What Happened to Iraq's WMD
How politics corrupts intelligence
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/12/04/EDGQIF5U1L1.DTL
Scott Ritter
Sunday, December 4, 2005
Democrats accuse the president and his supporters of deliberately
misleading them and the American people about the nature of the Iraqi
threat. Republicans respond that the Democrats are rewriting history,
that all parties involved had access to the same intelligence data and
had drawn the same conclusions. Typical of the Republican-led rebuttal
are statements made by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who noted that
"every intelligence agency in the world, including the Russian,
French, including the Israeli, all had reached the same conclusion,
and that was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction."
But this is disingenuous. The intelligence services of everyone else
were not proclaiming Iraq to be in possession of WMD. Rather, the
intelligence services of France, Russia, Germany, Great Britain and
Israel were noting that Iraq had failed to properly account for the
totality of its past proscribed weapons programs, and in doing so left
open the possibility that Iraq might retain an undetermined amount of
WMD. There is a huge difference in substance and nuance between such
assessments and the hyped-up assertions by the Bush administration
concerning active programs dedicated to the reconstitution of WMD, as
well as the existence of massive stockpiles of forbidden weaponry.
The actions and rhetoric of the Bush administration were aided by the
tendency by most involved to accept at face value any negative
information pertaining to Hussein and his regime, regardless of the
source's reliability. This trend was especially evident in Congress,
responsible for oversight on matters pertaining to foreign policy,
intelligence and national security.
One might be inclined to excuse lesser members of the legislative
branch for such actions, given their lack of access to sensitive
intelligence, but not so senior figures who sit on oversight
committees, such as California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who
occupied a seat on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. Today,
Feinstein all-too conveniently "regrets" her vote in favor of war on
Iraq, but defends her yes vote in 2002 by noting that "the
intelligence was very conclusive: Saddam possessed biological and
chemical weapons." This is a far different from the statement
Feinstein made to me in the summer of 2002, when she acknowledged that
the Bush administration had not provided any convincing intelligence
to back up its claims about Iraqi WMD.
In contrast to Feinstein's actions, Sen. Bob Graham, a Florida
Democrat who also sat on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee,
noted in September 2002 that the Bush administration's decisions
regarding Iraq had been made in the absence of a National Intelligence
Estimate from the CIA. The CIA hastily rushed to produce such a
document, but the resulting report appeared as much to be an example
of intelligence being fixed around policy, as opposed to policy being
derived from intelligence. Graham, his eyes opened by the seemingly
baseless rush toward conflict in Iraq, voted no on the war. Feinstein
and others, their eyes wide shut, voted yes.
The crux of the problem of this Iraqi WMD intelligence "failure" lies
in the fact that the U.S. intelligence community and the products it
produces are increasingly influenced by the corrupting influences of
politics. The politicization of the intelligence community allows the
process of fixing intelligence around policy to become pervasive, and
the increasingly polarized political climate in America prevents any
real checks and balances through effective oversight, leaving
Americans at the mercy of politicians who have placed partisan
politics above the common good. The recent overhaul of the U.S.
intelligence community, which resulted in the creation of the national
intelligence chief, only reinforces this politicization, because the
new director reports directly to the president and is beyond the reach
of congressional oversight.
The only true fix to the problems of intelligence that manifested
themselves in the Iraqi WMD debacle is to depoliticize the process.
The position of national intelligence chief should be a 10-year
appointment, like that of the director of the FBI, and subject to the
consent of Congress. Likewise, all intelligence made available to the
president to make national security policy should be shared with
select members of Congress, from both parties, so that America will
never again find itself at war based upon politically driven
intelligence. Finally, and perhaps most important, the American people
should start exercising effective accountability regarding their
elected officials, so that those who voted yes for a war based on
false and misleading information never again have the honor and
privilege of serving in high office.
______________________________
Learn more
Who: Scott Ritter
What: Former U.N. weapons inspector will deliver a speech on the truth
behind yellowcake uranium, missiles and Iraqi weapons of mass
destruction.
When: Friday, noon
Where: Commonwealth Club, 595 Market St., San Francisco
Reservations and information: (415) 597-6700; www.commonwealthclub.org
Scott Ritter is a former U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq (1991-98) and
the author of "Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence
Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein" (Nation
Books, 2005).
This article linked from: http://www.antiwar.com/
.
|
