Leaders Sought a Threat. Spies Get the Blame. nytimes.com
[ This article is a little bland, but it's notable for the nice photo of Powell doing his duty in propaganda operations past. Caption: A year ago, Secretary of State Colin Powell showed the United Nations a vial he said could hold Iraqi anthrax. I hold in my hand a list . . . ]
By PATRICK E. TYLER
LONDON — A British tabloid newspaper last week framed the public mood of cynicism over Iraq's missing weapons by playing on two words: "unfounded" and "unfound."
It is "unfounded," as the jurist Lord Hutton ruled Wednesday, to say that British - and perhaps by extension American - leaders lied to or deliberately misled the public about the threat from Iraqi chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. Yet, The Daily Mirror said, something is rotten in the apple bin that these weapons, which "they took us to war over," remain "unfound."
Britons and Americans remain baffled in trying to sort it out.
But with the testimony in Washington from David A. Kay, the inspector who led the hunt for Iraq's weapons and now says "we were all wrong" about the threat from Iraq, there is also a danger that the intelligence agencies in both countries will bear the brunt of recriminations.
Why? Because it seems more likely than ever that they will fail to confirm that Saddam Hussein was the imminent threat that he was made out to be by President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair. On both sides of the Atlantic, there are officials and experts who say it would be a mistake to look simply at the intelligence "failure," because many of them believe the failure was a much broader one of politics than of intelligence.
After all, the specter of Mr. Hussein's arsenal was built on data that he once had illegal weapons and had used them, and that he could not account for weapons he claimed to have destroyed. Intelligence logic suggested that he must still have them and was making more.
This picture took form largely in public and was shaped as much by politicians as by intelligence analysts or spies. Everybody - President Bill Clinton, intelligence agencies, United Nations inspectors - believed it. All through the 1990's, there was a bipartisan consensus in Congress that something had to be done about Mr. Hussein, if the political will could be found. Sept. 11 offered the opportunity to marshal that will.Six months later, Washington and London began to formulate a doctrine of pre-emption with a determination to confront Saddam Hussein. By the summer of 2002, Mr. Blair and his advisers could see that war was coming by the following spring, but he knew there was formidable resistance among the British public.
And that is when the critical shift occurred. Political hands in both capitals redrafted the intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs - intelligence that had not appreciably changed in years - to make it appear that the threat was no longer merely evolving, but was imminent. Intelligence professionals in both governments willingly lent their credibility to this task, and may assume the blame, but political leaders drove the process.
Last week, a senior British intelligence official told a small gathering that the news media and "some politicians" have "unreasonable expectations of what intelligence can deliver." It can "illuminate, fill in parts of the picture, but it is often contradictory and incomplete," he said, making the case that such a picture can be used to argue for alarm or complacence, caution or action. The final assessment lies with accountable political leaders.
Last Christmas, British intelligence officers made light of the absurd demands on their craft by singing a song with the refrain, "The possibility cannot be excluded that" - a favored expression of analysts who don't know the answer.
Yet, the official said, the world wants intelligence of the kind that would prevent terrorism - and that the Bush and Blair administrations served up.
Demand for convincing intelligence on Iraq's weapons rose in 2002 as Iraq began to be portrayed as a much more imminent threat to the West, first by Vice President Dick Cheney in August, then by Mr. Blair in an intelligence "dossier" the next month. Its revelation was that Mr. Hussein could deploy chemical and biological arms "within 45 minutes of a decision.''
A year later, after the invasion, Sir Richard Dearlove, chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, was asked whether Mr. Blair had taken this shard of intelligence and given it "undue prominence."
"I think, given the misinterpretation that was placed on the 45 minutes intelligence, with the benefit of hindsight, you can say that is a valid criticism," he answered.
What misinterpretation? he was asked.
"Well, I think the original report referred to chemical and biological munitions and that was taken to refer to battlefield weapons," he said. "I think what subsequently happened in the reporting was that it was taken that the 45 minutes applied, let us say, to weapons of a longer range." Thus battlefield artillery shells that Iraq might still have filled with sarin or mustard gas became strategic weapons that threatened the region and the world.
When the case for war in Iraq was first laid out by Mr. Blair in April 2002, on a visit to the United States, it was based on a view that Sept. 11 had changed the world's security equation. After such a catastrophe, to stand by and watch Iraq rebuild its chemical and biological arsenal, perhaps a nuclear weapon, "would be to grossly ignore the lesson of Sept. 11 and we will not do it," Mr. Blair said. Mr. Bush followed with his doctrine of pre-emptive war a few months later.
What this meant was profound. After Sept. 11, it was predictable that leaders would seek a pre-emption strategy. Few Americans were willing to chance another surprise. But it was harder to see the implications for international law and for defining how intelligence - always murky at best - would be used to justify future wars.
For a decade, the threat from Iraq had been evolving, not imminent. That would change with Mr. Cheney's warning in two speeches of a nuclear-armed Iraq and in Mr. Blair's dossier, with its signal of a moment of peril.
A seasoned government official, who had supported the goal of removing Mr. Hussein since 1991 and who closely observed both Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair during these months, said this was a "huge presentational shift." By fall 2002, said this official, Mr. Blair had "lost faith in the persuasiveness'' of portraying Mr. Hussein as a future threat "and he went to imminent threat."
The official, an ally of Mr. Blair, said the prime minister's shift was tactical. "It was clear by then that we almost certainly would be at war by the spring of 2003," the official said, and "the only sensible thing was to start planning for war." Sir Jeremy Greenstock, then British ambassador to the United Nations, pressed Washington and London about the option of an autumn war, to allow inspections more time, but found no takers in Washington, the official said.
Many experts believe that the mistakes that led American and British intelligence agencies - and some United Nations inspectors - to misperceive the state of Iraq's unconventional arsenal are likely to be more mundane than profound. Mr. Kay, for example, has suggested that corrupt Iraqi scientists kept unconventional weapons programs alive for financial gain and that some Iraqi generals assumed that others might have hidden stocks of chemical and germ weapons.
It is also impossible to discount that after Saddam Hussein dropped mustard gas and the nerve agent sarin on rebellious Kurds and Iranian soldiers from 1983 to 1988 - a campaign whose horrific effects this reporter witnessed - any reasonable analyst might have concluded that "the possibility cannot be excluded" that Mr. Hussein was still hiding some of those weapons.
Still, it seems inevitable on both sides of the Atlantic that the Iraq inquiries will ultimately return to the political arena, where raw and sometimes contradictory intelligence was used by leaders to turn what had been an evolving threat into an imminent one. That, says the official who observed the process from the inside, "is what got everyone in trouble." |
