitution was vastly exaggerated by the Iraqis themselves.
Economists have a simple maxim to explain human behavior: People respond to incentives. And if one looks at the incentives facing both the Iraqi scientists, Unscom, and U.S. intelligence, one sees the likely roots of the problem. Iraq was a totalitarian system in which everyone was forced to cater to Saddam's whims. We know that his son Uday, as head of the Iraqi Olympic committee, tortured losing athletes. We also know that during this war, Saddam was being fed false information about the success of his forces by commanders fearful of telling the truth. Iraqi scientists had every incentive to exaggerate the extent of their activities in internal communications with the regime. This appears to have been the case with the hapless Iraqi charged with developing the toxin ricin. He told his U.S. interrogators that he was never able to produce quantities of sufficient purity and toxicity for weapons use, but nonetheless reported to Baghdad that he was managing a large, successful program. It is also possible that Saddam understood that his own people were lying or exaggerating Iraq's capabilities, but wanted word to quietly slip out as a deterrent to the U.S. -- even as Iraq officially denied their existence.
Unscom and U.S. intelligence faced skewed incentives of their own when interpreting these communications. Both investment bankers and intelligence analysts earn a living by making predictions about the future. The bankers face relatively balanced incentives: If they are overly optimistic, they may lose a lot of money. But if they are overly pessimistic, they will also lose by failing to get in on the next big thing. The intelligence community, by contrast, faces incentives strongly biased toward pessimism in periods following a failure to predict serious threats. The worst thing that can befall someone charged with responsibility for national security is to be the next Husband Kimmel, who was in command of U.S. Pacific Forces on Dec. 7, 1941. Before Pearl Harbor Kimmel had access to some intelligence data, in the form of Japanese "winds" codes, that in retrospect might have provided warning of the attack. He was subsequently cashiered and went down in history as the man who was asleep at the switch at this critical historical juncture. (Kimmel was eventually exonerated by the Navy, more than 50 years after the event.)
Both Unscom and U.S. intelligence were unpleasantly surprised by the extent of the Iraqi WMD programs uncovered in 1991. Thereafter, both had strong incentives not to be made fools of again. Unscom developed estimates of the extent of covert Iraqi research and stockpiles not accounted for, but whose existence could not be verified. The Clinton administration used the Unscom tallies as a baseline, and supplemented them with worst-case estimates based on intelligence it gathered. The Bush administration simply continued this process. Overestimation was passed down the line until it was taken as gospel by everyone (myself included) and used to justify the U.S. decision to go to war.
The media's focus on whether President Bush or his advisors were lying is thus totally misplaced. Most in the administration honestly believed there were significant stocks of weapons and active programs that would be found, even if they let slip a false assertion about yellowcake in Niger. Why else would Centcom have been so concerned to protect U.S. forces against possible chemical/biological attack?
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The scenario I have presented is obviously speculative. But it is more plausible than any of the alternative explanations. Assuming weapons are not ultimately found, the Iraqis must have disposed of them at some point. Some have suggested they were destroyed or secreted to other countries just before the war. But if so, why did Saddam not reveal this, and save himself from an invasion? And why have U.S. forces, with complete access to the country, not been able to find evidence of their recent disposal?
It is much more likely that the weapons were disposed of long ago, and that all of Iraq's subsequent suspicious behavior was the product of half-hearted efforts at reconstitution that were ultimately fruitless but taken with utter seriousness by others. The failure is not one of dishonest politicians and officials, but of a broader institutional process involving multiple intelligence agencies and the U.N.
The systemic bias toward pessimism following an intelligence failure continues to influence our policy. As in the case of Pearl Harbor, someone was asleep at the switch on Sept. 11, and fingers have been pointing ever since (most recently, in the form of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report). Given the magnitude of the stakes (i.e., terrorists armed with nuclear weapons) it is understandable that people want to plan against the worst case. But worst-case planning bears certain costs as well, in terms of America's relations with the rest of the world and the way it treats its own citizens.
What we need now is not more politicized debate over specific items in presidential speeches, but a careful review of what Unscom and the intelligence community thought they knew about Iraqi programs going all the way back to the end of the 1991 war. This is being undertaken currently by David Kay, the former U.N. weapons inspector, in a closely held process. What he finds needs to come out in the open soon. What is at stake is not the credibility of one administration, but of a system designed to protect the world against weapons of mass destruction.
Mr. Fukuyama, a professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins, is the author of "Our Posthuman Future" (Picador, 2003).
URL for this article:
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Updated August 5, 2003 |
