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'Solid intelligence'?
By Zvi Bar'el
Tags: Israel news, WMD, Saddam 

"We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country. Are we to assume that he stopped when they left? The history, the logic and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger." Thus declared president George W. Bush to the world on September 12, 2002.

On January 28, 2003, in his State of the Union address, Bush uttered 16 words that he and members of the international intelligence community would later regret: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." George Tenet, then-head of the CIA, later said he should have stopped the president from making this statement.

A week or so thereafter, then-secretary of state Colin Powell appeared before the United Nations. "My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence," he stated.
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Toward the end of 2003, seven months after the second Gulf War started, and in the wake of intensive but fruitless searches, it became clear that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction. Furthermore, it had no plans to acquire them. But it was only in January 2005, nearly two years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, that White House press secretary Scott McClellan officially announced that the search for weapons of mass destruction had ended, with none being found.

Three questions remain today: Why didn't Saddam Hussein admit that he did not have these weapons and prevent the war? Why didn't the U.S. intelligence apparatus know Saddam had no such weapons? And was the claim of their existence meant to cover up what could be perceived as an ideological war, or a "settling of accounts" after the First Gulf War in 1990-91 ?

The truth is that Saddam always denied having a plan to develop weapons of mass destruction, but no one believed him. The construction of the nuclear reactor destroyed by Israel in 1981, the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1988 and documents discovered by one of Saddam's sons-in-law, who fled to Jordan in 1995, all pointed to the existence of chemical weapons and perhaps an intention to develop other unconventional weapons as well, but there was no proof of this after 1990. The game of hide-and-seek that Saddam played with UN inspectors, and America's total lack of faith in Hans Blix - head of the International Atomic Energy Commission and the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission team - eventually led to a complete rejection of Saddam's claim.

The most disturbing question is why American intelligence did not know the true story. Perhaps the most fascinating material on this subject is the report prepared by the Bush-appointed Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the U.S. Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, chaired by Senator Charles Robb and Judge Lawrence Silverman. The panel concluded that the Iraq weapons debacle constituted the most destructive affair in contemporary U.S. history. Its 620-page report is filled with details of faulty work methods, insufficient preliminary inquiries by analysts and dependence on dubious sources.

In this and other reports ordered by Congress, as well as in many books written subsequently, one finds abundant proof of negligence, unwarranted euphoria and an inability to question certain entrenched beliefs. Was it Bush's aspiration to oust Saddam Hussein that drove the intelligence branches to take his side, instead of deciding based on their own information?

Perhaps we will have to wait for the White House archives to be opened in the future to understand how diplomatic, military and intelligence disasters like this can be cooked up.
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