http://www.reason.com/links/links020904.shtml
"Iraq was in clear material violation of [UN Resolution] 1441. They maintained
programs and activities, and they certainly had the intentions at a point to
resume their [weapons] programs. So there was a lot they wanted to hide because
it showed what they were doing that was illegal."
Dr. David Kay January 2004
February 9, 2004
Saddam's Last Secret
If he didn't have anything to hide, why did he act as if he did?
Charles Paul Freund
President George Bush has now agreed to appoint a commission to examine the
performance of U.S. intelligence regarding Ba'athist Iraq, especially errors
concerning weapons of mass destruction. Dr. David Kay, the retiring head of the
team that has gone in search of such weapons, has credibly concluded that,
notwithstanding confident administration claims—and a near-universal
consensus—to the contrary, "we were almost all wrong" about Iraq's WMD
stockpiles: There weren't any. Given how much time the commission will have for
its inquiry—its report won't be due until 2005— I hope it takes up an
aspect of this issue that apparently looms as a central mystery: Why, if Saddam
Hussein had nothing to hide, did he behave as if he did?
For example, when the UN asked Saddam's regime for records proving that it had
destroyed all caches of WMD that Iraq was known to have had in the past, Saddam
failed to provide such evidence. Instead, his government offered records that
indicated it had destroyed some of these weapons, but left open the question of
what had happened to the rest. The distinguished journalist Timothy Garton Ash
aptly pronounced the voluminous but inconclusive Iraqi report to be "the
world's longest suicide note." If Saddam had indeed destroyed all his old WMD,
why did he make no serious effort to persuade the UN of it? Why did he send the
UN a report that suggested otherwise?
When UN inspectors returned to Iraq in 2002, they sought to interview Iraqi
scientists in private. Most such scientists refused to grant any interviews
unless a Ba'athist minder was present, or unless the interviews were taped. If
these scientists had no knowledge of WMD caches, why didn't Saddam encourage
private interviews? Dr. Kay and his team have since spoken to numerous Iraqi
scientists, and Kay cites these interviews in concluding that reports of Iraqi
WMD were mistaken. What prevented Saddam from encouraging interviews that would
have helped exonerate him of American and British charges?
Indeed, UN arms inspectors received inadequate cooperation from the regime, as
Hans Blix himself complained. Blix, in his reports to the UN, was clearly
skeptical about U.S. and British claims concerning the nature and extent of
Iraq's weaponry. But he was also openly critical of the lack of cooperation
from Iraqi officials. "It is not the task of the inspectors" to find evidence
of weapons destruction," Blix told the UN last February. "Iraq itself must
squarely tackle this task and avoid belittling the questions."
In sum, the U.S. and Great Britain could not have gotten away with their WMD
argument before the UN if Saddam Hussein had not behaved throughout the entire
pre-war period as if those charges were legitimate. What lay behind Saddam's
actions?
Of course, Saddam himself is in custody, but we've yet to hear what he has to
say about anything. In the meantime, a number of theories have been floated to
account for his pre-war behavior.
For example, there is the theory of self-serving machismo. According to this
view, which David Kay himself considered, Saddam's public posturing toward the
UN and the U.S. was guided by regional expectations of "Big Man" behavior. As a
self-styled champion of the Arabs, Saddam could not appear weak. If an open
admission that he had destroyed his WMD was perceived (by, say, the "Arab
street") as tantamount to weakness, Saddam would risk his regional standing.
Thus, he was compelled to act as if he was still armed with weapons of which
the West disapproved.
Does this make sense? A devious machismo is actually implied in the U.S.
charges against Saddam; it is consistent with secret stockpiles of proscribed
weapons. But is it consistent with actually destroying your weapons and then
pretending that you have something to hide? That seems less like machismo than
what journalist Ash called it: suicide. It's posturing with a vengeance, since
the posture involves placing a gun at your own head.
Besides, who says that Pan-Arabist machismo excludes weakness or even defeat?
Don't forget that Saddam was able to claim victory of sorts in the 1991 Gulf
War simply because he survived it. That's why he was still a Big Man. If Saddam
had demonstrated that he had no WMD, he could have revealed George W. Bush as a
liar while pulling Bush's UN justifications from beneath his feet. This time,
Saddam would not only have survived, he would have added to his
scimitar-wielding swagger.
But there are other theories to consider. For example, there's the possibility
that Saddam didn't have any WMD, but he thought he did. According to this view,
Ba'athist underlings created a Potemkin arms-program edifice that somehow
persuaded Saddam that he had stores of proscribed weapons when he had nothing
of the kind.
Could something like this have happened? If it did, it would make Saddam
Hussein the biggest political farceur since Rufus T. Firefly was president of
Freedonia. Like all retrospective conspiracy theories, however, this view makes
more demands on credulousness than it can satisfy: Whoever is at the center of
the plot has foreseen all problems, and no unanticipated consequences arise
until Bush goes to the UN. Nevertheless, this thesis may well be favored within
the intelligence community, since if Saddam thought he had proscribed weapons,
what do you want from people sitting in Langley, Virginia?
One might add all sorts of variations. For example, Saddam's actions could be
interpreted as reasonable, at least from his point of view. That is, he refused
to cooperate with inspectors because he believed them to be spies. As for the
incomplete records of weapon destruction that he offered the UN, that was just
an everyday bureaucratic screw-up that could happen anywhere. (But Saddam's
actions helped strengthen the case for a war that overthrew him, thus
undermining any "reasonableness" scenario.)
Or maybe Saddam was just a disengaged loon, relishing the pretense that he was
a great novelist and filling his palaces with unredeemable kitsch, and
otherwise behaving irrationally. (But there's evidence, such as the
"resistance" communications found with him when he was arrested, that suggests
he was reasonably engaged. Even so, I'll stipulate that, whatever else turns
out to be true, Saddam's political judgment had become as execrable as his
taste.)
Of course, there's still the thesis that Saddam really did have WMD stockpiles
after all. This would mean that it is not U.S. intelligence that is in error,
but Dr. Kay. During his Meet the Press appearance Sunday, President Bush
himself suggested that this may yet prove to be the case. (But if Bush
brandishes an Iraqi vial of Something Dangerous in the middle of the
presidential campaign, we'll be arguing about it for the rest of our lives.)
There's one last thesis to consider: Saddam acted like he had something to hide
because he was hiding something. According to this scenario, "Iraq was in clear
material violation of [UN Resolution] 1441. They maintained programs and
activities, and they certainly had the intentions at a point to resume their
[weapons] programs. So there was a lot they wanted to hide because it showed
what they were doing that was illegal."
Who thinks so? Actually, these are the words of Dr. David Kay, testifying last
month before the Senate Armed Services Committee. That would be the same Dr.
David Kay whose conclusion that there were no WMD stockpiles set off this
flurry of conjecture to begin with. Thus, the very man who opened this
"mystery" about Saddam's behavior also offered a reasonably comprehensive
solution to it. Yet while one conclusion ("we were all wrong") is quoted
ubiquitously, the remainder of his remarks remain relatively obscure.
True, Dr. Kay's conclusions—among them, that "the world is far safer with the
disappearance and the removal of Saddam Hussein"—don't exonerate bad
intelligence, they don't justify administration exaggerations, and they don't
address the damage that has apparently been done to U.S. credibility. But they
do seem to provide an informed context for understanding and judging all these
matters. Why, then, has there been so much conjecture over a matter whose
apparent solution lies in plain sight? Turns out the world is filled with
"mysteries" with seemingly obvious solutions.
Charles Paul Freund is a Reason senior editor.
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