Why was our intelligence wrong about Iraqi WMDs?

Great Debates
21

There was more than a “group inside” questioning the evidence – most of the intelligence community created the NIE, weighed all of the evidence, and produced the balanced view discussed by John Mace. More than 95% of us (I was in the community at the time) did our jobs in an intellectually rigorous way, despite the Administration’s drumbeat which was constantly in the news and coloring opinions around and above us.

The way it worked was that the document was composed of an outline, and under each heading was a one or two-page report by the expert on that topic. The articles were passed up the chain, edited for persuasiveness and clarity, strung together into a coherent argument, and then circulated to other experts in the field for review. When the consensus was reached, the NIE was passed up the chain for approval. The community position on almost any topic is reached that way: the expert in his cubicle writes the report after seeking peer approval, the paper floats its way up, and the CIA (and possibly the expert) gets to brief the President on the topic a few days (or hours) later.

At the same time, VP Cheney had created the Office for Special Plans. I didn’t know anything about them at the time, but I sure saw their work. At the time, I couldn’t understand how a sentence beginning “We have no evidence to suggest…” would get edited to “It is likely that…” but now I’m pretty sure I’ve figured it out based on open press reporting.

These guys were a cell of maybe 20 political types who, for some reason or another, were given a seat in the morning briefings with Bush and permitted to present their opinions on the intelligence as though they had equal credibility (I assert that they did not have anything approaching equal credibility, and that’s about as nicely as I can put it). They were not intelligence professionals. Their goal was not to examine the evidence and present the conclusions that make the most sense; their goal was to search for evidence to support the conclusions they were asked for. Someone at that high-and-mighty political level lost a fight, and the OSP guys were allowed to include their opinions in the NIE right alongside the entire community’s consensus, and wherever the positions diverged, the community position was overruled, or given equal weight at best.

Imagine that the Oscars are being given out next year by a new process: the Academy will meet and name their picks, but they can’t present their list until (a drunken college fraternity / Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity / a group of Muslim fundamentalists / a panel of seven-year-olds) have edited the list to their liking. If the two can’t agree, then the latter group gets to pick first place, but the Academy can “footnote” the announcement with their pick. This is how the OSP helped write the NIE. This is why we are in Iraq.

22

I’d like a cite on this, or better yet a retraction. I worked with the intelligence community, and found all of my coworkers to be intellectually honest, aggressive about standing up for their conclusions, and just as professional or moreso than the average person who does not hold a security clearance.

How long did you spend in the I.C.?

23

Some time, in fact.

But seeing as you ask, your prior post is in fact correct. I just happen to define the OSP as part of the relevant intelligence community.

That said, there is at least one instance of an intelligence analyst resigning after being told the President wants a war and his job is to find a way. Good for him, but what of the others, who didn’t resign?

24

We may have to agree to disagree on that point, but I see your reasoning; if the White House gave them a seat at the table, they were in, even if nobody else at the table would speak to them. If we are counting them in the IC, then for that particular subset of the IC, I will heartily agree to almost any scurrilous statement you can make about them, and raise you a “politically-motivated lying sacks of excrement.”

Well the military members I served with were stop-lossed, and couldn’t resign. We had a lot of liberty, though, because anyone pressuring us to change our assessment for political reasons could be asked to put the order in writing. I was regularly pressured on unrelated issues and never folded, because our leadership were incredibly supportive of military analysts. I wish I could say I was pressured on Iraq and resisted, but the only work I did on the document was proofreading. Marginal notes I added on the content were rightly ignored.

Most of the DoD civilians I worked with had 20+ years in, were widely considered the experts on their fields, and are the folks I spoke of glowingly above. If they had jumped ship they would have been replaced with woefully inexperienced kids, straight out of college (like me at the time!) who had no idea how to spot a political spin-job in an NIE. Staying to fight – even if it meant losing – was far better than giving up the fight. I know of one or two who went on to push back pretty hard when the Administration was ramping up for Iran. I wasn’t in the IC for that fight, so I can’t say how much this was their victory and how much was a little wishful revisionism – I know lots of the analysts will view the Iraq NIE as the community’s biggest failure of their career.

I can’t speak for the management types, but I heard from a friend in DC that lots of folks downtown realized the NIE was going to be pushed through one way or another (and would steamroll anyone who pushed back) and just got the hell out of its way: they had a deputy-assistant-nobody sign off on it before transferring him, or some other fairly silent protest. They are part of the community, though. I’m not sure where to draw the line between pragmatism and cowardice in their actions.

