[Peace-discuss] Scott Ritter on Iraq intelligence failures

[ppatton at uiuc.edu]

Published on Sunday, July 18, 2004 by the Times Union / 
Albany, New York
How We Got It so Wrong in Iraq
by Scott Ritter

Earlier this year, I testified before two investigative 
bodies -- the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the 
Butler Commission -- responsible for probing the massive 
failure of, respectively, the American and British 
intelligence services to properly assess the status of Iraq's 
ethereal weapons of mass destruction programs. The alleged 
existence of those programs was the foundation of the 
justification for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Senate 
committee issued its report July 9; the Butler Commission did 
the same on Wednesday. Both are harshly critical, with the 
primary focus of blame falling on the analytical arms of both 
nations' intelligence services, which are accused of grossly 
exaggerating and misrepresenting available data on Iraq's WMD 
capability. This lapse was real, and the negative impact on 
the integrity of the free world's most prominent intelligence 
services -- the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense 
Intelligence Agency in the United States, and Great Britain's 
Secret Intelligence Service, or MI-6, and Defense 
Intelligence Staff -- will take years to ascertain, and even 
more time to repair.

Both the Senate committee and the Butler Commission appear to 
take pains to underscore their shared findings that the 
failures of intelligence regarding Iraq's missing WMD rest 
largely with the analysts and intelligence collection 
managers, on both sides of the Atlantic, who forgot that 
their job as intelligence professionals was not to tell their 
bosses what they wanted to hear, but rather what the facts 
were, regardless of the political consequences.

Pointing a critical finger at these analysts and managers is 
fair; limiting the scope of criticism to these failures is 
not. Both President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair seem 
to be given a free pass by these investigations, which 
purport to have found no direct evidence of efforts by either 
the White House or 10 Downing Street to "cook" the 
intelligence on Iraq's WMD.

As I testified before both panels, looking for such a direct 
link was likely to prove futile. The issue, I noted, was much 
more complicated, involving years of advocacy in both the 
United States and Great Britain for regime change in Baghdad 
that had permeated all levels of government, corrupting 
formulation of sound policy with a "group think" conclusion 
that Saddam Hussein was a threat. Anything that could 
facilitate his removal became accepted, regardless of its 
veracity.

This "group think" approach can be traced to early 1995, when 
MI-6, working with the CIA's London station, put forward Iyad 
Allawi, now Iraq's prime minister, but then the head of an 
expatriate opposition movement known as the Iraqi National 
Alliance, as a viable vehicle for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

Throughout 1995 and into the early summer of 1996, the CIA 
and MI-6 worked with Allawi's alliance to cobble together a 
coup d'etat from within Saddam's inner circle. Saddam's 
security services uncovered the plot and liquidated those 
involved.

At the same time the coup attempt was being planned, United 
Nations weapons inspectors were making remarkable progress in 
accounting for Iraq's weapons programs. In July 1995, about 
the same time the CIA and MI-6 embraced Allawi's alliance, 
the Iraqi government, under pressure from the U.N. 
inspectors, finally disclosed its biological weapons program.

In August 1995, Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, defected 
to Jordan, and told the U.N., CIA and MI-6 that all of Iraq's 
weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed in the summer 
of 1991 under his direct orders. The Iraqi government, in 
response to Hussein Kamal's defection, turned over hundreds 
of thousands of hitherto undisclosed documents about their 
proscribed WMD programs, confirming data already known to the 
U.N. inspectors, and filling in many gaps.

While the U.N. was not in a position to verify total 
compliance by Iraq regarding its obligation to disarm, these 
dramatic events, combined with Iraq's cooperation in 
establishing the most intrusive, technologically advanced on-
site inspection regime in the history of arms control, gave 
the U.N. confidence that 90 to 95 percent of Iraq's WMD could 
be verifiably accounted for, and that in the face of 
effective monitoring inspections, the likelihood of the 
unaccounted-for WMD remaining in viable form was slim.

The effort to disarm Iraq was shifting from a search for 
hidden capability to a less threatening accounting problem. 
For advocates of regime change who needed the specter of a 
defiant (and dangerous) Saddam, this was not acceptable.

The attempted 1996 coup, and subsequent regime change 
activities, were not undertaken by renegade intelligence 
operatives, but rather as an extension of official (albeit 
secret) policy objectives approved by then-President Clinton 
and Blair, and made known to their respective legislative 
oversight bodies.

Both the Senate committee and the Butler Commission are 
heavily populated by personnel who were party to 
implementation of the regime change policy. Both are aware of 
efforts undertaken by their respective intelligence services 
to use the U.N. weapons inspection process not as a vehicle 
of disarmament, but as a tool for intelligence collection 
supportive of regime change. Those activities were not 
mandated by the Security Council and destroyed the integrity 
of the inspection-led disarmament effort.

The unwillingness of the American and British governments to 
capitalize on the dramatic breakthroughs regarding the 
disarmament of Iraq between July 1995 and July 1996 only 
underscores the reality that, when it came to the fate of 
Saddam's government, the outcome had been preordained. There 
was never an intention to allow a finding of Iraqi compliance 
concerning its disarmament obligation, even if one was 
warranted. Saddam was to be removed from power, and WMD were 
always viewed by the policymakers as the excuse for doing so.

The failure of either the Senate committee or the Butler 
Commission to recognize the role that the policy of regime 
change had in corrupting the analytical efforts of U.S. and 
British intelligence services means that not only will it be 
more difficult to achieve meaningful reform in these 
services, but more importantly, the general public will 
continue to remain largely ignorant of the true scope of 
failure regarding Iraq policy.

For representative democracies like the United States and 
Great Britain, with service members currently operating in 
harm's way inside Iraq, this is unacceptable.

Times Union materials copyright 1996-2004