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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rascal who wrote (123036)	1/11/2004 5:20:30 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The Faulty Weapons Estimates ____________________________ Lead Editorial The New York Times Published: January 11, 2004 There seems little doubt that the Bush administration's prime justification for invading Iraq — the fear that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass destruction — was way off base. Nine months of fruitless searching have made that increasingly clear. But last week three new reports cast further doubt on the administration's reckless rush to invade Iraq. Taken together, they paint a picture far different from the one presented to Americans early last year. They depict a world in which Saddam Hussein, though undeniably eager to make Iraq a threatening world power, was far from any serious steps to do that. The reports strengthen our conviction that whatever threat Iraq posed did not require an immediate invasion without international support. And they underline the importance of finding out how far the Bush administration's obsession with the Iraqi dictator warped the American intelligence reports that did so much to convince Congress and the public that the attack was justified. The likelihood that significant weapons of mass destruction will be found seemed to grow even more remote last week with publication of an investigative report by Barton Gellman in The Washington Post. Mr. Gellman, who perused Iraqi documents and interviewed key Iraqis and members of the American search team, found that Iraq's effort to produce terror weapons had been so thoroughly beaten down by conflict, sanctions and arms embargoes that its forbidden weapons program amounted mainly to wishful thinking. A program to produce missiles with enough range to reach neighboring capitals, for example, turned out to exist only in designs and computations on two compact discs. Experts estimated it would have taken at least six years to build the missile, if it had worked at all. A planned genetic engineering lab to design germ weapons was never completed. Most dramatically of all, an internal letter, written by Iraq's top unconventional-weapons official in 1995 to one of Saddam Hussein's sons, asserted unequivocally that Iraq had destroyed its entire inventory of biological weapons agents in 1991, proving the falsity of intelligence estimates that Iraq still possessed large quantities of germ materials. The failure to find anything significant has particularly disturbed Kenneth Pollack, a former Clinton administration national security official whose book "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq" led many moderates and Democrats to believe that an invasion was justified — at least in time to prevent Saddam Hussein from acquiring nuclear weapons, a prospect that seemed only a few years away. Now, in an article in The Atlantic magazine, Mr. Pollack anguishes over how estimates of Iraq's capabilities could have been so far off. He puts most of the blame on the intelligence community, which overestimated the scope and progress of Iraq's weapons programs starting in the late 1990's, partly because a lack of hard evidence led analysts to assume the worst. But he also condemns the Bush administration for distorting the intelligence estimates in making the case for going to war, particularly by implying that Iraq could have had a nuclear weapon within a year when estimates suggested five to seven years was more likely. Even that number now looks far-fetched given that Iraq's nuclear program was virtually eliminated. Analysts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace also found that three intelligence services that are arguably the best in the world — those of the United States, Britain and Israel — were tragically unable to provide accurate information on Iraq. But the Carnegie experts are even harsher in condemning the administration for deliberate exaggerations. They argue that the intelligence community gave reasonably cautious assessments up until mid-2002, when official statements and estimates suddenly became increasingly alarmist. The Carnegie analysts accuse the Bush administration of putting intense pressure on intelligence experts to conform, of minimizing the existence of dissenting views, and of routinely dropping caveats and uncertainties in painting a worst-case picture. What emerges most forcefully from these reports is the need for two thorough inquiries. Even though members of the American search team in Iraq told Mr. Gellman they hold little prospect for major discoveries of forbidden weapons, the search must continue vigorously to a conclusion, preferably with the assistance of United Nations inspectors who have a huge database on Iraq and are more credible to much of the world. Back home, a nonpartisan investigation independent of political pressures from the administration and Congress is needed to get a better sense of how judgments about Iraq were so disastrously mistaken. Nothing can be fixed until we know for sure how it happened. nytimes.com