My building was run by a colonel who had two or three layers of mixed military-civilian leadership under him; I can’t think of anyone in the building except the colonel whose resignation in protest would have made even the tiniest ripple up the chain, and the colonel wasn’t an intelligence guy anyway – he was an old fighter pilot who was there to be someone’s Big Boss for three years before pinning on his star. Even if he had gone to his boss and said “we’ve got a dozen senior intelligence analysts who are ready to resign if this goes out the door,” I don’t know whether someone would have called their bluff or not. I don’t think anyone resigning could have stopped the publication of that document, though.

[Oh, and a quick correction: Cheney didn’t create OSP. It was created by Rumsfeld and/or Feith and Wolfowitz, depending whose version you believe. The connection to Cheney was a highly unorthodox backdoor arrangement that makes the whole thing stink even more.]

25

But we didn’t actually know that until after the fact! It wasn’t like Saddam wasn’t playing cat and mouse with the weapons inspectors!
This whole thing was a result of post 9/11 fear of “what next” and needing to actually peek behind Saddam’s “man behind the curtain” to see what was really there for ourselves.

26

Actually, he wasn’t playing that game, despite, once again, claims to the contrary by the US administration. You should have paid more attention to what the weapon inspectors themselves were stating and less to the chatter that was coming out of the White House, chatter which, during this whole mess, never had any relation with reality, except by accident.
And besides the US administration, I think the US medias deserve their share of blame, because most informations weren’t exactly top secret. The very existence of this thread shows the extent of the disinformation at the time.

27

And, in what way exactly was he “playing cat and mouse” with the weapon inspectors in early 2003? From what I read, they had pretty unfettered access…and in fact, while it is hard to prove a negative in terms of actual non-existence of the weapons, they were finding that the American intelligence that they were being given on where to look was complete and utter garbage. Here is a CBS news piece about it a month before the war started.

Of course, we all know that the war wasn’t really about what weapons Saddam might have had at the moment anyway. If it was, the Administration would have put some sort of priority on securing the facilities where said weapons might be present so that they didn’t end up in the hands of terrorists. The evidence that I have seen suggests that they didn’t do this at all. This suggests to me a certain lack of concern about them…or else such mindboggling stupidity that these people ought not be allowed to run a sanitation truck, let alone a country.

28

Amen! The U.S. media really screwed up big time on this one. Judith Miller at the New York Times was one of the most extreme examples…But there were really very few media stories at all that were any good. That CBS News one that I linked to was one of the few. The only media outlet that was apparently pretty good as a whole was Knight Ridder.

29

I remember reading a Tom Clancy book years ago (I don’t remember off the top of my head which one) where one of the intelligence types who would brief the president brought in 3 reports…one with the best case scenario, one with the middle case, and one with the worst…and then briefed the president with the assessment that seemed to be what the president wanted to hear.

To a certain extent I think that is what happened (probably not in exactly that same way). Remember something here…the various intelligence agency’s were still reeling a bit from failing to detect and thwart 9/11…and I think to an extent they were wanting to get some of their own back. Couple that with an administration that WANTED Iraq to be either at fault or at least linked with what was going on and was therefore pre-disposed to believe whatever data pointed to the conclusion they already wanted. In addition I think there was a general (and generally unfounded) mindset that Saddam was trying to pull a fast one and that he could be a threat. Saddam himself did much to help build this image in fact…and Iraq’s actions throughout the 90’s were so wildly inconsistent that it was easy (for us blind sheeple types) to believe that he could and would rebuild his programs and pose a real threat…if not to the US directly then to our interests in the ME.

-XT

30

How so?

31

But what if it was a situation where we “believed/knew he had them” but we weren’t exactly sure where they were (or after the fact, where they went, for that matter)?
He DID have them, he DID use them…so where did they go?
You can hide a lot of shit in the desert, or you can dismantle s fledgeling operation to produce such weapons pretty quickly to make it look innocuous.

32

And what if our greatest fears about Saddam’s supposed arsenal proved to be true? Would we be having this conversation?
I am not trying to defend the current administration, I am looking for someone to PROVE that the reasons for going into Iraq in the wake of 9/11 (and yes, I know there was no Al-Queada link, so please) and the subsequent fear that Saddam, being a known hater of the USA and ISrael, and a sociopath, and the US being essentially at war with Iraq with “no fly zones” anyway, was maybe overtly concerned about a potential threat to itself (again, post 9/11) and decided to act instead of wait.
Is there no logic in that?

33

Well, that’s not what we were being told. We were being told that there was specific intelligence on what he had. It now turns out that said intelligence was weak to begin with, was being shown to be garbage by the inspectors, and indeed turned out to be completely wrong.

Frankly, I think the Administration more or less understood this when they invaded as almost immediately once the invasion began they seemed to be lowering expectations regarding what we would find WMD-wise. I do think that they probably thought that they would find something, i.e., enough to spin-up to justify the invasion, but as I noted, the idea that they were honestly concerned with there being weapons that would be dangerous if they got into the hands of terrorists begs the question of why they basically took actions that made it much more likely that such weapons would end up in the hands of terrorists. (It was no secret that the intelligence folks…and just about any intelligent person…thought that the idea that Saddam himself would give such weapons to terrorists was very unlikely.) We did much more to secure the oil fields than to secure any likely places where WMDs would be stored.

