Iraq’s nonexistent WMDs and the Bush administration’s credibility

By Ehsan Ahrari
Global Beat Syndicate

ALEXANDRIA, Va—President Bush’s main reason for invading Iraq was the claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He created his own “Bush doctrine” of preemption and regime change, and his own style—unilateralism—to conduct that war. Together, they continue to deprive the U.S. invasion of its highly desired international legitimacy. More to the point, no such weapons yet have been found.
As for those weapons of mass destruction, what happened? Were we misled boy our president, or was Mr. Bush misinformed by his intelligence agency? CIA Director George Tenet indicates otherwise. Equally important, the basic reason why we invaded Iraq was the sense of urgency that President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top official—and British Prime Minister Tony Blair as well—created. They argued against the prolonged use of UN inspections and economic sanctions that would force Saddam Hussein to cooperate with the international community.
In point of fact, the Iraqi leader did cooperate in the concluding months of 2002 and from January to March of 2003 by allowing UN inspections of Iraq’s WMD sites. But even while those inspections were being conducted, U.S. and British officials were making clear through constant force buildup around Iraq, and through their ominous rhetoric that the toppling of the Iraqi regime was a foregone conclusion even then. Ultimately, Mr. Bush decided to invade Iraq without UN approval and without seeking a broad international coalition.
Now the Bush administration is under heightened criticism due to fact that no WMDs were found in Iraq. Nor are there any substantiated links between Saddam’s regime and al-Qaeda, as Bush claimed prior to the invasion. Thus, global legitimacy continues to evade the U.S. force presence in Iraq. Moreover, ever since David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector, recently recommended an impartial inquiry underlying the failure of intelligence, the pressure has been building on Mr. Bush to conduct a larger inquiry into the decision to go to war.
As for the highly touted intelligence failure, it appears that the CIA wanted to be safe than sorry in its original estimations regarding Iraq’s WMD capabilities. It was dealing with a regime that had an established record of deception and of having WMD programs in the early 1990s. The Iraqi WMD facilities could not be inspected after August 1998, and no outside entity could be certain about its WMD potentials. The CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002 noted, “We judge that we are seeing only a portion of Iraq’s WMD efforts owning to Baghdad’s vigorous denial and deception efforts.” Translation: it was worse than expected. In fact, one former intelligence officer told a journalist how he “managed to survive” in bureaucratic wars that are the standard operating procedure of Washington officialdom. “When forced to make an assessment on the basis of fragmentary information,” he said, “it is better to err on the side of overstating the adversary’s capabilities.
The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research did not agree with the CIA’s estimates. Two explanations for this are now being bandied about Washington. First, that Saddam Hussein maintained a purposeful ambiguity on his regime’s WMD abilities to keep his domestic foes at bay. In the process, he supplied ample fodder for his external enemies to invade Iraq. The second explanation is that Saddam himself was deceived by his scientists and bureaucrats, who were too used to the good life and did not want to jeopardize their livelihood or survival. Thus, they spent enormous energy in creating the impression for the dictator that Iraq’s WMD programs were alive and well.
The absence of WMDs has indisputably created an enormous credibility gap for the Bush administration. Now Mr. Bush has dropped his previous opposition and agreed to an independent inquiry. The main reason for this change is that it threatens to affect his reelection bid. Mr. Bush’s calculation seems to be that even an independent inquiry is not likely to absolve him politically, but it might dampen the frequent public calls for resignations of top CIA officials until after the elections.
What is also at stake is the absence of impartial inquiry of the quality of intelligence supplied to the U.S. president before his decision to invade Iraq. This could affect the President’s preemption doctrine, indeed give it a body blow, because even more serious doubts will be raised if or when he decides to implement it in the future, or if he decides to address some other global problem by using military force.