34

If you have no plans to secure the potential weapons sites, then I would say that there is absolutely positively no logic in that…If there ever was to begin with.

35

But it didn’t. It turned out that Iraq really had no WMD…either the actual weapons or the programs either. Oh, I have no doubt that eventually Saddam would have at least tried to rebuild those programs, at least to some extent. But there was zero reason for us to distract ourselves from Afghanistan and AQ and trot off to Iraq at the time and in the way we did it. Saddam and Iraq were contained…and we had bigger fish to fry.

Saddam and Iraq were a paper tiger. The sanctions were working and preventing Saddam from amassing the funds needed to restart his weapons programs…let alone to let him fully even rebuild his CONVENTIONAL forces. The sparing in the no fly zone was just that…sparing. It had no wider context.

By the same token we DID have a very real enemy, and we already had a very real war to fight. And we dropped the ball. In the process of dropping that ball we have spend billions of dollars, managed to tie up the bulk of our military in what looks to me to be pretty close to indefinitely at this point and generally fucked up by the numbers…and all for nothing. Had we taken care of business and spend even a fraction of that money on going after AQ they would be looking for holes to hide in at this point…or be buried in them. THAT was our fight, that was what should have been our focus.

Instead, as it is today we do not have the military force left to crash a cub scout jamboree…because what isn’t tied up in Iraq is worn out, beat up, un-supplied and generally just tired. And THAT is the fuckup we can lay squarely at the feet of this administration.

None.

-XT

36

Not much. If you want to say that Saddam was a “sociopath”, I assume you mean to suggest that he was crazy enough to attack the USA? You know, the guys with the 50 megaton bombs. Us. 'Cause, of course, he’d have to be crazy to do that, right?

So why didn’t he? If, as you say, he was nuts and already “being essentially at war”, what was he waiting for? The US bitch slapped him down Main Street and up Broadway, and he does nothing? This crazy US hating guy doesn’t launch his satanic nuclear anthrax unicorns?

Why?

37

The book "Fiasco" lays it out better than any other analysis I’ve seen. In reference to what others have mentioned you had the confluence of three main factors.

1: Iraqi con men on the make being promoted and vouched for by the master con man Chalabi

2: An intemperate and foolish President determined well before 9-11 to somehow make an example of Saddam for thumbing his nose at his father, killing US Kurd allies, and being (in his view) the literal embodiment of evil.

3: A group of scholarly, intellectual neo-cons, many (though not all) with strong cultural and political ties to Israel, determined to put their theories of nation change into play in the middle east, with a strong eye towards the strategic protection of Israel from aggressor states. I include Cheney and Rumsfeld as an extension of this group, although they had their own convergent agendas that were not specifically motivated by concerns for the protection of Israel.

38

Because, despite some criticisms regarding the gathering an processing of informations, there was no way the American intelligence could possibly be that wrong in its assesment of the situation in Irak, and because it has been largely publicized since, from many sources, that people inside the american intelligence community weren’t at the time providing the BS that was coming out of the WH.
The OP is asking how could americans and others services have been so mistaken, despite the fact that the “others” services actually weren’t mistaken, and the fact that it has been since disclosed many times that the american services weren’t, either.
So, how would people be still asking this question (or, like we can see later in the thread, still make statements that were already widely known to be false at the time) if not as a result of having been bathed in so much propaganda at the time that they haven’t yet managed to get rid of it?
For instance, how comes you’re still stating, years later, that Hussein was playing games with the weapon inspectors, even though these inspectors were publically reporting exactly the contrary at the time? The only explanation I can think of is that you have read/heard in medias the blatant bullshit the US administation was spreading, and that the reality, the facts weren’t reported or were under-reported. If you have an alternative explanation, I would be curious to know it.

39

I think this got a bit garbled. But, first of all, there was a desire to do something about Iraq even before 9/11, and the rapid ordering of plans after showed that there was no real connection, even in the minds of the Bush Admin.

Second, for the war, the only thing that counts is the status of intelligence in early 2003. That so many countries didn’t want anything to do with the invasion shows that the UN inspectors demonstrated a lack of WMDs. The rush to war as the lack of evidence of the WMDs became clear indicates that Bush knew full well that there weren’t going to be any found. Thus he, or whoever pulled his strings, was either deluded, stupid, or a liar. Your choice.

40

I’d just like to thank you for taking the time to post here – it’s uniquely qualified views like yours that make this board so edifying. I find this kind of glimpse into the government sausage factory fascinating.

-P